Sim City *Limited* Edition

[spoodie]

Pfft, I didn't buy it.

Sorry, that wasn't meant to come across as directed at you personally. More a statement to gaming crybabies on the Internet.

It's frustrating that people continue to give them money. Although I am guilty too, but Battlefield is a must. I've managed to avoid Mass Effect 3 by already having too many other games to play.

[Dog Pants]

It's a fine line between vocally opposing something and crying, for sure.

Incidentally, I love the idea of an online city area where we can trade with each other, and obviously that would have an online requirement. I just don't see why it needs to be forced on us (well I do, but I disagree with the reasons). Same with the performance thing. Give me a tickbox in the options for cloud processing assistance, and a single or multiplayer option, and I'd have been happy (and probably always played it online). Oh, and not charged silly amounts. And not given us any variation as day 0 paid DLC. But other than that...

[TezzRexx]

High price, "additional" DLC and shitting DRM means I'll be

Which is a shame, as I quite liked the idea of collaboration. But I can only imagine it having the same quite of impact as Spore's monster sharing did.

[friznit]

Good luck with that. Half the game runs serverside, so sweepage may be a challenge.

[Grimmie]

I for one welcome our Online DRM overlords.

I can't see me being disconnected from the internet on my desktop (the only computer I have that'll run SimCity) for more than a day at a time, and If I can't find some other game to play in that time, I fear that I won't be trying hard enough.

The waiting line for playing the game is slightly concerning, but as Joose said with D3, it's launch day and queues are expected while they load balance all of their servers. This might well be why they're doing a staggered launch of US/AU/EU over the next few days. Rather let the 'murrikans set the stage for a smooth EU launch in this case.

I remain sceptical about the DLC rumours till I see someone from Maxis announce it, I can't help but feel it's a bit scaremongering and rumour-milling.

Roll on Friday.

[deject]

I think the problem is the exact same one as Diablo 3 had, in that the online requirement is nothing more than an arbitrary choice by the developer/publisher that really doesn't need to exist at all, and because of this requirement the game is very negatively affected. Waiting lines to play single player? If I wanted to play this game and paid for it, I would be seriously pissed off. They shouldn't get a pass just because they decided to make you have to connect to a server and making a stable back end for that is hard and expensive. If they want to do that, they should make it robust enough so that people who paid $60 for that shit can actually play the game when they want to. In what other situation would this sort of thing be anything close to acceptable? MMO's kinda get a pass, because they have to deal with large numbers of concurrent online players out of sheer necessity, but outside of that exact situation, FUCK THAT NOISE. I get that this is not a surprise to anyone, but this kind of shit should not be acceptable at all.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

Good luck with that. Half the game runs serverside, so sweepage may be a challenge.

That might not be a massive issue, I bet someone is working on a way to patch the game to talk to Localhost for the server, and bodging a server together to do the processing needed.

[spoodie]

Having watched the Giant Bomb quick look and I see other serious issues with the gameplay itself. Individual cities are limited to a relatively small box, which shares a region with other cities. And some interaction happens between the cities, which may or may not be controlled by other players. It seems to me they put that in just so it had some kind of online element and so has to authenticate online.

[Grimmie]

Largest region's 16 cities and 4 great works. If you want you can have a region all to yourself. The "Small cities" thing isn't really a problem.

[spoodie]

Largest region's 16 cities and 4 great works. If you want you can have a region all to yourself. The "Small cities" thing isn't really a problem.

Giant Bomb told me it was, but I've not really played the series since the original so what do I know. How about the lack terraforming, that's a problem we can get upset about, right?

[TezzRexx]

Good luck with that. Half the game runs serverside, so sweepage may be a challenge.

That might not be a massive issue, I bet someone is working on a way to patch the game to talk to Localhost for the server, and bodging a server together to do the processing needed.

this, can't see it being too difficult. Certainly not impossible.

It does feel like however that online processing has been included just for the sake of the DRM.

If it comes too it, could just play SC4 again

[Joose]

Largest region's 16 cities and 4 great works. If you want you can have a region all to yourself. The "Small cities" thing isn't really a problem.

From the reports I've been reading it shouldn't be, but is. For one, the sharing across regions often doesn't work as you would expect (example: one review I read had a city with a massive power surplus and a city with a power deficit, but only a small amount of the surplus was being transferred across so the cities remained with a deficit and a surplus. Another had the same situation with workers). Secondly, unless you want a cluster of villages, you need to pack things in to each of your cities a bit because of the small space available, which negates the point of curvy roads because grid systems are more efficient. A little more space to play with would allow more freedom for your layouts. Thirdly, even 16 cities seems small by the numbers compared to old sim city games. People are struggling to stuff more than 200k people in their new cities without everything going totally to hell. 16 cities x 200k people = 3.2 million people. I was shit at sim city and could reach populations three times that.

This is why I'm worried about the above but not the DRM issues: the overloaded servers situation will fix itself. Every game that uses servers (whether it morally should be or not) gets pwned in the first week or so after launch. Give it a couple weeks and the situation will go away even if nothing at all is done to try and fix it, purely because less people will be trying to play the game simultaneously. Problems with how the game itself works, on the other hand, will only be fixed through patching and/or DLC. And that's a situation that may happen, but just as possibly may not. The game may never have its resource sharing issues fixed, or the unhelpful and illogical advisors. They might release DLC to increase city sizes (which may or may not be free) but they also might not. The game as it stands sounds super broken, DRM issues aside, and I don't want to pay full price for something super broken that *may* be fixed in the future.

I need one of two things to happen before I put down money: a patch that addresses at least some of the issues reviewers are seeing, or reviews from more people I trust saying things are not as bad as people are making out. Because let's face it, although a lot of the reviews I've read have the above issues, a lot of them could just be down to user error. Although you could argue that if all the users are making the same errors, you have a GUI that needs patching...

As for the piracy thing: if people can make private servers for WoW, they can make private servers for this. Not saying they will necassarily, but it's totally doable.

[Grimmie]

So.. Is anyone gonna play in my 5punky region (oo-er), where we can make cities shaped like CDCs?

No? Aw..

[FatherJack]

So.. Is anyone gonna play in my 5punky region (oo-er), where we can make cities shaped like CDCs?

That sounds like it would be a very inefficient use of space, I'm not going to search for tesellated cocks here at work to dis/prove that though.

[Dog Pants]

As an aside, there's a striking difference between the coverage of RPS and PCG. The former is focusing on the DRM and launch issues, the latter calling it incredible tech. Make of that what you will.

[Joose]

Something occured to me about this in the car this morning: Could the issues all be related? Things like resource sharing across regions is very likely being passed through their servers, and if what they were saying about offloading calculations about the simulation is true thats stuff like how many workers/jobs you have at any one time being passed through the servers too.

I remember with the first week or so of D3's issues you had big old queues to get into the game, but even when you did there were occasional lag issues causing all sorts of squirrely behaviour. Could overworked servers be the cause of some of these other issues? Seems plausable.

It would also be gloriously ironic, seeing as "home computers cant handle the complex simulations without lag" was one of the excuses for the servers in the first place

So.. Is anyone gonna play in my 5punky region (oo-er), where we can make cities shaped like CDCs?

I absolutely will if the situation improves.

[Joose]

As an aside, there's a striking difference between the coverage of RPS and PCG. The former is focusing on the DRM and launch issues, the latter calling it incredible tech. Make of that what you will.

Having now had a look at both, I don't think that's a fair analysis of the two at all. For a start, RPS haven't reviewed it yet. They previewed it a while back and gave it a glowing report, but they have only covered the news since the launch and the only news in simsland is about the DRM and launch issues. PCG on the other hand have covered the DRM and launch issues, but also have a review up and a feature that is essentially a Lets Play in text form. Although the review is overall fairly positive, it also makes a point of how there are launch issues and it is one of (but not the only) review where I read about the other issues such as the unhelpful advisors and the resource sharing. Apart from the fact that PCG have *more* coverage than RPS, I don't think there's that much of a difference at all. Its certainly not "striking".

[Dog Pants]

I admit that it was only an observation based on headlines grabbed on my phone at lunch and whatnhad been written in the PCG review by last night. Since I trust both sites I'm glad they tally up more than they appeared to.

[HereComesPete]

...stuff... FUCK THAT NOISE. I get that this is not a surprise to anyone, but this kind of shit should not be acceptable at all.

I just about put up with it on Diablo 3 because I had wanted that game with a dirty passion. Wasn't worth it even after they resolved the login issues the always on DRM would sometimes fuck me over. The only reason it didn't affect me too much is that the game tuned out to be a bit shit and I quit playing.

Apparently the reason why it needs to be always on isn't just piracy. It's because it's designed to be connected at all times. So the aim is to help those with shitty PC's by relieving the computational burden? And it allows Maxis to monitor you so they can send you challenges? Seems like balls to me. As does the fact that the actual ability to build a sprawling megalopolis appears to have been removed. And they'll probably turn the servers off after a few years so you can never play the game in it's legitimate form.

I'm not directly bothered by this because I don't really like city building games, but if I did I'd probably just get that Cities XL 2012 platinum dealio on steam because fuck EA.

[deject]

new SimCity is discussed on this week's Giant Bombcast and Jeff has some really interesting arguments why it's not a great game. Be warned, they talk about some hot bullshit for a really long time that is equal parts hilarious and fucking weird.

http://www.giantbomb.com/podcasts/giant ... /1600-427/