

EA finally “exploring the possibility” of offline mode for SimCity - danso
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/10/ea-finally-exploring-the-possibility-of-offline-mode-for-simcity/

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ChikkaChiChi
EA lost me as a customer because they treated us as a hostile agent that was
somehow infecting their project goals.

The condescending attitude toward what we all knew was one thing. Refusing
refunds was another. But when EA started to threaten banning customers from
their Origin accounts (an EA only app store in which customers may have made
multiple purchases) that was it for me.

EA took what was once a source of immense enjoyment and nostalgic memories and
twisted it into one of the few battles I went nuts over.

It will be a long, LONG time before I consider purchasing another EA game
(despite my addiction to sports games on the consoles).

~~~
dragontamer
EA does not hold a monopoly on sports titles, although they have the license
to use NFL teams.

But 2K Sports also has a license for NBA teams, in NBA 2k14 for instance. And
I actually do like the Nintendo-based sports games a lot. :-p

~~~
ChikkaChiChi
I'm crossing my fingers that 2K gets back into the thick of things in the
nextgen with the NHL series, which is where I used to spend the majority of my
down time :)

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_mulder_
The ability to play offline is far down the list of improvements they could
make to this game. For a start, the inability to create any meaningful regions
means players just end up building a few specialised 'neighbourhoods'
separated by a couple of miles of grass or forest. The highways and railways
only seem to link up 4 neighbourhoods at a time so your 'Metropolis' ends up
being more like 4 seperate, non-connected towns, each consisting of 4 little
neighbourhoods.

EA massively missed the goal posts on SC5. Players enjoyed crafting a whole
world of their own, micromanaging it down to the nth degree. I didn't spend
hours and hours playing SC1,2000,3 & 4 thinking "if only my city could be
smaller and it was compulsory to play with strangers who don't share my design
ideas".

The only thing they got right, in my opinion, was the graphic refresh and
bendy-roads.

I did buy the game when it came out, even had to buy the Windows 8 upgrade
pack to play it! I don't know what I was more disappointed with, SC5 or
Windows 8. I can't remember to be honest because, after 1 week of playing the
game, I booted back into Linux and haven't restarted since.

~~~
MikusR
What Windows 8 has to do with SimCity?

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ChikkaChiChi
In a way, everything.

Both are prime examples of corporate desires to push something new on the
customer, despite the harbingers of doom that preceded their launch.

Coincidentally, both seem to also be scaling back some of these "mandatory"
decisions because the market has rejected them on a massive scale.

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robgough
The way handled this game is really quite sad. I was excited for it, the
previews looked promising ... but the fact that the server performance was
newsworthy, and the small-city problem, meant that I never bothered buying it.
I imagine I'm not alone.

Not having actually bought the game I can't say for sure, but I wonder if the
much-touted online features haven't been as popular as they hoped ... which
means that this now 7-month old game is probably quite expensive for them to
keep running into perpetuity. Ripping the online features out, and allowing
offline only, could allow them to save on running costs?

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EnderMB
I have absolutely nothing to back this up, but I feel that the vast majority
of gamers that would be interested in this game probably didn't have the
slightest clue about any issues the game has had. I read tech sites regularly
and as such I, like you, chose not to buy it, but it wouldn't surprise me if
sales were to still be fairly good. The problems were newsworthy, but in the
UK I only noticed a few articles stating the issues, and compared to other
games the news seemed fairly tame when you look at the severity of the issues.
It wouldn't surprise me if this news was largely ignored by those that found
out through mainstream news sites.

The thought of being happy about a games failure feels quite bad, considering
those that worked on it are real people who would probably like some
successful projects under their belt, but in a way I'd be quite happy to see
that EA had suffered because of this release.

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robgough
I'm in the UK too, and I believe it was frontpage BBC news for a fair while.
Also, don't underestimate the network effect of twitter & facebook for the
non-tech crowd ... if people see their friends moaning about their woes I
would suggest it is likely to make them think twice. How many people were
making positive comments about sim city during it's launch period?

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hobs
As both non-owners, you both dont know that features were disabled in SS for
literally months for some users. The entire launch and release was a fiasco.

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AbraKdabra
They're "exploring the possibility" and I'm sitting here at my PC, playing
SimCity in offline mode thanks to the cracker that made it possible.

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timje1
It's not very PC to call them that.

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yareally
Cracker, as in someone that "cracked" the DRM (which was done a while ago I
believe).

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dragontamer
Cracker usually entails "black hat". It would be proper to call him a
"cracker" if he broke the DRM and distributed it on Bittorrent.

Although if you crack the DRM, and then distribute it as a patch-file that
modifies an already installed version of Sim City, that would be a "Hacker".

Methinks he's using the term correctly. I'm just musing because it seems like
a lot of people here are not accustomed to underground lingo.

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MikusR
There already is a half working offline mode server emulator (made by one
person). And EA has a "Team" working on exploring the idea of possibility of
having an offline mode.

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chris_wot
Give them credit. Marketing teams don't generally know how to code. They're
probably still learning...

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chris_wot
Explore away, EA. Right while I explore the possibility of buying something
other than your game.

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bane
I'm sure they'll look into it after they fox all the glaring simulation issues
graphical glitches and severe city size limitations. The bigger problem, and I
realized this after just a couple days of playing is that the game just isn't
fun like the previous ones were.

Being sick in a tiny city, yet completely overwhelming every public transport
option with teens of thousands of people hanging out at single bus stops, with
no ability to build a subway is a huge simulation failure.

So many game regressions replaced with dumber alternatives. I ended up
uninstalling it after a couple weeks and loading up sc4k instead.

~~~
_mulder_
I completely agree (see my comment along similar lines).

The online/offline debate has diverted far too much attention away from other,
more important aspects of the game (at least to players) that badly missed the
mark. I'm certain SC5 would have been slated as "the disappointment of the
decade" even if 'online-only-gate' had not happened.

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saturdaysaint
How long are people even going to care about them bungling things like this?
Admittedly, I'm not a super hardcore gamer, but as indie games and iOS games
achieve ever higher levels of polish and depth, I find it hard to lament any
one company's flops - there's too much good stuff out there to enjoy in just
about every genre.

~~~
touristtam
Just a second. EA is one of the big publishers when it comes to the Windows
platform. Meaning they have quite a few franchises that have followers.
However they have been vilipending their paying customers as potential thieves
for a very long time with quite a few blow back and under delivering compared
to the customer's expectation. So, sure you can enjoy 'indie' games on other
platform, but as publisher go, I would advise to look and think twice before
you buy any games from EA.

On the technical side, I am far from surprised at the BS official answer from
EA regarding the feasibility of offline mode, and bigger playground.

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saturdaysaint
I can see my phrasing was a bit imprecise - when I said "How long will people
even care?", I meant how long will people bother protesting when they can just
buy good, fully functioning games from other publishers? For me, EA just seems
to be among the most boring, mediocre and un-user-friendly forces in gaming.
With the wealth of great games out there, I wonder if they'll see a
Zynga/Nintendo style reversal of fortunes in the near term.

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TheLoneWolfling
Didn't they say that it was a technical impossibility for SimCity to be able
to be run offline?

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GeorgeOrr
Is it possible that EA is finally (belatedly) learning to listen to their
customers? Could this be the point that they turn around as a company and
become player centric?

Or am I naive and reading way too much into this?

~~~
benologist
They probably want to fire 80% of staff working on the servers.

~~~
kabdib
Right. EA has determined

1\. No way to milk this year-by-year (John Madden's SimCity 2014...)

2\. So, might as well see if there's a long tail.

My wife bought this game, and was really mad at how EA bungled it. It's
probably the last SimCity game she'll buy. So from this single data point,
yeah, EA might as well give up :-/

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FedRegister
What online mode? SimCity, SimCity 2000, SimCity 3000, and SimCity 4 all still
work offline.

Oh, they mean SimCity Online! Why would they want to remove online mode from
SimCity Online? Surely they didn't bill it as a single player game that needed
an online component!/s

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Tyrannosaurs
When they announced a new SimCity game there was no mention of it being
SimCity online - that was only announced later.

Sure, you can say that people shouldn't get excited about a game until they
have something more solid than initial announcements and rumours but if
companies want to benefit from the pre-release anticipation, they need to make
sure they don't mismanage that expectation.

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talmand
Exactly. If they had named it "SimCity Online" then a great deal of the
negativity attached to it likely wouldn't have happened.

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CervezaPorFavor
EA on not allowing larger cities: "The system performance challenges we
encountered would mean that the vast majority of our players wouldn’t be able
to load, much less play with bigger cities."

Seriously? If they had allowed offline play in the first place, the city size
would only be limited by the player's own hardware.

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frankydp
Isn't all this moot if the RCI is just faked? The glassbox is not an engine at
all. Nothing you do in game actually effects the economy or labor force
directly.

How is offline mode going to change the fact that the game is not a simulator
but a really pretty linear RPG.

~~~
wmeredith
>> Isn't all this moot if the RCI is just faked? What!? Is this true? I've
avoided this sequel (to one of my favorite games of all time) because of all
the other user-hostile moves made, but I'd not heard anything about this. If
that's true, there's nothing left of the spirit of the game. Why would anyone
play this game, ever?

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talmand
First off, I don't own the game. Having an interest in the series I did a good
deal of research to decide over whether to buy it or not. I avoided it big
time from the beginning based on the comments from people playing it pre-
launch and post-launch.

I don't know the current state of things but all indications were that the
simulation was severely broken. I'm not sure about being "faked", as in
intentional, but things just worked in ways that made no sense.

For example, one experiment involved a city that was all residential with no
services whatsoever. Low taxes kept population in positive for happiness so
people kept moving in to replace the people that left because conditions were
so miserable.

The theory is that you could succeed at building a decent size city no matter
how badly you managed it.

~~~
bane
It's true. After just a couple plays I figured out the simulation and could
basically do whatever I wanted and make loads is cash and everybody was happy.
It was like playing a crappy sc clone on good mode.

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devx
Too little too late?

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loydb
Then perhaps I'll "explore the possibility" of buying it. But probably not,
they have left a nasty aftertaste with their shenanigans.

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nwh
The pirates beat them to it.

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islon
unfortunately it's not the possibility they are exploring, it's the users...

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6d0debc071
What, you mean the same offline mode that people hacked into it shortly after
it was launched? To say it would take significant engineering work, when
people have already done it fairly quickly, just makes you look like an
incompetent liar.

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Tyrannosaurs
To be fair to them they have to support the thing - a crack may be good enough
to get someone up and playing but from their perspective they need to make
sure it's rock solid else they'll face a repeat of the backlash they had when
the online version was flaky.

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laurent123456
No matter how well they want to make it, it wouldn't take six months of
development with full access to the source code though.

