
SimCity mod demonstrates the possibility of offline play - uptown
http://www.polygon.com/2013/3/14/4102966/simcity-mod-demonstrates-the-possibility-of-indefinite-offline-play
======
leetrout
I just don't get it. I've not heard one person say they are happy about the
state of the game. Yet EA / Maxis continue to ignore the customers. (And they
will continue to for the foreseeable future, I'm sure).

I have several friends that picked it up on launch day and a few of them
haven't even tried to play it yet. I can't understand the need to have the
latest game for the compulsive gamers. To shell out money just to have it
perpetuates this cycle of EA selling anything they want and the masses buying
it anyway.

I went to play NHL '10 a couple weeks ago on xbox and was greeted with a nice
message that the game servers are shut down. At least I can still play the
game. What are the odds there will be an end-of-life patch that enables
offline, single city game play when EA pulls the plugs on the SimCity servers?

In any case, it's clear that EA will laugh all the way to the bank with
everyone's money. I'll keep voting with my wallet.

~~~
JackdawX
As you say in your post, people are buying the game irrespectively. Why bother
making changes? Here are the current sales figures in the UK:

[http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gamesblog/2013/mar/11/t...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gamesblog/2013/mar/11/top-20-video-
games)

Debuted at #2 in the charts. Development time costs money, and the game
doesn't need 'fixing' to sell any copies. Despite the negative press in the
tech community, most gamers don't actuall care about the always online
requirement. I don't see the big deal myself either - most PC games from big
publishers actually install malware and rootkits onto your machine! That seems
infinitely worse than always-online, but no-one cares about that either.

~~~
fusiongyro
> Why bother making changes?

One that springs to mind is that everybody you burn on this one is potentially
a lost customer of the next one.

~~~
awj
That's only a concern when continuing your behavior results in a decrease of
revenue. EA has been acting like this for a _long_ time. If driving off these
kinds of customers was going to create future pain for them, it would have by
now.

~~~
fusiongyro
I posit this is because EA doesn't really have a brand identity per se, but
SimCity does.

~~~
awj
In that case, they've been doing this same kind of stuff with their other
brands for quite a while and either are ignoring the pain it generates or
aren't feeling it.

~~~
fusiongyro
Some companies are great at ignoring pain until it kills them. I guess we'll
see.

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datalus
The servers have gotten a lot more stable and I've been able to play
consistently. The new problem is: I'm bored already. The game isn't as deep as
I first thought it was. Not sure if I'll buy the inevitable DLCs to make it
more fleshed out.

In offline mode, since it doesn't save my city... maybe it'll offer a
different way of playing. Sort of like old school games that didn't have any
save points :)

~~~
skore
> The new problem is: I'm bored already. The game isn't as deep as I first
> thought it was.

Interesting! So you're saying the lack of fixing problems appears to be a nice
cover for a the lack of an interesting game?

~~~
johnward
There are some major issues. One of them being the traffic problems that were
posted on HN yesterday. Traffic is supposed to be somewhat challenging, but
there is really no way to fix it unless you remove all intersections. There
are also other bugs such as not being able to plop the sign for the trade HQ.
Also I built the trade building with the rail road tracks (forgot the name)
and it will take deliveries of items like oil but it will never hold the oil
or ship it out. It just disappears.

The budget controls don't go as deep as SimCity3000/4. In the past I could
shave a couple dollars of the road budget, but that would result in pot holes
and less repairs. Can't do that now.

The cities are also very small. I'm waiting for EA to release some "awesome"
DLC that gives you a decent sized city. The more I play this game the more I
like SC4.

~~~
rdl
The cities are just small enough that doing anything to get the high-level
trade buildings requires 100% dedicating your city to that purpose. e.g.
oil/refining, etc.

~~~
freehunter
Sim City 4 leaned towards this as well. You certainly didn't have to do it,
but it was a major boost to have a city dedicated to just trash and heavy
industry and a city dedicated to making power and a city dedicated to high
tech jobs and a city dedicated to living.

Cities XL is another game between Sim City 4 and SimCity where the land your
city is build on will not have all of the resources your town needs, forcing
you to juggle two or more towns. Some locations in that game are only good for
resorts, some are only good for oil, etc.

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mrspeaker
This whole thing is starting to feel like a case of "no such things as bad
publicity" - I kinda really want to check it out now that it's appeared here
10 times.

~~~
stickydink
I'm about to order it, to see what the fuss is about :/

~~~
gph
You'll probably be disappointed. Ignoring the fuss of DRM/offline-play the
game just wasn't very good IMO. Perhaps if you like watching little Sims and
feeling connected on the micro-scale to a city it's interesting. If you're
into Macro city management simulation, don't bother. They added some
interesting new features, it showed some creativity. But the implementation is
poor IMO.

Even if they enabled an offline mode I still wouldn't be playing it. Course
that's all subjective so I guess there will be those who disagree. I think
most of the yelling and screaming for an offline mode is the gaming community
making a Custers' Last Stand on the issue. People are mostly upset about the
concept of not "owning" the game and that at some point in the future they
might not be able to play this game. I doubt very many of those upset would
actually want to play this game in 10 years time. Course I do agree with the
fundamentals of that argument, but unfortunately I don't think we'll win.

Guess what I'm trying to get at, is the passion surrounding this game is more
due to principles than enjoyment or zealous fandom of the game itself. Well
perhaps some of the outrage is over how EA has destroyed a classic series like
SimCity. But that doesn't mean the game is good and you should buy it for the
playing experience.

~~~
andypants
I think they redesigned the game to be a bit easier.

I've played the previous sim city games, but I never really liked them.
Looking at the videos of the new one, it seems like they made it a bit more
accessible, such as not requiring players to build power lines or water pipes.
It's more of a game that I would play casually for half an hour here and there
and still find it fun.

------
ericcholis
I wouldn't be shocked if a bnetd [1] like situation arose. What's stopping a
clever hacker from coming up with a local proxy that just saves everything on
the user's PC? From what it sounds like, the server infrastructure isn't doing
anything crazy complicated.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle.net#bnetd>

~~~
lucian1900
It would not be trivial, since the client verifies the SSL certificate of the
server, which is stored in the client binary most likely.

~~~
metachris
You can add new, custom root certificates to the system and use them to
manually sign a fake server certificate.

~~~
lucian1900
The game is very unlikely to use the system certificates. What would it gain,
other than being more easily MITM-ed?

The certificate is hard-coded in the binary, most certainly.

~~~
tobiasu
Changing a certificate check in a binary is just finger exercise for anyone
serious about reverse engineering. "Hard-coded" does not mean what you (seem
to) think it means...

~~~
lucian1900
I never meant that changing the certificate is impossible, just that it isn't
trivial.

~~~
icebraining
I only did something like that once, but it was absolutely trivial, since it
included the ASCII header. Search, overwrite, add a little padding, done.

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ilitirit
Except that you can't save your game...

Still, it's a useful mod for people who have unstable connections. You can
also mod the UI to link a rarely button used button to "Sync", so that you
save at will.

~~~
tomrod
Save state in a VM?

~~~
icebraining
On Linux there are "process freezers" that work pretty well for simple
applications. I wonder if Windows has anything like that...?

~~~
stelonix
Can you list some of those? I've always wanted to implement a "Save State"
driver for Windows, but since I use Linux now, it's nice to know such things
already exist.

~~~
icebraining
The ones I know are listed on Wikipedia:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_checkpointing>

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SeanDav
I am so not going to buy this game.

EA just don't get it so I will help them a bit by choosing to spend my money
elsewhere.

~~~
ripter
I've opted for the new StarCraft 2. The launch went smoothly without an issue.

------
rdl
Even once all the online/etc. issues are resolved, it's just not a very good
game. I'm not angry enough to push Amazon for a refund, but it's not something
I'd ever pay full price for. It's actually inferior to CitiesXL Platinum
(although broken in different ways; between the two, you could have one decent
game).

Civ V wasn't great, either, but Civ V:G+K turned it into a decent and worthy
successor. Maybe the same thing will happen with SimCity 5.

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MBunny
I play on NA East 2 mostly and I have not had any issues with the server in a
while. Not like the start. There are still lots of bugs in the game but what
release like this is ever flawless? Simcity as a game is evolving and trying
to become more connected. I agree that they shouldn't have lied about all the
work require for offline mode when the game continues to function without a
connection. I think offline wouldn't be that bad to add if they felt like the
mechanics of the game still worked. TBH if it wasn't for the online mode I
wouldn't still be playing. As I play mostly social games with friends. For me
it is a plus. I have played other games such as LOL that have had several DAYS
of no service but yet there is not much of an uproar about it. It seems like
most the people commenting in this thread haven't had very much experience
with SimCity 5.

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frankenstein
The funniest thing is that the whole thing is not true. Yeah, you can disable
the first DRM layer in JavaScript but after 30 minutes you will get always
thrown back to the main menu.

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johnward
The game has bugs aside from the server issues. I hope they fix those too.

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ErikRogneby
some interesting reads over on the gaming stack exchange:

<http://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/simcity>

~~~
Lockyy
>Region searching is currently broken! When it is fixed, the task you are
trying to do will be easy. Until then, the best you can do is invite through
the friend system.

How is it that every single thing in this game is broken? I tried playing
multiplayer as well once I got bored playing alone and got just as bored
except faster because I was still playing singleplayer because nobody will
ever join.

