Mansen wrote:
Simcity was a pretty harmless release for me (thank god for EU being two days later than the US for once...)



Game installed and patched as expected - Even managed to get online for the most of the evening without any waiting (there was a 30min period where the servers were down - no warning).



The game itself is pretty good - nothing extraordinary. The multiplayer is asynchronous so anything you do in your city won't affect your neighbor for an hour or so. Pretty disappointing really.



Lack of terraforming is awful - It leads to some really frustrating (and pointless) geometry errors and considering how all construction in the game can terraform just fine, I don't see why we can't. At the least to correct some minor hills or riverbeds.



The industrial system is a "hard lesson" in itself - To get to high tech production (such as refining crude oil into plastics or fuel) you need to sell X amounts every day - but the natural resources deplete over time so you basically have to stockpile it and sell it all in one go. Very counterintuitive.



And cities are much, much too small. Maybe not for low end machines, but my computer is yawning by the time I fill up a square.

Hmm, I never was much into such sim-games. And as it seems, I will not be in the future.

From what I've seen I'd love to get on the game and play multiplayer, though I can't afford it!

I seem to know more about this SimCity than most people playing it, which is where I get into this.



SimCity twitter has directly told people that

"Offline mode is not possible"

"Mac is being worked on"

"Thank you for reporting this issue, we are looking into it"



Now personally I don't mind it being based off multiplayer, and I do find that single player would be fine for me as I could build multiple cities. Though I'm kind of hoping that by the time I get it they have larger regions (which are planned).

If you lose connection to the server for more than... 15minutes? then your game forces you to stop playing while it makes a final attempt at syncing your savegame to the cloud. If it fails (or you grow impatient) your progress since the last sync is lost to the void.



That is the most noticeable one right now - As I've said elsewhere; when the servers run properly, the DRM is a non issue in terms of gameplay. But if it breaks, then you are in for a world of hurt. One can only hope that the proposed "server upgrades" will fix these problems.



I spent 1½ hours yesterday trying to get invited into a region with some friends - the Server connection kept going on and off so I couldn't stay connected for long enough to log into the city (at which point it could just sync whenever it had connection and I could plays semi offline as I wanted)



Edit: And on a personal note, don't bother buying any of the European Cities DLC. They are litterally a single landmark building and a service building - at the price of 9,99$ or so.

While the game is designed around MP, I feel that it is one of the best game-play wise SimCity games out there.



I can deal without the terraforming, And the water and power-lines were kinda pointless past early game anyway.



The DRM.....now this is the question....can I deal with it? I mean, I don't mind using origin, the stigma of EA doesn't concern me only the products.



So can you guys list to me the DRM problems? That might help me decide.



(Also I will stray from the game until the servers are reliable.)

They're actually working on merging the cities so that each server is just for purposes of avoiding bottlenecks - your cities will be on all servers.

The game itself is good, but that useless always-online DRM... I hate it! You always have to chose one of the crappy EA servers to play, and when they are avaiable, they are still problematic. And your cities also don't go from one server to another. Example: if you create a city in the "West Europe 1", such city will not be in any other server.

adder wrote:
Mansen; how much would you give this game out of 10?

Would you recommend it to others?

Once the servers actually work as intended? 8,5/10 - It IS a great game. It is a lot more accessible than Simcity 4 ever was. The change to 3D makes it look less dated as well.



Multiplayer is asyncrous and thus won't really be as interesting as "proper" multiplayer - I'm in a 16 city region right now with 7 other players. It's fun as long as we're on Teamspeak together, but if it was just text... doubt it would be very thrilling.



In short - Great reboot of a personal favourite, lots of server issues that NEED to be fixed before I can recommend it to anyone, multiplayer is fun, but not thrilling.

Basically here is my post from another game forum:

OP: http://forums.unknownworlds.com/discussion/128904/you-dun-goofed-ea

"WhiteWeasel;128904" wrote:
EA ruined Simcity.



Totalbiscuit coverage:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUl_Cj2_KWU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1Z5MdT2U1s

11:13 for 2nd one

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lwo96d_rP1U



Every review on amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Electronic-Arts-41018ted-Edition2-SimCity/product-reviews/B007VTVRFA/ref=cm_cr_dp_see_all_summary?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1



A petition to remove always-on DRM: (41,631 sigs at time of post)

https://www.change.org/petitions/electronic-arts-inc-remove-always-online-drm-from-simcity-and-future-games



Why DRM is stupid and forever will be:

http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/07/we-built-this-simcity-on-a-shaky-foundation-of-drm/

Don't get me wrong It's a great game, if you can F***ing play it that is.

Mansen; how much would you give this game out of 10?

Would you recommend it to others?

Mansen wrote:
If you lose connection to the server for more than... 15minutes? then your game forces you to stop playing while it makes a final attempt at syncing your savegame to the cloud. If it fails (or you grow impatient) your progress since the last sync is lost to the void.



That is the most noticeable one right now - As I've said elsewhere; when the servers run properly, the DRM is a non issue in terms of gameplay. But if it breaks, then you are in for a world of hurt. One can only hope that the proposed "server upgrades" will fix these problems.



I spent 1½ hours yesterday trying to get invited into a region with some friends - the Server connection kept going on and off so I couldn't stay connected for long enough to log into the city (at which point it could just sync whenever it had connection and I could plays semi offline as I wanted)



Edit: And on a personal note, don't bother buying any of the European Cities DLC. They are litterally a single landmark building and a service building - at the price of 9,99$ or so.

Thanks for the info - I'm not going to buy it in the near future.

Simcity was a pretty harmless release for me (thank god for EU being two days later than the US for once...)



Game installed and patched as expected - Even managed to get online for the most of the evening without any waiting (there was a 30min period where the servers were down - no warning).



The game itself is pretty good - nothing extraordinary. The multiplayer is asynchronous so anything you do in your city won't affect your neighbor for an hour or so. Pretty disappointing really.



Lack of terraforming is awful - It leads to some really frustrating (and pointless) geometry errors and considering how all construction in the game can terraform just fine, I don't see why we can't. At the least to correct some minor hills or riverbeds.



The industrial system is a "hard lesson" in itself - To get to high tech production (such as refining crude oil into plastics or fuel) you need to sell X amounts every day - but the natural resources deplete over time so you basically have to stockpile it and sell it all in one go. Very counterintuitive.



And cities are much, much too small. Maybe not for low end machines, but my computer is yawning by the time I fill up a square.

murph wrote:
The more I read into SimCity, the more I am disappointed.



*many quotes*



/rant

Ouch, that hurt.

The more I read into SimCity, the more I am disappointed. Here are some quotes from SC creative director Ocean Quigley (http://www.incgamers.com/2013/03/sim-city-ocean-quigley-interview/)





Online, DRM:

"I could imagine us taking additional development effort to create a different version of the game that is offline, that’s doing all that stuff on the PC, but that would be a significant amount of effort"

Would make offline, but too much work.





Microtransactions, Future Expansions:

"This Sim City architecture is much more like the Sims. In the previous Sim Cities it was difficult to add any additional content. We built this Sim City to be “composable”....It puts us in a position to make more stuff for the game and to build more content. So we’ll see what people want and ask for in particular and we’ll make more content."

This quote just makes me angry. So they leave out obvious, fan-favorite features, then they'll see what fans want & include in future expansions. BS EA. That's not giving fans what they want







Terraforming:

"The Terraforming I did in Sim City 4, it felt you were performing as god and not necessarily the role of a mayor. It just seemed less realistic for this simulation game that we’re making."

e.g. Zombie Outbreaks = realism Leveling Mountain = ?



"...at some point down the road we may make a new version of Sim City that starts layering in that complexity."

Not sure if this means an expansion, or SC6 (expected release 2023)





When in multiplayer, any changes made by others update super-quick! :

"It depends on what transaction you are talking about, but in the order of seconds to minutes. If we’re building simultaneously, you’ll see my city updated every couple of minutes. If I send you a bunch of money for example, it could take seconds or a minute or two."

I'm sure by the time their servers close, they'll have it down to seconds. Lag like this would have been unacceptable in Duke3D w/56K modem 15 years ago.... (with direct connection of course)







"It’s worth pointing out we deliberately stripped away some of the stuff that was getting too complicated in Sim City 4 which made the game difficult to approach for new players."

Dumbing down games.... sigh. Civ VI vs. V anyone? It does such a disservice to fans of the series to hear their game is being adapted so additional people will like it. Screw those other people, that's the point of being a fan - you like something that other people don't. Making something that everyone likes will result in something that few people love.





"In Sim City 4 I came up with this whole region concept but it happened a little late for us to do anything serious with it. It wasn’t a full thought-out feature. With this Sim City, from the get-go we knew it was going to be about cities in the context of a region. Once you have this idea of multiple users performing different roles, then you give people the option to play different cities so that you create a region with your friends."

The last sentence doesn't logically fit. Ok, so they wanted a more integrated city-region. Does this necessitate multiple players or online synchronization via servers? NO. But he makes it sound like it was the next logical step. Server hosting would be much cheaper and easier to setup and manage, so what was it not considered?





/rant

murph wrote:
So would this have been solved if they let Steam manage it?? Not to always be pro steam or anything... But does Steam generally handle server-side management (DL+syncing), or is this not always the case?

Steam doesn't handle client / server connectivity at all - unless we're specifically referring to being able to download and install your game.



If the game servers aren't up to the task, then they aren't. Doesn't matter if you're using a digital DISTRIBUTION platform or not. The big issue here is that EA did not deliver enough server infrastructure to serve the people who waited to play it from the release date/time. This is something people keep excusing (how could they expect that many? and so on).



But the thing is they DO know roughly how many people who are going to be online based in part on beta feedback as well as 1:1 preorder numbers (digitally) and a rough number of how many of their physical copies are going to sell in the first day/week.



Especially in a game where all that the game servers actually do is handle savegames and a limited bit of simulation and data collection for leaderboards and such. It's not like it's an actual MMO with constant client1/server/client2 communication. Multiplayer is entirely asynchronous (your neighbor cities only change whenever your neighbor's client saves the game and it is uploaded to the cloud)

Would've been interested in a new city builder but sadly the DRM issue is just so damn annoying...

Mansen wrote:
The US launch seems to have been nothing short of catastrophic - not anywhere enough servers to handle the initial load of players downloading the game or trying to play. The official forums are flooded with people complaining.

So would this have been solved if they let Steam manage it?? Not to always be pro steam or anything... But does Steam generally handle server-side management (DL+syncing), or is this not always the case?

Mansen wrote:
The US launch seems to have been nothing short of catastrophic - not anywhere enough servers to handle the initial load of players downloading the game or trying to play. The official forums are flooded with people complaining.



It's SWTOR and Diablo 3 all over again - I'm amazed how they haven't learned from these recent releases at all.

hehehe, some people never learn - or learn way too slow

The US launch seems to have been nothing short of catastrophic - not anywhere enough servers to handle the initial load of players downloading the game or trying to play. The official forums are flooded with people complaining.



It's SWTOR and Diablo 3 all over again - I'm amazed how they haven't learned from these recent releases at all.

GreenManGaming offers the game at a much cheaper price than Origin - might be worth looking at even if you don't want to play right now. I doubt Origin will be doing any 50% deals anytime soon. (And anyone who has Simcity on their Origin account are getting a free game from EA's own franchises on the 18th - no specific details though)

Mansen wrote:
(And anyone who has Simcity on their Origin account are getting a free game from EA's own franchises on the 18th - no specific details though)

Including buyers from GmG?