@amyggen: They should probably stop trying to salvage it then.

@circlenine: B b b b but NBA Live was broken!!!!! oh my GOODNESS!

Way too late, no thanks.

@daddycabinet: To be fair...."fair" all Maxis did was try to explain why they wanted it to be always-online and a massive emphasis on multiplayer with multiple cities. They constantly got asked why there wasn't straight up offline single player and they would go back into the spiel about wanting multiple people working together to create this great region which could pool resources together to build the great works. Ultimately this is what the goal of this game was. To build multiple cities with different focus to maximize profits and exploit as many natural resources as possible to build a great work that would benefit everyone and thus happiness and tranquility would fall upon all and yadda yadda EA's great.

They were always upfront about the vision and goal of this SimCity, the problem is they did it by ignoring what long standing fans wanted and alienated new players by having poor server support and a debacle of a launch.

I applaud when companies try to do something with an old franchise, to freshen it up and bring new ideas around a familiar package because otherwise no one innovates or takes risks but sadly this is a case where SimCity 4 was a long time ago, and just making a bigger, prettier more functional version of that would have been A-OK.

I will continue to play a little SimCity here and there while listening to podcasts or watching long Brad videos, but it did not live up to expectations and Maxis will need to do a lot to repair it's reputation with gamers.

Fuuuuuuuuuck that game and the burning truck it came in on. Hackers told us days after release that it was able to be played offline. It took EA another year to tell us the same.....

Maybe the mods can address size issues? And did they ever fix pathing?

I dunno, maybe years after the release, EA and the community can fix the game?

Undeniable proof that the game bombed. There's no one playing it, so they introduce this offline "feature" to get as many people as possible to buy it now. In six months, the servers will be closing down, since they won't be necessary anymore. Mark my words.

This could have been the SimCity that finally got me in, save for the small city thing. I liked a lot of what they did with making the game feel more streamlined - but that put me off way too much to get it. The always-online was never an issue for me either. Stemming from that, neither were the clogged-up launch servers because that's almost an inevitable launch issue of any popular always-online title.

But unless they can give me at least 4x the current city size, and probably closer to 9x or more, I'm still not gonna be picking this one up any time soon.

As long as it stays Sim Village - not interested.

Too little, too late. I could've lived with the always on since I wanted to play with my friends anyway, but the tiny cities still kills it.

Now quadrouple the build area and it's a deal.

this. thank you for saving me the effort.

Maybe during a sale, when the price goes to $10, then I'll try SimCity. But when they said that it was prohibitively impossible to create an offline mode back when the game launched last year, to then go and do this... it just seems super ridiculous.

Sim towns

"Yep."

I kinda wish that was the entire body of the article.

@authenticm: LOL

@ghostiet: nah he'll just block anyone that brings it up

Sorry but honestly, the company has lied so much that I can't possibly reward that kind of behavior by giving them money. They wouldn't have even made this offline fix if the community hadn't found their own offline mode, disproving all the crap they've been saying about the game having to be played online. If they could have it their way, they would have just kept lying and hoped that no one would have ever dug far enough to find the offline fix. This fix that they're releasing is only a PR spin to try to get back to the people's good graces which I don't think they deserve yet. How about doing the good stuff up front instead of releasing the products up front, taking full money from the consumers, and then hiding behind a wall of apologies and fixes.

I don't know Arthur Gies but I find that shit hilarious.

@duxa said:

Sim City made me so mad, I'm seriously considering buying Cities XL out of spite. I REALLY hope some of the other independent city builders take this opportunity to de-throne the pretender king of metropolis simulation. It's an opportunity of a life time.

@reisz:

I think the problem with city size is performance. They weren't are are not able to optimize the game so a large zone would work. I've got a pretty nice PC, and when I fill that land up, it's dropping lots of frames. I'm not tryign to defend them, I'm just saying that's likely why.

I want a bigger city area as well. Shit's too small.

Give me more space to build my city, and I will buy your game.

I always liked the online components the game offered, but if I were to feel constrained by the limits of space and other players' cooperation, I'd expect to have a single player experience to fall back on.

Not buying your game yet, but now I'm interested.

Why isn't EA/Maxis saying why this game is now able to go offline? They were really adamant about it being impossible so what in the actual fuck happened that allowed this change to occur?

This game is still annoying.....

Also an offline mode would have been wonderful when the game was on fire. It's kind of a slap in the face at this point.

Too many lies, too many denials, too many PROMTIONS for Lucy Bradshaw who said the lies and made the denials, and the BIGGEST fix needed - bigger cities - are not coming.

@spraynardtatum: Because they lied but they're hardly going to say so in as many words.

They should patch the name of the game to 'SimTown' or maybe 'SimVillage'.. then the size of the playable area might make sense.

Neat. Might actually go play this now!

Offline mode, only possible by the amazing power of the cloud!

@shortbreadtom: Yes, I did (congratulations for reading correctly). Apparently, to enough people, EA was the worst company in the world, because that is exactly how they felt, and it showed.

Ok now quadruple(at least) the city size and i will totally buy this for 5$ during a sale.

Arthur Gies can suck it.

Here is the thing, although the always online nonsense was a bad problem with the game, I felt a lot of people missed the forest for the trees by focusing on that. Always online or not, the real issue is that Sim City is fundamentally a bad Sim City game at its heart due to core development decisions, the tiny plots, the fake "simulation" of sims, region map, lack of terraforming, lack of real modding, and just overall shallow gameplay. Everything that made previous Sim City games awesome and made them last for over a decade was gutted from the Sim City reboot. There is no amount of patching that can fix this game.

If you want to play a real Sim City game then pick any of the older ones, they are all superior to this turd

haha...EA is rude

IF WE CAN'T TRUST EA WHO CAN WE TRUST.

Too little, too late. $90 USD for six hours of a miserable experience, deleted it, never going back. Between this and BF4 (two copies including Premium for both), EA have really been a shit-show in 2013. Fuck them.

@thefriend: Yup, it's clear that they couldn't make big cities with the engine they're running it on. That's of course no excuse though, the small cities is some bullshit.

@seanfoster: Giant bomb needs a like system because that comment was awesome!

A lot of people still angry at EA and Maxis.

I find this interesting. Despite my immediate, knee jerk, reaction to be angry they really didn't need to do this. Supposedly the game did very well sales wise (well, I assume that based on what they were saying about the sales figures) so I find it pretty interesting they'er giving this much support to the game post launch, even going as far as to add components they previously said were not possible (turns out none of that stuff had to be done online- weird).

I won't be buying the game still as I don't have any interest in purchasing anything on Origin or playing a gimped Sim City game, but in a small way this is a pretty decent move on Maxis' part. Even though no one will take it that way- they already lost their small share of fan good will.

What a strange world we live in now.

I think with this they have fixed part of the problem but it might be too late. If they could also increase the size of cities that would definitely bring me back to playing it. For now anytime I want to make a city I will just dig up my copy of sim city 3000.

With so many really good games to come out this past year I can't waste my time and money on games that attempt to redeem themselves. There are only a couple series I buy before reviews and word of mouth get out. Releasing games with a needless always online requirement like this or game design breaking micro-transactions(Forza 5) when there are great games on the horizon that don't do this crap is insane. Whatever amount of money you may get through the micro-transactions or data you can mine from always on is not worth the sales you may lose or image you will earn yourself. You want to make a quick buck after the game has been released? Put it on sale a few months after release on PSN/Live/Steam with a hefty discount. Not only will you get a bunch of sales, you may also get some fans of your work interested in your sequel or checking out what other games you may have made.

@alex Maxis officially stated that they cannot alter the structure of city-sizes. They made a blog post about how they tried, and during the process of research found potential for (unrelated) future updates - but ultimately deemed making city limits any bigger impossible.

Really don't know whether to believe them or not, but the post seemed earnest!

SimCity still kind of pisses me off. After describing it to my wife (a non-gamer) she was fucking hyped to check it out. We bought whatever super expensive ultimate BS edition because we are excited to play two cities in our own region!

And then we play the game.

Small cities, broken traffic, shitty simulation, small plot size, broken multiplayer resource sharing; this list goes on and on and on.

Overall we spent about 25 hours trying to like it and just felt super frustrated for our efforts.

@snail: At this point, why believe them?

I might give it a shot (I gave the reboot a chance until I encountered traffic issues and the inability to scale further due to land size) but like others I feel like it's waaaay too late. Also, I'd probably just wait for good mods, since there's bound to be one that deals with the size issue.

That was fast. At this rate, we'll have larger cities before 2020.

Man, how crazy would it be if the Simcity saga continued all the way through 2014!

so, off line, but then I still have to play ANOTHER City in order to manage sending garbage to in order to build the bit structure alone.

Fucking stupid city sizes.

SimCity was an enormous fuck up, from top to bottom.

This update will do nothing to change that.