Game News Sim City gets released. Recieves mixed reactions

[Zed]

everything in this thread is fake. nothing is real.
except the fact that sim city is shit served in a toilet that flushes when people try to eat it. heh. poop.

 

[Tzaero]

sim city is shit served in a toilet that flushes when people try to eat it. heh. poop.

 

[Deuce Traveler]

With the negative news this is getting, I can't help but wonder if the online play was tacked on somewhere in mid-development. Also, doesn't EA believe in playtesting?

We should unleash The Brazilian Slaughter upon them.

What a huge screw-up, and I hope places that sell older, workable versions of SimCity like GOG and Steam are able to bring in some new customers over this.

 

[Whisky]

With the negative news this is getting, I can't help but wonder if the online play was tacked on somewhere in mid-development. Also, doesn't EA believe in playtesting?

I read one article in a local paper a few years ago that mentioned at one point EA was helping out the community by hiring local homeless people as play-testers.

No idea how true the article was, of course.

 

[Deuce Traveler]

With the negative news this is getting, I can't help but wonder if the online play was tacked on somewhere in mid-development. Also, doesn't EA believe in playtesting?

I read one article in a local paper a few years ago that mentioned at one point EA was helping out the community by hiring local homeless people as play-testers.

No idea how true the article was, of course.

Are you sure they weren't hiring local homeless people as journalists to cover their games?

 

[Zeriel]

That, and hiring local homeless people to force them to watch a "SERVERS DOWN" error page for 8 hours a day 5 days a week strikes me as a form of torture, not a kindness.

 

[Mraston]

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/03/12/simcity-server-not-necessary/

Interesting to see some actual journalism coming out of all this.

 

[fizzelopeguss]

Jesus christ, what a royal cunting fuck up.

How are the citiesXL games by the way?

 

[commie]

Jesus christ, what a royal cunting fuck up.

How are the citiesXL games by the way?

They are ok, but mostly just patches of the original Cities XL. I actually preferred the older versions when they were called 'City Life'. Seemed to be simpler to play around with without the memory leaks of XL and less of a grind. City builders tend to get monotonous pretty quickly for me so I liked the more objective based scenarios even if it was just amass x wealth or attract x people.

 

[fizzelopeguss]

Yeah, that's why i loved the impressions titles. There was a bit of a narrative leading from one mission to the next.

"This area will make an ideal mining town for the supply of copper/iron to the capital city we built earlier, as we have heard rumbling of barbarians in the distance and need to get our weapons industry started."

 

[Shannow]

With the negative news this is getting, I can't help but wonder if the online play was tacked on somewhere in mid-development. Also, doesn't EA believe in playtesting?

I read one article in a local paper a few years ago that mentioned at one point EA was helping out the community by hiring local homeless people as play-testers.

No idea how true the article was, of course.

Blatant lies. You're just some angry discontent who wants to smear EA's good name by abusing his anonymity on the internet!

EA would never pay homeless people to play-test their games! That's what paying customers are for. Why waste money on things your customer will do and pay you for? Win, win. /suit

 

[Mrowak]

With the negative news this is getting, I can't help but wonder if the online play was tacked on somewhere in mid-development. Also, doesn't EA believe in playtesting?

They did. They have one of the largest QA teams in Europe and US. What they didn't believe in is stresstesting. Why couldn't they just use their marketing estimates of prospective customers, multiply figures by 3 and run these many instances of the game with pre-programmed behavioural pattern on their servers months prior to the release will remain a mystery for years to come.

 

[Zeriel]

With the negative news this is getting, I can't help but wonder if the online play was tacked on somewhere in mid-development. Also, doesn't EA believe in playtesting?

They did. They have one of the largest QA teams in Europe and US. What they didn't believe in is stresstesting. Why couldn't they just use their marketing estimates of prospective customers, multiply figures by 3 and run these many instances of the game with pre-programmed behavioural pattern on their servers months prior to the release will remain a mystery for years to come.

If Blizzard, the company that ran the largest online game in the fucking world, can't get this right, I'm not sure anyone will in the near future. Not an excuse, this whole thing is still a huge fucking mess and the game is unplayable even if you set aside the always-online part, it's fundamentally flawed, but I don't think anyone has yet to come up with a good answer to the load this sort of DRM puts on servers. Financially, they don't want to spend lots of money on servers they won't need later. As a company, they don't want the horrible reputation that people unable to play their game day 1 will give them. I am a little confused why they don't just rent a bunch of temporary space from some massive datacenter for the first week or month, though. There must be a good reason, these are big companies, does the scale just not exist in third party sites?

 

[Kirtai]

Scaling up requires a lot more than just more servers. It needs a load of infrastructure work that often works quite differently to smaller scale systems. If they don't have the right infrastructure, more servers can actually make it slower (e.g. from overhead scaling faster than server power)

 

[Whisky]

With the negative news this is getting, I can't help but wonder if the online play was tacked on somewhere in mid-development. Also, doesn't EA believe in playtesting?

I read one article in a local paper a few years ago that mentioned at one point EA was helping out the community by hiring local homeless people as play-testers.

No idea how true the article was, of course.

Blatant lies. You're just some angry discontent who wants to smear EA's good name by abusing his anonymity on the internet!

EA would never pay homeless people to play-test their games! That's what paying customers are for. Why waste money on things your customer will do and pay you for? Win, win. /suit

Found it!

Jesus, that was almost five years ago. Right during the stock market crash too.

EDIT: All things considered though, it's not really a bad idea and I can't fault EA for doing that.

 

[commie]

Amazing...Eurogamer ACTUALLY PLAYED IT to then give it a 4/10! What's the world coming too? Critical reviews based on actually playing the game for more than a few minutes? PREPOSTEROUS!

 

[Dead Guy]

In a way it's kind of sad that it's mostly not until after weeks of outrage, fans discovering game-breaking flaws, that the touted detailed simulation is just find the shortest route from A to B, and a PR clusterfuck, that reviewers jump on the bandwagon and give poor reviews.

 

[Zeriel]

$.

 

[SCO]

You don't say, captain obvious

 

[Gerrard]

I like how all the early reviews were glowing 10/10 GOTY and all that followed are 70 and below.

No corruption to be found here, Your Honor.

 

[Spectacle]

I like how all the early reviews were glowing 10/10 GOTY and all that followed are 70 and below.

No corruption to be found here, Your Honor.

Well, the early reviews were all played on a special press server that actually worked...

 

[Gerrard]

Thing is, even if they could play without problems, it was still the same buggy game full of bullshit claims.

 

[fizzelopeguss]

 

[Micmu]

Hahaha, let the screenshot speak for itself
What a dump; it's just embarrassing. Dumbdown at it's finest.

 

[curry]

don't touch this turd unless you want to get your feelings hurt

 

[commie]

In a way it's kind of sad that it's mostly not until after weeks of outrage, fans discovering game-breaking flaws, that the touted detailed simulation is just find the shortest route from A to B, and a PR clusterfuck, that reviewers jump on the bandwagon and give poor reviews.

Yeah and by then EA have already grabbed most of the cash they were going to get anyway for their rushed turd from glassy eyed day one purchase retards, thus vindicating their strategy.

I like how all the early reviews were glowing 10/10 GOTY and all that followed are 70 and below.

No corruption to be found here, Your Honor.

Well, the early reviews were all played on a special press server that actually worked...

But even so, that doesn't explain the bugs and the fact that the underlying game is fundamentally broken. Their much hyped 'every sim is modelled individually' may have fooled people like Anthony Davis but as is increasingly evident, it only works for the first few hundred sims, then it's all just extrapolated for the rest resulting in the kind of AI clusterfuck that is described in the Eurogamer review. As a result, the whole 'sim needs' thing doesn't work and at the same time wastes processing power resulting in the tradeoff being tiny villages as the engine system can't handle much more.

 

[Stabwound]

Haha oh wow, I knew the game was a disaster but I didn't know it was this bad.

I'm reading that if you design a road system with intersections, once one car takes the shortest route from one spot to another, every single car for the rest of the game will follow that same path. This is kind of sad. A good, modern Sim City, even with online components, could have been good. Could have.

 

[Zeriel]

I like how all the early reviews were glowing 10/10 GOTY and all that followed are 70 and below.

No corruption to be found here, Your Honor.

Well, the early reviews were all played on a special press server that actually worked...

That still doesn't really excuse them, considering the basic simulation under the hood doesn't actually work, either. It once again proves that 99.9% of reviews are really reviewing the first few hours of the game. If you want a review of the full thing, you're shit out of luck.