SimCity (2013) Official Thread

I've been following this guy's LP since it started up 2 or 3 weeks ago. He's kind of goofy, but talky in the good way, he likes to zoom around and chat. It makes it easy to skip around his LP episodes.

The latest installment provides a good example of why, if you didn't buy this game at launch, you should continue to wait it out...

http://youtu.be/QXrTJzxwD9U

He takes it pretty well, all things considered. Good attitude.
 
It's certainly the blunder of the century, but are there any measurable consequences for EA/Maxis? My feeling is that there will be, and has been, a lot of criticism but EA will still make their money back and then some which incorrectly signals that the people want this and the rest of us are just trolls.

Sort of like the sentiment you see after a presidential election, don't blame me because I voted with my wallet.

There is an recent article where a Maxis developer states that the reason the simulation is not very deep is to keep it fun. Hogwash. I'm looking at Cities in Motion 2 which is basically a transit simulator. They will let you get down to developing timetables for buses and trains, but the game will also do it automatically if that's not your thing. This is from a studio that lacks the mighty resources of EA.

A great simulation will give the player the option to get under the hood or not.
 
I decided to come back to this game after a few weeks of not playing. I started a new region and it started to seem like everything was going to work out. Then I noticed traffic is still an issue no matter how many buses you have out. I thought I would put up a rail car system only I can't upgrade any of my roads with the tracks. I'm also now running into an issue with money.

In the past it would have happened around 70,000 people. Now I have around 100,000 and unless I have my taxes in the range of 11%-15% I'm losing around 4,000 dollars an hour. Before I hit the 100,000 mark I was able to keep the taxes as they were when I started the city.

I'm also finding that I can have nothing to bulldoze then 30 abandoned buildings and 10 that are rubble. After I get done getting rid of all of them with in a minute it is right back up to that same amount.

This game still seems like it needs a lot of work.
 
[quote name='sendme']I decided to come back to this game after a few weeks of not playing. I started a new region and it started to seem like everything was going to work out. Then I noticed traffic is still an issue no matter how many buses you have out. I thought I would put up a rail car system only I can't upgrade any of my roads with the tracks. I'm also now running into an issue with money.

In the past it would have happened around 70,000 people. Now I have around 100,000 and unless I have my taxes in the range of 11%-15% I'm losing around 4,000 dollars an hour. Before I hit the 100,000 mark I was able to keep the taxes as they were when I started the city.

I'm also finding that I can have nothing to bulldoze then 30 abandoned buildings and 10 that are rubble. After I get done getting rid of all of them with in a minute it is right back up to that same amount.

This game still seems like it needs a lot of work.[/QUOTE]

Umm,
It sounds like your issues have nothing to do with the game being broken.
It sounds like you just suck at the game.
 
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Could be, but the traffic from what I have read is still an issue. It would be nice to have some overpasses in the game. I still don't get how I can do fine now till 100,000 people then drop to the negative and have to keep knocking down buildings every time I turn around.
 
Anyone else having issues with getting disconnected from the servers? I has actually having a city doing well till I was kicked from the server. When I went back nothing was there. Also is their a way to upgrade to an Avenue for the medium size road or will I have to actually build it?
 
Yeah I noticed that. I ended up just making one later on. Still having an issue with once the population gets to around 100k I go from 4k an hour to -10k an hour. The only thing keeping the one city I have going is the money from electronics I'm getting. If I raise taxes to much nothing else gets built however if I have them to low I'm losing 10k an hour.
 
It's become an interesting story, because we can now look back on the early PR response to the backlash and see that the suits, including the Maxis head (Lucy something-or-other), simply didn't know how SC2013 worked. All they cared about was the fact that the shit was online all the time so they could sell DLC.

So for as mad as everyone was at EA in the early going for the rushed release, insistence on Origin (DRM) and always-on connectivity ($$$), lack of servers, misleading PR (which, again, *may* not have been intentional), etc., it looks like it's Maxis who's now fucking this up. All the patches and fixes aren't doing anything by multiple accounts, it's an honest epidemic of issues.

I'm sure after the initial backlash settled, EA's eager for Maxis to fix SC2013 so they can get the DLC thing going. We saw the plans for the $15 marina earlier. They didn't insist on always-on for nothing, EA wants to get into the bidness of churning out cash via DLC. But try as they might, Maxis can't get it fixed.

So you've got a shit publisher with a developer who clearly doesn't understand its own simulation and how to fix it. That's a lousy pairing.
 
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/04/22/the-power-of-silence-why-the-simcity-story-went-away/

Here's an article I read on Rock Paper Shotgun earlier his week. It discusses how the initial story was that the online servers handle a portion of the processing but we later found out a mod-er had the game running offline indefinitely with no problems. The response from EA and Maxis about that development? Complete and total silence. Essentially the only option they have left at this point to handle a wildly out of control PR nightmare and an implicit admission that they've been lying through their teeth about this whole debacle.
 
Well, it's possible that EA and the Lucy gal weren't lying when they talked about "server-side computation." It may be a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing.

The scenario to explain this that I imagine is EA suits and the actual SC2013 developers from Maxis sitting in a room 3 or 4 years ago. EA says, "We need this puppy to be online all the time, so's we can sell digital bullshit to people." Maxis grunts accept it, and an up-and-comer in the Maxis ranks says, "Sure, that will even allow us to offload some of the local processing to the servers! Think about it, it'll be awesome!" Putting a happy face on it, a bit of spin...

And from the EA/suits POV, that's the last update they ever received on SC2013. They had no idea if any of the ideas discussed in that meeting were actually implemented, all they cared about was the fact that it had always-on so they could use it to sell DLC.

Again, I'm not excusing EA, but we're nearly two months out from release and the simulation is still very bad. I'm not talking about server issues -- lost saves, crashes, weak chat, you name it -- I'm talking about the actual game simulation itself. Sewage, pollution, traffic, tourism, crime, fire control, etc. There's crippling bugs throughout the simulation, and if you read the Maxis comments to bugs on twitter or reddit, it's clear that these guys are lost, they're in a genuine panic. They're just bug squashing and hoping to survive, and in blindly squashing bugs, they're only creating more problems because they don't understand the simulation.

EDIT: Some guy at Tom's Hardware got a chance to revisit the game.
 
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Well that seems to be about right on the game. That's why I have held off on playing it. I might play it again later on to see if any thing has been fixed.
 
Welp, turns out offline play wasn't impossible after all. Which everyone knew as modders had the game running offline weeks after its release in spite of Maxis/EA claims otherwise.

I'm still astounded at the massive shit that Maxis/EA took on that game. It's worse than D3 in my opinion, given that the Diablo fans were probably going to bitch no matter what came out. But the Simcity fans just want mods and big cities, it's all they give a shit about, it was so obvious before release, and Maxis went out of their way to ignore the obvious priorities of that huge installed fanbase. It's not like Maxis was mistaken, they blatantly ignored a ton of people.

Also, going straight necromancer on this thread. OBEY YOUR MASTER AND RISE!

 
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Seems like each time the fix something they break something else. Nothing but one issue after another from day one. Cities of tomorrow seemed like it would be great but its not. Multi city play still doesn't seem to work.
 
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