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Balls!

Prettier graphics, subpar gameplay. No thanks.

Do any of you guys remember the story of the original SimCity 3000? Not the one that got released but the one Maxis scrapped because it was too CPU/GPU intensive for PCs back in the like TNT2 days? It was fully 3D and everything was modeled like they are pitching for the new SimCity. Based on what I read on Ars I can't help but think they tried to bring that idea back with all the simulated agents and stuff and then realized it was still too demanding so they shrunk everything down and released it anyway...

Darn it, I have a quad core hyperthreaded 4.2Ghz CPU that is just dying to do some serious number crunching - you are releasing a PC exclusive game - there is no reason not to let me have a massive badass city that will bring my PC to a crawl if I want it to. Plenty of games let you do crazy stuff that will let you crush your computer, guess what? You can just play will lesser settings or smaller map sizes... This sounds like trying to tone down the game to run on low spec machines with an IGP and only 2GB of RAM. This should have been the 64bit only game that can use 8GB plus of memory while simulating 10 million things at once... *sigh*

I had such high hopes based on everything they were saying up to release... I'm pretty sure the bugs will get fixed but I just don't think the scope will be.

Edit: Grrrr...

this is bullcrap... (City Size)

well, back to playing CitiesXL, satisfies all your curvy road needs..

...and not being able to save and reload your game, WTH?

I agree with some of the Ars commenters that EA/Maxis is probably going to nickel and dime people on this. Want a bigger map? Pay money. Want a save and reload point? Pay money. Want more interesting buildings, visual styles, etc. that used to be serviced by mods? Pay money. And so on...

As far as granular simulation, didn't SC4 have that already? I do remember being able to click on a building and be told where the occupants live, work, shop, etc. Sure, it wasn't watching the little car drive all the way from the house to the office and back but the framework was there. And it ran on a Pentium 3. So I'm not buying that technical limitations had anything to do with anything.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/03 ... y-simcity/

OMG...

I've actually been enjoying the game quite a bit. I played the old school versions when they came out back in the day. Yes, you used to be able to build huge cities and my anger for that I took out on Simcity 4 but after awhile I grew to like it. Now it's all about making your city have a certain purpose in the region. I played the beta and that was my reason for making the purchase. I've managed to play a good 4 hours of the released version with no issues of waiting for servers or anything of that sort.

That's nice to hear. How is performance? Is your rig running it maxed? It's similar to mine...

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/03/c ... -problems/ Wah, wah. Origin is awful.

Looks like my Amazon shipment arrived today, might get a chance to play assuming the servers are working.

drfish wrote:

That's nice to hear. How is performance? Is your rig running it maxed? It's similar to mine...

Mine seems to be doing fine. I downloaded the nvidia beta drivers before I even tried the game out. Not sure how it would react without them though.

steelcity_ballin wrote:

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/03/clogged-streets-simcity-launch-plagued-by-server-problems/ Wah, wah. Origin is awful.

That's really sad...I'm not as against the always-on DRM as others (most, it seems), but I've seen this or something similar done on Steam with few issues. Am I incorrect?

The backlash of these things can't be worth the peace of mind...

Well I played about an hour last night once I could finally get on a "West" server. I do like the game so far but an hour isn't a long time.

Outside of the stupid server wait the one thing that was annoying was when I first launched the game it said I could launch right away and I did so. Got into the game but couldn't start anything not even the tutorial. Messed around in there for a while and then decided to exit thinking must be a server error. When in to switch servers and found the game defaulted to some server in Europe which isn't even live but marked as "available". Then I switched to a live server and couldn't connect, so it gave me the 20 minute timer. I proceeded to do something else while it counted down. After the 20 minutes the timer just reset. So really I'm not sure if it was a queue or just something to slow down people who are pinging the server to get in. All I do know is that timer is meaningless for the true wait time. After that I just shut down the game and came back a hour or 2 later.

The game seems fun, ran find on my Q9400 and things were smooth but I onlhy had about 2500 people in town before I quit for the night.

^ but, I thought requiring always-on DRM for single-player games never caused any issues?

I was wondering if this would run on an HD3000-equipped i7 laptop, but I'm not sure what 'Series 4' Intel graphics means:

System Requirements wrote:

GRAPHICS CARD:
ATI Radeon HD 2x00 or better*, NVIDIA 7800 or better*, Intel Series 4 integrated graphics or better*

Does that imply HD4000, or one of the old GMA setups that were integrated into Intel Northbridges until the G45 chipset?

travbrad wrote:

^ but, I thought requiring always-on DRM for single-player games never caused any issues?

Thanks for the update I hadn't heard about this issue, can you tell me more?

I believe he is referring to the 40+ minute wait to connect to the server.

Logging in last night was much easier but still issues. The game is fun, I have about 70K people in my city and everything is still running smooth. I have read complaints about how its hard to make money or about huge swings but I haven't had any of those issues yet however I'm not at 200K for population. I haven't started a new city yet but I expect it will be easier (not that is one hard) as my original city can support things as needed.

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/03/e ... y-servers/

Wow, just wow... So many things wrong with that...

LOL, that sounds bad... Amazon's reviews for it are like 1.3 out of 5 stars, most ppl complain about being unable to play... Hopefully EA will learn from this, though I doubt it

In the comments.

I was hoping that this would be a good launch and at least a decent followup to Sim City.

Saw that too, good stuff.

Just is all just appalling and even worse than I imagined... We don't all have crappy computers EA, just make the maps bigger so we can actually build self-sufficient cities and let us play offline... Or better yet let us run our own servers if the social aspect is just too critical to drop (yeah right).

The future of gaming, according to EA:

http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2013/03/08


...and it looks like someone started a WhiteHouse.gov petition about better return/refund policies for "broken" or improperly functioning video games:
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petiti ... y/nMy1wrtC
Not many signatures so far...

I believe Change.org works better for getting petitions across.

But with 100,000 signatures, the White House must respond (at least in some way). If you can organize the people to sign, you'll at least make it part of the conversation.

They might respond, but I highly doubt that anyone there really cares about games... Unless the games are being used as an "escape goat" for some social issues

EA makes me sad. I read some blurbs on the release over on ARS.

I was greatly disappointed in the game...and though I owned every version of Sim* you can think of (SimCopter, SimSafari, SimCity, etc.), I don't foresee myself getting this hodgepodged POS unless something changes. Forced DRM or "online-play" has ruined anything that ever was IMHO.

Those of you who've spent your pennies -- how bad is this awful server deal? I hear EA has asked advertising to stop as they can't keep up with what they have...

JohnC wrote:

They might respond, but I highly doubt that anyone there really cares about games... Unless the games are being used as an "escape goat" for some social issues

More than games, this is more about product policy, and if consumers have right to demand a refund on a product that doesn't work as advertised... I believe there are laws on the books with regards to physical products, but software is uncharted waters right now.

JohnC wrote:

Hopefully EA will learn from this, though I doubt it

If EA was ever going to learn, it would have been the Spore launch debacle. But they didn't, or rather they "learned" that people getting pissed off about an obnoxious and crippling DRM scheme should be solved by spending a bunch of money to build an even more obnoxious and crippling DRM scheme and have marketing say it's a feature.

If it's any consolation, I doubt EA will still be around in ten years. Something will come along that bored frat boys enjoy more than playing Madden, and the rest of the company can't survive without the cash cow propping it up.