Maaaan EA you blew it big time here. Did you not learn from Diablo 3 launch?
Anyway this game is excellent, if you manage to play it. But there are so many servers problems because EA decided to make a single player game online only. I have not been able to play it since launch because servers are busy. Hell, they are so incompetent that at one point they had the busy servers labeled as available and the available servers labeled as busy. And I've had the servers log me off only to try to come back with 30 minute waiting queues. Problem is if you pick another server your city is not there. Hell, I've had cities roll back or be completely erased when I came back to a server. It's very annoying. Yesterday, EA actually removed features from the game because they were causing server instability. What the fuck?
Say what you will about the Diablo 3 launch. Nothing competes with this failure.
But yeah the game is awesome and very deep despite the city size is a lot smaller to past games. But there is a lot more "simulation" to this game than past games though. I like that you now have to gather and manage resources, or import them. People are giving this game a lot of shit on the gameplay side of things, and they are wrong. I understand the city size thing, but I don't think people have played the game long enough to understand the mechanics inside and out. Sim City 4, considered the best in the franchise (which I agree), had 10 years to develop through patches, an expansion, and mods. In this new one, there is a lot more shit you have to pay attention to or it will just domino into a complete disaster right before your eyes. It's really neat and at the same time while makes the game more challenging than Sim City 4.
Like I tried to get away with not building a police station at the start (in Sim City 4 you can wait quite a while before crime levels get to a point where you need police). Well I had criminals coming over from a neighboring city taking advantage that I did not have police. The game is very sensitiveness to these types of things. To add to that, not only is there a lot more money sinks, but building things seems more expensive compared to Sim City 4. To add insult to injury I had a Zombie infestation, which lost 80 percent of my population because I had no money to defend my city. And this is neat too because you can zoom in and follow Sims and it was cool to see them fighting Zombies and hearing gun fire going off in the streets with some people running for their lives and others defending their homes.
It's moments like above that really suck you into this game.
I picked up this game Yesterday and me and Kaz played for about 6 to 7 hours straight in a private room. We played on North America east 3 with no servers issues what so ever. I don't see what all the complaints are about; this game is fantastic.
Edit: Just sat down with this game again and I literally sat there for like 7 hours straight and played this again. Once you get the hang of things (developing a specific thriving industry to rake in big cash) you begin to see how things actually open up and how multiplayer is necessary to make the best cities and make the most cash. The Great Works in each areas are necessary for the communal area to really expand and increase their cities. This game has so much replay value its kind if twisted.
Been moving this week so I had to put off buying this, but I'm really looking forward to playing in some big mega-AT region with you guys.
The launch does sound like the biggest clusterfuck of the century, but hopefully by Friday when we get the internet hooked up it will be smoother sailing. Save a spot for me in the apocalypse-topia!
Even with the messy launch this game is already in contention for GOTY for me. Game of the fucking year.
What the fuck, a new sim city came out? Where the fuck have I been?
This game is fucking fantastic. Got sucked in and played until after 3 am without even realizing it last night, hahah.
It really strikes a great balance between the depth of the simulation, and providing enough visual information to let you know exactly what's going on in the city without being overwhelming. The limitation on the space along with the specializations really makes you have to focus on a certain type of city. (Not to say I still don't think there should be an option to build in the entire region, "classic" simcity style)
The multiplayer is great too, when we're all working on our cities simultaneously. The servers were all packed when I finally got on so we've started a new region on the Antarctica server named "Apocalypso".
Im not gonna lie, game is really good, especially all of us playing together. Crushin was helping me out taking out my trash.
Yeah and now my dump is full of your city's dirty diapers and i have a hobo outbreak!
Everyone who registered SC before the 25th gets a free game off Origin. Choices aren't too shabby either:
Battlefield 3
Mass Effect 3
Dead Space 3
Need For Speed: Most Wanted
Medel of Honor: Warfighter
Sim City 4 Deluxe
And...
Bejeweled 3
Plants Vs Zombies.
It's gonna be either BF3, DS3 or NFS for me... hmmmmm.
If we all get NFS:MW it would be pretty fun to play online. But DS3 is a good choice too.
The more I play and learn the mechanics under the hood, the more I realize this is a city variant of farmville with a pretty face. Ignorance is bliss with this game, the less you under stand it the more fun it is. Sadly I have seen just how absurdly broken the core of the game is, I am getting to the point where I find this game more of a disappointing failure than Diablo 3.
The game is definitely more clever then farmville; although, the game does have its "builds" which are more favorable then others. From a pure variation standpoint, the game has many variations, but from a min-max standpoint, the game becomes more rigid, especially with the current glitches.
My main problem as of late is the city size and removed/disabled features. I built a city, I ran out of room and had no trouble making money. It was just nothing left to spend anything on. There was nothing to do. The leaderboard is not working, so there is no reason to make myself look good there. So I figure I find a place to participate in the 2 million sims challenge. Well that does not seem to be tracking properly, so can't do that either. Finally, I start a new city and then get frustrated at no Cheetah speed. I don't mind not having it so much when I have a well developed city. But it's a bit wretched at the start not having it.
I really want to play this game. But every time I load up, I close it after 10 minutes and say to myself "I'm just going to wait until they patch this thing." I pull up the launcher everyday to see what was patched.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMnvDIYG-PU
Current 1.8 patch AI at its finest.
They don't work because the game IS a facebook game. Here is a fun fact, R builds regardless of any circumstances. If you have R zoned people will move to it no matter what state the city is in, this means you cannot "lose", everybody wins!
So here is what I did, I busted out some "cleverness" and built a residential only city (the only city in the region as well). Cept this R only city has nothing but R, roads and a town hall. No power, no water, no police/fire/medical, no trash pickup, no waste disposal no education. Just a town hall, roads and R zones. Currently I am over 440k population, with 80% approval rating with no traffic issues. This is not a bug, it is an intended function based on core design mechanics of the game.
This game is a facebook game designed to sell DLC with a facade of being a "simulation". Mind you I am quite certain the 24 year old original would not allow any construction of any kind without power. In 24 years the simulation has become worse, so as to not be too difficult for people. The only cleverness and skill this $60+ screensaver has is working around the bugs and garbage design choices.
It's just matter of time before a zombie-out break totally annihilates your entire town and you have to re-cheese it back to 400k. Yeah, the game is bugged we know that. They need to fix it. When the game works, it becomes good.
Keep in mind, my city would rebuild quite fast, even obscenely fast despite falling victim to a zombie outbreak because the population listed is fake. The game lies to you about your population so you feel like your 2km x 2km city is larger than it really is. At 440k displayed pop, the real population is around 53k. The code function being called is aptly named 'GetFudgedPopulation'. Obviously if I am really only waiting for 53k people to move back in vs 440k+, it will go a whole lot quicker.
This chart shows the population scale between displayed and real.
I really hate how fucked up and essential un-simulating the simulation is in this game, but I still can't help but enjoy playing it and fucking around.
I truly hope they can fix what's broken with the aspects of the sims, traffic, and... shit well everything because despite all that shit I really do like this game a lot, and keep coming back to it.
You can help beta test on the test server. Currently you can beta test cheetah speed, a release feature. They also supposedly fixed the recycling center bug, but wont release patch notes for the test server so what you are actually beta testing is a guess.
The problem with this game is, and now confirmed by the devs themselves, they designed this game for the lowest common denominator. It is a fancy 3d Facebook game (farmville city variant!) and nothing more. Because of those design decisions the simulation aspect of this game will never actually simulate anything meaningful. It will take at least one very large patch just to get the multiplayer aspect working in any useful non-broken way. RCI will most likely never be fixed properly, the best we can expect is taxes being nerfed so you can no longer do http://imgur.com/a/gW7F9 The chances of them fixing the agent system to anything more than gang banging the closest and most direct location regardless if it fills up before the agent arrives are minimal at best being the game core would need a major rework. Unless the stars align you cannot fail at this game. (excluding show stopping bugs).
The only reason I keep playing a game inferior to 24 years of predecessors is to showcase how utterly incompetent Maxis developers are, and what is wrong with the gaming industry as a whole. I want to like this game, I really do, I mean its fucking SimCity! Hell, I think the first time Crush and myself really talked was in TLC class when we were assigned together to build a city in OG SimCity. Unfortunately this new version is a SimCity box filled with runny foul smelling shit laden with undigested corn and peanuts that cost us $60+.
Unless the modders get access to this game to fix asap, it will be a ghost town by end of summer, and risking abandonment by the end of the year if left solely to Maxis incompetence and EAs greed.
This game is like the perfect storm. Incompetence, greed, thinking they know what people want to do for fun, and just the pure shit that is the gaming industry today.
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