8 ms·

SimCity Offline Is Coming

71 points by simias 13y ago

macinjosh 13y ago
Sweet, I might actually start playing this game again!
carlmcqueen 13y ago
I'd be interested to see the data of how Simcity sales did averaging out past the launch date compared to other sim city games. Or, since it's all online, a view of active players past the first few weeks of play. I know I bought it because the articles about the game failed to mention the size issues or any of the faulty AI issues (like traffic). I was amazed the reviewers didn't find any of those faults because they happened pretty fast and ruined the game for me. Offline or not, Simcity was a huge step back for me and not worth all the hype it got.
- djkz 13y ago
  I believe that they used online mode as an excuse to limit reviewers to only be able to play for 8 hours, so many of the limits were not apparent. The game really only starts showing it's shallowness once you filled up one city space and started on your next one, only to come out with a homogeneous clone of the first city.
- belorn 13y ago
  They sold 1.1 million copies in its first two weeks, and around 2 million copies in total. Compared to Sim city 3k/4k, that is less than half the sale numbers in a growing industry. I would also guess that Sim city 2013 had a much higher production cost, server costs, administration cost and support costs. And most wonderful thing, they can't blame pirates.
  - uptown 13y ago
    Worse for them - though they'll continue to have some new sales, the initial spike is over, and the costs of maintaining their online infrastructure will continue to eat into any sales revenue for as long as they keep it active. Makes you wonder how big a margin there is between sales revenue and ongoing costs.
llamataboot 13y ago
So much for all the excuses about needing the cloud to run the simulation engine, etc
- debaserab2 13y ago
  Chances are those excuses were true considering it took them nearly 8 months to release an offline patch that pretty much every SimCity fan immediately wanted upon (and prior to) release of the game.
  - serf 13y ago
    doubt it; their solutions from earlier bugs included such gems as disabling the fastest play speed in order to improve stability. I wouldn't give EA the benefit of the doubt about an 8 month patch. They probably began work on it late last week. The company has shown time and time again that they don't give a fuck about you -- the offline patch is just the minimum amount of work they have to do in order to unplug the servers on a new game without total outrage. "Look, we pushed an offline patch before terminating the servers, WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT FROM A GAME LESS THAN A YEAR OLD!?"
  - valarauca1 13y ago
    Actually no. People were able to hack the game to run offline within 2 weeks of its release.
  - streetnigga 13y ago
    Seems like EA should be hiring the crackers who patched the game then considering they got the job done within a week or so.
  - SimHacker 13y ago
    No the excuses were not true. It was Origin's fault, and Maxis had to take the blame. The people working at Maxis opposed it, and it didn't actually need to be online to play, but the people at Origin insisted it only run online.
  - mmanfrin 13y ago
Vaskivo 13y ago
Well, the harm is already done, but it's good to see Offline mode coming. But, to me, the most interesting news is the mod support. If you want to at least double your game's lifetime, make it easy to modify.
- anonyfox 13y ago
  See Skyrim as an example for a successful modding culture. The community is just awesome.
  - freehunter 13y ago
    And the complete Skyrim game (all expansions/DLC) still sells for $60 on PC, two years after release. People still buy it at this price, and it's still a pretty good value.
sirkneeland 13y ago
File under: "breaking news from 1989" :)
- libria 13y ago
  It's cool if they're responding to the user base and meeting the demand. It's not cool if they're unveiling this like a feature sans apology for prior behavior. They're restoring original, sane functionality. The GM should be expecting relief/forgiveness, not excitement.
mkautzm 13y ago
The damage is done, and if they actively enforce their modding rules, specifically: "Mods may not modify any .com, .exe, .dll, .so or other executable files." Then what's the point? The game is still awful, and the means to fix that aren't available.
tinfoilman 13y ago
EA, desperately trying to force life in to a product they did not understand and now attempting to recover the large part of their fan base they alienated. Not going in to the rant, there were many around the time this PoS hit the market. All I can say is, as an avid sim city player, Sim city 4 had it. This new thing called Sim City, was more a city based sims level. I was just waiting for the "sim City delux edition where you could get +5 more houses, and some new cars" Honestly I used to love sim City, but after spending £50 on sim city, it really is (and i said this before sim city) the last EA game i buy. Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me
- timje1 13y ago
  fool me consistently for a decade or two... why aren't more people boycotting EA yet?
  - jamesaguilar 13y ago
    Because many of the games they publish are quite good? Just in games that are current, AC4: Black Flag and BF4.
    - luckyno13 13y ago
      AC is a Ubisoft product and BF4 has been so screwed up that investors are exhibiting enough concerns that the team for BF has moved from working on ANY dlc, to fixing the immediate issues that BF4 shipped with. Not to mention they trashed the most recent C&C because it was terrible.
      - BlackDeath3 13y ago
        I know that I pre-ordered BF4 and have yet to play more than a couple of hours since launch. How much have things improved since then? Has the CPU parking issue been fixed? It's silly that I have to run some third-party CPU utility to make the game playable.
        13y ago
bane 13y ago
I'm still playing and enjoying SC4k. There's tons of people who love SC3k, and even 2k. I pretty much exhausted all I care to do with this new SC inside of 2 weeks and uninstalled it. It's easily the worst city sim game I've ever played. And not just because of the issues with the AI and city size and all that. It just has no joy in it. This is what happens when the marketing department takes over a company. (I would have been perfectly happy with SC4k with curved roads, mixed-use zoning and a few fixes for highways and such).
- webjunkie 13y ago
  This is it. There is not much challenging to the new SimCity. It is just not the same experience as SC4. Even with all things fixed, offline mode etc. it makes fun for just a couple of hours.
  - fennecfoxen 13y ago
    I think even the unwanted abomination they called Societies is more challenging and rewarding than newSimCity.
- 3JPLW 13y ago
  It'd be so wonderful to have a SC4.5k. Or, hell, could you imagine what the modding community could do with the source? No chance in hell of that ever happening, but one can dream...
  - zanny 13y ago
    Existential quandary here, but I loathe how we are now hitting the 20 year mark on the modern PC gaming era. 1993 opened the floodgates with Doom, and we are already seeing the loss of many games from that era that just don't run on a modern computer but have never seen a source release to let anyone update the engines. And it only is poised to get worse over time, especially now that ARM is superseding x86 for a lot of computing. Is it reasonable to expect everyone to know how to run VMs of old operating systems (where you are already in questionable legal water if you download isos of, say, Windows 98, which is no longer available for money but still is copyrighted forever). And titles like "Baldurs Gate Enhanced Edition" I feel hurt the industry hugely by presenting the legal departments an excuse to deny source release, because later on they could touch the game up for a few weeks and sell it all over again. Same way companies like Square will re-release 20 year old games like Final Fantasy rather than do source releases on the original engine code. Except for most games they won't see a re-release, and they will just drift into the binary purgatory of unrunnable titles.
uptown 13y ago
I was a lock to give them my money - and that's extremely rare for me to be committed to buy a game. But their delayed Mac version, the botched launch of their PC version, and the outright lies from their executives changed all of that. I've moved on.
- SimHacker 13y ago
  I think Origin deserves the blame for making bad decisions and forcing them on Maxis, and I feel sorry that it was Maxis's job to repeat the lies they were told to say, because they didn't agree with the bad decisions (i.e. offline play, and needing more servers for launch), but it was their job to take the credibility hit, while Origin got to have their way.
sarreph 13y ago
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Oh wait... It was just the worst of times.
ry0ohki 13y ago
The servers/DRM ended up being one of the least of this game's problems. Tiny plot size and oversimplification of the engine made this beautiful game basically no fun.
dalacv 13y ago
I'd be curious to know how many of the folks making such negative comments actually purchased and have played the game recently.
- jaredmcateer 13y ago
  Didn't purchase and never will, but my friend did and he's played it recently, lost his city to the ether after just 10 hours of play before he rage quit again.
- johnward 13y ago
  Purchased played. Uninstalled several time and reinstall after "updates". The game is just not up to SC4 standards. Once it was stable I could only be entertained for a little more than an hour and then there was nothing more to do.
Danieru 13y ago
It's amazing how close this iteration has followed in the path of the original Cities XL. Take for example the Sim City world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3oFKhftK88 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3oFKhftK88 If you didn't play the Cities XL beta nor were around for the first bit of Cities XL there was something called the "Planet Offer". The world map Maxis shows 12 seconds into the trailer looks just like the Planet Offer's globe. Maxis even shows a commodities market at 22 seconds which looks like the Planet Offer's trading. Just like the Planet Offer things did not work out as planned. Core components of the city builder were left undone such as the terrain manipulation or map creation. In part I suspect both were business decisions made to allow a DLC market. From the beginning EA promised DLC. In the case of Cities XL the DLC was less obvious. The way things worked out the developers of Cities XL went bankrupt and the game was bought out by its current publisher. Every Cities XL game since has just been the original edition plus some extra maps and buildings. The real shame is that both Cities XL and Sim City 2013 were beautiful and did not lack anything art wise. Instead they just failed at game play. Part of said problem was crippling the game to open DLC avenues. The other part was horrible balancing. In the case of Cities XL there was no balancing. Every city service cost the exact same with no room to adjust service level like in Sim City 4. Cities XL also made the mistake of tying medium and large density zones plus most services to your city's population. In effect every new city felt the same since you had to bootstrap everything every-time. Of course finances were also dead easy to balance. During Cities XL beta my biggest problem was opening enough inter-city transport capacity to export my over supply of office services. For a while I could just open international airports one after the other but I soon ran out of space. My city got so big I triggered a rare bug where the game replaced my entire city with a hilly field. Since said hilly field had no export routes I couldn't rebuild. This was a shame since the glitch managed to delete everything which was costing me money but leave all the export revenue. Thus despite being a hilly field I must have amassed more money than any other city during beta. Sorry back on topic: just like Cities XL's planet offer Maxis is now stepping back from the online. In theory online would be fantastic but first you need to make a fun city builder. Maybe in the future we'll get one.
- sentenza 13y ago
  What surprises me is that they didn't realize that SimCity doesn't have the right game mechanics for classic DLC. Instead of going the DLC route, they should have gone the user-gernerated content route. Allowing users to not only share and rank their cities but also to create additional content (3D models, conversions) and to interact with the game mechanics using an in-game scripting language. By that last part I mean things like programming the logic of the in-game traffic lights, train schedules, and so on. Pure, raw, script-based micro-management. Had they managed to implement a game incorporating content-sharing, they might have seen the sales of their core game skyrocket, fueled by the positive marketing feedback of a content-generating community.
wil421 13y ago
Too bad I returned my purchase to Amazon after I was unable to play during the first week. Corporate Execs from companies like EA and even Microsoft/Xbone are ruining gaming.
- jaredmcateer 13y ago
  Don't feel bad about returning your game, the game is still horribly broken in many ways that an offline mode won't fix.
  - wil421 13y ago
    Mostly I feel bad for Amazon more than Maxis/EA. They probably ate the cost of the game just to satisfy me and a bunch of other people.
Aardwolf 13y ago
Is Coming? Isn't it there for a long time already? SimCity 2000 etc...
lmkg 13y ago
My understanding is that SCO was designed and balanced around player-player interaction between cities, to the point that a single free-standing city couldn't really be "complete." Cities functioned better when they were specialized and interacting with neighbors, than when they tried to be self-sufficient. I didn't play the thing myself, but that's how the devs seemed to portray things. Given that (and other ways in which the online-ness was pervasive in game design), this seems like the epitome of a band-aid fix on a bullet wound. Just inserting an offline mode won't make the game better, because the game design was based around online play from a very fundamental level, and it's not a feature that can be removed simply. I.e., 'you can take SCO offline, but you can't take the online out of SCO.'
- mratzloff 13y ago
  Given that you can play solo regions, I assume you could simply create several specialized cities (I haven't played the game).
  - wmf 13y ago
    You can, although when I do this I end up switching between cities constantly to keep resources flowing and each switch takes about a minute so it's kind of un-fun.
- bane 13y ago
  That's partially true. But the online plays was screwed from the start since you simply couldn't delete cities. So that city you built when you were screwing around with the build tools and made a giant happy face out of the roads and didn't really have any intention of making it self-sustaining or part of a larger region play? It's there forever. SC4k also had region play, cities weren't really as effective until they were part of a region. The mechanic should have been to let you and some friends start a region, each pick a zone or two and start cooperatively developing them over time. Enhance things like cross-city usage fees (so I can recoup cost for putting up a huge airport in my city that my friends use) and it would have completely satisfied the multi-player requirement. What you ended up with was a bunch of half-asses cities that nobody wanted to play with in regions that nobody wanted to be multi-players in, that the only benefit was regional construction projects that never really worked right and had cryptic requirements in order to construct. Coupled with impossibly small city sizes and broken AI and the game is fundamentally broken in ways that no amount of patching or fixing is ever going to solve. Time to deep six this failed experiment and move on to Sim City 2.
tunap 13y ago
RE: offline play & non-mod modding: Too little, too late.
yngccc 13y ago
Is it just me but simcity was the best game I played in 2013, maybe I am just new to the genre, but it was like playing video game for the first time.
- fennecfoxen 13y ago
  It's just you. SimCity 4 / Rush Hour is widely regarded as better. Give it a try: http://store.steampowered.com/app/24780/ http://store.steampowered.com/app/24780/ Allow me to lift a review: "While you cannot build crazy windy roads, SimCity 4 is perfect for building a city with grid street plan and you'll get everything you didn't get in SimCity 2013: huge maps, multiple entrances, zoning lots, detailed statistics/graphs/budgets, multiple transportation options from subway, elevated train, freeway, toll gates... the list goes on." Heck, I think even SimCity 3000 will give you more raw City to play with.
mratzloff 13y ago
Why exactly are people willing to blame EA but not Maxis?
- ForHackernews 13y ago
  I don't think Maxis even exists as separate entity anymore. Aren't they just a small division within EA now? EA kept the brand name because Maxis used to be good, but it doesn't mean anything today.
  - SimHacker 13y ago
    Maxis has a separate studio in Emeryville (by Berkeley), where Spore and SimCity were developed. Maxis isn't exactly small, since The Sims franchise has been responsible for a large share of their profits: A few years ago EA reorganized into three parts, and The Sims division was one of them, but I don't know how they're organized now.
- johnward 13y ago
  I think it has more to do with the fact that Maxxis made a good Sim City in the past and now it sucks.
- forgottenpass 13y ago
  Maxis is no longer comprised of the people or direction that made the company once known as "Maxis", it is an EA subsidiary and run as such. People assume (with good reason) that the design choices that made Sim City a poor game were made with the publisher's interest placed above the player's.
  - SimHacker 13y ago
    The lead designers and artists who developed the latest version of SimCity were old time Maxis people, but they've left since it launched. They weren't very happy with what Origin forced them to do with their game.
SimHacker 13y ago
Serious question: Would anyone be interested in a version of SimCity Classic that ran in the browser? (Playable offline, of course!) In what ways do you think it could be brought up to date with modern technology, without spoiling the fun of the original game? What do you like about the original SimCity Classic? And what do you think should be changed or added? What I'd really appreciate is advice on how to fund the development. Kickstarter is out because I'm not in the United States, but I'm considering Indiegogo, but open to alternatives, especially ones focused on open source and educational software.
- DanBC 13y ago
  I used to play simcity classic on a hercules monitor. I would like to play it in the browser. Things I'd like to see: Nice graphics. Doesn't have to be high res or anything, just nice. Perhaps allow tilesets to be used so the community could easily create and share tiles. Easy laying of road and track. I remember the odd rubber banding of classic being a bit frustrating. Some nice easy to use terrain editor. Some social features? Allow more than one person to work on a terrain map at a time? (I understand this raises complexity significantly). Or Allow people to passively view the terrain and sent chat suggestions? Have a free play version, and a well tested challenges version with a wide variety of challenges. Eg "last X years", "grow to Y size", "survive these disasters", "earn Z money" etc. Have a way for me to pay you. I much prefer a single payment for full access rather than a freemium model. (Wait x hours to collect enough coins to build this road, or unlock coins for $x now!!" Would not be pleasant. Hope these are some use!
  - SimHacker 13y ago
    Definitely it needs user editable tile sets, for 2D mode. And nice info visualizations of the simulator state and data layers. And I think it would be great to create buildings with digital bricks (Legos), and render them in 3D -- that would make it fun and easy to create your own buildings with existing tools. And integrating browser based building editing tools into the game would be even better! See my other post with details and links: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7052399 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7052399
  - 13y ago
lingben 13y ago
now? after people have been playing it offline by hacking it since the second week it was release? incredible!
ihsw 13y ago
Will we get an apology for being so obstinate and narrow-minded, too? How about a promise to never again shove always-on down the throats of their customers, and admit that it's a fruitless effort to exert absolute control over the ways users play their games? How about Blizzard and Diablo 3, where you feel lag in a game that's predominantly single player?
jackmaney 13y ago
Way too little, way too late.
mcv 13y ago
Offline? What a brilliant innovation! I can't believe nobody thought of that before.

71 points by simias 13y ago

Sweet, I might actually start playing this game again!

I'd be interested to see the data of how Simcity sales did averaging out past the launch date compared to other sim city games. Or, since it's all online, a view of active players past the first few weeks of play. I know I bought it because the articles about the game failed to mention the size issues or any of the faulty AI issues (like traffic). I was amazed the reviewers didn't find any of those faults because they happened pretty fast and ruined the game for me. Offline or not, Simcity was a huge step back for me and not worth all the hype it got.

djkz 13y ago
I believe that they used online mode as an excuse to limit reviewers to only be able to play for 8 hours, so many of the limits were not apparent. The game really only starts showing it's shallowness once you filled up one city space and started on your next one, only to come out with a homogeneous clone of the first city.
belorn 13y ago
They sold 1.1 million copies in its first two weeks, and around 2 million copies in total. Compared to Sim city 3k/4k, that is less than half the sale numbers in a growing industry. I would also guess that Sim city 2013 had a much higher production cost, server costs, administration cost and support costs. And most wonderful thing, they can't blame pirates.
- uptown 13y ago
  Worse for them - though they'll continue to have some new sales, the initial spike is over, and the costs of maintaining their online infrastructure will continue to eat into any sales revenue for as long as they keep it active. Makes you wonder how big a margin there is between sales revenue and ongoing costs.

llamataboot 13y ago

So much for all the excuses about needing the cloud to run the simulation engine, etc

debaserab2 13y ago
Chances are those excuses were true considering it took them nearly 8 months to release an offline patch that pretty much every SimCity fan immediately wanted upon (and prior to) release of the game.
- serf 13y ago
  doubt it; their solutions from earlier bugs included such gems as disabling the fastest play speed in order to improve stability. I wouldn't give EA the benefit of the doubt about an 8 month patch. They probably began work on it late last week. The company has shown time and time again that they don't give a fuck about you -- the offline patch is just the minimum amount of work they have to do in order to unplug the servers on a new game without total outrage. "Look, we pushed an offline patch before terminating the servers, WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT FROM A GAME LESS THAN A YEAR OLD!?"
- valarauca1 13y ago
  Actually no. People were able to hack the game to run offline within 2 weeks of its release.
- streetnigga 13y ago
  Seems like EA should be hiring the crackers who patched the game then considering they got the job done within a week or so.
- SimHacker 13y ago
  No the excuses were not true. It was Origin's fault, and Maxis had to take the blame. The people working at Maxis opposed it, and it didn't actually need to be online to play, but the people at Origin insisted it only run online.
- mmanfrin 13y ago

Vaskivo 13y ago

Well, the harm is already done, but it's good to see Offline mode coming. But, to me, the most interesting news is the mod support. If you want to at least double your game's lifetime, make it easy to modify.

anonyfox 13y ago
See Skyrim as an example for a successful modding culture. The community is just awesome.
- freehunter 13y ago
  And the complete Skyrim game (all expansions/DLC) still sells for $60 on PC, two years after release. People still buy it at this price, and it's still a pretty good value.

sirkneeland 13y ago

File under: "breaking news from 1989" :)

libria 13y ago
It's cool if they're responding to the user base and meeting the demand. It's not cool if they're unveiling this like a feature sans apology for prior behavior. They're restoring original, sane functionality. The GM should be expecting relief/forgiveness, not excitement.

mkautzm 13y ago

The damage is done, and if they actively enforce their modding rules, specifically: "Mods may not modify any .com, .exe, .dll, .so or other executable files." Then what's the point? The game is still awful, and the means to fix that aren't available.

tinfoilman 13y ago

EA, desperately trying to force life in to a product they did not understand and now attempting to recover the large part of their fan base they alienated. Not going in to the rant, there were many around the time this PoS hit the market. All I can say is, as an avid sim city player, Sim city 4 had it. This new thing called Sim City, was more a city based sims level. I was just waiting for the "sim City delux edition where you could get +5 more houses, and some new cars" Honestly I used to love sim City, but after spending £50 on sim city, it really is (and i said this before sim city) the last EA game i buy. Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me

timje1 13y ago
fool me consistently for a decade or two... why aren't more people boycotting EA yet?
- jamesaguilar 13y ago
  Because many of the games they publish are quite good? Just in games that are current, AC4: Black Flag and BF4.
  - luckyno13 13y ago
    AC is a Ubisoft product and BF4 has been so screwed up that investors are exhibiting enough concerns that the team for BF has moved from working on ANY dlc, to fixing the immediate issues that BF4 shipped with. Not to mention they trashed the most recent C&C because it was terrible.
    - BlackDeath3 13y ago
      I know that I pre-ordered BF4 and have yet to play more than a couple of hours since launch. How much have things improved since then? Has the CPU parking issue been fixed? It's silly that I have to run some third-party CPU utility to make the game playable.
      - 13y ago

bane 13y ago

I'm still playing and enjoying SC4k. There's tons of people who love SC3k, and even 2k. I pretty much exhausted all I care to do with this new SC inside of 2 weeks and uninstalled it. It's easily the worst city sim game I've ever played. And not just because of the issues with the AI and city size and all that. It just has no joy in it. This is what happens when the marketing department takes over a company. (I would have been perfectly happy with SC4k with curved roads, mixed-use zoning and a few fixes for highways and such).

webjunkie 13y ago
This is it. There is not much challenging to the new SimCity. It is just not the same experience as SC4. Even with all things fixed, offline mode etc. it makes fun for just a couple of hours.
- fennecfoxen 13y ago
  I think even the unwanted abomination they called Societies is more challenging and rewarding than newSimCity.
3JPLW 13y ago
It'd be so wonderful to have a SC4.5k. Or, hell, could you imagine what the modding community could do with the source? No chance in hell of that ever happening, but one can dream...
- zanny 13y ago
  Existential quandary here, but I loathe how we are now hitting the 20 year mark on the modern PC gaming era. 1993 opened the floodgates with Doom, and we are already seeing the loss of many games from that era that just don't run on a modern computer but have never seen a source release to let anyone update the engines. And it only is poised to get worse over time, especially now that ARM is superseding x86 for a lot of computing. Is it reasonable to expect everyone to know how to run VMs of old operating systems (where you are already in questionable legal water if you download isos of, say, Windows 98, which is no longer available for money but still is copyrighted forever). And titles like "Baldurs Gate Enhanced Edition" I feel hurt the industry hugely by presenting the legal departments an excuse to deny source release, because later on they could touch the game up for a few weeks and sell it all over again. Same way companies like Square will re-release 20 year old games like Final Fantasy rather than do source releases on the original engine code. Except for most games they won't see a re-release, and they will just drift into the binary purgatory of unrunnable titles.

uptown 13y ago

I was a lock to give them my money - and that's extremely rare for me to be committed to buy a game. But their delayed Mac version, the botched launch of their PC version, and the outright lies from their executives changed all of that. I've moved on.

SimHacker 13y ago
I think Origin deserves the blame for making bad decisions and forcing them on Maxis, and I feel sorry that it was Maxis's job to repeat the lies they were told to say, because they didn't agree with the bad decisions (i.e. offline play, and needing more servers for launch), but it was their job to take the credibility hit, while Origin got to have their way.

sarreph 13y ago

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Oh wait... It was just the worst of times.

ry0ohki 13y ago

The servers/DRM ended up being one of the least of this game's problems. Tiny plot size and oversimplification of the engine made this beautiful game basically no fun.

dalacv 13y ago

I'd be curious to know how many of the folks making such negative comments actually purchased and have played the game recently.

jaredmcateer 13y ago
Didn't purchase and never will, but my friend did and he's played it recently, lost his city to the ether after just 10 hours of play before he rage quit again.
johnward 13y ago
Purchased played. Uninstalled several time and reinstall after "updates". The game is just not up to SC4 standards. Once it was stable I could only be entertained for a little more than an hour and then there was nothing more to do.

Danieru 13y ago

It's amazing how close this iteration has followed in the path of the original Cities XL. Take for example the Sim City world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3oFKhftK88 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3oFKhftK88 If you didn't play the Cities XL beta nor were around for the first bit of Cities XL there was something called the "Planet Offer". The world map Maxis shows 12 seconds into the trailer looks just like the Planet Offer's globe. Maxis even shows a commodities market at 22 seconds which looks like the Planet Offer's trading. Just like the Planet Offer things did not work out as planned. Core components of the city builder were left undone such as the terrain manipulation or map creation. In part I suspect both were business decisions made to allow a DLC market. From the beginning EA promised DLC. In the case of Cities XL the DLC was less obvious. The way things worked out the developers of Cities XL went bankrupt and the game was bought out by its current publisher. Every Cities XL game since has just been the original edition plus some extra maps and buildings. The real shame is that both Cities XL and Sim City 2013 were beautiful and did not lack anything art wise. Instead they just failed at game play. Part of said problem was crippling the game to open DLC avenues. The other part was horrible balancing. In the case of Cities XL there was no balancing. Every city service cost the exact same with no room to adjust service level like in Sim City 4. Cities XL also made the mistake of tying medium and large density zones plus most services to your city's population. In effect every new city felt the same since you had to bootstrap everything every-time. Of course finances were also dead easy to balance. During Cities XL beta my biggest problem was opening enough inter-city transport capacity to export my over supply of office services. For a while I could just open international airports one after the other but I soon ran out of space. My city got so big I triggered a rare bug where the game replaced my entire city with a hilly field. Since said hilly field had no export routes I couldn't rebuild. This was a shame since the glitch managed to delete everything which was costing me money but leave all the export revenue. Thus despite being a hilly field I must have amassed more money than any other city during beta. Sorry back on topic: just like Cities XL's planet offer Maxis is now stepping back from the online. In theory online would be fantastic but first you need to make a fun city builder. Maybe in the future we'll get one.

sentenza 13y ago
What surprises me is that they didn't realize that SimCity doesn't have the right game mechanics for classic DLC. Instead of going the DLC route, they should have gone the user-gernerated content route. Allowing users to not only share and rank their cities but also to create additional content (3D models, conversions) and to interact with the game mechanics using an in-game scripting language. By that last part I mean things like programming the logic of the in-game traffic lights, train schedules, and so on. Pure, raw, script-based micro-management. Had they managed to implement a game incorporating content-sharing, they might have seen the sales of their core game skyrocket, fueled by the positive marketing feedback of a content-generating community.

wil421 13y ago

Too bad I returned my purchase to Amazon after I was unable to play during the first week. Corporate Execs from companies like EA and even Microsoft/Xbone are ruining gaming.

jaredmcateer 13y ago
Don't feel bad about returning your game, the game is still horribly broken in many ways that an offline mode won't fix.
- wil421 13y ago
  Mostly I feel bad for Amazon more than Maxis/EA. They probably ate the cost of the game just to satisfy me and a bunch of other people.

Aardwolf 13y ago

Is Coming? Isn't it there for a long time already? SimCity 2000 etc...

lmkg 13y ago

My understanding is that SCO was designed and balanced around player-player interaction between cities, to the point that a single free-standing city couldn't really be "complete." Cities functioned better when they were specialized and interacting with neighbors, than when they tried to be self-sufficient. I didn't play the thing myself, but that's how the devs seemed to portray things. Given that (and other ways in which the online-ness was pervasive in game design), this seems like the epitome of a band-aid fix on a bullet wound. Just inserting an offline mode won't make the game better, because the game design was based around online play from a very fundamental level, and it's not a feature that can be removed simply. I.e., 'you can take SCO offline, but you can't take the online out of SCO.'

mratzloff 13y ago
Given that you can play solo regions, I assume you could simply create several specialized cities (I haven't played the game).
- wmf 13y ago
  You can, although when I do this I end up switching between cities constantly to keep resources flowing and each switch takes about a minute so it's kind of un-fun.
bane 13y ago
That's partially true. But the online plays was screwed from the start since you simply couldn't delete cities. So that city you built when you were screwing around with the build tools and made a giant happy face out of the roads and didn't really have any intention of making it self-sustaining or part of a larger region play? It's there forever. SC4k also had region play, cities weren't really as effective until they were part of a region. The mechanic should have been to let you and some friends start a region, each pick a zone or two and start cooperatively developing them over time. Enhance things like cross-city usage fees (so I can recoup cost for putting up a huge airport in my city that my friends use) and it would have completely satisfied the multi-player requirement. What you ended up with was a bunch of half-asses cities that nobody wanted to play with in regions that nobody wanted to be multi-players in, that the only benefit was regional construction projects that never really worked right and had cryptic requirements in order to construct. Coupled with impossibly small city sizes and broken AI and the game is fundamentally broken in ways that no amount of patching or fixing is ever going to solve. Time to deep six this failed experiment and move on to Sim City 2.

tunap 13y ago

RE: offline play & non-mod modding: Too little, too late.

yngccc 13y ago

Is it just me but simcity was the best game I played in 2013, maybe I am just new to the genre, but it was like playing video game for the first time.

fennecfoxen 13y ago
It's just you. SimCity 4 / Rush Hour is widely regarded as better. Give it a try: http://store.steampowered.com/app/24780/ http://store.steampowered.com/app/24780/ Allow me to lift a review: "While you cannot build crazy windy roads, SimCity 4 is perfect for building a city with grid street plan and you'll get everything you didn't get in SimCity 2013: huge maps, multiple entrances, zoning lots, detailed statistics/graphs/budgets, multiple transportation options from subway, elevated train, freeway, toll gates... the list goes on." Heck, I think even SimCity 3000 will give you more raw City to play with.

mratzloff 13y ago

Why exactly are people willing to blame EA but not Maxis?

ForHackernews 13y ago
I don't think Maxis even exists as separate entity anymore. Aren't they just a small division within EA now? EA kept the brand name because Maxis used to be good, but it doesn't mean anything today.
- SimHacker 13y ago
  Maxis has a separate studio in Emeryville (by Berkeley), where Spore and SimCity were developed. Maxis isn't exactly small, since The Sims franchise has been responsible for a large share of their profits: A few years ago EA reorganized into three parts, and The Sims division was one of them, but I don't know how they're organized now.
johnward 13y ago
I think it has more to do with the fact that Maxxis made a good Sim City in the past and now it sucks.
forgottenpass 13y ago
Maxis is no longer comprised of the people or direction that made the company once known as "Maxis", it is an EA subsidiary and run as such. People assume (with good reason) that the design choices that made Sim City a poor game were made with the publisher's interest placed above the player's.
- SimHacker 13y ago
  The lead designers and artists who developed the latest version of SimCity were old time Maxis people, but they've left since it launched. They weren't very happy with what Origin forced them to do with their game.

SimHacker 13y ago

Serious question: Would anyone be interested in a version of SimCity Classic that ran in the browser? (Playable offline, of course!) In what ways do you think it could be brought up to date with modern technology, without spoiling the fun of the original game? What do you like about the original SimCity Classic? And what do you think should be changed or added? What I'd really appreciate is advice on how to fund the development. Kickstarter is out because I'm not in the United States, but I'm considering Indiegogo, but open to alternatives, especially ones focused on open source and educational software.

DanBC 13y ago
I used to play simcity classic on a hercules monitor. I would like to play it in the browser. Things I'd like to see: Nice graphics. Doesn't have to be high res or anything, just nice. Perhaps allow tilesets to be used so the community could easily create and share tiles. Easy laying of road and track. I remember the odd rubber banding of classic being a bit frustrating. Some nice easy to use terrain editor. Some social features? Allow more than one person to work on a terrain map at a time? (I understand this raises complexity significantly). Or Allow people to passively view the terrain and sent chat suggestions? Have a free play version, and a well tested challenges version with a wide variety of challenges. Eg "last X years", "grow to Y size", "survive these disasters", "earn Z money" etc. Have a way for me to pay you. I much prefer a single payment for full access rather than a freemium model. (Wait x hours to collect enough coins to build this road, or unlock coins for $x now!!" Would not be pleasant. Hope these are some use!
- SimHacker 13y ago
  Definitely it needs user editable tile sets, for 2D mode. And nice info visualizations of the simulator state and data layers. And I think it would be great to create buildings with digital bricks (Legos), and render them in 3D -- that would make it fun and easy to create your own buildings with existing tools. And integrating browser based building editing tools into the game would be even better! See my other post with details and links: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7052399 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7052399
- 13y ago

lingben 13y ago

now? after people have been playing it offline by hacking it since the second week it was release? incredible!

ihsw 13y ago

Will we get an apology for being so obstinate and narrow-minded, too? How about a promise to never again shove always-on down the throats of their customers, and admit that it's a fruitless effort to exert absolute control over the ways users play their games? How about Blizzard and Diablo 3, where you feel lag in a game that's predominantly single player?

jackmaney 13y ago

Way too little, way too late.

mcv 13y ago

Offline? What a brilliant innovation! I can't believe nobody thought of that before.