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

[Losonti Tokash]

ME1 was published by Microsoft, not EA. And yeah, 2 and 3 are the best games Bioware has made because they're actual games and are fun to play. The first one is largely a clunky pile of hot garbage that is an absolute slog. And that's still better than their earlier games of "clumsily modeled D&D fan fiction."

I mean it's pretty telling that the first things you talk about are totally irrelevant to the game itself and that you blame problems that have plagued Bioware (like terrible project management) for literally decades on their publisher. But what's really funny is you always complain about how derivative games are because you want them to be just like these other games. Your constant comparison of ME3 to COD or Halo also leads me to conclude you have either never played any of these games or you have suffered some sort of traumatic brain injury where you can only communicate in meaningless buzzphrases taught to you by gaming journalism.

Oh, and obviously my throw away line about video game Hitler was 100% serious and I was directly stating people actually believed that, rather than mocking your hysterical outrage about video games.

[Vendetta]

Your constant comparison of ME3 to COD or Halo also leads me to conclude you have either never played any of these games or you have suffered some sort of traumatic brain injury where you can only communicate in meaningless buzzphrases taught to you by gaming journalism.

ME3 does feel more like CoD than previous games, the missions are more frequently "walk on a line between setpiece spectacles (esp. Earth, Tuchanka)" rather than ME2's "walk on a line between combat encounters" (the Gears of War model which ME2 predominantly used), and the tone of the game was much more military oorah, especially at the start and end.

It's also less interesting gameplay wise than ME2 because of the loss of the enemy protections. Having enemies with layered protections that required different powers or weapons to defeat was most of the player's effort in combat im ME2 but it was too hard for tomato players so it went away so they can still get their insanity achievement without actually having to think about power and weapon choice and party composition and engaging with the gameplay systems.

Also, the interrupt system was frequently turned into lazy QTEs with less character coming out of the actions they provoked in most situations (especially in the end where there is a renegade interrupt you must take or die if you aren't 100% paragon, basically a straight up "press X to not die" QTE of the worst kind).

It really does feel like a victim of EA's stalkerish obsession with turning every property they own into Call of Duty (see also: Battlefield 3's campaign, Medal of Honour)

[Lagmonster]

So is there a good, fun, modern-looking SimCity-type game out there, that is actually finished, and doesn't employ dated or ugly graphics, and requires a reasonably complex amount of strategic thinking and balancing to build a functioning city?

[Crossroads Inc.]

Yup there is, it's called sim city 4
In all seriousness , no not really . Simulation games have been dieing out.
Civilization 5 is the most recent big simulation game I can think of

[TheFeniX]

ME1 was published by Microsoft, not EA.

Hence the ""s. IIRC, by the time EA bought up BW, they already had ME1 pretty much finished and a publishing deal with MS ready to go to have ME as one of the 360's flagship games. Or as flagship as it could be considering the timeframe and the 360s atrocious launch line-up.

And yeah, 2 and 3 are the best games Bioware has made because they're actual games and are fun to play. The first one is largely a clunky pile of hot garbage that is an absolute slog. And that's still better than their earlier games of "clumsily modeled D&D fan fiction."

ME2 was a boring corridor shooter (uh oh, I'm using "review buzzwords!") from what I could be bothered to play. But that isn't even all that important in an RPG. What was important was that the storyline felt like a sidequest or DLC. I skipped ME3 because I realized it wasn't going to get any better as a series.

It also deserves mention that BW has always beat on old fantasy cliches (even in KOTOR) and merely mashed them with Sci-Fi cliches (and what they could crib from Star Control 2) for the Mass Effect series. However the implementation of Baulder's Gate and the novelty of taking PnP Role-playing to a visual medium in NWN is why those game are fondly remembered and ME won't have near that longevity.

But what's really funny is you always complain about how derivative games are because you want them to be just like these other games.

You mean good? Have options? Not railroad the player? Not narrowing the scope in sequels when they should be expanding it?

Your constant comparison of ME3 to COD or Halo also leads me to conclude you have either never played any of these games or you have suffered some sort of traumatic brain injury where you can only communicate in meaningless buzzphrases taught to you by gaming journalism.

Please, BW is such a lazy developer now, they think CoD is a fucking RPG. And they wanted that audience for ME3. Judging by your post, they seem to have done a great job getting it.

Oh, and obviously my throw away line about video game Hitler was 100% serious and I was directly stating people actually believed that, rather than mocking your hysterical outrage about video games.

People like you are another huge problem with the industry: "Cmon guys, you should like what I like! No? Well fuck you nerd for caring about your hobby."

[Zaune]

So is there a good, fun, modern-looking SimCity-type game out there, that is actually finished, and doesn't employ dated or ugly graphics, and requires a reasonably complex amount of strategic thinking and balancing to build a functioning city?

You're going to mock me if I suggest Dwarf Fortress, aren't you? Though it does tick every item off that list except graphics, and even then there are a number of graphical tilesets.

[bilateralrope]

Here is Maxis talking about why offline mode took so long:

Jan 14, 2014
Simon Fox, Lead Engineer, Single Player Mode

Hi, I’m Simon Fox, lead engineer on the Single Player Mode for SimCity, and I’m here to tell you more about how we engineered Offline gameplay for SimCity.

When the game released, our fans were calling for Offline. I rallied the team to start making that happen as soon as practical after launch.

REENGINEERING A CREATIVE VISION

The original creative vision for SimCity was to make a game where every action had an effect on other cities in your region. As such, we engineered the game to meet this vision, setting up the player’s PC (client) to communicate all of its information to the servers. That means that our entire architecture was written to support this, from the way that the simulation works to the way that you communicate across a region of cities. So yes, while someone was able to remove the “time check” shortly after launch, they were unable to perform key actions like communicating with other cities that they had created locally, or with the rest of their region(s), or even saving the current state of their cities.

My team did, however, see a path forward towards Offline, one that would maintain the integrity of the simulation. Lucy once said that Offline wouldn’t be possible “without a significant amount of engineering work”, and she’s right. By the time we’re finished we will have spent over 6 ½ months working to write and rewrite core parts of the game to get this to work. Even things that seem trivial, like the way that cities are saved and loaded, had to be completely reworked in order to make this feature function correctly.

REWRITING KEY PIECES

I wish it were as simple as flipping a switch and telling the game to communicate with a dummy client rather than our server, but it’s more than that. Entire calculations had to be rewritten in order to make the game function correctly.

SimCity was written to rely on the servers. The game routinely pings the servers for critical pieces of data (region status, workers, trading etc.) and it relies on that information to keep the simulation moving. This meant rewriting the entire system, which previously existed in Java, and putting it into C++. We’ve had to knock out the internet pipe stuff. There’s lots of code that hits the servers looking for information. We’ve had to write a lot of code to produce that data locally, specifically for region information.

Our game routes pieces of data from one city to another as data flows through the regions. All of that code exists on the server, and now we’ve brought all of that down into the client. The client processes the region box, which is what all of the cities pushes their data into. We’ve brought that down into the client as well.

And now, all of the regional simulation needs to be done locally. The algorithms governing trading between cities needed to be retuned in order to make the behavior between cities more responsive for this type of play. This in itself required major optimizations in order to run the simulation locally. We have an obligation to make the game fun and functional on all specs of machines. We wouldn’t want someone who was enjoying the Multiplayer game to find the Single Player game crippled due to poor optimization.

And it’s not just adding, we had to remove parts of the game for it to function properly as well. This means removing lots of code integral to Multiplayer include code and UI supporting Trading, Social Features, Global Market, Leaderboards and Achievements. And, all without crippling the Multiplayer game.

So where are we at right now? We’ve been working on this since August and now, we’ve hit Alpha and are in the final stages of testing before we release it as part of Update 10 in the future. On behalf of the engineering team, thank you for your patience on this one. We know you want Offline play in SimCity and we are really happy that we are finally getting ready to deliver it to you.

Changing which language you coded in sounds like it would be major work. I just don't see how that has anything to do with offline mode.

Also, I see they are repeating the lie about how Simcity relied on the servers.

[Purple]

So is there a good, fun, modern-looking SimCity-type game out there, that is actually finished, and doesn't employ dated or ugly graphics, and requires a reasonably complex amount of strategic thinking and balancing to build a functioning city?

You're going to mock me if I suggest Dwarf Fortress, aren't you? Though it does tick every item off that list except graphics, and even then there are a number of graphical tilesets.

He might, I won't.

Fellow dwarf, I greet you.

[Lagmonster]

So is there a good, fun, modern-looking SimCity-type game out there, that is actually finished, and doesn't employ dated or ugly graphics, and requires a reasonably complex amount of strategic thinking and balancing to build a functioning city?

You're going to mock me if I suggest Dwarf Fortress, aren't you? Though it does tick every item off that list except graphics, and even then there are a number of graphical tilesets.

He might, I won't. Fellow dwarf, I greet you.

I won't either, but I've not played it before. I know it's a popular game, but I never approached it because it was described less as 'lo-res SimCity-style metropolis builder' and more 'unwinnable quagmire of spiraling and inevitable doom'.

[Purple]

I won't either, but I've not played it before. I know it's a popular game, but I never approached it because it was described less as 'lo-res SimCity-style metropolis builder' and more 'unwinnable quagmire of spiraling and inevitable doom'.

http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2012:FUN

[Zaune]

Well, it takes some getting used to, no two ways about that; the interface isn't very intuitive or consistent right now, with a top-to-bottom overhaul scheduled for the end of the alpha phase, and the learning curve is more like a learning cliff. But if you want to see an example of deep and complicated agent-based gameplay that delivers almost everything Simcity 5's Glassbox engine was promising, DF's right up your street.

But remember. Losing is Fun!

[Vendetta]

Or if you want a not shit agent based building sim, Tropico 4

[Napoleon the Clown]

So is there a good, fun, modern-looking SimCity-type game out there, that is actually finished, and doesn't employ dated or ugly graphics, and requires a reasonably complex amount of strategic thinking and balancing to build a functioning city?

You're going to mock me if I suggest Dwarf Fortress, aren't you? Though it does tick every item off that list except graphics, and even then there are a number of graphical tilesets.

He might, I won't.

Fellow dwarf, I greet you.

No true fan would spell it dwarf. It's spelled dorf.

[Crossroads Inc.]

I have always said, that in some Alternate universe, the Guy behind Dwarf Fortress got together with Will Wright and Markus Persson and made wonderful beautiful Video Game music together.

[phongn]

Or if you want a not shit agent based building sim, Tropico 4

Well, Tropico 5 is due this year

[Highlord Laan]

Creative vision

Your vision sucks.

[Civil War Man]

ME2 was a boring corridor shooter (uh oh, I'm using "review buzzwords!") from what I could be bothered to play. But that isn't even all that important in an RPG. What was important was that the storyline felt like a sidequest or DLC. I skipped ME3 because I realized it wasn't going to get any better as a series.

So you are saying that you know with 100% certainty that ME2 and ME3 are objectively bad games and worse than Bioware's earlier work despite having played none of ME3 and an unspecified amount of ME2. Sounds legit.

They are not perfect games by any stretch of the imagination, but I'd rank 3 as the strongest of the series if only because it actually makes Shepard feel human. As the game progresses, Shepard becomes increasingly fatigued, stressed out, and plagued with nightmares, and you can see them visibly cracking under the pressure of having to be the Savior of the Galaxy. I never saw that level of emotion with the Bhaalspawn in BG, Revan or the Exile in KOTOR, the Warden or Hawke in DA, or even Shepard in ME 1 and 2. One of my favorite moments in 3 comes relatively late in the game, Shepard has just experienced one of the worst and most humiliating defeats in their entire life. Joker chooses that moment to crack a poorly-thought out joke about it, causing even a Paragon Shepard to go ballistic.

[TheFeniX]

So you are saying that you know with 100% certainty that ME2 and ME3 are objectively bad games and worse than Bioware's earlier work despite having played none of ME3 and an unspecified amount of ME2. Sounds legit.

You'll obviously be happy to show where I said "objectively bad" or even "bad." And piss off with the "you didn't 100% the game and think it's boring? Pfft" because that's the whole fucking point of why it was boring. It couldn't keep me engaged. That is a fault with the game, not me.

Everything about the development of ME3 had me feel the same way: this isn't a game for me. It's targeted toward a different audience.

They are not perfect games by any stretch of the imagination, but I'd rank 3 as the strongest of the series if only because it actually makes Shepard feel human.

ME3 in a vacuum might have been a good game, but it suffers it a lot of areas. Instead of fixing issues with ME1, they just cut them for later games. There comes a point where even I can't take gameplay over lore: that every weapon in the galaxy is magically replaced in two years all with inter-changable heat sinks? And this is because BW couldn't find a way to balance the overheat problem of the first game? Omni-tools, which unless I misread in ME1 were holographic wifi devices, can now stab people? Robot Camel Toe and stock Internet photos are just cheap jabs at the developers on my part. The later games are much more about what looks cool and gameplay over lore, which doesn't cut it in an RPG even though I do feel that way in other genres.

This leaves out EA's business model that has a 4 year old ME2 still $20 while something like New Vegas is half that. And that EA thinks INI edits are theft and ban users for explaining how to do them.

[Civil War Man]

You'll obviously be happy to show where I said "objectively bad" or even "bad." And piss off with the "you didn't 100% the game and think it's boring? Pfft" because that's the whole fucking point of why it was boring. It couldn't keep me engaged. That is a fault with the game, not me.

Everything about the development of ME3 had me feel the same way: this isn't a game for me. It's targeted toward a different audience.

While you did not say the word bad specifically, the reason I used it to describe your stance was this post:

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.

Not finishing ME2 is no big deal, seeing as how the list of games I haven't finished is a mile long, but you yourself admitted that you haven't even touched ME3. So that "If you think game X is better than game Y then you don't like RPGs" comment is based predominantly on secondhand information and your impressions from third party sources rather than any actual experiences with the game itself.

Though I do find the Tali example funny. Out of all of the flaws of ME3, you choose to single out them half-assing an easter egg that is only seen if the player follows a very specific story path (Tali survives through the end of the Quarian storyline and is romanced in ME2 and ME3).

[Vendetta]

Shepard has just experienced one of the worst and most humiliating defeats in their entire life. Joker chooses that moment to crack a poorly-thought out joke about it, causing even a Paragon Shepard to go ballistic.

Yeah, Shepard was bitter that he lost to someone's mary sue self insert character* because the cutscene said so as well....

I mean it's not like ME ever had a good bossfight, but none of the others actually ignored the gameplay mechanics of the rest of the game like Mr. "I can sit in the open regenerating shields and I am invincible whilst doing so because fuck you".



* PS hope you read the books so you have a clue who that is.

[Tribble]

Yup there is, it's called sim city 4
In all seriousness , no not really . Simulation games have been dieing out.
Civilization 5 is the most recent big simulation game I can think of

Please don't get me started on Civ 5. lol

[Borgholio]

What was wrong with Civ 5? I know they changed some fundamental stuff but it was still a fun game.

[TheFeniX]

Not finishing ME2 is no big deal, seeing as how the list of games I haven't finished is a mile long, but you yourself admitted that you haven't even touched ME3. So that "If you think game X is better than game Y then you don't like RPGs" comment is based predominantly on secondhand information and your impressions from third party sources rather than any actual experiences with the game itself.

Well ME2 definitely wasn't BW's best game and ME3 is pretty much the same thing (or another move in the same direction) if all the glowing reviews it's getting are true. But this is why I generally stick with Forbes because even though they might love the game, I can pick up from their writing exactly why I won't like it and why I don't think RPGs like ME should be "interactive movies."

It also helps to have friends that have played it and know your gaming tastes to tell you that you won't like it. This same thing saved me from stumbling into BF3 or 4. Is there a remote possibility that I might think ME3 is better than Baulder's Gate, NWN, or even KOTOR? Yea, but it's also highly unlikely and not worth risking even $20 over.

Though I do find the Tali example funny. Out of all of the flaws of ME3, you choose to single out them half-assing an easter egg that is only seen if the player follows a very specific story path (Tali survives through the end of the Quarian storyline and is romanced in ME2 and ME3).

She's only one of the most popular ME characters and "what she looks like" has been a big focus of fans since the original game. "No big deal, my son does photoshop, let him come up with something."

But hey, ignore the rest of my post and focus on a jab I made at just how fucking lazy people spending hundreds of millions of dollars on development and selling you a product for $60 are allowed to be before I can criticize. That's some poor-boy shit. How about just resizing a man to be a boy? I mean, it's only in the ending to the fucking game. Quality? Bah!

See, these are jabs because it's easy to let them go, but they weren't issues like bugs that were overlooked or missed. There's a whole load of conscious decisions like this in the game that I don't find acceptable for a company that bills itself as one of the best in the industry. Also because I don't care to argue about how fucking stupidly they wrapped up the series.

[Tribble]

Civ 5 is very similar to SimCity 5 - all they had to do with improve and refine upon the elements of the previous installment, and they could have had a fantastic game. Instead they tried to "revolutionize" everything, and IMO it didn't work out. It's still a decent game, but I prefer Civ 3 or Civ 4 any day

I think one of the designers of the game could sum up my feelings far better than I could: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/JonShafe ... _Civ_5.php

[Grumman]

My first post on the Bioware forums was me saying how the fake-out of Shepard's death destroyed my suspension of disbelief. At that moment I did not fear for Shepard's life, I hated the creators for killing my character in a cutscene.

Then what do they do for the sequel? Right off the bat, they kill my character in a cutscene. That's why I have never bought Mass Effect 2.