EA announces SimCity will get an offline mode, FINALLY!!!

[Crossroads Inc.]

From Geek.com

To say that the development and launch of SimCity was a train wreck is a bit of an understatement. You’d think it difficult for someone to ruin a game as solid and loved as SimCity, but Maxis and EA managed exactly that.

Making the game require an Internet connection to play was the first huge mistake. Then at launch the servers couldn’t cope meaning thousands of gamers were left unable to play a game they just purchased. The complaints were handled poorly, the cities were way too small, and it turns out the sims weren’t even operating like individuals. To top things off, EA wanted $9 to add airships and balloons to your copy of the game.
I don’t think anyone was surprised when the creative director, lead architect and gameplay engineer quit Maxis and moved on to a new challenge. And now it finally seems as if Maxis and EA are waking up to reality.

Remember how, despite evidence to the contrary, SimCity needed to be an online-connected game in order to function? Well, that turns out to be no longer the case as Maxis is set to introduce an offline mode.

Offline mode will be added for free as part of Update 10 for the game. It means all of your content can be accessed without needing to connect to the Internet at any time–a true single player experience. Save games will also be saved locally, meaning you can play wherever and whenever you like. Something so simple as playing the game on holiday on a laptop is finally a reality. It feels like the ’90s all over again!
Maxis general manager Patrick Buechner is keen to point out that the online version of the game will live on unchanged and multiplayer will still be a core part of the experience. But the feature so many gamers wanted from day one is finally set to get implemented.

There’s no specific date yet for when Update 10 will be available, but it should happen soon and will go hand-in-hand with being able to mod the game. I think the community of SimCity players would also appreciate more information on how an offline mode is now possible when Maxis and EA were so adamant last year that it was impossible. What changed?

So after almost a YEAR since the release date, we are getting at LAST, what people have been calling for since day one, AND something that EVERY other SimCity game has had since the original release.
The thing I most got out of this story was that this will be in Update 10. TEN Thats almost one update a Month since the game came out. Is that normal? Or another sign of how fucked up the game was?

[Purple]

So after almost a YEAR since the release date, we are getting at LAST, what people have been calling for since day one, AND something that EVERY other SimCity game has had since the original release.

Sadly I feel that it's too little too late. At least for me and most of the people I know. People who skipped on the game back when it was released because of the obligatory internet garage sure as hell won't spend money on it now that it's old news. At best, they might pirate it.

The thing I most got out of this story was that this will be in Update 10. TEN Thats almost one update a Month since the game came out. Is that normal? Or another sign of how fucked up the game was?

Sadly it's pretty common for game developers these days to rush toward deadlines and release what amounts to a polished off beta and than fix things later on with a myriad of patches. It's really the availability of cheap internet connections that did it. Used to be a patch meant something. Now it's just 30 seconds of download time.

[Vendetta]

Just being offline won't make the game not broken and it's core simulation not fundamentally fail to do what it was advertised as doing. (the software agents that make up your city aren't stateful, they don't have individual jobs and homes they just choose the closest one to go to and take the straightest route to it not the fastest route, hence traffic being fundamentally an unsolvable problem, the overused route will always be overused because it will always be the shortest.)

Simcity isn't even a "polished off beta", its core simulation is completely absent.

[Borgholio]

EA flat out said that they can't make cities any bigger than they are now because of engine limitations. That basically means they have a shitty engine, since previous versions of Simcity let you have massive urban centers. Offline mode or not, I'm not paying for a game with a broken engine.

[Jub]

The traffic issue, while frustrating can't compete with the fact that your cities will always get stuck at a certain level because the interaction between your cities is fundamentally broken. Even if you could get past the fact that regions don't work they way we were told they would. Small city sizes and the broken way that emergency services within a city fail to respond to multiple issues at once would sink you anyway.

In all this game wasted my time and my money and unless they rebuild it from scratch I doubt that any number of patches will fix it enough that I enjoy this turd of a game.

[TheFeniX]

So, legitimate buyers get a year later what pirates had from day 1? Oh wait, it's EA.

[Tribble]

The moment I saw "EA" I knew this game was going to suck big time. Glad I didn't spend money on it.

Seriously though, how the hell did they screw this up? All they had to do was take SimCity 4, update the graphics, and incorporate fan-made elements like NAM directly into the game so that it works seamlessly. 90% of the work was already done for them! If SimCity (5) had been an evolutionary improvement, it would have probably been a great game. Instead they decided to take a revolutionary approach... while forgetting that revolutions tend to be awkward and messy affairs. Well that and the fact that EA does not give a damn about the quality of their products.

I think EA decision to put in an online mode had nothing to do with the fans. They probably have some other game in the works that they want to use their servers on.

[TheFeniX]

You think many EA executives have even played a video game? They're businessmen in the business of making products. Said products that happen to be video games. "Sim City? Like those free games my kids play on their iPads? No? Well, it is now."

They don't understand or give a shit about video games and probably have little respect for people who play them. Meanwhile, they set all the criteria for the developers. You can see the same shit going way back. A notable example was when the MS guys from the Xbox team green-lit Kameo. I didn't like it but it got good reviews. But it's a weird game not fitting into a lot of molds. It was green-lit specifically because the marketing guys wanted to kill Legend of Zelda. The hilarity that MS thought anyone but Nintendo could kill LoZ.

They don't have a reference point to even understand originality (or even just making old stuff better) and merely look at what's popular right now, completely ignore why it's popular, and generally copy all of it's shitty elements due to assumptions that will make them the most money, and pound it full of DRM that screws legitimate users and possibly annoys pirates for a week while they figure out how to bypass it.

Dungeon Keeper, SWTOR, Ultima, Spore, Mass Effect (we want the CoD audience), Battlefield, and many more. Dead Space was the first in-house idea they had in years that was even remotely good and original. And they turned it into a corridor shooter in 2 because they just couldn't stand having an original game that didn't suck. Mass Effect 1 isn't garbage specifically because EA bought BW too late in the development cycle to fuck anything up.

[Wicked Pilot]

I'm still playing SimCity 4 even today. I'm not going near this game online or offline. A warm piece of crap isn't much better than a cold one.

[Purple]

I'm still playing SimCity 4 even today. I'm not going near this game online or offline. A warm piece of crap isn't much better than a cold one.

You are not seriously implying that SC4 is crap by any margin?

[bilateralrope]

At best, they might pirate it.

If anyone was going to pirate it, they would have done so shortly after launch when the offline mod came out.

[TheFeniX]

I seriously doubt Wicked Pilot has been playing a game for a decade and thinks it's crap. He was likely referencing Sim City 5 now being a warmed-over POS without online as opposed to cold POS when it was online only.

The game is just garbage, even expansions only adding reskins and a new building type while ignoring fundamental design flaws. Par for the course really. It would be acceptable as a F2P or bargain bin game, but at it's release (and currently $40) price point, it's laughable that just having "EA Games" and "Maxis" on the box justifies it.

Once again, "It looks good" is a + point on a AAA title.

[Purple]

I seriously doubt Wicked Pilot has been playing a game for a decade and thinks it's crap. He was likely referencing Sim City 5 now being a warmed-over POS without online as opposed to cold POS when it was online only.

Ah, that makes far more sense.

The game is just garbage, even expansions only adding reskins and a new building type while ignoring fundamental design flaws. Par for the course really. It would be acceptable as a F2P or bargain bin game, but at it's release (and currently $40) price point, it's laughable that just having "EA Games" and "Maxis" on the box justifies it.

Once again, "It looks good" is a + point on a AAA title.

Well let's be fair. A POS game that also looks the part can be considered at least marginally worse than one that at least does not make your eyes bleed for the short time needed to uninstall it in rage.

[TheFeniX]

Well let's be fair. A POS game that also looks the part can be considered at least marginally worse than one that at least does not make your eyes bleed for the short time needed to uninstall it in rage.

I find that's a rather large problem with the industry. As I've stated before, reviews for AAA games should not be rated favorably for having on par graphics. Further, up until a year or two ago, it was routine to ignore or downplay major issues WRT to gameplay and even setting/story because a game managed to look decent. It wasn't until Alien: CM combined boring and broken gameplay as well as looking hideous for the times that the bottom kind of fell out of the review process. Other AAA shit-heaps started reviewers down a road where they could no longer pretty up everything to make shit look like gold, but it was a AAA title from (stupidly) well-trusted companies in the industry that had no redeeming qualities which finally made even the most casual gamer realize we're being fed garbage for $60 a pop. Brink almost skated by, but it was so fucking broken the review industry almost choked on their own bullshit.

Sim City 5 is notable in this because it's basically a watered-down mobile game, yet it was marketed and sold as a AAA successor to the Sim City series. But people act like this is a new concept from EA when they've been doing it for a decade or more. The game in it's release form should have never hit shelves, either digitally or physically, but they marketed the fuck out of it and nothing will stop an EA release schedule.

I can't even be all that bothered to care that people still throw money at EA except they (and other publishers like MS) like to violate the decayed carcases of old IPs to accomplish all this when "Cim Sity 1" would have been a better option because SC5 looks and feels more like the shitty Ice Age app that came with my Windows phone than a Sim City game.

[Wicked Pilot]

You are not seriously implying that SC4 is crap by any margin?

I found SC4 very addicting when I first got it back in 2004, even with it's massive faults. Every now and then when I need to kill a bunch of time (sitting around Afghanistan for days waiting for my ride home, etc) I'll fire it up and play some. I keep hoping they just take that game, update it, and more importantly fix it. Didn't happen, probably never will.

[Crossroads Inc.]

Fenix, you summed up my feelings on the game release far better than I could ever articulate.
Your comments about SC5 being more of an iPad game then a traditional PC game makes a great deal of sense.

I will say that the gracias side of it, to this day make it unplayable for me.
Long long before we knew the game was an unmitigated pile of shit, I saw the promo pics and knew, KNEW I would never play the game. Because SC5 isn.t just about being a broken steaming turd, it's about taking out virtually all of the things that made sim city, sim CITY.

The following is a rant just from my end, but, I could never get over the "cartoonish" look to the new game. The feel of it was much more of "the sims" then sim city. The feeling of realism and being immersed into a realistic environment was utterly demolished In. SC5. It looked from the very start like something made for kids in grade school, instead of a high end, high powered world simulator.

Your earlier comments about the EA execs having never played the game, of having no clue what the game is about, but building it out of some disturbed notion about what is currently 'hip' (ie tablet and smart phone games) is spot on on.

I will echo others comments in that, if they had just revamped SC4 updated graphics Nd added some common sense features, I would. Happily she'll out 60$ for it.

[PREDATOR490]

Dont touch anything EA make until after a year after its been released - Great public message they are sending out
Sadly, it is quickly becoming a trend of the gaming industry to release shit and tell the customers to go fuck themselves because it's their own fault.

This is the same company that took an RTS about base building and consistently removed the RTS base building so they could make you micromanage hot keys on unit special abilities and watch pretty actors attempt shitty drama.

Since they screwed Command and Conquer and Mass Effect is done.
Next up: Sim City

[TheFeniX]

The following is a rant just from my end, but, I could never get over the "cartoonish" look to the new game. The feel of it was much more of "the sims" then sim city. The feeling of realism and being immersed into a realistic environment was utterly demolished In. SC5. It looked from the very start like something made for kids in grade school, instead of a high end, high powered world simulator.

Some games do it well, but most the times I hear the term "cartoonish" or "stylised" I'm thinking "make low poly and compressed textures not look terrible to make it portable to systems with next to 0 hardware, such as mobile."

Dont touch anything EA make

I fixed that for you. The problem is that SC5 maybe maybe could have been worth the money provided what I think they were going for was actually pulled off: Sim Town where the city comes into play because friend's other towns pop up in your game and the system works connections between them. You're basically making suburbs or districts and could tailor them based on specialty. However, all that shit got axed for, what I can only assume, engine/hardware limitations due to tying to make the game have a small footprint for mobile devices. But Maxis isn't even Maxis anymore, a team of like 4 guys who could pound out gold in the form of games like Sim City 2000. Instead you get over-worked and under-paid developers watch their desire for a good game get trashed because that's what EA does.

Since they gutted the only possible emergent gameplay, you may as well just download some shitty F2P/P2W sim that mobile markets are inundated with because at least they're up front about gouging the shit out of you, unlike EA who continue to bald-face lie about pretty-much everything, but skate by because no one cares about products in the entertainment industry.

[Napoleon the Clown]

I suddenly remember one of the people involved in the Sim City release claiming that there's no possible way they could make an offline mode because so many calculations are done on the server end. And it was quickly proven to be bullshit.

But hey, now EA is basically coming out and admitting it, even if they aren't acknowledging that they lied or ever said anything about offline being impossible.

[General Zod]

At best, they might pirate it.

If anyone was going to pirate it, they would have done so shortly after launch when the offline mod came out.

I might be inclined to pick it up on a super-cheap sale. Pirating games just isn't worth the time these days.

[Thanas]

Or the rootkit risk.

[Highlord Laan]

From Geek.com

*snip*

So after almost a YEAR since the release date, we are getting at LAST, what people have been calling for since day one, AND something that EVERY other SimCity game has had since the original release.
The thing I most got out of this story was that this will be in Update 10. TEN Thats almost one update a Month since the game came out. Is that normal? Or another sign of how fucked up the game was?

So it's going to be turned into an optional $25.00 DLC for those with an Origin account, and unavailable to everyone else, once EA figures out how many people likely want it. This is EA we're talking about. There is never, ever any reason for saying anything good about them.

[Zaune]

I might be inclined to pick it up on a super-cheap sale. Pirating games just isn't worth the time these days.

Don't bother. Looks prettier, fewer gameplay restrictions and a much better modding community, even if it is obviously half-finished.

[Losonti Tokash]

This is EA we're talking about. There is never, ever any reason for saying anything good about them.

Sure there is. They published Mass Effect 2 and 3 (and made 1 available to PS3 folks), the best games Bioware ever made, along with the Rock Band series, which was easily the high water mark of plastic instrument party games. I know the thread has now become endless regurgitation of meaningless terms and contradictory sentiments, but the constant refrain of "EA is video game Hitler" is pretty silly.

[TheFeniX]

I suddenly remember one of the people involved in the Sim City release claiming that there's no possible way they could make an offline mode because so many calculations are done on the server end. And it was quickly proven to be bullshit.

Probably a marketer. I think I remember that from the thread a while back. They just read off what they're told and don't know any better.

Sure there is. They published Mass Effect 2 and 3 (and made 1 available to PS3 folks), the best games Bioware ever made,

Hahahahaha. Oh wait, you're serious, allow me to laugh even harder! The game they "published" was ME1. The games they had a direct hand in developing were 2 and 3 and ME2 was a step back from ME1 and ME3 couldn't decide if it wanted to be Halo or CoD more. ME3 wasn't terrible. But it was a pretty big fucking joke. "Tali has 3 fingers, let's totally ignore her character model and just crop some fingers off this chick." I could bag on ME3 all day for it's lazy production value, laughable premise, and shitty color-coded ending, among with numerous other failures it culminated in. Instead I'll just say: it's EA and BW has been gutted like a fish.

If you honestly think ME2+ were BWs best games you either haven't played anything they made pre-2006 or so, or just don't like RPGs.

along with the Rock Band series,

Guess who doesn't own Harmonix? Guess who didn't have direct involvement in the development of Rock Band? IIRC, even though EA owned Maxis at the time, they were allowed to keep their own offices until around 2006 or so and there was very little involvement with Sim City 4. Garriot had a great interview about this as did a few old-hat Bioware guys WRT the way they finally consume a business they've aquired.

And no one is comparing EA to Hitler except you. They're much more like Microsoft in the mid-90s to early 2000s: a shit company that released buggy and broken software onto it customers for beta testing and were called out for the assholes they were, yet still made billions of dollars.