Where Is The SimCity Game I Waited For?

Yesterday, Maxis and Electronic Arts released the new SimCity into the world, bloodied, screaming, and lacking a few teeth. If you don’t know about the City that is of The Sim, not only have you been living under a tech-rock but you need to have many tech-rocks thrown at you until you admit to being a luddite and flee Techno City or enter into the warm embraces of Mother Machine and undergo the reeducation programs.

I’ve poked around SimCity, played the betas, watched all the videos, and have had plenty of opportunity to pre-order it. But I’ve held off. Even though we’ve had to wait for a decade for this upgrade, something seems a little off.

While many critics have given the game a resounding thumbs up, others are making some rather loud complaints, like Ars Technica does here. In fact, a lot of users also aren’t happy. Here’s Total Biscuit’s take:

For all of EA’s beta testing and pre-orders, its servers aren’t capable of meeting demand. People can buy a copy of SimCity at their local bricks and mortar store and start playing today whilst people who have pre-ordered are having over 30 to 60 minutes of server timeouts for downloads. Some users have even experienced 4 and even 8 hours of delay logging in to start games. That’s after installing Origin and linking the game to your Facebook account, of course.

EA’s Origin Twitter feed tweeted the following.

We are aware of an issue affecting customers trying to download The Digital Deluxe edition of SimCity. We are working to correct this issue.

— Origin (@OriginInsider) March 5, 2013

We have resolved issues affecting SimCity downloads. Due to server load it may take up to three hours for your game to unlock.

— Origin (@OriginInsider) March 5, 2013

Then Origin resorted to a panicky, bot-like repetition of this message.

It’s telling that frustration is felt by the staff at Maxis, who had no control over this aspect of the marketing and sales of the game. Even though they did have their cake and ate it too.

Dan Moskowitz, lead gameplay engineer on SimCity, also tweeted the following.

Extremely frustrated that Origin problems are preventing some of you from playing #SimCity.The folks at Maxis are just as annoyed as you.

— Dan Moskowitz (@moskow23) March 5, 2013

I feel bad for Friday, when SimCity is released in Europe. Then, all the splines will need reticulating.

First-day teething troubles are expected, even when the game has been hyped to be the greatest thing since sliced hen’s eggs. However, other problems have been gradually grinding people’s gears, such as the “Always-On DRM” issue. DRM is bad news in any business — just ask Apple’s iTunes — but in this instance, Maxis has made it an essential part of SimCity’s Glassbox engine.

What this means, though, is no mods. EA-Maxis creative director Ocean Quigley confirmed this to Joystiq when he said, “Right now we’ve got our work cut out for us to build the product up to the quality level it deserves as a SimCity. Then after we ship, we’ll make decisions about how we can and when exactly we’ll support mods.”

Quigley went on to say, “But it’s worth pointing out that the reason people are still playing SimCity 4 almost ten years later is because the modding community essentially re-created it and filled it with new content and fixed bugs and made it as much of a hobby as it is a game.”

One of the best games I can no longer play on my computer.

No cheats. No single-player games, playing all weekend against yourself and the computer. Players must be online on Origin to play. (Here’s where we point out that you only need to be online to log in and start your game.) If EA’s servers are down or you want to play this game away from a WiFi signal, you’re banjaxed. Because the game saves your progress to EA’s servers, you need to pray that SimCity remains popular and well played. Let us know if this sound byte from EA sounds familiar:

We would rather our hard-working engineering and IT staff focus on keeping a positive experience for the other 99% of customers playing our more popular games. We hope you have gotten many hours of enjoyment out of the games and we appreciate your ongoing patronage.

That’s a nice number from EA from almost a year ago on April 13, 2012 when it shut down servers for a slew of games, some only 15 months old.

Another already repeated complaint is the strict limits to a city’s size to force multi-city gameplay, create greater goal-based gaming, and encourage a better understanding of how land value works. Not so much Phoenix or Salt Lake City, more San Francisco or New York. Also, EA’s servers can only handle a maximum of 16 cities to one region, because of a “client performance issue.”

From a Reddit AMA discussion, Richard Shamaka, a gameplay engineer at Maxis, said that, “The memory required to store information of more cities and the performance required to show even bigger regions and additional cities is too much. 16 was just the number that met the budget.”

Responding to the city size, Quigly told IncGamers that:

We need to keep in mind that SimCity is a mainstream game, it’s not a game that is only going to run on high-end gaming PCs, it has to run in your Dad’s PC as well. That is just a performance decision. Given that was the performance constraint we decided to work under, we built a larger region environment and a bunch of the multiplay to work with 2km cities. We’ll eventually get around to expanding the city size, but I can’t make any promises as to when.

Of course, multi-city gameplay can have its drawbacks, as Kotaku’s Mike Fahey found out. Unless you cooperate with your neighbors, they could pull the plug and screw your experience — or stop you from making Great Works — unless you play in private mode.

GRIEFING EXTREEEEME!!1!

Probably the single greatest improvement though is getting rid of the damnable Sims. Those gibberish spouting, idiotic AIs that cluttered up your enjoyment of SimCity 4 are now gone. Hurrah! But (and you knew there would be a but), Maxis-EA also got rid of the terrain editor. Boo! I guess EA wanted to put the anal into artisanal.

“The goal with the regions was to create these crafted experiences. We wanted to give players a new challenge to overcome in each one of these maps that we create,” said lead producer, Kip Katsarelis, to Destructoid back in January.

Some developments have been for the better. Now everything is road-based, so you can’t build where you don’t have a road. In fact, everything travels by road. Even data. See a truck traveling with debris? That’s a data point moving from creation to disbursement. There’s no more electricity or water-grid to deal with. In previous games, you could have 100 percent water and electricity to every grid in a city and still have a shortage.

Unfortunately, everything is road-based, so that means some features like subways are incomplete. Shocking, an incomplete game released forcing you to buy DLC in the future? Now there’s an innovation. DLC available at launch? Well, it’s not like EA wants all of your money up front. Just, well, most of it.

All that said, here’s a description of the SimCity Digital Deluxe package and a game trailer to entice (or infuriate) you further.

Get three European city sets at a great value with the SimCity Digital Deluxe, available exclusively at Origin. Recreate a European inspired neighborhood in the center of your city! Place world renowned landmarks including the Eiffel Tower, Brandenburg Gate or Big Ben to help your tourism business in your city. Receive challenging missions, complete unique achievements and earn big bucks as waves of Sims visit the landmarks. Watch as the businesses, homes and vehicles around your landmarks start to take on the flavor, style, and architecture of those countries. The Digital Deluxe Edition also includes the SimCity Heroes and Villains set.