I have been amazed at the interest level in this game. I shared in the excitement and could not wait for the Mac version. Now the bad backlash, bugs, and generally horrific reviews have significantly deflated my interest. Gaming startups - make a better one!! ;)
Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues
231–240 of 452 posts
Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues
#232I haven't been paying much attention to SCV except that it seemed to be generating a lot of hype and excitement...so I'm kind of confused why the game has to be so intricately tied into whatever (apparently faulty) online service that EA has setup. I mean, besides the DRM. I don't get why my fake city has to be attached to a world of fake cities if all I want to do is play in the sandbox. Didn't the designers/executi…
"I mean, besides the DRM." But that's the core issue, really.
No, the core issue is: the game doesn't work. Lets face it, gamers would still be buying the game with DRM if it didn't crash.
If what you mean is: "Crashing (to the point of unplayability) is an inherent consequence of DRM"...the many wildly successful games that have DRM would indicate otherwise
Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is the auth space something a startup could occupy? "Easy DRM/Auth for games that doesn't suck?"
All DRM is eventually bypassed, why do game studios even bother?
In this case it's not just DRM; SimCity has social features that clearly require a server.
Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some places in EA are amazing places to work at. Others have challenges. They aren't the only game company that has seen studios do sub-standard work after being acquired.
You're seriously blaming this on Maxis ? I think the respective records of EA and a pre-EA Maxis ought to provide ample evidence of the likely culprit here.
I was speaking more broadly.
This isn't the first time EA has seriously blown a launch due to infrastructure issues I realize. EA's main infrastructure server team runs things like a pre-dotbomb forture 5.
I'm slow to throw blame since EA's acquisitions chose to join EA. Technical Directors at Maxis are just as much to blame as well as product/project managers that fail to squeeze load testing into the busy schedule.
I do (sadly) agree that studios seem to lose their magic to us gamers once they join EA. Why?
Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
We lack the internal knowledge to know whether an offline mode would have been a good experience for most customers. I have no idea whether Maxis+EA tested this, and how well it worked. That said, you can imagine a situation where doing these computations locally did compromise the experience for a certain spec of machines. Maxis has already explained that city size limits were imposed because the simulation didn't r…
You're saying that the client PCs are so weak, yet EA can offload it into the cloud for cheap? How exactly does that work? My 3-year-old ultralight laptop has as much CPU as an EC2 M1 large. I find it hard to believe the game is so complicated a laptop will struggle, but EA can efficiently load it onto servers? That sounds pretty hard to believe. Even if the target player is using a crappy Netbook, you're talking abo…
SimCity system requirements:
Intel players will need, minimally, a 2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo, while our AMD players will need at least a an Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core 4000+.
Those sound pretty capable of a significant amount of simulation themselves...
Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues
#236EA is offering refunds but only in some cases, with a very haphazard criteria:
http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/18gs2vgs50fjijpg/original.jp...
Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
We lack the internal knowledge to know whether an offline mode would have been a good experience for most customers. I have no idea whether Maxis+EA tested this, and how well it worked. That said, you can imagine a situation where doing these computations locally did compromise the experience for a certain spec of machines. Maxis has already explained that city size limits were imposed because the simulation didn't r…
You're saying that the client PCs are so weak, yet EA can offload it into the cloud for cheap? How exactly does that work? My 3-year-old ultralight laptop has as much CPU as an EC2 M1 large. I find it hard to believe the game is so complicated a laptop will struggle, but EA can efficiently load it onto servers? That sounds pretty hard to believe. Even if the target player is using a crappy Netbook, you're talking abo…
This is an over-simplification of the performance demands of the game. Keep in mind that there are many levels of computation involved in the simulation, from rendering loads to inter-agent complexity, to city management (i.e. taxes). It all adds up, and the graphics needs alone are the limiter in most games.
But beyond the "feather that broke the camel's back" rationale for offloading compute, keep in mind that there are issues around shared data that would vastly improve performance of region-level computations in the cloud. If the region state is maintained in the cloud, any computations on that state will be far more quick when done in a centralized way.
Further, there are fewer challenges around handling client desynchronization, which is a classic problem in large scale strategy games. Reconciling one or more desync'd client's state can get very difficult. Under a centralized system, the master copy reigns.
Obviously there are downsides, but it's not like it's a crazy idea to offload some of the compute to the cloud.
Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues
#238Can we talk about this more clearly? This isn't strictly "evil DRM" as people are highlighting. Unlike some other games, it's not like SimCity is just phoning home to figure out if it is licensed or not, and preventing unlicensed copies. SimCity depends on EA/Maxis' server infrastructure for a great deal of storage and computation related to the macro-scale components of each game. Not only is city state synced there…
> I think there is a plausible, if imperfect, argument for doing so; Many players are involved and system resources are scarce relative to simulation complexity. Game reviewers like Polygon knowingly played prerelease code on private development server, and reported no major issues. In addition, EA recently cut back on game features and disabled the fastest game mode to help their servers cope -- some additional indi…
Relaxing their overly aggressive DRM strategy would easily reduce the need for servers by order (orders?) of magnitude, so it would be a possible solution.
Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues
#239SimCity 2000/3000/4 still work perfectly, and are available for free.
Since when are they available for free?
I think SimCity 2000 was considered abandonware, or was it only the first SimCity game? I'm not really sure about it. But the first 4 games are definitely playable without any internet connection whatsoever.
Re: Amazon stops selling Sim City V over game issues
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think you're adding clarity here. People are upset about the lack of a single player offline mode, which absolutely is about preventing unlicensed copies. There is no technical reason for its absence. The cloud based stuff sounds great, and if it were an optional extra that was unavailable at launch due to technical difficulties, I doubt you'd see a hundredth as much bad PR.
>People are upset about the lack of a single player offline mode, which absolutely is about preventing unlicensed copies. There is no technical reason for its absence. I see this sentiment expressed pretty often, but in this case it seems flawed. From what I understand, you can't build a city that does everything, instead you rely on the other cities in your 'region.' The new Simcity is no more single player than Wor…
Orrrr you could just program some simple AI for the other cities in your 'region'.