Slashdot Mirror
Electronics Arts CEO Ousted In Wake of SimCity Launch Disaster
mozumder writes "The disastrous launch of SimCity took its first major toll, with EA CEO John Riccitiello being fired from his position and removed from the Board of Directors. It is unknown what effect this may have on the SimCity franchise or any future DRM of EA games, but clearly someone didn't think their cunning plan all the way through when they decided to implement always-on connections for single-player gaming."
Yay!
Also more likely the first to say: its != it's. Yay for slashdot editors.
Someone at a high level paying the price for DRM-incurred failure. Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out, asshole.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
DRM does.
Serious question... is this the first time an exec was ousted for a mistake with DRM?
The guy tendered resignation. The letter he wrote is in that link there. Besides of that EA has been all over the place in terms of performance for awhile. I picked up a few hundred shares at $12 ~6mo ago and sold them at $18.50, which while not a spectacular turn around was decent enough.
Om, nomnomnom...
Poster "Unknown Lamer" lives up to name.
Well, hopefully his golden parachute will only be accessible if he maintains a continuous online connection to HR for the next three years.
The press release doesn't mention anything about SimCity. Could it be other causes and you're just trying to bend the message to your own personal fantasies? In any case, I doubt it'll have any real effect on the user of DRM.
I still play that game and it was sooo fucking close to a Wow killer. They rushed it without dailies and raids to meet Christmas projection marks in some accountants spreadsheet and they killed the game cards and the expansion at the store and gave up too early.
I do not care what other say about SWTOR it is not failure and much better. Bioware did great things and they got rid of great people too quickly. Another 6 months when SWTOR had the dailies, raids, and fixes it would have 3x the amount of subscribers.
What a shame and I am irritated as I do not want to go back to Wow.
http://saveie6.com/
... this does give him more time to play SimCity.
And the next video game you buy from EA will include a golden parachute tax. Thanks free market.
SimCity was the tipping point.
Remember, EA was recently ranked as the Worst Company in America. Gamers have been complaining about EA way before SimCity. Like when EA negotiated an exclusive rights deal on all NFL games and then churned out the worst NFL games for years and years to come. They have ruined many, many franchises.
Good riddance. Now kindly proceed rolling heads throughout all upper and middle management, until you get to the first employee who indicated that the always-online feature was an indescribably bad idea. He or she is new CEO.
"The more corrupt the state, the more it legislates." - Tacitus
He'll somehow have to scrape by on 24 months of full pay (and stock vesting):
http://www.polygon.com/2013/3/18/4120344/ea-ceo-john-riccitiello-quits
As part of Riccitiello's separation agreement, he'll receive 24 months of salary continuation and continued vesting of unvested stock options until Nov. 30, 2013, with those options exercisable until Feb. 28, 2014.
I guess John Riccitiello couldn't get past Turbo Tubes...
Charisma is the measure of someone's ability to lie with a straight face.
While it's nice to speculate that the guy was fired for reasons that suit the average slashdotter's predilection's about DRM, there is no evidence that this is the case.
Good God.
I know this is /. and no one RTFA and all but seriously, at least try to search for key words like "Sim" or "City" before submitting an article with a moronic sensationalist headline like this.
His resignation has nothing to do with Sim City. Dream on.
Disclaimer: My opinions are my own and do not, in any way, reflect the opinions of my employer or university.
Pinball Construction set for the Mac 512. The 800k floppy disk was DOA. Was I ever pissed. Got a free hat for my trouble, though, so...
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
It may have more to do with the fact EA stock went from $40 to $20 since he took office and there are plenty within and without the company that want to move into mobile gaming more and he's in the way. The board may also believe fresh blood will bring in a new way of doing things in the gaming sphere. I hope they take this opportunity to actually do some worthwhile changes; first being getting rid of or at least finding a better DRM mechanism (since I'm sure there are some dinosaurs who think DRM is still a workable system) and branch out.
They should learn a lesson from Atari. Inheritence isn't how you hold on to the throne. If blood must be spilled, then so be it.
If computers were people, I'd be a misanthrope.
Perhaps the next EA CEO might see about some of the IP they are sitting on and make something decent that isn't just the same junk over and over.
Wing Commander, Ultima (I know there is are games in the works, but it would be nice to see Ultima 8 stricken off the books, and a "real" 8 and 9 made. Heck, I'd love to see a modern rendition of "Cybermage" just for the surreal aspect that mixes magic and technology, and not being Shadowrun or steampunk.
It's all good.
BWAHAHAHAHA!
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
When the spokeswoman for Electronic Arts stated that they would try to restore trust with their users I never fathomed that they would actually follow that up with action. I cannot begin to overstate my congratulations to the board of Electronic Arts for doing the right thing and ousting a CEO that had declared his customers the defacto enemy.
When the lies came out that the online requirement was for server processing I took it as yet another BS statement from a company that held it's customers in contempt. When customers showed how easily you could play offline the lie was exposed and Maxis / EA was forced to admit the truth. I never expected that action would come out of this, and must say I am surprised by this as anything in technology in twenty years. Congratulations to EA for taking a step in trying to restore the trust of your customers.
Wasn't this the same guy that killed single-player only games from EA?
Is there any actual confirmation that he was let go because of the DRM failings specifically and not just because of simcity's general failure.
We know why it failed but it's bad reporting to say that's EA's reason.
"The disastrous launch of SimCity took it's first major toll
Look, I'm getting sick of this. Just leave out the fucking unnecessary apostrophes OK? What are you, 7? How hard is it to learn the bloody rule and use it? Not hard at all - I've known it since I was seven!
I do not expect to see this happen ever again. Thankyou.
We have no idea this was the reason and I would bet EA does NOT blame DRM for the failure. Especially given the fact that the servers do little processing (as we now know). I am sure they blame server engineering for being unprepared, or the guy who didn't sign the big server check, or the team responsible for forecasting. I can almost guarantee they do not blame DRM, since your gamer brethren BOUGHT THE GAME knowing DRM was in there.
Only if DRM disappears from EA games in the future, can you declare victory.
I wonder if they would have just spent that money to expand the market into Linux then they could have picked up an additional few percent on sales. Then they would be much closer to being able to port to new devices and platforms in the future to extend the sales out for longer. Basically they could have spent that engineering cost on expanding the market instead of locking down the existing one.
> It is unknown what effect this may have on the SimCity franchise or any future DRM of EA games, but clearly someone didn't think their cunning plan all the way through when they decided to implement always-on connections for single-player gaming.
Your comments imply that always-on connected DRM is the reason this guy was fired. If EA is like any corporation I've ever worked for or with, that issue isn't even close to being on the radar. I'm sure the reason the board thinks it's firing him are as follows:
* Poor release and capacity planning for such a major launch
* Failure to mitigate the emergency before it became a catastrophe
* Need a scapegoat, the higher on the totem pole the better. I guess in this case, VPs of engineering or QA weren't enough.
I'd be shocked if anyone above manager level at EA was thinking about releasing the next game without "always on connected DRM". They're thinking about capacity planning and performance testing instead. Why? They think DRM makes them money. This was fundamentally an execution problem. It's unfortunate, but I think the days of big budget games that didn't require a network connection are over.
Sometimes the best way to get what you want is to give a little and let go a little.
It has never been a question of "can they" but of "should they." I think most of us agree they should not, and now perhaps a few more agree as well. Interestingly, there have been ample examples of why such practices are bad. Blackberry outages should have taught this to executive types over the years. But there have also been DRM servers which have gone down in the past I seem to recall with large amounts of attention on the matter of DRM and always online gameplay.
"This time it will be different." Perhaps not.
Fans are more valuable than customers... and customers more valuable than consumers. Hubris.
US taxpayers would have been happy to fund a large performance bonus for him!
Why are the marketing and IT departments still there?
I remember the good ol' EA days, when they had nice fold-open packaging complete with campy pictures of the development team and some other neat odds and ends. In a way, it kind of symbolizes the direction that gaming has gone, from being very much a novel and experimental field, into something which has become ruled by focus groups and boardroom politics (I guess that parallels movies, too). I don't think that firing this guy is going to make much of a difference to EA's business model in the long term, but seeing the titan stumble a little bit may at least signal to indie developers that there is still plenty of room to grow and capitalize on the paralysis at the AAA level. Come to think of it, the last AAA game I played that really screamed "Wow!" was Red Dead Redemption. Since then, I've found things like FTL to be far more compelling. Anyway, get off my lawn, EA execs!
Anyone who pre-ordered through origin (like me) received $20 off coupon for a purchase of $30 or more through origin. Not a bad deal, I could pick up C&C franchise for $29.99 and add a $5 or $10 filler to break that threshold.. sure I'd be giving them a bit more money but every C&C game ever made for $20 seemed like a good deal. However the fine print says the offer expired today at 10am PDT. I don't recall seeing the limitation to the offer until after I had purchased the game.
Today I got the email telling me I'll get a free game due to the Sim City fuckup. It's not fine print this time but the email says that eventually we'll be able to choose our game (doesn't say when exactly) but we have to have it downloaded by March 30th. They want to limit their "losses" by making the instructions difficult to understand and leaving a very short window to "cash in".
EA are a bunch of dicks (I knew it already, just felt like reiterating).
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
Well, of course the 'always online' requirement was ridiculous. But I am commenting on a more important point. The future.
The future will require society to embrace new living situations. Small communities moving below ground and below water, and ultimately to space.
SimCity concept as a game is fun. I played the demo, when I could get on the server - that is. SimCity could be a dream for design ideas that require count of people, water, pollution, air, transportation, etc. What a better system for designing cities built into cliffs, along and in the shore, below lake, underground, could you have? It could have been perfect.
My (and your) poor grandchildren need our help. SimCity - Please, just think of the children!!
I hope he was responsible for the demise of Motor City Online too.... best game ever.
First, it wasn't necessarily the failure of SimCity that caused the job change. Second, the existence of the DRM wasn't the reason SimCity is a disaster.
SimCity is a disaster because of the implementation of the DRM, the PR surrounding the DRM, and then the fact that it's just a completely broken non-simulation.
Implementation failure.
Just having an account sign-on for DRM authentication is a thumbs-down, for sure, but it isn't a guaranteed game killer. Case in point, StarCraft 2. I do not like having to sign on to play the single player campaigns, but I've never had a problem logging in, even on day 1 of Wings of Liberty or day 1 of Heart of the Swarm.
With SimCity, however, I was unable to log on and play for 3 days after launch. After that I never had server problems, but there are many people who are still unable to stay connected or who are having their cities (which are saved on EA's computers) erased or rolled back.
The lesson is, if you're going to force people to sign on to play a single-player game, you better fucking make sure they can sign on to play their single-player game.
PR failure
I don't think Blizzard ever lied to people about why they had to sign on to battle.net for StarCraft. "It's 'cause DRMs." Lucy Bradshaw, the Maxis spokesweasal has stated that SimCity just had to be always connected because EA's servers are performing "significant computations" that just have to be done by their servers. Their terrible "sims go the nearest house to sleep" AI has gotta be run on their Beowulf cluster of HAL 9000s. The beast of a gaming rig under my desk clearly isn't up to the task.
Of course this is a monstrously stupid lie, and obvious to anyone who has any experience with video games or computers or breathing. This falls into the "pissing on me and telling me it's raining" category. If you're going to piss on me, at least be honest about it. And don't eat asparagus first.
Game failure
Despite all that, the real problem with SimCity is once you actually are able to get in and play, you find that they did not actually make a city simulation game, they just made a pretty city drawing program.
You lay out reasonable street designs, but they get snarled with traffic because the sims do not know where they're going to end up when they leave their homes for work in the morning or when they come home at night. They pick as their destination the nearest place that meets their need and go there first via the shortest path. If when they get there they find the place is already filled up, they go to the next closest place. So imagine if all 400 people who live in your neighborhood were coming home from work at the same time, but instead of going to their actual homes (or whatever place they're going to end up sleeping) they all came to your house first. And after 2 of them crash on your floor, the remaining 398 go next door and all knock there. And then the remaining 396 go to the next house after that, etc etc.
Next, the whole RCI balance mechanic has been the core of SimCity forever, and that's completely gone. Residential areas are supposed to need Commercial areas so people have a place to buy things (or work). Commercial needs shoppers, workers, and goods. Industry provides jobs for residents and goods for Commerce. They broke all of that, because sims, it seems, can live on love. All they need to not move out of their homes is "happiness," which can be obtained from shopping (commerce) but can also be obtained from city parks. So people have made 400k+ population cities that are absolutely nothing but residential high rises and parks. The people have no jobs and no money and no food, but they can still live in gleaming skyscrapers because I guess they're urban foraging in the parks.
So, yeah, you can "solve the puzzle" and make cities that don't collapse, but they're completely ridiculous, so it's not a city simulation game. It'd be like having a flight simulator where the rudder has no effect on y
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
I doubt this is over SimCity, corporate America doesn't move that fast, but the fact is that it will look like that, the same way Steven Sinofsky looked over Windows 8, and that's good enough for me.
We are all assuming that this is specifically because of the botched Sim City release. While it may be very compelling and possibly even obvious to think so, there is no mention of SimCity in the article. It's all speculation by the poster. It might be true, but it makes for a slanted summary. You can see from this thread that it had a definite affect on the discussion.
An article I read on Forbes today about this didn't mention Sim City as a reason either. The announcement came with the report that Q4 earnings at EA were lower than expected. The server issues, may have had something to do with this and maybe even a big part, but the summary jumps to conclusions. Pretty much this entire thread is following suit.
Whether or not that asshole got sacked, or how he got sacked, isn't important
What's more important is if EA gonna let users enjoy SC5 without been unnecessarily burdened by the online DRM ?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Well, I for one welcome our FIRED and DISGRACED DRM-enabled always-on EA gaming overlords.
Next time, don't cross the time streams.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I offer my services as CEO. I might fail, but I'd be willing to do it at half the price.
See, that is the problem. If they pay less for you, you must be worth less.
You need to say you'll work for only 10 percent more than the outgoing CEO did.
Insane Executive Search Committees think that way. They're really really really really stupid.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
First, it wasn't necessarily the failure of SimCity that caused the job change. Second, the existence of the DRM wasn't the reason SimCity is a disaster.
SimCity is a disaster because of the implementation of the DRM, the PR surrounding the DRM, and then the fact that it's just a completely broken non-simulation.
No, the DRM turned a product launch glitch from a "no patches yet" minor issue into a always-on "NO GAME FOR YOU" utter debacle.
There are ways to have an online capability be semi-optional.
Have only the online servers be used for city-to-city competitions, but single player (just me and my quadrants) run locally.
Have only extra add ons be from the server - and give away free ones - this is what they do at EA Maxis for Sims 3 - if you login you can download new content, from other players, and Gold (pay extra) crafted items - this could be used for extra disaster scenarios, special buildings, etc. You charge for the chrome, like they do in China and South Korea. You can play without Chrome, but most people will pay a small amount for Chrome.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
It's not the DRM (a real screw-up) but the fact that the entire underlying game is borked.
All that cool "model each sim, global structure emerges" rather than "model the global structure, visualize it with animations of sim" seems to be faked. All the fakery means the global structure of the game is just broken: you can't build a large functional city in any reasonable way.
For example, sims leave work, drive home, and pick the first random house they see. They they get wealthy/educated for the next day based on the house they are in. Sure, you get some emergent structure, but it's nothing like a real city or even previous simcity games.
Path-finding seems borked: shortest path is picked over fastest path. All your fire-trucks race to the single closest fire. Left-turns are a recipe for endless traffic jams. Forget using mass transit usefully.
The YouTube videos show all this. It seems beyond fixing, unless they can revert to the old statistical simulation model somehow: one PC doesn't have enough compute to run a large city - they could offload to the cloud (ha, they aren't going that,) or rope the GPU into doing clever sim work (that's a research project.)
I think we agree. My point was the summary made it sound like "well game companies will learn not to have DRM anymore!" when SimCity isn't a debacle because customers rebelled against the concept of DRM. People bought the game knowing full well they'd have to log on to play. Customers rebelled because they couldn't play the game, and when they could play they game they discovered it was broken.
If they'd had a DRM authentication requirement and it didn't stop people from playing the game, and the game were good, there wouldn't be a problem (for most users).
Starcraft: good game + available authentication servers = happyish customers.
SimCity: broken game + broken authentication servers = RAGE.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
He was fired. At the CEO level, they don't hand you a check and take your key and have the security droid escort you out of the building. He's being paid what his contract says he will be paid when he is terminated, and the face-saving fiction is that he is allowed to resign effective March 30. However, make no mistake; he was fired.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
A better comparison would be to switching from Diablo II to III or Warcraft to WoW.
You can move from single player to always-on multi-player, but you have to do it well.
(not disagreeing)
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
You don't have to simulate the whole thing from roots to leaves. You sample.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Oh agreed. That's the other terrible decision by the EA management. I understand that EA had decided they wouldn't green light anymore single player games (citation googlable). "The future is social cloudified experiences! I read that in the inflight magazine, so you programmers best do it!" So in order to make a SimCity game, EA demanded it be multiplayer. But who the hell wants that? As a long-time SimCity player, I certainly do not. I do not want other players in my region that I have to wait on or rely on for services or, anything really. I do like multiplayer games, for sure. But not SimCity. I really don't want an online, "social" version of tetris, either.
Shoehorning online DRM into the game and then trying to spin it as "our vision for a multiplayer experience" and "we're doin' cackalashuns!" was a disaster. And an obviously foreseeable one.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Agreed, but what do you expect them to sample?
A global statistical model? They claim not to have one.
A Population of actors doing rational things? They didn't seem to implement one.
As he refuses to greenlight single player games.
Which should not be construed as even a suggestion that the man should lose his job. I don't believe the appropriate response here would be to destroy a man's livelihood. I would like him to reconsider his policy, though.
I think EA (and all other video game companies) are missing the mark on this entire subject, they implement these ridiculous methods of anti-piracy within their games to the point where you know have a CEO of 7 years stepping down in shame at this blunder of a launch.
Maybe if they reconsider the fact that implementing more sophisticated anti-piracy measures only evolves piracy more and more. Pirates get better at what they do, I know for a fact some of these people crack these games simply for the joy of cracking them. It's a puzzle to them, and when they figure the puzzle out, they share it with the world and it pisses the developers off.
Unfortunately, I do not have a suggestion to any of these companies who are so avidly combating piracy, but maybe they could consider that fact... Maybe it's the fact that games cost so much that normal people decide it's a LOT easier to steal a game and VERY EASILY get away with it.
Having worked in a company that big, there's nothing the CEO could have done about it. Everyone would have lied to him "oh, it's going good, it'll be great" if he asked, and he'd be so far out of development, he'd have no way of knowing that something was buggy or not ready. Just have to shuffle CEOs around so that they look like they are worth $100,000,000 per year, when they outsource on the basis of "supply and demand" and any of a million people would take his job, and apparently, not many could do it worse.
Learn to love Alaska
one PC doesn't have enough compute to run a large city - they could offload to the cloud (ha, they aren't going that,) or rope the GPU into doing clever sim work (that's a research project.)
I have a hard time accepting that. Rollercoaster Tycoon, released 14 years ago, was able to simulate a theme park with 1,000s of actors without too much difficulty. I remember the game was able to run pretty well on my Pentium 2 at the time.
Comparing the processors, I see that today's i3s run about 100x more flops than p2. (i3 ~ 25 Gflops, p2 ~ 0.23 Gflops).
Given the resources that EA/Maxis has (compared with 1 developer programming the whole thing), I think they probably could have programmed it to simulate ~100,000 citizens at acceptable speed on midrange hardware. So I think it probably boiled down to more a question of priority than possibility.
Lucy Bradshaw outright lied to the customers over and over again.
If they want to squash this PR nightmare then they need to sacrifice all of those whom made it so much worse. That means firing Lucy Bradshaw.
Because of her utter contempt for their customers I have no intention of purchasing another EA or Maxis title.
I have a hard time accepting that. Rollercoaster Tycoon, released 14 years ago, was able to simulate a theme park with 1,000s of actors without too much difficulty. I remember the game was able to run pretty well on my Pentium 2 at the time.
Comparing the processors, I see that today's i3s run about 100x more flops than p2. (i3 ~ 25 Gflops, p2 ~ 0.23 Gflops).
Given the resources that EA/Maxis has (compared with 1 developer programming the whole thing), I think they probably could have programmed it to simulate ~100,000 citizens at acceptable speed on midrange hardware. So I think it probably boiled down to more a question of priority than possibility.
Gorobei's point is that the simulation approach to SC5 is fundamentally different to the older "Sim" games - the older games, as you say, modelled the entire organism (theme park, in the case of Rollercoaster Tycoon) and generated the actors within that simulation based on a group of relatively simple statistical behaviours - a certain percentage will head for the next ride, a certain percentage will puke as they come off the rollercoaster (always a goal of mine when playing that game), some will go and eat, and so on. The graphics are then generated to put a visual representation on those statistical behaviours.
SC5, on the other hand, turns that model upside down - now, instead of having a single simulated organism (the theme park or city) with a small number of centres for behaviour collection (rides in the theme park, city zones/buildings/events in Sim City) for which to generate the statistical behaviours that your actors will show, now each individual actor is their own organism - the model is too complex to resort to "averaging" and modeling the overall system, but it is not complex enough to give each actor enough behaviours to be able to form creative solutions such as taking a detour around a road block.
In that sense, SC5 is going in the right direction, but until the models for the actors are complex enough that they can appear semi-intelligent, the gameplay result is going to feel inferior to what it has replaced.
How did you connect Sim City and the firing of this guy? All I found was reports on targets missed, nothing particularly Sim City related (in fact I'd wager it's a box office success, we all paid already).
He was fired because his financial results sucked. The projections on the launch were higher than actual sales, and the perception is the problems with launch were at the root of it. As much as one would like to say he was fired for being a DRM pimping grease ball, the reason he went down is because he could not execute well enough on being a DRM pimping grease ball.
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
A PC could easily handle that level of simulation because you don't have to calculate everything every frame. The simulation is asynchronous to the GUI.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I keep reading this regurgitated as fact. I also read from some who apparently know what they are talking about that parts of the population is being modeled in independent simulations, while the rest is more emergent, and that the videos you mention capture only the anomalies.
Also,I understand that EA were forced to tone down the simulations because of the back-end availability problems.
You and others make it sound as if the game does nothing but 1980s Pac-Man AI.
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
If there is nothing he could do about it, why is he getting paid so much? One could see a big salary being justified if he was critical to the company performing well. But I guess not.
One bloke intent on building a game so deep that it takes sixteen materials and four different crafts to create a metal bucket (then measures individual happiness on how pretty it is) is modelling individual actors right down to the loss of an arm, the saving that makes in gloves, the work that individual can now do and how upset his family are about it.
And EA with a budget in the tens of millions can't even work out basics such as 'works here, earns that, lives there, wants food/entertainment/job/sleep'..
Hell, the Tropico series manages it, and they depict all of the individuals. Crunching the numbers in the background without displaying each person is easier, and should scale up to SimCity levels. Certainly for the first few hundred thousand.
I've never ever encountered a game that wasn't cracked (drm removed) in a few days/weeks.
So why trouble? Just wait a little and you'll can play it. For nothing. Just fuck the drm a..h..s.
The CEO sets the direction. Even if the direction is down, it's still a direction. But in a practical sense, the CEO only ever sees the executive team, his admin, and people outside the company. Smaller companies are less rigid, but when I worked IT for a 10,000 employee company, he pretty much never left the executive floor.
Learn to love Alaska
He's a figurehead and a spokesperson at big events, but ultimately is only as good as his advisors and staff. He can't be at every interview for coders, or even interviews for the HR people who hire the coders. He has to trust his staff to do their job, and they didn't. I see this as more of a marketing selling an idea up the food chain, and dev trying their best to hold it together while sticking to their ridiculous deadlines.
The next CEO will be in exactly the same position, because everyone else responsible is still in their position of responsibility.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
And one of the reasons why this game tanked is for the same reason it was done this way: Diablo 3.
Lots didn't buy it, most did, because they loved D2 and D1 so much and ignored (and even violently repudiated) the "online only is shite for a single player, it's just DRM in a dress". But these idiots were then buttfucked when D3 came out EXACTLY AS WE PREDICTED.
EA saw D3 and saw it sold well (the customers didn't want to know any better and so bought it, meaning plenty sales), and saw the DRM-in-a-dress and went "We'll have some of that".
That's how it started.
But, having been truly fucked over by D3, with an example of WHY this is a fucking stupid idea for a single player game to have "always on online" DRM-in-a-dress, people had decided NOT to pooh-pooh the arguments against it and didn't buy. Complained about it. And didn't scream abuse at people for DARING to say they won't buy it because it's online only.
Wow. He should have a got a job in the banking sector. Become CEO and you can fuck up as bad as you want and you'll just get a bigger bonus. Should the shit really hit the fan, you might even become treasury secretary for the US government.
Anyway, seems perhaps a bit over the top for releasing a single player game that requires internet connectivity.
Look at how many businesses he's had a hand in killing off by incompetence.
Hell, one of the BoD at Guiness a while back had been in jail for fraud at his Director job, released early because his doctor said he had alzheimers and would die in prison, which is cruel, so let him out. Then when he got out, it turned out to LOOK like alzheimers, not actual alzheimers.
And, despite having been in jail for fraud and having the symptoms of alzheimers, he got a job as a Director within a month of release.
Have you even played the game? I've clocked about 40 hours and the sims really do go into teh first available house. And the schoolbusses all go to the same stop. And all the moving vans spawn at the exact same time.
Freight does nothing.
Sims will not cross the road to go shopping even if they have money and the shop is of the right level.
If you have a single tourist in your city then the simulation builds hundred or perhaps thousands of hotel beds... then the hotels gets abandoned because they don't have costumers and you demolish it and start again hoping that it won't turn into a useless hotel.
If there is a hidden proper simulation then it is disabled or being ran on so few sims that it's virtually untracable.
Hey, you are right, Torchlight II looks like fun. Thanks for the tip.
I don't disagree with anything you said, but just as much as its not DRM (borked), its not the game play (borked) but the marketing failure he is being ousted for.
From what I have seen there is simply no indication anyone writing official communications from EA recognizes the problems from our perspective. As far as they are concerned they think "he did not sell it right", and as far as the investors/sheep/dollars and cents all play together they might be correct.
Yea its pretty disappointing as product but I don't think that is what is driving the musical chairs game starting to play out at EA.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
someone made the call to DRM this thing. And it was not the coders. The marketing weasels? maybe.
But the end call was the CEO. No one put's that much money/thought into a back end infrastructure without the CEO knowing about it.
At least in pacman the different ghosts had different behaviour.
He's taking the fall because EA will publish dismal figures by the end of March.
EA has been in a downward spiral for some time now. And that has everything to do with the general strategy of the company. The reliance on high-risk AAA games, EAs failure to tap into the lucrative mobile market, the non-starter of their "indie" label, buying and closing down expensive studios, the launch of Origin to the sound of crickets...
The SimCity kerfuffle is a drop in the bucket. And I highly doubt it was a financial desaster. They sold a lot of copies of it and that's what shareholders care about.
EA has been a company to avoid for some time. The amount of hassle involved as a legitimate customer is a bit higher than anything Ubi or GfW will throw your way. Origin, UPlay and Games for Windows are clear indicators(to me at least) that I may have to count myself lucky if I can play the game at all.
The strategy to launch highly expensive AAA games with a Michael Bay sized budget has proven to be unsustainable. You run a very high risk not to make any money on the game even if you sold gazillion copies of it. People laughed when EA announced they wanted to launch an "indie" label. But that made quite a lot of sense, actually. If you can sell cheaper games with a lot less production cost you have a lot less risk involved.
as a really old school gamer I can't see the appeal of AAA games anyway. The cutscenes get in the way. All that voice acting makes for a very narrow plot. You have no emergent gameplay. And most of the time one game mechanic is enough.
20 minutes into the future
The always online requirement for SimCity could have been a successful campaign if:
1) The developers lowered the ping request timer, or have a steady stream to their servers via the chat client
2) EA servers should have only processed the chat client and login authentication.
3) Multiplayer as a mode / choice
4) Open and honest about the DRM / always-online requirement
5) Proper infrastructure to handle the login attempts and chat clients.. even add chat client "regions"
6) Only saved games are stored on the EA servers
If they (EA) had done the five things listed above, this launch would have fairly successful. People would still have groaned and moaned about the always-online, however, I think most people would have understood why it was done. "Hi guys, this is such and such, I'm the overseer / overlord of SimCity 5, we're adding a login and regional, that is, based on your country, chat client. While you can (hide, turn off, whatever) the chat client, saved games will be processed on our servers. Yea, the full game is installed on your computer, and it is your computer that handles the simulation and graphics, but we're doing this to try to combat piracy as much as we can. We know it'll eventually be hacked and pirated, but, we can only do so much."
Even if the launch failed due to the infrastructure prediction, the PR department could have said, "OMG, we're very sorry guys and gals, we're adding more login servers for everyone as fast as possible!" and people wouldn't have been in arms about the entire fiasco.
Of course, this is nothing to say about the actual gameplay, that is a different subject.
Loss of an arm? DF models it down to individual fingers and toes, and fingernails and toenails. It's quite possibly one of the most painfully accurate anatomy simulation available in an RPG.
And it's probably why I've never been able to play more than about 15 minutes minutes of it before giving up in frustration and going back to something less tedious, like Hydlide or Battletoads.
A PC can easily handle that level of simulation because it is actually not very computing intensive. SimLife, for example, was an agent-based simulation, and came out in 1992. Or take Tropico, which is a city-building game which models every citizen. So does Simcity Societies, for that matter, so there's really no excuse: they could had just bolted in a few additional simulations and better graphics on that and called it a day.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
parts of the population is being modeled in independent simulations, while the rest is more emergent, and that the videos you mention capture only the anomalies.
The grammar employed in your sentence is sufficiently tortured that I don't believe that even you know what you're trying to say.
Also,I understand that EA were forced to tone down the simulations because of the back-end availability problems.
[citation needed]
You claim that what we're seeing is just the anomalies, but there is no evidence of this whatosever. Since traffic patterns also shut down at the same time these alleged "anomalies" appear, in fact the evidence suggests that all sims are behaving in the same manner. Surely a handful of sims exhibiting anomalous behavior would be insufficient to bring your city to its knees, given that the game doesn't have a Charles Whitman mode.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
And it's probably why I've never been able to play more than about 15 minutes minutes of it before giving up in frustration and going back to something less tedious, like Hydlide or Battletoads.
In my case it's the interface, which I found to be even more impenetrable than nethack. Text-based does not have to mean "shit".
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It's not the DRM (a real screw-up).
#1 reason I will not buy it (#2 is not having the time).
Left-turns are a recipe for endless traffic jams.
Seems realistic enough...
Yeah, it would benefit from actual graphics, and particularly from a modern UI with little things like templates - design a 'standard bedroom' and just paste it where you want it, with the appropriate build orders for the various bed, wardrobe, door, etc.
None of that impacts the gameplay, but it would make it far more accessible. Unless you count "forgetting to make enough beds" as part of the gameplay, which to be fair in a way it is. The comedy oversights lead to some of the more interesting emergent outcomes.
I am not a fan of always on, DRM, ect. But after having actually played this game for the last 2weeks, it just isn't a single player game. While I understand many people here want it to be, it really isn't. The entire game relies on an ecosystem of cities interacting.
The problem with that argument is that the ancient (1994) very first Settlers game already did model the flow of individual packets from producers to consumers through a limited-capacity road system, did this in real time, and implemented such niceties as priorities and terrain effects on delivery speed. There were no statistics involved, you could trace any delivery on-screen from the moment the producer leaves his door with it to the moment the final hauler walks in the target building's door with it. There's no excuse whatsoever for losing to a game that ran on Amiga 500 in AI complexity.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
They sold a lot of copies. They also likely killed a golden goose franchise. They won't be selling a lot of copies of the next SimCity game, at least not on hype - and it's a lot harder to compete on actual merit than on hype. The shareholders know this, and any potential future shareholder also knows, so it affects the shareholders whether they choose to stick with EA or not. And that's something they do care about.
So yeah, it is/will be a financial disaster, just one with slow-motion special effects.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
However, until they get rid of their Origin requirement to use any of their games, they still won't see a dime from me...
They should have just went with the non-digital rights management that the original SimCity used.
That annoying piece of red paper with barely legible blue ink with the symbols on it that you had to squint at.
You know what it looks like to me? It really looks like the project lead pitched all the 'in depth simulation' shit to upper management with a fancy demo, upper management ate it up, then acted like upper management does and bogged down the project hopelessly, and in the end what got released was... the fancy demo, which is only meant to look smart, not be smart. Maybe halfway through somebody in upper management said "If WE can't tell the difference, who else can!" and removed the "actually implement logic" section from the timeline.
Having worked in a company that big, there's nothing the CEO could have done about it. Everyone would have lied to him "oh, it's going good, it'll be great" if he asked, and he'd be so far out of development, he'd have no way of knowing that something was buggy or not ready. Just have to shuffle CEOs around so that they look like they are worth $100,000,000 per year, when they outsource on the basis of "supply and demand" and any of a million people would take his job, and apparently, not many could do it worse.
On the other hand, if he's the kind of person that punishes people for being honest so that everyone lies to him, then he does need to go.
In a company that size, your primary source of information is going to be other people, and if you can't create enough trust with them to get good information to make your decisions, then you can't do your job.
You mean the CEO of a big company fucked up hugely and actually had to endure consequences?
Cats and dogs sleeping with each other, chaos, the world is upside down!
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
"you could offload to the cloud (ha, they aren't going [to do] that,) or rope the GPU into doing clever sim work (that's a research project.)"
You see, if this had been the default behavior of the game and the need for being always connected, I think more people would have been
less frustrated. Or if SC5 had some revolutionary AI behavior which would have made waiting to connect worth it.
But what do we get: corner-cutting in terms of the (really weak) AI, unnecessary online-only play for single player mode (due to DRM paranoia) a prettier version of SC4
with the added problem of having to wait a week to actually play the game after EA gets your money, in addition to the fact that once you do connect, you don't even get half of the features they promised. Even prostitutes have better business sense than that.
You'd think in the age of Siri and Watson, SimCity would actually be a real sim.
This Sig does not Exist.
Yeah, but the EA fiscal year ends at the end of March. Believe me, at CEO level you only deal with strategy and how much you made in that quarter and how you make your projections for the next quarter. SimCity might have saved him if he had gotten more of those massive sales into this fiscal year(read: rushed it out for the holiday season). SimCity only interests shareholders that actually play the game.
20 minutes into the future
It's true. Some decade the programmer will possibly even do something about it. But right now, it's all about actually integrating your dwarven armies and your civilization's trade caravans into the world at large, or something like that.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
EA's earnings have been sub-par for a while now. And their poor company and customer practices have been well documented. And while the CXX's have done everything in their power to insulate themselves from responsibility there still is a limit to what even our borked system will take.
I personally think part of the straw that broke the camel's back was the fact that the story broke that the game itself did not need EA's servers to be played solo. That right there is a huge egg on face moment when you are caught in such a huge lie.
Because trust me, those MBA nerds were ready to feed on the fact that they all told each other, the press, and their friends that the game was using EA's serves for processing. And zomg those pirates! Hahaha, they would never crack the game because it would take them reverse engineering the server code!
When the story came out that the game did not require EA's servers but for linking the city's (those tiny tiny city's) and saves heads were rolling in those plush EA offices. I especially liked when a Maxis engineer did not roll over on his sword and said something to the effect of, "Well we never said that it was a requirement that they use the servers to play the game," when EA's press machine had said the direct opposite of that over and over and over.
Knowing those MBA geeks like I do, that was what pushed him out. His lies have to make the company money and make them look good. Under him the lies did not.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
Gaming in an industry heavily determined by appearance. He's the figurehead, which means he gets to be absurdly rich when the company does "well," and gets to be tarred and feathered when the company does "poorly."
That said, from what I've heard most problems with EA games are in fact due to the interference of management, and the CEO is supposed to have a handle on the types of managers he employs. Of course it's not as if Riccitiello snuck into the codebase at night and replaced good code with bad, but it's probably also not the case that he was completely clueless as to what was going on. And if he was really, honestly clueless, he wasn't doing his job properly, either in paying attention to reports or in putting people who will tell him the truth in positions of power.
But of course, I'm just an armchair CEO going off one press release. It would be far more useful to see what other changes are taking place inside EA. What other middle managers left? What project leads got fired/reassigned? Is anybody looking at the process and saying "Where should this failure have been caught?"? Chances are nothing is changing aside from the name plaque on the corner office, and that's really the problem.
Hey, I have a novel idea. 20 years ago people told me that in just a few decades, regular average people like me, would own "supercomputers." That by the year 2013 we might all have two-CPU SMP systems, with each CPU clocked possibly as high as a GIGAHERTZ, and possibly containing up to 512MB of RAM and maybe as much as ten gigabytes of hard disk space!
Now, I happen to know that the personal computers of the early 1990s are themselves capable of some pretty impressive sims, so it makes you wonder what might be possible in 2013. What if someone were to write a simulation game which runs on the very same personal computer as the person who pays for the game, rather than having to run the game in CompuServe or AOL's data center? Not only would you get superior performance and reduced latency, you would get automatic scaling; every sale of the game gets that copy of the game a new computer to run on.
Is my idea genius, or insanity? Could it work? Might we some day run CPU-bound games on our own computers? Will Joe Average people some day be able to afford hardware which can run more than one thread simultaneously, might the Pentium Pro not be the final word in Instructions per Clock, and might the GigaHertz barrier be reached? Or is the problem that these supercomputers of the future, will be too expensive (over $5000) and therefore not be used for anything as trivial as games, so they won't have color screens? I admit my vision may not come to pass, I'm just wonder how it might fail.
[/sarcasm] My point being, of course, that the person playing the game likely has at least a Core i3 or Phenom II, each of which is a fucking beast of a monster machine, easily able to eat the problems in question like an veteran-hunter orca whale ripping apart a cute baby seal. Back end? For a single-player sim game? Really? EA can't possibly be that stupid. Is the game really that bad?
He's a figurehead and a spokesperson at big events, but ultimately is only as good as his advisors and staff. He can't be at every interview for coders, or even interviews for the HR people who hire the coders. He has to trust his staff to do their job, and they didn't. I see this as more of a marketing selling an idea up the food chain, and dev trying their best to hold it together while sticking to their ridiculous deadlines. The next CEO will be in exactly the same position, because everyone else responsible is still in their position of responsibility.
If they are just figureheads, then why are they paid such a high salary. They do well when things out of their control go well, they are punished when things out of their control go wrong.
The amount of hassle involved as a legitimate customer is a bit higher than anything Ubi or GfW will throw your way. Origin, UPlay and Games for Windows are clear indicators(to me at least) that I may have to count myself lucky if I can play the game at all.
That's why I basically only buy games that either come in humble bundles (or sometimes one of its many ripoffs) or on Steam/Desura after I'm sure the game doesn't have some kind of silly DRM like the ones you mentioned.
Yes, it means I can't play the newest versions of SimCity or Diablo or whatever, but judging from what I hear after releases of these games, neither can the people who actually bought them. So I still count myself ahead.
And who gets to decide on the CEO's staff and advisors? The CEO.
The ghosts in pacman had better pathfinding....
CEO's don't get canned over a single mistake. SC5 was simply the straw that broke the camel's back. It is the end result of a long series of poor judgement calls which has resulted in EA stock price suffering through a year long drop in price. I actually find it a little surprising that he is being let go now instead of at the start of the year as the stock price has been recovering over the last couple months.
However, I think pretty much everything that EA has been involved in has been a bit of a disaster for the last few years. Old Republic has been a failure. ME3 and DA2 were met with lots of negative press and customer complaints. The botched SC5 release is simply the last chapter in EA"s legacy of poorly considered decisions.
Look no farther than Dwarf Fortress for the prime example of what is possible.
They have graphics packages for it that make it much easier to play. Of course, most DF fans loathe those packages since it makes the game accessible to newbs. The whole fun of DF is dealing with its insane complexity and difficulty to use.
EA: "Hey look.. we care we fired our CEO" Consumer: "Sweet, this means they care" but then next game they do this and everyone just buys in all over again. It's like the Xbox 360 a console that caused endless headaches for nearly every consumer that bought one for years, cost microsoft billions of dollars and yet how many of the people who 'swore they wouldn't do it on the third xbox" will be there buying it not only in the first month but on that first day. Quite frankly if we really want to 'vote with our wallets' noone should be buying this next xbox offering until at least two weeks have past and ideally a month or two.
Just another second banana
EA JOBS...ITS IN THE GAME.
Much of the industry had already expected Ricitello to get fired months ago after it became clear that he'd directed hundreds of millions of dollars into Old Republic, and produced poor-to-lukewarm revenues from the result.
Putting that much investment into Old Republic was definitely the CEO's choice of direction. I agree with others above that SC5 was only the straw that broke the camel's back. Old Republic is what cracked it.
(It's not even that Old Republic was a bad game, it just produced really poor ROI after consuming an enormous amount of the company's investments).
Whether or not that asshole got sacked, or how he got sacked, isn't important
What's more important is if EA gonna let users enjoy SC5 without been unnecessarily burdened by the online DRM ?
Actually, I'd say it's far more important that the CEO got sacked. If the gaming industry learns that stupid DRM results in Bad Things (tm) like losing your job, even for upper level management, than this will be less likely to happen in the future.
It is better that future games avoid this inanity than that this specific game gets fixed.
What are you TALKING about?
The CEO is definitely the one calling the shots for stuff like always-on DRM, free-to-play, in-app purchases and other decisions of this kind.
He implements "big" policy and mediates the power struggles between for instance marketing and engineering.
There are numerous examples of this, but one that comes to mind is Steve Jobs' architecting of Apple so that Jonathan Ives would "win" when it came to design decisions.
If they'd had a DRM authentication requirement and it didn't stop people from playing the game, and the game were good, there wouldn't be a problem (for most users).
For most gamers, that's an acceptable compromise. Yes, there are some costs, but people are willing to pay that. Some gamers refuse to do DRM on principle, and there's a part of the gaming market that caters to them, but for the rest, all they care about is enjoying the game. If they get to enjoy their game, who is anyone else to deny them their enjoyment?
This failure is going to encourage companies to do DRM non-intrusively (more effort, more expensive), or avoid it altogether (cheaper). That's still a positive step IMAO.
I don't mean to appear disconnected, but I haven't purchased an EA game since PS2, and I actually would applaud them using a Facebook login as a requirement for the next few games. This seems like a good time to buy more FB stock while it's still below $30.
The next CEO will be in exactly the same position, because everyone else responsible is still in their position of responsibility.
Then maybe where the last guy fell down and where the next guy should start is eliminating some of the advisors that failed. There is unlikely a single point of failure, and the first point of failure so large that someones job should be evaluated is quite high up. I like that the CEO was sacrificed, but I hope the next guy does some management house cleaning. Blaming developers is doubtfully the right course of action (bias note: IAAD) because you can only get so much done in a ten hour workday, and when the demands exceed the time contraints of a developers ability, they shouldn't be accountable for that. Some manager somewhere that answers any estimate by demanding it be completed in 1/3 the time is accountable for that.
As someone who rarely "fellows" in LotRO, I don't see why I really need to be online all the time - unless it's just so the Turbine Store UI opens quicker.. oh, yeah.
The frame keeps the GPU from having to render the entire city all at once. What's keeping the city from having to simulate the entire city all at once? The frame isn't going to do it (unless you want to put parts of you city that you can't see on hold).
It's the other way around. They can crank the graphics up to 11, but the simulation can only be so complex or the city so large before a commodity CPU can't handle it any longer.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
A figurehead CEO is a shitty CEO. The CEO is the Chief Executive Officer. It's his (or her) job to lead the damn company. If John Riccitiello said, "No DRM", there'll be no DRM on EA's games. If the company isn't executing his orders, then he's ineffective and should resign anyway (or he should start firing people).
This whole thing just sounds like he's incompetent, and not capable of leading a major game publishing company, either because he doesn't understand the business, or he doesn't have an effective team reporting to him. It's not surprising. Most CEOs are picked not because of what they know, but because of who they know.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Whether or not that asshole got sacked, or how he got sacked, isn't important
What's more important is if EA gonna let users enjoy SC5 without been unnecessarily burdened by the online DRM ?
The answer is: "We're going to come up with a more clandestine way to hide the fact that we're going to produce a product with the same effect, only with a different presentation. See, we're fired the guy who made all of this bad happen, so nothing but good things can come from now on."
It's just another play in the proverbial game of chess. Dude got sacked with a buttload of cash just to convince the masses that things are About To Change(tm).
Mind you, you have to account for the Amiga's near-magical ability to run programs an order of magnitude or so more complex than it theoretically should have been capable of doing.
When your Amiga, running a software-based Mac emulator (ShapeShifter) is running a Mac program faster than the native Mac at the same clock speed.. there's some Dark Arts shit going down.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
Who're you calling a sample, you blatherskite?
There was an internal memo where he apologized for missing earnings forecasts. He left apologizing to investors, not to gamers.
Gorobei's point is that the simulation approach to SC5 is fundamentally different to the older "Sim" games - the older games, as you say, modelled the entire organism (theme park, in the case of Rollercoaster Tycoon) and generated the actors within that simulation based on a group of relatively simple statistical behaviours.
I suggest you go back and re-play RCT if you don't believe me on the simulation aspect of it. It is not fundamentally different from how SC5 is simulated, except smaller numbers of people and perhaps less fudging (I haven't played SC5, this is based on what I've read about it).
RCT was NOT the same kind of simulation that Sim City 2000 and other simulation games of the time were running. You could look at each individual person and see their hunger, queasiness, happiness, bathroom, money, etc. Then they would walk from location to location based on what those statistics suggested they did. It was very much bottom-up simulation in nature. Hell, even the rollercoasters themselves were simulated in order to determine thrill/excitement/nausea scores.
It was really neat. To see what you should do to improve your park, you could look at an aggregate number of people thinking a certain thing. For example, you could sort by people's thoughts and see that 100 people think that Splash Mountain was overpriced, (and even sort through them and find where they are in your park, see their names, statistics, etc.) then lower the price based on that. Versus Sim City 2000, where there was a magic colored indicator that showed you how much residential/commercial/industrial you were supposed to build.
Now I'm sure there was some internal fudging on it, but it was difficult to see where from players point of view. Certainly, there was no "getFudgedPop" or whatever they have in SC5 - if you're park had 2000 people there then dammit, you could go through and count each person and come up with 2000. So I fail to see any difference in principle in that simulation vs. the one in SC5.
Since dropping EA games I have moved EA part of my budget to buying more Ubisoft games. I got into Prince of Persia series only after the initial release of a DRM free Prince of Persia (I bought on Steam but I like their form of DRM and Valve as a company). I have since purchased every Prince of Persia game I can via Steam, I got into Assassin's Creed franchise, bought every game and DLC, and enjoy the integration with Ubisoft platform and Steam (it's not in the way of my enjoyment). I also started investing in KickStarter games that are focused on PC (Star Citizen), Castle Story, and others (buying six games at a time for household use)
If EA wants part of my cash pie DROP Origin. It's a waste of time (kind of like Bing against Google, nice try but in the end you'll cut your losses). Let those talented developers at Bioware work on co-op in their games (Neverwinter Nights is your benchmark). Then I'll come back. I haven't even played over half the games in my Steam library, I simply stockpile to help Steam, Valve, developers, and I'll get around to them one day. I don't miss EA games at the moment. I enjoyed the news that CEO was canned and removed from Board.
EA is a Nega-BSAF. They don't make a lot of the games we buy, they make a lot of the games we buy worse.
"It's quite possibly one of the most painfully accurate anatomy simulation available in an RPG."
Until you can determine the circumference of a Sim's nipples, F.A.T.A.L. still wins that matchup (for very low values of 'winning').
I have been unable to purchase anything through the Origin interface since Dead Space 3, as all of my attempts at purchases have been denied due to 'error NU2001' Origin themselves couldn't help me and the automated responses I got from them stating it had now been fixed try again were fabrications as I still had the problem, in the end I just gave up trying to buy anything from them, as have the countless thousands of other people who have had the NU2001 problem (You can verify this with a quick Google for 'error nu2001' - No wonder they are in trouble now, they have lost a huge cross section of their customer base through lack of communication between the complaints department and management. The only person who has genuinely tried to help me with this problem so far is whomever it is that runs the Origin Facebook page - Thanks Dude! I haven't had problems prior to or subsequently when purchasing stuff through Steam or GOG, or anyone else for that matter, so the problem is with Origin, not me, my card, nor my financial institution. So, I can't even buy SC5 through Origin to join in the fray, or not.
EA says that the always online decisions was a creative one made by Maxis, the developers of the game, not an evil plot by EA.
Source: http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2013/03/28/ea-exec-simcity-always-online-came-from-maxis.aspx