I agree with BJB for the most part--Origin is dumb. It's not going to stop me from getting a game if I really want it, but it's still dumb. Now, the always-on Internet requirement coupled with EA's penchant for quickly closing down game servers... that might very well stop me from getting the game.
Getting back to the game itself, I don't think the smaller city size is going to worry me. As nice as it is to see a nice big sprawling metropolis, I always seemed to get a lot more fulfilment out of Sim City 4 creating much smaller cities that felt distinct, rather than a crisscross of city blocks across the map. What does worry me is the regions appear to have empty ground in between. I would like the regions to sit flush against one another but that appears to not be the case?
Yeah I don't know about that either. It's going to be weird to have a fully-built region with these distinct populated tiles of civilization.
Getting more and more skeptical. Inter-regional stuff looks good, but I Ion't like the small cities. And it seems almost too detailed (graffiti on buildings to signal crime - I don't play at that level of zoom). The building upgrades does sound like DLC-stravaganza, though it's kind of neat.
Tropico 3/4 had that problem, sacrificing macro-scale cohesion for micro-scale graphical details. Then again, a huge city in Simcity 4 sorta looked like pixels thrown up all over the place, but it accomplished looking very dense. I'm not sure the "medium" city size bothers me having seen how fluid it is to pull out and go to another city. The fact that cities interconnect so readily makes me question the decision, so perhaps there's just too much simulation in the engine to handle larger cities so they're broken up.
This is why I haven't preordered...even the city size doesn't worry me as much as EA's commitment: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/201...he-sims-2-online-services-ending/#more-137233
Every game in that list is either years old and sequels behind (Sims), or is an old sports game that I'm going to bet most people aren't playing online anymore.
A) People still play Sim City IV today, and will likely still want to play Sim City V 10 years from now. B) The way that Sim City V's online features are designed to work puts means that the only way to play it is online. When the servers go down, for whatever reason, then you cannot play anymore. C) EA is the only major publisher with a regular habit of pulling the plug on old games and there is absolutely nothing to indicate that they would refrain from adding Sim City V to a similar list in the future. It might be five years or it might be eight years but I have no doubt that eventually EA is going to pull the plug.
EA phasing out their sports game is par for the course right now. The only major release on there is... well, it's pretty fucking old.
Pulling the plug on old sports games stops you from playing them in multiplayer, it doesn't stop you from playing them in singleplayer. If SimCity V truly requires connection to a server to be played in any capacity whatsoever, then when the server gets pulled either EA will issue a simple patch to remove the server connection requirement, or pirates will figure out how to dupe the game into working either by hacking it or by setting up a dummy server, or some combination. If you really want to play the game, the threat of a server shutdown in a decade should not be enough to dissuade you from buying it, and grandstanding about it in this thread is pointless.
Since part of the game is actually being run on EA's servers, the entire reason why the game doesn't even offer an offline mode, I'm just going to call bullshit on this until I see pirates setting up dummy servers for now-dead MMO games. City of Heros would be a good start, I'd play that again for nostalgia's sake. Given how they've described their network architechture I think it's fair to say that Sim City V falls into the MMO space. It's not grandstanding. It's a data point, which in combination with a lot of other data points adds up to a purchasing decision. If you think the flaws, if any, are worth dealing with then you buy the game. If not, you don't. Different people will put different values on having EA dictate if they can play games they buy in the future but no matter how you slice it it's not a good thing for you as a customer.
Speaking of pre-orders: Pre-order SimCity from the Origin store and get this tile, called Plumbob Park, absolutely free (details): I think I'll stick with massive GMG pre-order discounts...
Kalle nailed it. To add to what he said, it's possible that they release an updated version of Simcity next year called Simcity 2014. How long until they pull the plug on this one? It could be two years, it could be five, it could be maybe even eight. But you know at some point it's getting pulled and that's just not acceptable with me.
This touches on a much larger issue; there doesn't seem to be much concern for obsolescence in the gaming industry, at least not from the consumer side. Publishers won't hesitate to pull the plug on online services or master servers if they see a downward trend in usage, but the ugly part is that there's often no alternative option for the end user, at least not if you're playing on a console. I wonder how the PS3 and Xbox 360 will fare in five-to-six years when Sony and Microsoft decide to discontinue online services for those platforms. How will the games from that era be archived when parts of them could be missing?
Seeing that pre-order tile makes me want to rage at Maxis/EA with a giant "Fuck you." The modders behind SC4 always, always managed to churn out superior looking city tiles than what Maxis ever did. And while the always on connection doesn't bother me, if it comes at the cost of people being unable to mod in free custom content, I'm out. Eg http://sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=2157
They haven't disabled custom content in Sims 3, and they know how it fuels the game, so I see no reason they'd keep it out of Sim City.
That is a very good point Athryn. The Sims 3 is focused toward the single player experience though, while a big dot point of Sim City V is its multiplayer region perspective. I suppose what I wonder is how the game functions with respect to offline vs online saving. It is getting late so I can not go back and see what information exists on the subject, but where does a city get saved? On the EA servers or on the user's local hard drive? The Sims 3 functions because everything is stored locally. You are right though, Maxis certainly should be (and hopefully are) aware of what the custom content from their playerbase in The Sims 3 and Sim City 4 did to change and enhance their game.
I don't give a fuck until it happens. Bloviating about a theoretical as stupid as that is, indeed, grandstanding.
Big new blog thing talking about SimCity V's "Massive Multi-City Scale." I've got no time at the moment to do much beyond point out the fact the article exists, and since the whole multi-city crap thing mmo shitnitz has been a point of contention surrounding this game for many of us (and the rest of the SimCity fanbases universe-wide), I figured it'd be worth throwing a quick link out for it: Click to read. EDIT: After a quick skim, it looks like SimCityV is actually Farmville 3.
Because that's how cities work! They give stuff away to other cities! Here's the clarification for the core reason this seems off: it's no longer SimCity, it's GameCity. I'm sure they'll say you can also play traditionally, just designing the city you want to play, but with this cruft and the always online component, they don't seem to actually want to support that. This is line rang a bell with me: Where've I heard that before? Oh, right. Every other game designer/producer pitch or PR statement (including some I might hypothetically been involved with) when 1) there isn't a clear and coherent design which drives development, and/or 2) the thing is hopelessly over-engineered (or over-designed), and/or 3) the developer is stretching to cover multiple 'market segments' but not deeply (broad and shallow), and/or 4) they actually know there are only a handful of optimized routes but can't say that (freedom to gimp your game is also freedom, amirite?), and/or 5) they don't know how to describe things well. There's a difference between "modeling reality" and "modeling people's perception of reality" (hint: the latter is easier and wiser for games). I think they might have crossed from the latter to the former then taken a left into gamification.
You only trot out a producer for a pre-release interview when you want to spew bullshit at the potential audience. It's a sales pitch. If this were a movie you could keep a running tally of how many times he says 3d in the same sentence.
Probably about as upset as the people who were playing Xbox still when they cut the cord to that. And that only took, what, 5 years after the Xbox 360 came out. And guess how many people cared? Less than 100, and they all tried to cling to the desperate hope they could change Microsoft's mind by sitting on Halo 2 until they all eventually gave in, and then they also stopped caring. The industry will always have very little concern for obsolescence as long as we continue to release new games every week. It isn't a decade long investment; at most, games are a 1-2 year investment, usually much shorter, and consoles are a 5-7 year investment. There are obvious outliers (hell, I still play regular Starcraft, and that's over a decade old), but in general, no one really cares about a game 6 years after it releases. I know (hope?) you're being facetious about a yearly SimCity release (come on now. Those are reserved for Sports/FPS games and everyone knows why), but if you can provide me a link to a game that has been critically acclaimed (i'll accept anything with a metacritic of over 80),isn't an outdated Sports game, and is less than 5 years old that EA has shut down the servers to, I'll gladly give in and admit I'm also worried. But closing down The Sims 2's online stuff (I didn't even know there was an online portion to the Sims franchise at that point) isn't really that big of a shock. It's also not out of their character as a company, so I don't understand why it's that much more big of a deal now than it's ever been. I'm guessing those shutdowns came because most people aren't playing those games anymore. And yeah, "Most" shouldn't come into it, but EA's a business, and they are a business that produces a lot of games that are online enabled and require servers to run.
Didn't EA shut down the coop servers for Mercenaries 2 within about 2 years of release? I remember there being a pretty grumpy QT3 thread on the subject! It's not quite the same thing, but they've certainly shown a willingness to shut down servers for recent games.
Was that around the same time they axed Pandemic, too? I think SC5 will be safe(ish) because I expect them to release expansions for it regularly rather than opting for the sports franchise model. If it bombs, all bets are off.
Yea, I'm not sure if anybody is expecting EA to attempt to monetize the game any less than this: This list does not include the upcoming $40 Sims 3: University DLC.
And? (editing this part in to be less snarky - I highly doubt EA takes the metacritic number into account when deciding what multiplayer servers to shut down. I get that this was part of your original criteria, but it's not particularly interesting criteria to use.)
Keep in mind that that's 3 years of addons. To support your monetization thing though, you really need to look at the Sims 3 store. that's where the most egregious cases of moneygrabbing are.
Which works out to about $12 a month up to this point if you'd been buying these (and the University Pre-order) add-ons at full price since since release. Reminds me of an MMO subscription, which I'm always willing to pay for games I enjoy. Even though SCV is turning out to be a glorified social game, it could still differentiate itself enough from one to warrant the cost of keeping up to date on the content if you're the type who doesn't mind paying what amounts to a monthly subscription. Yea, I have no idea what people are spending here though. I've never even opened the store from within the game, but I'm sure EA is milking the whales with ease. I can't wait to see $10 baseball stadium tiles, or the $19.99 Katy Perry Starbucks Coffee branded shack packs.
