151–160 of 189 posts
Skylines is a great game, with great mod support... ...that retails for $30 (can get it for less on sites like greenmangaming.com). That part blows my mind.
Skylines is showing at £29.99 (equiv of $46) on greenmangaming for me atm...
Not to mention the fact that it's the first decent city building game that runs on Linux!
I think we are all playing into EA's strategy by calling it Maxis instead of just EA. Simcity 2013 was a failure of EA, but by mentioning Maxis 11 times and EA only once (and in passing), it's as they give EA a carte blanche to fail without the lowered reputation for future games (which means many people will preorder, and so on)
Honestly I think Maxis deserves a ton of blame as well. They operate semi-autonomously for how long and they routinely churned out terrible games. On reddit, I see far more people blame EA than I do Maxis. And while I'm all for EA getting a ton of bad press, I think it's bs that nobody points a finger at Maxis because they're just as guilty, imo. Nostalgia for 90s and early 00s Maxis is blinding people from the reali…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly I think Maxis deserves a ton of blame as well. They operate semi-autonomously for how long and they routinely churned out terrible games. On reddit, I see far more people blame EA than I do Maxis. And while I'm all for EA getting a ton of bad press, I think it's bs that nobody points a finger at Maxis because they're just as guilty, imo. Nostalgia for 90s and early 00s Maxis is blinding people from the reali…
And honestly their strong suit was never the software itself so much as the awesome ideas that came from the Will Wright, Jeff Braun, and their team. For instance, The Sims. Not a great game technically , not much innovation there are far as game play. In fact it's quite generic. But the idea of creating an AI-driven character that has it's own emotions, it's own life? That's legendary stuff. But they've always seeme…
I think we are all playing into EA's strategy by calling it Maxis instead of just EA. Simcity 2013 was a failure of EA, but by mentioning Maxis 11 times and EA only once (and in passing), it's as they give EA a carte blanche to fail without the lowered reputation for future games (which means many people will preorder, and so on)
Honestly I think Maxis deserves a ton of blame as well. They operate semi-autonomously for how long and they routinely churned out terrible games. On reddit, I see far more people blame EA than I do Maxis. And while I'm all for EA getting a ton of bad press, I think it's bs that nobody points a finger at Maxis because they're just as guilty, imo. Nostalgia for 90s and early 00s Maxis is blinding people from the reali…
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They are non-sandboxed but most are open source. Additionally, there are so many users testing these mods that I doubt any serious malware could be put on Steam without being caught by the community.
assume I have a "good" mod, lots of people download it, which as far as I understand is a "subscription" in steam workshop terms, somebody breaks into my account and uploads a malicious update, now everybody will download the malicious update instead: unless there was a way to tie a code audit to a specific module that you download it seems like this would still be risky
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To many, many gamers, as soon as the word EA comes up, it already means "prepare for disappointment, DRM, and disastrous launches".
To me they're a mixed bag. I've enjoyed many titles from them (Dragon Age, Titanfall, Dead Space, NFS: HP, Mass Effect, Bulletstorm, BF: BC2, and countless other titles from older gen consoles and even older PC games like Archon and Kings of the Beach). I think that when expectations are set high (most any recent BF release), disappointment is sure to follow.
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Interestingly enough, while it looks bizarre in a video game, this is functionally how left/right turn bays work in some large urban one-way streets in real-life. See, for example, this NYC intersection: https://goo.gl/maps/SCFrQ . The left turn lane is a parking lane until one is within half a block of the intersection in question. While it isn't as extreme as 2 lanes to 6, it's very similar. So... is it a hack for…
I walk through that intersection most days. What they've done in NYC is interesting. That part of First Avenue used to be, like most in mid and upper Manhattan, six (or sometimes more) undifferentiated lanes. The first change was the addition of dedicated bus lanes (right-most lane, painted reddish), complete with violation cameras and automated ticketing. This reduced competition among buses and cars -- in favor of…
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Honestly I think Maxis deserves a ton of blame as well. They operate semi-autonomously for how long and they routinely churned out terrible games. On reddit, I see far more people blame EA than I do Maxis. And while I'm all for EA getting a ton of bad press, I think it's bs that nobody points a finger at Maxis because they're just as guilty, imo. Nostalgia for 90s and early 00s Maxis is blinding people from the reali…
This is the classic symptom of changing oneself to fit the mainstream once one hits the mainstream. Whether it's EA's fault of Maxis's fault is just fruitless finger pointing (it's EA's, these guys are literally the cancer that's killing the video game industry), but the real mistake is updating your game to fit "mainstream standards" of connectivity, social, high quality 3d graphics, etc. Some management official or…
Need for Speed: Rivals was similar. It was a neat concept, but it revolved entirely around online play that was generally just completely terrible. You get dumped in a map with 1-7 other people, and then you drive around aimlessly hoping that you eventually run into them, which you don't. In the meantime, you're listening to every idiot with a Playstation Camera screaming at their moms for another PB&J, or some jackass swearing the entire time because he thinks he's alone in his room, because there's no way to turn off voice chat in the game whatsoever.
Congratulations, your game is both online (but you can't really tell) and social (but it's actually antisocial).
Simcity is the same way. What if you could play online against other people? I mean… with other people. You could build neighbouring towns. Except you're actually building neighbourhoods because realistically sized cities would take too much server resources. And then you can interact with other cities! By buying or selling resources like garbage pickup, recycling, and power.
Except that the servers didn't work, so online only meant offline always. And the social idea was cool, until some jackass dropped into your region and built a zone that was entirely coal power plants and industrial zones, and polluted the whole region. Or built a city with nothing but power plants, provided power to everyone else in the region, then one day bulldozed everything, pulling the rug out from under everyone else and sending their cities into chaos.
I really hope that Cities: Skylines is successful. It already seems like a far more interesting game than any previous Simcity was, and it has a lot more potential as well. I love the idea of being able to ease congestion by 'work from home' incentives, and it would be cool if they (or modders) could implement that.
Skylines is hands down my favorite game right now and is directly responsible for my highly unproductive, but fun, weekend. But it's not without faults. For me one of the telling things will be how they handle a very similar problem that EA had with the latest Sim City. Traffic. Once your city becomes a certain size the game goes from City Builder to Traffic Management Simulator. Which itself wouldn't be a problem if…
They later updated the algorithm, apparently, to do path cost routing, making it far more preferable to take avenues over dirt roads, but until then the only way your city could work at all was to create it entirely out of cul-de-sacs.
There was also an issue with the train service, where, when a commuter train came to an intersection, it would randomly choose which direction to take. This meant that if you had a grid of avenues, some of your sims would be waiting for hours for a train, because the train is bouncing randomly around your downtown instead of dropping anyone off.
Moving to a system where there were literally no intersections at all for your trains was the only way to make your mass transit system a benefit and not a liability.