EA Caves: SimCity Offline Mode Coming

iONiUM writes "After EA staunchly denied any offline mode, it would seem the disastrous SimCity launch and continual gamer community anger (as well as a CEO firing), EA finally caved and has now going to make an offline mode. However, the obvious question still remains: is it too little too late?"

Comments

too little too late?

[Culture20]

Why buy an EA game unless you're a masochist?

Re:too little too late?

[erroneus]

Gamers are picture perfect examples of addiction. Not "all gamers" but there is a subset of gamers significant enough to predict that no matter how bad things get, they will wait in line to spend lots of money so they can "earn achievements." And why? Because they can't get them in real life as easily or as well. That sense of achievement is addicting and even necessary.

But it's not just gamers who suffer from this. How about all those football fans who rejoice when their team wins or gets sad when their team loses? How about those soccer fans? Have they decapitated and dismembered anyone lately? There's no end to the lunacy. None. And because of that business out there sees unlimited potential for exploitaiton.

Re:too little too late?

[Cryacin]

But that argument would indicate that EA and its subsidiaries behave just like drug dealers and pimps! Oh, right... Carry on!

Re:too little too late?

[Skarecrow77]

Because games aren't created by the publishers, and sometimes a publisher contracts/purchases a development studio that actually knows it's shit?

Re:too little too late?

[girlintraining]

But that argument would indicate that EA and its subsidiaries behave just like drug dealers and pimps! Oh, right... Carry on!

Please don't compare EA with drug dealers and pimps. Both usually provide exactly what is promised; drugs, or sex. EA can't meet that standard, not by a long shot. When you buy drugs, or a girl for the night, you usually get to do what you want... not guilted at every turn and told you can't be trusted, and that instead of forking over $50 you'll be forked over for about $500,000 and a 7 year jail sentence for "piracy" because your DVD got scratched and you used a backup copy... for shame.

Re:too little too late?

[JoeMerchant]

It's never too late to start doing the right thing.

If the new SimCity adds an offline mode, and you're a SimCity gamer, you should support it, and shun other games that are needlessly connected.

Re:too little too late?

[artor3]

But they're not fixing other issues, like the minuscule city size. They're probably only doing the "right" thing here so that they can save on server costs.

Re:too little too late?

[Common Joe]

It's never too late to start doing the right thing.

If the new SimCity adds an offline mode, and you're a SimCity gamer, you should support it, and shun other games that are needlessly connected.

Disagree for two reasons. 1) Once I despise a company so much that I boycott them, then I'm boycotting them until they proved to me they have made real changes to their management structure and their attitude. How many times have companies suddenly "wised up" only to do something worse on their next game? EA is among the worst of those offenders. Even if they did a 180 tomorrow, I'll be watching for years before I buy anything from EA. I know there will always be people who think like you so most companies with this crap attitude do have the chance to redeem themselves. Even if EA went under, I wouldn't feel bad for the management at all. I'm not even sure I'd feel bad for the programmers and artists... which brings me to point 2.

2) EA has treated their employees so bad, a wife got online and wrote a very shaming letter back in 2004. They aren't the only guilty company either. Has it gotten better? I haven't heard anything saying how things have improved. In fact, I generally keep reading how bad it is to work in the AAA gaming industry. I even know someone personally who works in the AAA gaming industry and he recently mentioned something about mold issues in the office where he was expected to work and it caused him to get very sick. (It wasn't EA.)

You're entitled to your opinion, but I think you should not support SimCity until EA cleans up its act. If the company goes under, let it be a message to the other companies to clean up their acts. If they all go under, then that gives the little companies an opportunity to thrive -- something which I think is badly needed.

Re:too little too late?

[rhodium_mir]

Between The Erotic Review and TNA Board it's generally pretty easy to get what you paid for as long as you go with a reputable provider.

Re:too little too late?

[sjames]

But once you pay the money, the drugs are yours. They no longer care what you do with them. Share, do it all yourself, whatever. They don't show up at your door demanding to see your license when you try to open the package. They actually prefer that you DON'T call them and ask for permission each time you want to use some of the drugs they sold you.

Re:too little too late?

[artor3]

Sometimes, yes. For example, if my arm gets chopped off, a perfect solution would be to reattach it and make it good as new. An imperfect but acceptable solution would be to clean up the wound and give me a prosthetic. What EA is doing is offering to move my watch to my remaining wrist. It's nice and all, but it doesn't solve the problem I'm actually concerned with.

SimCity is still a huge disappointment to fans of the franchise. A dull, buggy, pared-down game that works offline isn't much better than one that requires the internet.

Re:too little too late?

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason a lot of people play games is because they provide a challenge that's fun to overcome. There's a certain satisfaction that comes with solving the obstacles presented in a game, and the harder the obstacle, the greater the level of satisfaction. Don't be a sourpuss by extrapolating this to mean their real life lacks any means of gaining satisfaction.

But even if that's indeed true, it's also harsh to have a go at the gamer because let's face it, life sucks for a LOT of people. They go to a dead-end job doing something they hate, then go home in their shitty car because they can't afford anything better, then sit at home worried about whether they'll have a job to come home to the next day. Gaming is a form of escapism and a means of achieving satisfaction from accomplishment, and is increasingly popular precisely BECAUSE society itself is fucked. Given the pressures companies put on their employees these days, no wonder people have no sense of achievement anywhere except in gaming, which readily rewards the player for successes that their efforts in real life tend to go unacknowledged, or worse, continually berated for.

For a lot of (most?) people, life is just about existing because the alternative (death) is not particularly desirable. So they end up becoming addicts as you say because games provide the satisfaction of accomplishment they don't get in real life, because real life is a harsh mistress. It's not always the fault of the gamer, and you need to understand this.

Re:too little too late?

[Digital Vomit]

You better believe if a dude doesn't get anal and tells upgrayyd cinammon is gonna have a black eye.

That's Upgraydd.

Remember: the extra 'd' is for a double dose of his pimping.

Re:Maybe next time

[PsychoSlashDot]

Not a chance. I predict there will be relatively few sales because of the "too little, too late" status, and EA will simply conclude that they were right all along... offline mode doesn't matter.

Not sure this is a "Cave"

[Ksevio]

With offline mode, EA can now shut down the servers that were once required while still selling the game. Since SimCity isn't subscription based, the servers are just a drain of money for them at this point since the hype died down and not many are going to pirate it.

Come a few months they'll be announcing that the online portion will be shuttered, but look forward to the next great EA release!

Re:Not sure this is a "Cave"

[JoeMerchant]

I can't express how disillusioned I was when GT5 Prologue killed their (lame, stuttery) online racing servers. For me, $60 is a damn investment, and I didn't expect to be losing features a couple of years after making that investment.

Rebranding Opportunity

[gregor-e]

Since they're not going to increase the city size, perhaps EA should consider rebranding it as "Sim Village".

What would EA have to do?

[TsuruchiBrian]

What would EA have to do to get me to ever buy another EA game again?

1. Atonement: They could become a nonprofit organization and only come out with open source games that ran on linux with all profits going to charities to help children in 3rd world countries learn to program.

2. Deception: Change their name, and payoff every website that I visit and everyone I know not to tell me that they changed their name.

3. Coercion: Kidnap someone I care about and threaten to kill them if I don;t buy one of their games.

4. Temptation: Start some crazy PR stunt where if EA sells X copies of a game, the CEO will literally eat the collectors edition of the game (the disc, the box, the manuals, the collectible miniatures, and any cancer causing chemicals, etc), and by some arcane loophole in the law this turns out to be enforceable by by the courts.

Re:What would EA have to do?

[phantomfive]

5. Make a game you really want to play.

That's how it is with games. And if you happen to be one of the few principled enough to follow through with what you said (despite really wanting to play it), EA won't care because there will be plenty of other gamers to take your place.

"EA Caves"?

[Michael Woodhams]

Here was I thinking they'd released a Minecraft clone.

EA Sports: It's in the game

[tepples]

Because EA owns exclusive rights to professional and collegiate football. Last time I checked, EA was the exclusive licensee of NFL, NCAA, and FIFA rosters.

Re:Not for me

[tepples]

The market is not free for several reasons, two directly related to EA and one not so directly.

• EA holds the exclusive license to several major sport leagues' rosters.
• EA has claimed in a lawsuit (EA v. Zynga) that its copyright in The Sims Mobile extends to ownership of gameplay elements. This lawsuit was settled out of court, but it still contributes to a chilling effect on development of video games in the same genres as certain flagship EA titles.
• Currently, there are three companies, whose names start with M, N, and S, with effective veto power over playing a video game on a television. I'm told only a commercially insignificant fraction of game buyers use a television as a a desktop PC's monitor, and this will remain true unless and until Steam Machines become popular.

Re:Maybe next time

[jd2112]

I tend to agree it's probably too little too late for SimCity, but hopefully EA and other game companies will learn a lesson from this disaster. The fact that they are willing to release an offline mode hints that such hope is not completely unrealistic.

Or more likely, "Hey, we've made about all the money we can off of Sim City but it's costing money to run those servers for online play. We had better release a fix for offline play before we shut them down to avoid a nasty class-action suit."

Re:50 MB limit

[Shados]

google play allows expansion files at 2gb each (I think it lets you have up to two, for a total of 4gb).

TO LITTLE TOO LATE!

[Anonymous Coward]

EA GAMES - we fuckup everything

Seriously. They killed a giant cash cow with the death of simcity. 2k and 4 are still in the most popular games of all time catagory. How they managed to fuck that up is simply amazing. That took serious work and skill to fuckup so completely! They even had the perfect model handed to them with all the custom mods out there for simcity4. All they had to do was grab a few of those. Slap it on a new compile that plays happy and nice with vista+. Upgrade the graphics some. And bam. Continue to rake in millions for another decade or more!

The fact they could not do this is astounding.

And now? Fuckem.. Simcity is dead to me.. (anything after 4 anyway) A game i have paid for a total of 9 times because i LIKED it and wanted it everywhere.
Dead. Not one cent will they ever get again from me.

Hopefully a bunch of stupid fuck managers get fired over all the monumentally stupid things that killed the simcity cash cow. Because they deserve it.

(still blows my mind how they managed to fuckup something so completely like that. when they had how many years of past code and experience and customer feedback to build upon)

Freudian Slip

[Roger W Moore]

sometimes a publisher contracts/purchases a development studio that actually knows it's shit?

Well that would be the case for EA. I imagine most development studios "know it is shit" by now. You did mean to include that apostrophe right?

Re:Sweet.

[danknight48]

Most pirates stay away from dogshit.

Re:Maybe next time

[pspahn]

And just wait until they start yelling about how once they allowed offline mode, piracy skyrocketed.

See! They were right!

Alternatives, if you like the game consept.

[fjin]

To play city building game, you don't have to rely to products of EA. There is few free alternatives aroud.

• Rebranded original SimCity - Micropolis
• Lincity and Lincity-NG
• Opencity

Ya that is near as big a problem

[Sycraft-fu]

The limit in the new Sim City is 2km x 2km. That is pathetic. Literally all you can create is a couple city blocks, or a very tiny small town. I mean I live close enough to work to bike in, and I live a good deal further than that (8km).

While there are always limits as to what you can do reasonably in a game, this limit is way too small to be fun. It isn't a matter of being able to create a "big city" it is a matter that almost all small towns are far larger than that.

Apparently they aren't fixing it either. They say the performance isn't good on larger cities, which translates to "We fucked our engine up bad so it can't scale at all."

Unless that is fixed as well, I wouldn't get it. Offline mode is a requisite for sure, but if gameplay is still broken then it isn't worth money.

Re:Ya that is near as big a problem

[ultranova]

Apparently they aren't fixing it either. They say the performance isn't good on larger cities, which translates to "We fucked our engine up bad so it can't scale at all."

If, as EA claimed, every resident - and everything else to the last spark of electricity - actually gets simulated individually at the level of walking on street, then the engine likely scales linearly (twice the residents require twice the computing power); it's just that even a small town requires route-finding for tens of thousands of agents in realtime, which is not feasible.

Not that this should had been a surprise to anyone, given that other games that simulate individuals at this level - such as Tropico - aim for a few thousand residents tops.

Re:Ya that is near as big a problem

[Anonymous Coward]

No it doesn't require route finding for tens of thousands of agents. Once an agent has a route from his home to his place of work, then unless he moves house, moves job, new roads are built or destroyed, or his internal 'pissed off at traffic jams' counter exceeds his 'tolerance' statistic, he can continue to use that route. Exactly as real people do. You don't recalculate your route to work every morning. You use the same one until you move house, job, or get sufficiently pissed at traffic.

Re:Ya that is near as big a problem

[Rockoon]

They're more-or-less simulating that virtual person's commute in the sense of actually simulating the car he drives, it's position on the road, etc.

Thats O(n) .. in other words, a modern computer could handle literally millions in real-time.

..and before you suggest that its an N-body problem.. it isn't. A hierarchical grid makes the types of interactions necessary here linear, so its still millions in real-time.