Simcity

[Ninot]

EA's forums have blown up with complaints and apologies from the Devs.

Sad to see, but expected with how they made the game I guess. Hope they can turn it around.

[Hauldren Collider]

dp

[Hauldren Collider]

Hah, how'd I miss this.

Put it to you this way. I can either assume you're too young to remember it, or too stupid, or you're intentionally ignoring trends contrary to your argument. Your call.

As I said, condescending.

[kentonio]

Snoopy, you're just wrong about the demographics here. An entire generation of games basically skipped the PC (or were released on consoles as well) because of piracy. There are maybe FOUR games out of about fourty in my Steam library that aren't also available on the Xbox 360. And computers are so much more powerful than the 360 now that it isn't funny. It's cutting into game quality.

Listen to Snoopy, because he knows of what he speaks. If you'd like something a little more solid to go on, perhaps you could explain why last year PC games sales were up 230% while console game sales went down 28%?

There was a time when 'conventional wisdom' said that piracy was killing the PC market and that PC gaming would die out as a result. It wasn't true then and it isn't true now. The reason PC games took a big hit was because the publishers made the same mistake as the music industry and initially tried to stick to the high price model combined with increasingly strict anti-piracy measures that decreased the user experience. A lot of companies dedicated themselves to console because then they could maintain the high prices in a protected market sure, but a lot of other companies just realized that selling at a lower price point, ensuring ease of use and building up a good relationship with fans (plus offering things like DLC which require a legitimate copy of the game to access) meant that most people were happy to buy rather than steal.

It's kind of sad that after years of example after example of overly strict piracy prevention hurting sales that EA have just made the same mistake again. Then again when it comes to titles as huge as Diablo or SimCity, they're guaranteed huge sales anyway so now tons of people will make the mistake of thinking it validates the practise.

[Alexander's Horse]

I've finally had to succumb to Steam cos the gameshops are full of console offerings but I think the PC game is far from dead. Kentorio is on the right track. Another thing that is going on is compartmentalisation. There is a guy called Gary Grigsby who does mil sims, he has a cult following. Now you can get his stuff online but you won't find it in shops.

[Nikolai]

[Guynemer]

What exactly was the point of that?

[Nikolai]

Did you see the video? Broken promises ring a bell?

[Guynemer]

a 20 second video posted out of context is a bit baffling. They said they have people on call to bring servers back up if they go down. Well, duh. That statement is meaningless.

More important is the question of what will happen when EA shuts the servers down for good. Will a single-player, non-online patch be available?

[ColdWizard]

Silly, Guynemer. EA sells games to people who want the new and fresh, like sports games with a new iteration each year or a Sims expansion every other day. They don't care about old fogeys like you, playing the same game decade after decade.

[regexcellent]

Now that I've finished the Tomb Raider reboot, should I try Sim City 5? For those who have actually played it, recommendations?

[Sava]

Simcity is a failure. Don't buy.

Even without the server issues, the game is fundamentally flawed. Broken traffic AI grinds your city to a halt. Fires break out. Fire trucks can't put them out. Your city burns to the ground. Criminals run wild (seemingly above the traffic jams) turning your city in Detroit.

The number of workers provided by your population isn't enough to fill all the jobs. Residents need shops. Shops need workers. Industry needs to ship things to shops. The math of this balance is so out of whack... it ruins the game.

And region play... let's talk about this. You need other cities to do things for you because your city can't afford to do it on it's own. The changes made in one city take an unknown amount of time to update so the other city "sees" it. Make a private region. Build power plants in one city. Try to sell it in another. Good luck.

[Wiglaf]

YES LET'S PLEASE. SINGLE LANE ROADS ARE A BIG PROBLEM FOR FIRE COVERAGE. I HAD A GARBAGE TRUCK DRIVING DOWN MY MAIN THOREAU FARE AND HE WOULD STOP FOR 1 MINUTE AT EACH HOUSE, AND NO ONE BEHIND HIM INCLUDING FIRE TRUCKS COULD PASS. CAUSED MY CITY TO BURN DOWN UNTIL I ADDED ANOTHER LANE TO THE ROAD.

OH AND IM SORRY TO HEAR YOU DONT HAVE ENOUGH WORKERS MAYBE INCREASE DENSITY OF RESIDENTIAL OR BUILD A RESIDENTIAL FOCUSED REGION

[snoopy369]

What, they don't have Scott's Law in SimCity? Or alleys?

[Wiglaf]

How do you yield to a fire truck on a one lane street?