So I just spent 2 hours going through the tutorial, and starting the scenic Bradville on its maiden voyage into tiny metropolis glory. But it seems the game doesn't have any sort of local saving feature, and when I exited (during which process no option to save manually was apparent), a syncing message appeared for 1/2 second and vanished. Just out of curiosity, I loaded back in and was faced with beginning again the initial tutorial, and found I had no saved regions of any kind. I'm just blown away that a game could be designed like this in 2013. If my wife hadn't already bought a copy to play with me, I'd request a refund. I can tell you that I will never pre-order another EA title on Origin, and will do everything I can to avoid using that service in the future.

Really ignorant of Maxis and EA to expect saving straight to "the cloud" is going to work without any problems. Both steam and xbox use local saves that are then later synced to stop this for happening. And i know steam atleast will let you choose if the saves dont match up.

Sounds really silly that it would just trow you back into the menu rather then try again when the save failed.

Will be fun to see how saves will work on launch as i doubt they will be able to cope with the traffic.

Its supposed to be going on in the background really frequently, and you shouldn't lose more than a few minutes worth of gameplay if the connection is lost. It seems like its failed you big time. Smart move to check it when you did, not risking even more lost progress.

Yeah Origin uses the same save system as steam and Xbox for other games (you save as normal and it uploads them when you finish playing) I think this is a specific sim city issue rather than origin. I'm pretty glad that we don't get till Friday in the UK. Gives them a chance to fix all this stuff.

<p>Just to be sure you might want to check that you are trying to play on the same server as before. It might have changed the default server due to heavy traffic.</p>

I thought the same thing just happened to me, but:

the launcher should've explained that. there's going to be a lot of e-rage from people who think they lost their cities.

Welcome to the future OP! While consumers have to deal with awful DRM like this, pirates continue to enjoy EA's games without any issues!

Oh, EA. Why do we still trust you with anything? Sorry that happened, OP. That's pretty shitty.

@qawsed: Am I reading this right in that your city will live only on a specific server? Because if so I bet theres going to be alot of random cities sprouting up due to the overflow servers.
EDIT: Or am I forgetting that (i think) theres no local save data so your city will only live in the cloud and not on your computer.

So Ive gotten into the game a few times and even claimed a city, but I can't seem to find out when the game even tries to save. I've played 10 minutes then quit out to the main menu only to find out it thinks I haven't yet started a game and I can't resume. A little feedback on the update/save process would be nice I think.

It seem that it is a quite issue it is better if you save it so when time's you will play your still on what you done.

Same thing happened to me. Since I had joined a different server the second time around, I figured it had something to do with that, though.