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I don't think you're adding clarity here. People are upset about the lack of a single player offline mode, which absolutely is about preventing unlicensed copi

I don't think you're adding clarity here. People are upset about the lack of a single player offline mode, which absolutely is about preventing unlicensed copies. There is no technical reason for its absence. The cloud based stuff sounds great, and if it were an optional extra that was unavailable at launch due to technical difficulties, I doubt you'd see a hundredth as much bad PR.

estel 14y ago
Isn't: > We can argue about whether these things should be computed and stored in the cloud, but I think there is a plausible, if imperfect, argument for doing so Conceivably true? We could be in a world with no DRM, but there would still be a market trend moving games towards a more social, connected and integrated experience; and some developers will be looking at ways to fundamentally build their new games in a way that takes advantage of this. Why not SimCity? The Sims 3 already indicated where the Sims franchise might be heading with regards to improved connectivity with friends, I don't think it's an entirely unreasonable leap to get to where SimCity is now. Which isn't to say that DRM wouldn't have been a business consideration at an executive level; but there's definitely an argument that SimCity's design choices, even if flawed, can be justified without considering DRM.
- alex_c 14y ago
  Conceivable, but a real stretch. It would imply that they considered adding a single player mode, knowing that there would be demand for it, but decided it would be too difficult given their other design decisions to make it worth adding. Or as Diablo 3 players like to joke, "the technology just isn't there yet" to do something that previous games already did successfully.
- toyg 14y ago
  No. One thing is to offer a "social mode", even to push it hard in terms of marketing or menu placement or whatever, another to require a connection at all times, even in "sandboxed mode" where you're not going to interact with anyone else -- which is completely preposterous, and it's done only because of DRM. If the problem was "going social", you'd see more p2p and lan-gaming features, rather than "let's all connect to my servers, creating huge scalability problems which may or may not be solved at some point".
  - andylei 14y ago
    > to require a connection at all times, even in "sandboxed mode" where you're not going to interact with anyone else -- which is completely preposterous this is not preposterous at all. if all the simulation happens on the server side, its not necessarily trivial to have that run on the client. maybe the server requires unix. maybe the server requires an oracle database.
    - johnward 14y ago
      We have plenty of simulation games that run client side. My ipad is faster than the PCs that ran SimCity 3000. They made a poor decision to move this to the cloud as a hack proof drm attempt and they are facing the consequences now.
    - toyg 14y ago
      The simulation happens locally, it's only saved server-side at point-in-time; which is why people are losing hours of gameplay to failed saves.
- Apocryphon 14y ago
  But I don't think we're living in that world where MMOs/Zynga social games are this hot new thing that every single game has to move towards.
spartango 14y ago
We lack the internal knowledge to know whether an offline mode would have been a good experience for most customers. I have no idea whether Maxis+EA tested this, and how well it worked. That said, you can imagine a situation where doing these computations locally did compromise the experience for a certain spec of machines. Maxis has already explained that city size limits were imposed because the simulation didn't run sufficiently well on the low-mid spec machines above the allowed size. As the owner of a higher spec machine, I find it somewhat silly that this couldn't just be a preference item (as AA and resolution are), but I can understand the decision to cut down the computational demands to keep gameplay smooth. Games that have launched with framerate issues recently have met a huge amount of flak--see what's going on in the Planetside 2 community. You can argue that what's happening to PS2 is far worse: they released a poorly optimized game, and those issues prevented people from playing for months.
- MichaelGG 14y ago
  You're saying that the client PCs are so weak, yet EA can offload it into the cloud for cheap? How exactly does that work? My 3-year-old ultralight laptop has as much CPU as an EC2 M1 large. I find it hard to believe the game is so complicated a laptop will struggle, but EA can efficiently load it onto servers? That sounds pretty hard to believe. Even if the target player is using a crappy Netbook, you're talking about a dedicated compute server for every 4-20 players. That's insane.
  - ariwilson 14y ago
    SimCity system requirements: Intel players will need, minimally, a 2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo, while our AMD players will need at least a an Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core 4000+. Those sound pretty capable of a significant amount of simulation themselves...
    - johnward 14y ago
      Yep they ran Simcity 4 fine.
  - spartango 14y ago
aeturnum 14y ago
>People are upset about the lack of a single player offline mode, which absolutely is about preventing unlicensed copies. There is no technical reason for its absence. I see this sentiment expressed pretty often, but in this case it seems flawed. From what I understand, you can't build a city that does everything, instead you rely on the other cities in your 'region.' The new Simcity is no more single player than World of Warcraft. The previous games were single player, as they focused on a monolithic city. This game is designed from the ground up with the assumption that you will play with other people. There's no technical restrictions preventing Blizzard from offering single-person servers for WoW, it just doesn't follow from the game design. The same is true here.
- danso 14y ago
  I think you're really missing the parent commenter's point, which is: "Why isn't there a single player mode, given that previous SimCity releases have done just fine as single player games?" WoW relies on active human beings to make its world lively and addicting. I don't think that need is as prevalent in a sim game, where the game AI itself can...well...simulate the regional qualities that would affect a player's city well enough.
- johnward 14y ago
  In SC4 there was region play. You just played each city in the region locally. It work. Cities XL does simulation locally. Tropico does some but much less.
- pyrocat 14y ago
  Orrrr you could just program some simple AI for the other cities in your 'region'.
- rdw 14y ago
  It's possible to have a single-player experience, where one player controls all of the cities in a private 'region'. It's alluded to here: http://kotaku.com/5988848/tips-for-playing-simcity http://kotaku.com/5988848/tips-for-playing-simcity Ironically, if they hadn't included that feature, arguments such as yours would have a lot more weight, but as it is there is a purely-single-player experience, and you still needlessly connect to a server for it. (I don't own the game, just going off what I've read on the Internet)

estel 14y ago

Isn't: > We can argue about whether these things should be computed and stored in the cloud, but I think there is a plausible, if imperfect, argument for doing so Conceivably true? We could be in a world with no DRM, but there would still be a market trend moving games towards a more social, connected and integrated experience; and some developers will be looking at ways to fundamentally build their new games in a way that takes advantage of this. Why not SimCity? The Sims 3 already indicated where the Sims franchise might be heading with regards to improved connectivity with friends, I don't think it's an entirely unreasonable leap to get to where SimCity is now. Which isn't to say that DRM wouldn't have been a business consideration at an executive level; but there's definitely an argument that SimCity's design choices, even if flawed, can be justified without considering DRM.

alex_c 14y ago
Conceivable, but a real stretch. It would imply that they considered adding a single player mode, knowing that there would be demand for it, but decided it would be too difficult given their other design decisions to make it worth adding. Or as Diablo 3 players like to joke, "the technology just isn't there yet" to do something that previous games already did successfully.
toyg 14y ago
No. One thing is to offer a "social mode", even to push it hard in terms of marketing or menu placement or whatever, another to require a connection at all times, even in "sandboxed mode" where you're not going to interact with anyone else -- which is completely preposterous, and it's done only because of DRM. If the problem was "going social", you'd see more p2p and lan-gaming features, rather than "let's all connect to my servers, creating huge scalability problems which may or may not be solved at some point".
- andylei 14y ago
  > to require a connection at all times, even in "sandboxed mode" where you're not going to interact with anyone else -- which is completely preposterous this is not preposterous at all. if all the simulation happens on the server side, its not necessarily trivial to have that run on the client. maybe the server requires unix. maybe the server requires an oracle database.
  - johnward 14y ago
    We have plenty of simulation games that run client side. My ipad is faster than the PCs that ran SimCity 3000. They made a poor decision to move this to the cloud as a hack proof drm attempt and they are facing the consequences now.
  - toyg 14y ago
    The simulation happens locally, it's only saved server-side at point-in-time; which is why people are losing hours of gameplay to failed saves.
Apocryphon 14y ago
But I don't think we're living in that world where MMOs/Zynga social games are this hot new thing that every single game has to move towards.

spartango 14y ago

We lack the internal knowledge to know whether an offline mode would have been a good experience for most customers. I have no idea whether Maxis+EA tested this, and how well it worked. That said, you can imagine a situation where doing these computations locally did compromise the experience for a certain spec of machines. Maxis has already explained that city size limits were imposed because the simulation didn't run sufficiently well on the low-mid spec machines above the allowed size. As the owner of a higher spec machine, I find it somewhat silly that this couldn't just be a preference item (as AA and resolution are), but I can understand the decision to cut down the computational demands to keep gameplay smooth. Games that have launched with framerate issues recently have met a huge amount of flak--see what's going on in the Planetside 2 community. You can argue that what's happening to PS2 is far worse: they released a poorly optimized game, and those issues prevented people from playing for months.

MichaelGG 14y ago
You're saying that the client PCs are so weak, yet EA can offload it into the cloud for cheap? How exactly does that work? My 3-year-old ultralight laptop has as much CPU as an EC2 M1 large. I find it hard to believe the game is so complicated a laptop will struggle, but EA can efficiently load it onto servers? That sounds pretty hard to believe. Even if the target player is using a crappy Netbook, you're talking about a dedicated compute server for every 4-20 players. That's insane.
- ariwilson 14y ago
  SimCity system requirements: Intel players will need, minimally, a 2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo, while our AMD players will need at least a an Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core 4000+. Those sound pretty capable of a significant amount of simulation themselves...
  - johnward 14y ago
    Yep they ran Simcity 4 fine.
- spartango 14y ago

aeturnum 14y ago

>People are upset about the lack of a single player offline mode, which absolutely is about preventing unlicensed copies. There is no technical reason for its absence. I see this sentiment expressed pretty often, but in this case it seems flawed. From what I understand, you can't build a city that does everything, instead you rely on the other cities in your 'region.' The new Simcity is no more single player than World of Warcraft. The previous games were single player, as they focused on a monolithic city. This game is designed from the ground up with the assumption that you will play with other people. There's no technical restrictions preventing Blizzard from offering single-person servers for WoW, it just doesn't follow from the game design. The same is true here.

danso 14y ago
I think you're really missing the parent commenter's point, which is: "Why isn't there a single player mode, given that previous SimCity releases have done just fine as single player games?" WoW relies on active human beings to make its world lively and addicting. I don't think that need is as prevalent in a sim game, where the game AI itself can...well...simulate the regional qualities that would affect a player's city well enough.
johnward 14y ago
In SC4 there was region play. You just played each city in the region locally. It work. Cities XL does simulation locally. Tropico does some but much less.
pyrocat 14y ago
Orrrr you could just program some simple AI for the other cities in your 'region'.
rdw 14y ago
It's possible to have a single-player experience, where one player controls all of the cities in a private 'region'. It's alluded to here: http://kotaku.com/5988848/tips-for-playing-simcity http://kotaku.com/5988848/tips-for-playing-simcity Ironically, if they hadn't included that feature, arguments such as yours would have a lot more weight, but as it is there is a purely-single-player experience, and you still needlessly connect to a server for it. (I don't own the game, just going off what I've read on the Internet)