That sounds fine, I am sad I haven't heard anything about my attempt at getting into the beta. Did anyone else get in? It starts today.
I read over on Reddit somewhere that they won't actually send out the bulk of the invitations until morning. Link: there are conversations about it here. Take them for what they're worth.
Ah I see ,well lets hope we all get one. :p ALSO!!!!! I saw the game manual was posted online on BeyondSims.com , but the link to it was for some zippyshare file host site, I downloaded and virus scanned it, all was legit. I uploaded it to my dropbox here : https://www.dropbox.com/s/s4uuq0p696l4hr2/SimCity_Manual.pdf And one of the game dev's posted a Stadium story thing with nice pics: http://www.beyondsims.com/45864/gorgeous-simcity-stadium-shots-uploaded-by-guillaume-pierre/
It is such a nice looking game, especially based on the link you shared lordkosc, especially that shot of the avenue with the traffic queued up. Who am I kidding, I'll likely buy this game, I know I will. Also, those pictures with the stadium show what looks like a fairly large city. Of course, part of that may be illusionary based on camera angle and the number of roads present.
That's kinda lame. Why does there need to be a maximum limit as to how many saves I can have on my computer? Let me fill up my hard drive if I want. Or is this part of the DRM, that saves are stored in the cloud or something? Destructoid takes a look at Simcity. They say there is always empty space between cities in the region. They say the zone density is yet another thing abstracted out to the roads; the higher quality road you place, the better buildings will pop up near it. But they also say arcologies are (sort of) back.
That 6-hour review by IGN pretty much confirms many of the tidbits I've been reading here and there. I'm interested to see how they've implemented roads, since they have such an impact on the quality of buildings in the immediate area. I'm not thrilled about it, and I'm already thinking of ways to hate it, but I'm doing my best to grit my teeth and just wait it out till I can install and play my pre-order. Unless he's playing single player, and hoarding all cities in all regions to himself, it sounds like it's gonna be possible to burn through the 10 region cap pretty quickly. I'm gonna have to get used to the idea of *gasp* destroying (rather than forever revisiting and tweaking) all my older cities. One of my major concerns right now has to do with regions and how we're supposed to deal with the multi-player ones that only have one or two active players once everybody else eventually moves on from it and/or just stops playing the game all together. I hope there's a way to copy an existing city from a multi-player region into a single-player region so I can keep working on my own stuff once the region has more or less been abandoned by everyone else... especially if I need some of the regional-only stuff, like major airports, and there's nobody else left actively playing in the region to work with me on building one.
Don't worry, if any of your fellow SimVillage players abandons a city in a multiplayer region, you can take it over (according to EA). On the flip side, I wonder how long a vacation you can go on before its considered abandonment, and your SimNeighborhood has new management... I imagine a few weeks or months at least.
That's exactly what I wanted to hear. In a perfect world, this duration would be something that could be set by the players while creating their regions. Being somewhat of an A.D.D. powergamer, if this duration wasn't something the players could set themselves for each region, I could only hope EA would err on the very very short side (like 48 hours or so); but I suspect any default setting will probably be measured in weeks or months instead.
It's now apparent that calling their cities "medium-sized" was a PR move to prevent people from causing too much of a ruckus back when info about this game was first coming out. The final size of these cities is a Small city from SC4, it's pretty obvious: Here's my "Medium" tile city from SC4:
Preordered this via Amazon almost entirely just to try the 'beta' this weekend and see if I actually want it. Comes with a promotional credit if you're willing to get the disc version shipped, so it only ends up being $40. Time to give the 'beta' a whirl.
Well, I've played a couple of one hour runs of this. It's hard to say without the regional play and a lot of the building options if I'll enjoy the full game, but I think when it comes down to it there's just so much other stuff I could be playing that I'll probably pass on this for a while. Even within an hour I found myself running out of room all the time, and I didn't want to go and try to manage multiple spots within the same region for such a short period. Non-beta games will probably have other options for dealing with city size. I really wanted a bigger sandbox though.
Tried to play it earlier today and the server was down, hopefully that won't be indicative of the game at launch. But I did get an hour in last night. I don't know, maybe it's that I've been playing too much of the Impressions CBs and talking about high level CB design, but the hour I played last night was a little boring to me. I really liked how the infrastructure of the city works, with how power, water and waste is moved around. But it felt that I was just plopping down buildings instead of actually building a city. Also I don't know if this is just the beta, but the building detail did not look as sharp compared to the demos and preview videos put out, and I had all the details maxed. I'll play some more tonight and post more on it later.
I have a somewhat off topic question. I realized that after I installed Origin, I had a copy of Sim City Societies I must have bought a long time ago. Does anyone know if the digital version of it has any copy protection on it? As a quick google search just pulls up the CD version which did have securom.
If you install via origin usually it gets a launcher of somekind for its "copy protection" SSC had a launcher anyway, my point of reference was downloading the entire sims 3 set. I don't get requests for cdrom and I don't have to log in.
What a shocker, this looks to be another severely dumbed down affair, no thanks. Keep your social elements away from any game I play. And there is worse Add the nagging and revolting aspect of needing to always be online... Conclusion: stay away from it, and possibly all EA games
An Origin employee named Thierry Nguyen posted this on Qt3 regarding that Redditor: I hope that's not a recant. That Redditor screams mouthbreather to me. You have beta feedback about not being able to log in? Great. You're playing a Beta and Internet Petition Against Online DRM #59840 is old, tired, and contains no new arguments and you should probably just shut the hell up or bitch about it on a forum that discusses it, not on Origin's Simcity V beta feedback.
Well, my takeaway from that image is the guy should probably stop applying to betas for online games. It's unhelpful, needlessly antagonistic and patronizing. While I wouldn't have banned him from his EA games, I can certainly agree with booting him from the program and prohibiting him from any future beta programs.
Riiiiiiight, people who know exactly what they're signing up for go into a beta to test a system that breaks and then they go on a diatribe about the merits of the system on the beta boards. Real fucking pioneers right there.
Exactly this. You have every right to complain about it all over the internet if you want (though I disagree with the productivity of doing so as I said), but it's a whole other level of neckbeard social ineptitude to sign up for a beta and then blow up on the beta board about something that is a feature, not a bug. It would be like if a beta tester posted an essay about how the cities should be in space because he would like it better. You're there to find bugs and report them and for the most part you are actually just there to test server load capacity. Oh also, "revolting"? Jesus. Tone down the hyperbole a little.
Was the beta specifically to test the multiplayer aspects of SCV? If so, then your point is absolutely valid. But if he just wanted to play single-player (assuming testing SP mode was part of the beta), then why should access to his game be blocked by server/network infrastructure failures associated with the online components of the game he has no interest in playing?
With the beta I guess technically over today, I played another hour of it yesterday. This time I had around 6k people before the beta ended and could have probably optimized my play to get the 10k challenge. My feeling is still the same: I like the underlining simulation aspect, but the game itself feels very plain. I don't like how housing and commercial buildings "evolve" if you put down enough aesthetic structures to raise the land value, and looking through the locked buildings, there doesn't appear to be as many compared to SC 4 available. I miss creating an interconnected city of various systems and services that runs as good or as bad as my design. I also can't shake the feeling that all the buildings that I'm lamenting that aren't featured, are going to come in the form of DLC later. I will say that the game engine itself was well done and I admit that I love how you can define your own road system besides using the standard formats. The ability to customize buildings is great, but from looking at the list, it looks like most of the choices are incremental instead of requiring the player to make hard choices about how that building would be used. I am wondering how long the game is going to remain interesting once it is finally released, as I don't think it has the same legs as SimCity 4 had.
I don't know, if I were doing a taste-test for Subway and they had their new "Shit Sandwich" sub for me to try, I might be a bit annoyed at getting booted out for pointing out that maybe it'd be a better sandwich if they took the shit out of it. I mean, yeah, maybe that's not a new critique, but it's still a valid critique.
I wouldn't feel bad for you being thrown out of the store, I'd feel bad for the guy squeezing out foot-longs with a crowd complaining that he's only giving them 11 inches.
I'd feel bad for the guy squeezing out foot-long shit sandwiches too. That's a rough job, and in public too.
I believe it's an always-online game like D3 so I would assume he couldn't play the game, full stop. But... it's beta. This is going to happen. It's happened in virtually every online game I've beta tested over the past few years and I've never seen this sort of overblown reaction from a tester. Frankly, his diatribe strikes me as dishonest grandstanding to score points on the internet because EA. And here I am defending EA, so fuck him.
It's funny because people actually WANT this shit to fail so that they can say "I told you so! See! Everyone should have revolted with me!" as they log 100 hours in Diablo 3, the first major AAA title to crash and burn under the weight of online DRM. That sold millions. While games that were infinitely more stable and mechanically more interesting (Settlers 7) got thrown under the bus. So yeah, fuck those fucking people. Buy faster internet, adapt, shut up, and stop complaining about how you might one day want to take your laptop on a train to play Simcity V.
That's the difference between a game that lives and dies off word-of-mouth and a game with an established fanbase in the millions with all the marketing resources of ActiBlizzard behind it. And I still didn't buy D3.
Yeah well, that poster admitted to buying the game. If he was savvy enough to enter the beta for it, he probably already knew what he was getting into when he bought it. I do wonder what fraction of the price tag has to go to serving information to a single purchaser of the game.
I'd say if your game makes even a person who says they wouldn't mind your online drm as long as it works proper, launch into a rant how annoying it is when it doesn't work after it makes them sit and wait there a few hours... a pretty useful beta feedback because that demonstrates what a part of your playerbase will be doing come launch if you don't fix your shit. And they will be doing it on other forums and to their friends, generating pretty poor word of mouth for you. Instead of just sitting there patient and quiet because hey, they knew what they were getting into when they bought a box. You may not like such feedback but that's too bad. Beds made, etc.
The game making you wait three hours while it tries to authenticate whether you can play it, and in the end never managing that, is a feature, not a bug?
The rant is about the DRM in general, not about particular issues with it during the beta. Authentication delays are a legitimate issue for a released game, but have no significance in a beta. I'm sure EA was well aware of those issues.
