SimCity's Launch Isn't Going So Well

I got in for a couple hours last night at 1 am, but at that point I was too tired to function. I hope they get it fixed soon because it seemed cool from the little time I had to play it. But now I really wish I would have waited on buying it.

It shows I have 14 hours played of this game [shows it on the origin client].

I think half of that was trying to get into my cities / make cities. The other half was making cities that I currently no longer have and have been deleted/pulled back to start again and again after hours of building them up.

I was willing to accept the problems of the incredibly lame city size [yuck] and would still have enjoyed this game, but this just has ruined any chance of that. Sad part is I really still want to play as I do find it fun what little I have played, but this is destroying my patience.

When players plead for pirates to make their legitimately bought copies of a game playable, its a bad day for Always Online DRM.

I mean if your game can't handle the expected quantity of players trying to connect, or you can't work out how many players will buy it at launch then maybe you shouldn't be making always-online games?

My origin client shows 12 hours played. I have yet to even successfully launch the tutorial.

My brother in another room in my house has played two cities for like 12 hours since it came out.

I've tried to load the game 50 times and I once got into the tutorial. It lost connection at a point and it kicked me out when I tried to visit the neighboring town in the tutorial, sending me straight to the main menu.

At least I have patience, I ain't even angry. I just find it rather comical how badly botched this all was.

I know some people are gonna get CANNED.

As soon as I heard the words "Always On DRM" and "Origin Required" my enthusiasm for this game went from 1000% to 0% instantly.

I absolutely sympathize with PC developers and the ongoing struggle with piracy but I will not tolerate this kind of shenanigans when I buy a product. Especially one I cannot return to the point of sale for a refund if it does not work as advertised (or in this game's case, at all).

Wasn't Cliffy B just defending EA a little while ago, asking why EA got such hate?

They really do it to themselves. Have they had a good game launch since Dragon Age 2?

Juggling too many balls for too long I guess you lose some.

And yet, I bet EA will once again take the number one spot.

no thank you EA Maxis ... my mum which is 67 loves these type of games heck i like em as well so do other family members but with a company requiring always on internet which in country Australia is pretty hard to do at times no offline play and other problems like them being able to turn off features in your game.

We have come to the decision that its not worth the hassle we will stick to simcity 4 and wait until a pirated version comes out that allows offline play.

Im sorry EA you always online DRM has basically driven us to pirate. Maybe you should think of that a bit more not everyone has always online

Good news everyone! I managed to get into the tutorial again.

Bad news, it kicked me out partway through when it was trying to connect to the neighboring city.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank Giantbomb for covering the Simcity trainwreck.

I probably would have bought this game and be incredibly bummed about it if not for them.

Many Apologies for the length of this.

A nightmare to say the least would be an understatement at this point in whats going on with this game and it was hardly like EA/Maxis didn't have fair warning this was going to happen, all the way back in august of least year users on their official forum started talking about the woes of launch day because of this stupid and quite frankly, rediculous notion of having DRM in a largely singleplayer game. The sandbox should have been the offline mode, period.

My personal expriences have been of what has been reported all over the world by now, server disconnects, lost "saved" cities, multi city interaction not saving, AI being completely the worst ever at times, where garbage trucks would rather pick up your neibours trash up instead of picking your own up first? errr whaaaaa??

It was obvious this was going to happen on launch day, I think almost everyone generally who knew about the game before hand and perhaps past experiences with infamous Diablo III launch, that this was going to happen, I think what's taken everyone by supprise is the fact that this launch is far more worse then anyone could have even anticipated. Pre-Orders have given both Maxis & EA plenty of information on just about how many ppl were actually going to be playing this game right off the bat day one, and you damn well know this is going to be mentioned at this years E3. There will be states and numbers, as well s the odd joke about how not to launch a game and how there will never be another sim city like launch on origin, and its going to just damn right piss me off if they make a joke about it, because this is a serious buisness practice flaw, that almost every game developer/publisher is pushing towards because they are so affraid their games are going to get pirated.

DRM, in itself, promotes piracey, and there will be some of you who disagree and thats perfectly fine, but it does, UBISOFT learnt this the hard way, and after 8 or so years of having this, no longer support or have this in their games anymore. When you have a game that requires a constant connection to a server, there are a 100 things that can go wrong and come into play, we're only seeing a small fraction of the potential issues sim city faces right now. Quite frankly, if you are going to create, or build an online game, and simply cannot supply or build the server infrastructure to support that online game, DONT FUCKING MAKE ONE... its literately that simple.

When you get to a point where you have to stop fundamental parts of the game, in order to simply just create a server stability, then you as a developer, as a publisher, have some serious, serious issues going on at your companies... and cannot be shocked, dismayed, or even complain, about people wanting their money back.

Yes, things will obviously get a lot better, things will work properly once the server side stuff has eventually been fixed, but who knows how long this is going to take? this could be weeks before the game is -as should be- when it was launched.

With mutli cities not working, server access hit or miss, Unresponsive saves, halving the speed of the game plays at, and basicilly limiting everyone to only building 1 city per region right now, you can safely say, the game is just simply, not ready and should never have been launched.

never got the hate for Origin (besides slight inconvenience at having another steam-like client open, big deal), but this stuff is pretty ridiculous and i'll eat my dismissing words from earlier. even if it does get fixed soon seems the damage has already been done.

Well, so long as it can't be pirated easily maybe this is all worth it

I wonder if there's someone over at EA who is still saying, "Well, we're still selling more copies than if we had chosen a less strict DRM and had lost sales to piracy!" I wish I knew the numbers as far as sales made during this issue vs. projected sales made if piracy was possible. We've got to be nearing the point of no return where just sending the server-side data to each customer starts to make more sense.

Anyone know if that's even possible? If EA decided this was a mistake, can they even make the game offline playable at this point?

@ben_h said:

I bought this on sale for $3. No DRM, takes up 50 MB, bigger cities, has Cheetah Speed, has a Mac version.

Don't forget it also includes a tileset editor! It's not limiting you to just put on another smokestack on that power plant - you can repaint the entire building!

You guys realize that Diablo 3 had the exact same problem for about 2 weeks right?

Careful now, you are trying to reason with the internet.

No one's even thinking about the poor citizens of SimCity.

@insanejedi: I played a lot of Diablo 3 in the first three days it was out, and from the looks of it people haven't been able to play Sim City at all. I might have just been extremely lucky, however.

Your point?

Polygon adjusted their review score twice. Once from 9.5 to 8, and latest all the way down to a 4.

@vackillers: This article attempts to disprove the notion that DRM causes piracy. It acknowledges that it's logically plausible, but also asks (and tries to answer) how we got to that point in the first place.

http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/8374852.page

What I got out of that article is that the region design is pretty deeply ingrained in both the client and server side infrastructure. I'd hazard to guess they'd have to recode a pretty large chunk of the game to turn that boat around at this point.

you would've thought that they had some contingency planned for this after the hellstorm that followed diablo 3's launch.

My fiance tried to play this and she's just been bogged down with server issues and Origin stupidness constantly... So tempted to just go and buy SimCity 4 on Steam and just play that instead; it's a quarter of the price, and it actually WORKS.

Hah, just read some of the comments on Kotaku (yeah, I know, shame on me)

This whole thing is just insane. There are actually quite a few people still defending this shit. At this point, I really have to question their sanity. Is this how we let the industry get this far down the drain? By accepting and even defending shitty products that straight up don´t work?

This is like going to see a film and have the power go out- and they tell you to come back sometime next week to see it. This is unacceptable. People have a right to be angry at this. If they don´t offer refunds, I hope somebody takes them to court.

How exactly is this an excuse for EAs apparent ignorance? They could have and they should have learned from that experience. It's the exact opposite of an excuse, it goes to show that they simply don't fucking care. Saving money on server infrastructure, clearly worth it …

Yes, and the internet was losing it's collective mind over it back then as well. So nothing has changed really.

what was it about the game itself that is not ready to launch? p.s., servers aren't part of the game itself.

hahahaha. what a joke.

For a game that seems to be having so many server problems, I think I've watched almost 17 hours of people streaming Sim City since its launch. I know things are going poorly for many and it's really not what it should be, but considering the amount of outrage over it somehow not being playable at all, I have been very pleasantly surprised to see it up as much as it is.

Though, to be honest, this server insanity seems to be overshadowing the fact that even when it's playable, it's not a great Sim City game. To me, it's a nice game, but it's so radically different from what I've enjoyed about Sim City in the past that I have a hard time even thinking of it as a Sim City. It seems more like "Small Town Government: The Game". Which is fine, but it's not what I was expecting.

You obviously can't have one without the other, so I say they are. Your line of reasoning is outdated, I am afraid.

I was excited for this game, finally, one of my favorite PC series of all time gets updated. Then I saw the small restricted city size, no offline mode, no terraforming and them charging $20 extra for building style variety, and I was in disbelief. The entire enjoyment of the series to me is carving out the land in interesting ways and then building 1 massive city (not a bunch of sim towns..). Like how could they screw that up?

The possibility that bigger cities and other important features might be added later as DLC you have to pay for made me even more disturbed, and I wouldn't be surprised if EA pulled that bullshit off.

So I decided not to buy it. All this horrible server issue stuff just makes me glad I dodged this bullet. God damn EA, must you ruin every beloved series?

PS- I actually noticed the Amazon thing yesterday too, but it looks like they're selling it again now with a disclaimer about the server issues, I wonder if EA threw a fit about Amazon making it unavailable. The game has 1 out of 5 stars average rating on Amazon with over a thousand reviews lol, ouch.

EA: Ruining another game.

Give it 6 months and it might be worth forking out for

@the_patriarch: Damn Straight, I almost pre-ordered the day before release thank god my debit card was in another room. Now to work on that laziness problem.

No.

So Polygon has updated their review twice, from a 9.5 originally to an 8, and now? A 4.

Does anyone else find that ridiculous? It feels like back pedaling. I'm cool with the 9.5 to 8, but now all the way down to 4? I get that reviews are most useful on release and this game is fucked on release but even with these issues, we have to also see they're just the sort of issues that have happened with just about all games that use always online system (Diablo III, all manner of MMOs, etc). It's pretty ridiculous.

I don't get the point. People can see all the news about the servers being jacked up on Polygon's site... so what is the point of this updating review? Once the servers work are they just going back to the 9.5 again? Who is aribitrarily assigning these numbers for the complaint? (oh, the servers are still broken, -5 points now).

I agree. As hard as it is to defend EA right now, retroactively lowering the review grade due to launch woes seems pretty silly. Game Informer had the right idea when they decided not to post a final review till the game was in a stable state. These launch week problems, however painful they might be for the early adopters, were pretty predictable and really have nothing to do with the ultimate quality (or terribleness, for that matter) of the game.

I actually was able to get in last night around midnight EST, and was delighted to find that I actually didn't lose as much of my previous play session (when the server just shit out on me half way through and never seemed to recover) as I had thought. But after hours of trying to get on again last night, I had only played for maybe 20-30 minutes when I tried to look at a neighboring city that my friend was working on and at that point the game froze / crashed and wouldn't relaunch so I just gave up and went to bed. Also in my short amount of time playing last night the lack of cheetah mode was very noticeable. This is such a huge bummer.

I was really, REALLY hoping that the multiple-city region thing was going to make up for the small city size, but it doesn't look like that's the case. And I'm beginning to wonder if simulating every Sim in a city is worth it for the sacrifices they've made to the overall design. I was giving them the benefit of the doubt, but it doesn't look like they've delivered at all. I actually like the aesthetic--but the overarching design decisions look to have been a serious mistake.

@squigiliwams said:

It's the obvious solution to the server problem, but they wanted universal cloud saves, so ... again, the kind of decision you expect from a committee, not a dev team with any sort of core leadership and vision.

Remember Simcity 3000? Huge cities, lots of features and a building editor so you could create and modify the game assets. Now we got a fucking block of a city, stripped down version of the game and you gotta pay for different buildings? I'm sorry, but fuck off Maxis and EA.

So it's a 7.16 on average. Or 8 by median. Maybe a 7.58 if we average those. I think that's how you're supposed to interpret it. :-p

<p>Why do people say this is begging people to torrent the game? I would not play a bad game, free or ortherwise. Not even if you paid me.</p>

Good to see I'm not alone.

As I edited in as well, you can clearly see Polygon covering the launch issues with Sim City on their own site... so I just don't get this at all. Wait, like you say, or just put up your review and if you want make note that there are issues in launch with an update. To go from a 9.5 to a 4? So arbitrary. Really tarnishes all of their scores in my eyes.