EA and Maxis are relentlessly patching SimCity, and they appear to be so excited that each update is considered a major patch — after all 3.0 was only released two weeks ago. I’d probably disagree with their numbering system completely as none of these have really been major patches at all, but hey! It’s your game Maxis, you do your thing.

The patch will include a new region, as well as something called a “Launch Park” to reward “dedicated fans who were early adopters”. There are also a bunch of bug fixes and overall tweaks, including improved response times for fire trucks.

There is, of course, still no mention of an offline mode — so if you were looking for that, I’m afraid you’re out of luck. Check out the full notes below.

• New: SimCity Launch Park, an exclusive new park just for our dedicated fans who were early adopters.
• New: Region: Edgewater Bay. Seven city sites in one cluster around a beautiful bay with one great work site.
• New: Your current server will now be shown in the options menu.
• New: More detailed rollover information on buildings telling player’s if their Sims received happiness from a park or from shopping. Previous to this fix, this information was generic.
• Re-Enabled Feature: Global Market prices now dynamically change during gameplay.
• Re-Enabled Feature: Leaderboards will be active on EU West 3, Pacific 1 and Pacific 2 at the release. We will enable them on additional servers throughout the day.
• Re-Enabled Feature: Region filters are now enabled on all SimCity servers. Players will be able to search for open games by Map Name, Sandbox Mode, and Abandoned Cities.
• Rain Clouds: Fixed an issue where some cities would not have rain clouds to replenish their water table. If you had a city with this issue, you will start seeing clouds again within a game day.
• Fire: Improved response time of fire trucks to fires. Improved the time it takes for a fire signal to reach a fire station.
• Mission updates: Tuned Metals HQ and Community College missions. These were appearing too early, making them difficult to complete. They now appear later in a city’s development.
• Solar Farm Great Work: Reduced fire risk at the Solar Farm Great work. Local fire engines were spending too much time at the Solar Farm.
• Messaging: Improved pre-requisite messaging for Trade Port, Casinos, Smelting Factory and Oil Refinery. It should be clearer on how to unlock these buildings.
• Graphics: Fix for flickering low wealth buildings on NVIDIA graphics cards.
• Education: Fix for an issue some cities experienced where commuting students did not return from a neighbor’s city. This was causing a problem where students would disappear from a city in some cases.
• Tuning: Sims will lose a small amount of happiness if they don’t have a place to shop. Cities without places to shop will see complaints and feel the effect of unhappy Sims. This will emphasize the importance of commercial zones.

Source: EA Forums (Thanks, Mike)

News of Maxis’ upcoming Sim City expansion has accidentally hit the internet, with Green Man Gaming posting a listing for the DLC on their site (and then quickly removing it).

Maxis have since confirmed the expansion on their Facebook account, saying “Some of you may have seen thrilling new SimCity content that arrived too early at the gate. It’s coming May 28th. We think you’ll be amused.”

Unfortunately it wasn’t pulled down quickly enough, with one quick-thinking YouTube user catching the whole thing below.

Source: VG247

SimCity series creator Will Wright has used an address at the University of California to talk about the latest incarnation of his famous city-simulation game.

“I feel bad for the team. I kind of did predict there’d be a big backlash about the DRM stuff,” he said during his lecture. “It was kind of like, ‘EA is the evil empire, there was a lot of ‘Let’s bash EA over it. That was basically inexcusable, that you charge somebody $60 for a game and they can’t play it. I can understand the outrage. If I was a consumer buying the game and that happened to me, I’d feel the same.”

“I think people care if it doesn’t work. If you can’t play it on planes, stuff like that – I think there are some very valid concerns about it.”

Wright also explained how SimCity‘s always-online approach confused people’s expectations, saying “Also there’s a perception; I don’t expect to play World of Warcraft on the airplane, because my perception is it has to be on the net. Sim City was in this very uncomfortable space, like the uncanny valley, almost; [it was caught] between was it a single player game or was it a multiplayer game?”

Despite this, Wright reiterated that he did, actually, enjoy the game.

“It’s a good game,” he said. “I enjoy playing it a lot.”

Source: GamesIndustry via VG247

Maxis have released details of all the issues they plan to address with SimCity 3.0, due out “later this week”. The company are pushing out the big version numbers, with 2.0 only released two weeks ago.

Included in the list of fixes are changes so one vehicle will no longer block traffic on the entire highway, random air pollution from unknown sources, and continual improvements to the traffic routing system.

Check out the full list below:

• New: Added more Hotel models to increase hotel variety.
• Traffic: Updated routing system to improve traffic. Routing system now understands more information about u-turns, required vehicle stops, and vehicle behavior on certain road types. This should make traffic smarter.
• Traffic: Commercial and industrial buildings stagger their work shifts to start throughout commute hours instead of at the top of the hour. This should reduce traffic.
• Traffic: Fixes one issue where a car won’t move causing traffic to back up behind it.
• Traffic: Vehicles can now make right turns on Red. This should improve some cases of traffic.
• Traffic: Trading polish that will improve regional traffic when one city has a lot of jobs and its neighboring city has a lot of workers.
• Air Pollution: Fixed more issues where cities that placed air polluting buildings received large amounts of air pollution from unknown sources.
• Service Vehicles: Fix for disappearing service vehicles on cities that whose vehicles had disappeared before update 2.
• School Buses: Fix for issue where school buses were getting stuck at neighbor’s city or arcology.
• Audio: Tuned audio on French Police Station.
• Trading: Fixed issue where fire servers were not trading consistently between Brakeman’s Folly and Twain in Whitewater Valley.
• Trading: Sewage trading: Sewage will now take a more direct route to regional sewage plant instead of throughout the city.
• Trading: Made gifting more reliable.
• Ferry Terminal: Ferry Terminal can now send its sewage to the output pipe and treatment plant.
• RCI Tuning: Fixed issue where sims going to a park via transit would sometimes lose their money or happiness on the way home.
• RCI Tuning: Bulldozing abandoned or rubble buildings will now prevent new developments for 6-12 hours.
• RCI Tuning: Less Happiness is taken from wealth 2 and 3 buildings when rent is due when no money is present.
• RCI Tuning: Fix for issue some users experienced where buildings would stay abandoned because moving trucks would not be able to move in.
• Trees: Trees now last longer, but also do not eliminate as much ground pollution.
• Radiation: Radiation causes less ground pollution than previously.
• Transit: Changed thought bubble suggestion to add more trains to deal with crowded passenger trains to suggest that you add more train stations.
• Transit: Improvements to lights to make rail look better at night.
• Transit: Streetcar stops can now be placed directly on standalone streetcar tracks, and passengers can walk along the tracks to them.
• Transit: Tuned the chance buses or streetcars will go to high-traffic stops first as a minor traffic improvement.
• Roads: University pedestrian paths can now cross streets.
• Manufacturing Trucks: Fixed issue some users experienced where manufacturing trucks left the city and were lost permanently.
• Delivery Trucks: Fixed issue where some users would experience a loss of resources is their delivery trucks returned to garages without proper storage.
• Sports Parks: Tuned the amount of skateboarders and neighborhood athletes at the sports parks.
• Data Layers: Zones are now visible in heavy data layers.
• Edit Mode: Added more valid snap points in edit mode. This improvement is most noticeable on Parks.
• Buildings: Addressed some cases where buildings would stack on one another.

Source: EA Forums (thanks, Mike!)

The long-awaited SimCity 2.0 patch has apparently caused massive sewerage overflows, with many users reporting citizens being continually hospitalised due to, well, pooping at a volume far beyond what their tiny bodies should be capable of.

Other bugs have also been reported, including loading screen lockups, buildings that won’t finish construction, and high levels of regional air pollution drifting in from empty regions. While traffic issues from emergency vehicle navigation have been fixed, other issues have arisen including traffic jams from mysterious taxi cabs appearing out of nowhere.

Maxis have issued a statement on their forums stating that players are “eager for more” fixes, and announcing that they’re working on a number of the current issues. “We are continuing to improve the traffic simulation, and decrease the need for rollbacks,” reads the statement.

EA recently revealed that people who purchased certain Oral-B and Crest brand products would get exclusive SimCity DLC — something that we found quite unbelievable, given the current state of the game. Read our thoughts here.

Source: PCGamesN

EA Maxis is still tinkering furiously with poor old arguably utterly broken SimCity. This week, the developer will release what it describes as its first “major” update, fixing a number of bugs, correcting some balancing, and ensuring your mayor drives the appropriate vehicle to work.

Some of the more interesting updates include a fail state for residential-only cities. A number of tweaks such as increased unhappiness from unemployment and decreased happiness boosts from tax cuts mean filling a whole plot with just houses will no longer cut it.

On the other hand, casinos have been buffed a bit so that they’re much more worth your time and resources, there’s a cooldown on random disasters, and some of the frustrating transit issues have been fixed.

The update will begin rolling out to servers at 1:00PM PST on April 22, which is 6:00AM Tuesday, Sydney time. Servers are expected to be unavailable for a couple of hours as a result.

Full patch notes are available on the EA Forums.

I spent about 16 hours in SimCity across the Easter long weekend. This was my first time with the game since the limited one-hour beta, and while it was great to see all the new stuff I was forbidden from seeing in that testing period, the biggest feeling that I came away with after those sixteen hours was not one of happiness and discovery.

It was anger. Anger and frustration.

For a game that’s built with such charming, inoffensive graphics, relaxing music and cute sound effects, that’s a pretty impressive achievement. And yet when my city rolled back for the fourth time and undid another hour’s worth of work, what else was I supposed to be feeling?

Earlier this month the announcement that SimCity would be getting free advertising DLC for Nissan, however, demonstrated that I had another emotion yet to experience: incredulity. That’s the same emotion I felt again today, when I read that you can buy specially-marked Crest and Oral-B products to get DLC codes for exclusive new tourist attractions in your city (more info here).

Unlike the Nissan LEAF station, at least these new products don’t result in your simulated city turning into a tiny advertising billboard. But that’s not the point: the point is that SimCity is a literally broken game that doesn’t work properly — and the fact that even a small amount of development time is being devoted to extraneous DLC nonsense like this should be upsetting to players and fans everywhere.

Your city has stopped processing correctly

SimCity really isn’t in a good place as a product. We’re talking about a game so broken that you literally can’t even rely on something as simple as chat messages, which arrive anywhere up to ten minutes after sending them and often in the wrong order. A game where cars stop on the highway for no reason, blocking all traffic into your village city. A game where you spend hours and hours turning down the same repetitive quests because, for some reason I can’t possibly fathom, the game can’t track what you have and haven’t done.

Now, alone, all these problems (and the many others) would be fine: little bugs that you could ignore, or perhaps work around. But SimCity needs to be online for some reason (even though it actually really doesn’t) and so we’re talking about a game where — for no reason at all that can possibly be justified in this era of MMOs — your city can and will randomly stop “processing correctly”, resulting in forced rollbacks that undo hours of work.

SimCity is broken. It is a broken game, and it’s built on Origin’s hideously broken architecture. Origin is the only game service I’ve ever used where I’ve literally had to restart my entire computer to get the friends list to display correctly. Coupled with SimCity, it’s like somebody decided to build a house of cards on top of a trampoline. Surprise! The cards fell down somehow. Who could have foreseen this?

Lots of people aren’t having problems connecting, and to them I say: lucky you. But even if you can connect just fine, the game is still all kinds of broken, confusing, and in need of serious development work. So why are Maxis and EA spending any time at all on Nissan-brand in-game ads?

But it’s free!

Yes, of course it’s free. Yes, if I don’t want it, I don’t have to get it. All these things are true, and you know — you’re right. I am choosing to focus on this and to become frustrated with it because — like some sort of customer — I paid money for a product and now, over a month after launch, the game still doesn’t work properly.

I, like many others, am invested in the future of SimCity and we want it to get better, faster, so we can go back to enjoying it. Instead, I’m seeing press releases telling me I can now have Nissan-branded buildings in my city (for free!).

This is just the tip of the iceberg. There’s more DLC on the way, and a whole pile of it — we’re talking Roman casinos, a Coal Stripmine great work, army bases, mosques, a Red Cross building, an Amusement Park and more. There’s even something called a ‘Crime Lord Package’, if you scrape the datafiles deep enough.

Obviously, this isn’t the first time EA and Maxis have flirted with corporate sponsorship. Hell, there’s an entire Katy Perry-brand version of The Sims, and SimCity Societies featured a partnership between BP and EA.. But here’s the thing: These were actually working games before the DLC started rolling in. SimCity was actually broken right out of the gate, to the point where EA Labels boss Frank Gibeau has publicly expressed his disappointment in the launch.

Once you’ve got a game engine up and running, most of the hard work has been done: it’s easy enough to design and code a new building, get some 3D assets in place to represent it, and make it happen. But we have to ask the question: how much development time is this taking up?

Could that development time be used to fix bugs instead? Could it be used to expand city sizes? Could it be used to develop a more stable cloud-saving service (since we know that the city is actually simulated on your computer)? Is the Crime Lord Package being worked on right now? What about the Roman Casino? Have they already been worked on? And if they have, are the developers who finished them now back on bugfix and polish?

These are all questions that we should be asking.

There is no conspiracy here

Before we get all tinfoil-hats up in this joint, let’s be clear that there is no conspiracy here. EA obviously didn’t (and continue to not) enjoy the negative press surrounding SimCity’s launch, and Maxis doubly so. That negative press has probably cost them, in sales, more money than Nissan would have spent to get their branded advertising DLC into the game. Probably more even than Oral-B and Crest are pumping into the joint promotion.

Chances are very good that these deals were signed months ago, before SimCity even launched, and EA/Maxis are obliged to honour them. If this is supposed to be a money-making exercise, it’s a pretty poor one — and given that the current promotion also provides codes for The Sims Social, the Facebook game that EA just announced would be shutting down, there’s little incentive to believe this is some sort of mad cash grab.

What we need to see now from EA and Maxis is a strong commitment to not only explaining exactly why the game needs to be online (and not just saying “We designed it that way”), but to moving ahead with solutions to these problems, problems that have no place plaguing such a high-profile title with such a big push behind it. Not more announcements about more DLC-distractions from the core issue: SimCity is a broken game.

And we, as consumers, need to keep asking questions and demanding answers — especially when we’re being charged through the nose.

EA have announced that SimCity will be coming to the Mac as promised — and the date to circle on your iCalendar is June 12.

PC owners who have already purchased the game will receive a free Mac version as well through Origin, and EA have also confirmed that there will indeed be cross-platform play between the two.

Maxis claim that the Mac version is entirely native and optimised specifically for Mac hardware and OSX. There’s no word on a price, so expect it to be exactly the same as the PC edition.

Looking forward to SimCity DLC? Well, the first of it is here and it may leave a bit of a sour taste in your mouth: it’s an advertisement for Nissan’s LEAF-brand electric cars.

The LEAF charging station “provides happiness to the Sims that use it and a onetime wave of happiness to the nearby businesses,” writes EA.

“Need another bonus? It produces no sewage or garbage. That’s right! Green indeed.”

How does it all work? “Plopping down the Nissan Leaf Charging Station will add happiness to nearby buildings. Adding the Charging Station will not take power, water or workers away from your city. Zoom in to the streets of cities and players will start seeing a percentage of their Sims from all wealth classes driving the electric vehicles.”

As PC Gamer points out, this is essentially free DLC that just… makes everything around it better? All the time? For no cost at all — other than having to see a giant ‘NISSAN’ logo every time you scroll across your city, of course.

Source: PC Gamer

SimCity‘s Senior Producer Kip Katsarelis has taken to the EA forums to discuss the current state of the game and their plans for their next big patch at 2.0.

“For the future, in Update 2.0, we’ll be addressing the Recycling Center bug, fixing the fire engine clumping, improving the efficiency of Street Cars, and increasing the radius of river water,” writes Katsarelis.

“We’re also fixing the tuning on Casinos and are making them more profitable. These are just a handful of the substantial changes coming in Update 2.0.”

SimCity‘s most recent update was 1.8, which you can read the patch notes for here.

Source: EA Forums

EA Labels bossman Frank Gibeau has ruled out the idea that they forced Maxis to adopt always-online DRM for SimCity, claiming in a recent interview with GamesIndustry that they wouldn’t do such a thing because “DRM is a failed, dead-end strategy”.

“It’s not a viable strategy for the gaming business,” he concluded.

Gibeau also poured water on any conspiracy theories about “evil suits at EA forcing DRM down the throats of Maxis”. “That’s not the case at all,” he said. “At no point in time did anybody say ‘you must make this online’. It was the creative people on the team that thought it was best to create a multiplayer collaborative experience, and when you’re building entertainment you don’t always know what the customer is going to want. You have to innovate and try new things and surprise people and in this particular case that’s what we sought to achieve.”

“If you play an MMO, you don’t demand an offline mode, you just don’t. And in fact, SimCity started out and felt like an MMO more than anything else and it plays like an MMO.”

Gibeau did however say that he was “disappointed” that they didn’t do a good enough job of communicating with consumers about exactly how much like an MMO it was.

Source: GamesIndustry

As the below video demonstrates, there is something seriously wrong with SimCity‘s traffic pathfinding — especially when they’d rather climb this enormous TrackMania-esque rollercoaster road mountain than just cut across town. This single unbroken road goes so high, that at one point in the video an honest-to-god aeroplane passes underneath it on the way to land. I love it.

Source: PC Gamer

Players of SimCity are eagerly awaiting every patch as Maxis and EA continue to fix confusing AI and pathfinding issues, as well as fine-tune various aspects of their compelling but flawed creation.

Patch 1.8 has now been released, and includes changes to police station capacity bugs, road building bugs, and confusing text descriptions relating to missions.

Check out the full patch notes below:

General

• Police station can no longer hold more prisoners than the capacity.
• Added missing roof texture for certain commercial building.
• Added completion moment cinematic for Great Works.
• Visiting police cars have avatar of neighbor above them.
• Arcology Population reflects the population of the Arcology, not the city.
• Fixed a clog in the pipes where sewage would sometimes get backed up and act jittery.
• Region Wall will pop up when a new chat message has been received.

Road Improvements

• Improvements to cases when connecting a new road to an existing road that goes over uneven terrain.
• Tuned some of the road snapping priorities to address some edge cases where it wasn’t behaving as desired
• Fixed a case where a new road would sometimes cause an existing road to change its shape drastically.
• Made Upgrade Roads mini-tutorial appear at appropriate time.
• Fix to four lane bridge to improve divider line placement.

Text Improvements

• Clarified alerts about residents not moving in because of high taxes to state if it is residents, commercial businesses, or Industry that won’t move in because of high taxes.
• Improved text and icons on cities in region view.
• Updated text for “Become a Suburban City” mission to improve clarity.
• Updated requirements text for HazMat garage for clarity.

Source: EA Support

SimCity 1.7 has arrived, and it attempts to address the traffic congestion problems that have been plaguing the city simulator, resulting in a number of less than flattering videos.

The full patch notes read as follows:

• Traffic Improvements: Tuned traffic congestion and fixed some intersection traffic issues.
• Traffic improvements: Emergency Vehicles will drive in empty lanes to get around traffic at intersections.
• Traffic improvements: Emergency and Delivery vehicles get priority over regular traffic when leaving garage.
• All units and buildings can now be demolished using the bulldoze tool.
• Performance improvements for low spec systems.
• New Server: Asia 2 will be released Tuesday afternoon (PDT)!

Fire it up and let us know if you notice a difference!

Source: EA Forums

EA have made good on their promise to compensate players affected by the messy launch of SimCity, with a post on the EA forums outlining the free games available. The games are on offer to players who have a registered copy of SimCity on their account by the end of March 25, so it’s entirely possible to basically purchase SimCity and get a free game if you do it soon enough.

“The portal will be live worldwide for everyone to select their game by March 22,” says the post. “We don’t want any of you to miss out on your free game, so please note that you must register your copy of SimCity before March 25, 2013 at 11:59 PM PDT and you must claim your free game by March 30, 2013 at 11:59 PM PDT.”

The games available to choose from are:

• Battlefield 3 (Standard Edition)
• Bejeweled 3
• Dead Space 3 (Standard Edition)
• Mass Effect 3 (Standard Edition)
• Medal of Honor Warfighter (Standard Edition)
• Need for Speed Most Wanted (Standard Edition)
• Plants vs. Zombies
• SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition

Source: Blue’s News

The debate around an always-online requirement for SimCity continues, with Maxis SVP Lucy Bradshaw firing another salvo in the wake not only of revelations from an anonymous Maxis engineer that the servers weren’t really doing any simulation, but proof from a modder that offline mode was completely workable.

“Always-Connected is a big change from SimCities of the past,” writes Bradshaw. “It didn’t come down as an order from corporate and it isn’t a clandestine strategy to control players. It’s fundamental to the vision we had for this SimCity. From the ground up, we designed this game with multiplayer in mind – using new technology to realize a vision of players connected in regions to create a SimCity that captured the dynamism of the world we live in; a global, ever-changing, social world.”

Bradshaw also discusses other benefits of the connected model, such as cloud-saves letting you play from multiple locations. “You can pop from work to home, play the game and have your cities available to you anywhere,” she says.

“The game we launched is only the beginning for us – it’s not final and it never will be. In many ways, we built an MMO.”

“So, could we have built a subset offline mode? Yes. But we rejected that idea because it didn’t fit with our vision. We did not focus on the “single city in isolation” that we have delivered in past SimCities. We recognize that there are fans – people who love the original SimCity – who want that. But we’re also hearing from thousands of people who are playing across regions, trading, communicating and loving the Always-Connected functionality. The SimCity we delivered captures the magic of its heritage but catches up with ever-improving technology.”

Source: SimCity

Pathfinding bugs have quickly become apparent in SimCity as a series of entertaining videos yesterday demonstrated. A key part of those bugs comes from the congestion caused when sims make poor driving choices on the roads, and it’s something Maxis are currently working on a fix for.

“We understand that when cars always take the shortest route between point A and point B there will be unavoidable (and illogical) traffic jams, so we are retuning these values to make the traffic flow more realistically,” claims lead designer Stone Librande on the SimCity blog.

“To dig a little deeper, our roads will have a weighting system based on 25%, 50% and 75% capacity. As a road hits those marks it will become less and less appealing for other cars, increasing the likelihood of them taking an alternate path if one exists.”

Additional fixes are also coming, such as ones that will stop your buildings burning down because fire trucks are stuck. “Emergency vehicles will not get blocked in their garages and will move into empty lanes to get around traffic jams. We’re also working on preventing service vehicles from clumping up (for instance, only one fire truck will respond to a fire instead of two) and improving the way that Public Transportation operates in the city.”

“We are currently testing a patch internally and hope to have it out to you soon.”

Librande also addressed the complaint that sims do not retain jobs or houses, but simply fill them up as they encounter them afresh every morning and evening. “Many aspects of the Sims are not persistent,” he said. “They don’t own a particular house or have permanent employment. We also don’t track their names, their clothing, gender, or skin color. We did this as in attempt to increase performance so that we could have more Sims in the city. Ultimately we didn’t feel that the cost of adding in that extra layer of micro detail made the macro game play richer. Game design is filled with tradeoffs and compromises like this and we are constantly evaluating these (and many other) decisions.”

Source: SimCity blog

Ah, PC gaming. If your game ships without something in it, the players will just add it in — and if it ships with something unpopular feature, the players will take it out. That is exactly the case with SimCity, which an enterprising modder has altered in order to allow you to play offline, on your own, forever.

There’s a couple of catches, which will no doubt eventually soon be ironed out: you can’t save your game unless you reconnect to the servers, and of course region-sharing features are completely impossible. But it demonstrates very clearly that the need for online servers to perform simulation is entirely untrue — something an anonymous Maxis engineer confirmed on Wednesday.

The mod also allows you to enter debug mode and play gain access to edit outside your region boundary, including highways, and to view the actual population number instead of the “fudged” population count returned by this interesting bit of code. You can see a video of it in action here on YouTube — it hasn’t been released yet, but it’s only a matter of time.

Source: Eurogamer, EA Forums

A new blog update from Maxis’ lead gameplay scripter Guillaume Pierre delves into the fiddly subject of public transport algorithms, something that has left many users scratching their heads to try and figure out.

Much like many cars and pedestrians in SimCity, public transport seems to make completely illogical decisions, such as clumping at certain points or ignoring crowded bus stops in favour of closer, deserted ones. This in turn has a flow-on effect, jamming traffic and stopping citizens from getting to work.

Maxis has also come under fire overnight as more and more users notice pathfinding issues that cause traffic to take logically shorter but actually inefficient, slower routes, citizens who get caught walking in loops, and cars that just shriek and flee when presented with alternate paths.

We’ve embedded a number of the more popular videos below, showing the bemusing pathfinding AI that SimCity players are currently discovering, courtesy of Eurogamer and Rock, Paper, Shotgun.

There’s nothing more contentious than always-online DRM, and especially when it works so badly that users can’t play your game.

Maxis and EA have been working long hours to get SimCity up and running, and defended their decision to require online connectivity by saying “we offload a significant amount of the calculations to our servers so that the computations are off the local PCs and are moved into the cloud”. Now, a Maxis engineer has come forward to say that this isn’t the case at all.

Speaking to Rock, Paper, Shotgun, the Maxis developer claims that “The servers are not handling any of the computation done to simulate the city you are playing. They are still acting as servers, doing some amount of computation to route messages of various types between both players and cities. As well, they’re doing cloud storage of save games, interfacing with Origin, and all of that.”

“But for the game itself? No, they’re not doing anything. I have no idea why they’re claiming otherwise. It’s possible that Bradshaw misunderstood or was misinformed, but otherwise I’m clueless.”

In fact, says the source, “It wouldn’t take very much engineering to give you a limited single-player game without all the nifty region stuff.” This is in direct contrast to Maxis SVP’s Lucy Bradshaw claiming that a “significant amount of engineering work” would be necessary.

Other people are beginning to discover that, in fact, SimCity works just fine offline until the server catches on. Kotaku ran a test today, and Notch as well has observed that you can just keep playing when the servers go down.

It’s unlikely EA or Maxis will respond to these claims, but they demonstrate clearly that not everyone at the company feels the same way about the always-online requirement. Pleasingly though, a server status page has now been added so that you can quickly see if your region is offline or not.

Source: RPS

Maxis’ SVP Lucy Bradshaw has released another update on the status of the game, claiming that crashes are now down 92% from day one. While she was looking to issue the all-clear, apparently the situation still requires monitoring and further adjustment.

“The good news is that tens of thousands of new players are streaming into the game every day and the confidence our fans have shown is truly humbling,” writes Bradshaw. “I can’t begin to explain the way a development team feels when something you’re proud of is threatened at launch. Our biggest fear was that people who love this franchise would be scared off by bad reviews about the connectivity issues.”

“But you put your faith in us. You bought the game with the understanding that we’d quickly fix the server issues. For that support – that incredible commitment from our fans — we are deeply grateful.”

Meanwhile, an additional tweet from the SimCity account has seemingly walked away from yesterday’s comments that they would “look into” an offline in order to regain the trust of players.

“The game was designed for MP,” reads the comment. “We sim the entire region on the server so this is just not possible.”

Source: Blue’s News

In the beginning, it did not bode well for SimCity. My original plan was to dedicate a solid week, at the very least, to taking apart the entire game and focusing on the various new elements that it had introduced.

This plan, however, was dashed — by the very element that I had, on many occasions, defended as a necessary evil of the modern PC age. My enforced, limited experience with the “beta” (more affectionately known as a “demo” by many), lead me to believe that EA had not actually finished up developing the bulk of the multiplayer aspects, and that the few days it was available with a playtime restriction really wasn’t enough to test anything. These thoughts were shared not only by many of my peers, but almost all of the gaming community who had the chance to play.

So it was with a plethora of face-palming that EA’s servers crashed, and crashed like a ton of bricks as soon as the inevitable flood of diehards attempted to rush in at the stroke of midnight. In the new world order of “games as a service”, many developers — including those who run the show at EA — took a look at what happened to Blizzard with Diablo 3 and made exorbitant claims that these issues wouldn’t plague their creation.

They were wrong.

A casualty of its own ambition

It’s been 6 days since the US release of SimCity and I’m sad to say that it has been one of the messiest online game launches I’ve ever seen. I was there when Half-Life 2 wouldn’t authenticate, I was there for WoW‘s queuerific maiden voyage, and I was there when we all moaned and groaned at Borderland‘s region lock. But EA really had to break some legs and dislocate a few shoulders to get things rolling at all — leaderboards were dropped, regional features cut out, and primary game functions were muted or removed altogether. It has only been in the last few hours on Friday afternoon that many of the primary functions have returned while an ounce of stability remained, but problems with recurring errors in regards to save games, or the enormous lag when communicating with other users, still plague every game.

SimCity is a casualty of its own ambitious design, coupled with overpowered DRM that only seems to be included in order to perpetuate the continued existence of Origin. But one myth does need to be dispelled from the very beginning; this is not a single player game. Any ounce of what constituted a pre-2013 SimCity has evolved into something different, which in some cases is a positive, and in others, a negative. For all intents and purposes however, this new SimCity is a multiplayer game through and through — and from the very beginning, your inclusion into a region that could be shared by other players is mandatory, whether you choose to make it public or private. Your assigned lot of land is smaller than you might be used to, and generated in a manner that provides optional incentive to move one way or another, such as an abundance of oil or a particularly strong gust of wind.

I mentioned in my beta preview that I actually enjoyed this feature — and I still do, since much of the strategy that comes out of exploiting this benefit, while creating a metropolis that represents your sensibilities, makes for a much more interesting game. The original titles never attempted to differentiate various geography or natural assets nor use them as a prop for difficulty or cooperation, thus it’s a risky move that pays off well, especially once you realise that developing your city is simply the beginning of your career. A smaller lot of land forces you to be ruthlessly efficient with placement, and the game does well in briefly providing you with overlays that analyse your existing placements to guide you appropriately.

Road placement is everything in SimCity, since it now represents the major arterial for your entire town, from traffic to power, water to sewage. No longer will you struggle with subways, or ridiculously long power poles. The developers have caught up with town planning for this decade and have realized that, like most modern cities, everything already sits underground and follows the roads. This arrangement seems rather basic at first, until the first time you see power and water travelling from the source and through the veins of your streets, visibly and audibly thumping into the homes, businesses and amenities that constitute the backbone of your town. There’s no other word for it — it’s incredible.

Your city is now an autonomous, organic being. While you are still pulling all the strings, your citizens are the ones doing all the hard work. Instead of popping down big squares of R/C/I, you zone the areas you want and the city does the rest. Cheap, diner style restaurants alongside small, 2 bedroom cottage homes are the order of the day at first, while a short distance away features a host of grimy factories that represent the engine room of your burgeoning economy. Before long, a growing population needs a clinic here, a police station there, and all the while you do what mayors (in the US at least) do best — play with tax rates, zone more land, and manage the public purse.

Great engine, awful explanation

How your city grows depends entirely on the vagaries of “density”, which is defined in the game by road grading. Just want a nice little suburban block with BBQs and Tennis Courts? No problem. The same goes for skyscrapers or the middle ground short-story towers in the middle. But density is part of the major, overarching problem with the new GlassBox engine and its real world algorithms — barely any of them make a lot of sense.

A good example is residential zoning — in the beginning of the game, things are simple. Everyone sits within the same income bracket, and they grow wealthier over time. The problem lies with the game’s philosophical definition of class and labor, and its attribution of these factors to density. Why do rich people only want to live in towers? In such a tiny block, why can’t I have high density living for all three types of worker?

The same problem can be attributed to commercial and industrial zoning. Then there’s education, which is even more confusing and random in its mysterious granting of power. The rule of thumb is that educated citizens are wealthier, smarter and healthier, and their presence inspires local industry to become cleaner and more high tech. But occasionally, putting a lot of money and effort into building an educated populace doesn’t always result in this occurring. The point I’m getting at is that SimCity does a brilliant job of advising you in the beginning, and an awful job of explaining its complex algorithms in the late game — especially when they’re so unpredictable.

This lack of explanation becomes even more quixotic when the game, as it stands, is still effectively so broken that you have no idea of the difference between SimCity‘s features and its bugs. Is there a reason my residential indicator never goes down? Or that my populace are still pissed at me for things I fixed ages ago? Or that “germs” (outside of their barebones connection to pollution) are never explained in a manner that offers resolution? This extends to the multiplayer features also, where players can focus on a particular specialization (such as exploiting fossil fuels, playing the trading market, or manufacturing high tech electronics) whilst playing off the strengths of their friends’ in the same region.

But, even in this playing field, is there a reason for the enormous delay in communication? When does my ally “officially” recognize my existence? Can I prevent them from creating agreements with me for rubbish collection or using my educational buildings? The crazy part about all this confusion is that, at the core, much of it works very well and makes for a lot of fun. I like seeing my friend’s city grow alongside mine, or being able to offer them some cash or extra ambulances when a disaster hits. I might have a ton of coal I don’t need, so I can sell it to them for a reduced rate, in exchange for some cheap power during a period where I can’t afford a new plant. At best, these features are fluid and organic, offered in a way that is ridiculously smooth and simple to operate and oversee.

The “connected strategy”

SimCity is, largely, fighting to define the a new future of PC gaming. It’s all of those things publishers love to talk about — it’s “intuitive”, and it’s “social”. It breaks a lot of ground by implementing features other games (Cities XL, primarily) have failed miserably at, by incorporating them into the fundamental game design. But at the same time, Maxis have decided to put a Ferrari engine inside a Suzuki Swift. 2013′s SimCity is arguably the easiest yet to pick up and play without much of a learning curve, but falls over once players actually need to understand or directly control their own experience. The power is there and you can see it in the overwhelming coolness that exudes from every orifice — but it’s clouded, in the end, by some atrocious decisions around DRM.

There have been numerous justifications for this extraordinarily deep and connected internal highway of online paths. The most mentioned explanation by Maxis (other than the self-fulfilling “we designed it as an online game”) is that, due to limitations on many PCs, the complex calculations of the GlassBox engine require cloud computing to accomplish. The other is due to the essential connections to regional and global markets to define supply and demand over commodities. Even if these two reasons are entirely valid for this purpose, why did EA sit back and grow so blase about their launch expectations?

We’ve had over 11 years of MMO launches now, and many of these enormous headaches have been avoided due to developers and publishers taking stock of mistakes that were made by others. EA should have had a proper beta, one that lasted longer than 3 days and did not limit players to hour-long sessions. I said this then and I have been repeating this now, in the hope that the next inevitable evolution of some other genre into this realm of constant connectivity takes note — you can’t simply bang up a couple of medium-sized boxes and hope for the best. In 2013, this sort of collapse is completely unacceptable and gamers won’t sit back to give you the benefit of the doubt anymore.

Should you buy SimCity? The short answer is yes — but not now. Try again in about two weeks time, and don’t put up with EA’s price-gouging for Australians if you can avoid it. The dust still hasn’t settled on the server implosions of March 5-9, and many of the game’s core features are MIA. But there’s something here that still managed to draw me in for hours at a time. Maxis’ new GlassBox engine is easily the best example of what Will Wright attempted to demonstrate with the original SimCity — that you could make an entity that has a mind entirely of its own, over which you are only the guiding hand. Whether your city flourishes or fails is based on your relationship with the citizens you lead.

The same could be said about the ultimate success of this game and its inevitable sequels — so, will you listen to us, EA?

Good:

• The GlassBox engine is phenomenal
• The regional system is a great idea (when and if it works)
• Forced specialization creates interesting challenges

Bad

• Complete failure to anticipate demand
• DRM that actively proves why DRM is awful
• Much of the advanced GlassBox features aren’t explained or seemingly even working

One of the most-demanded features following on from SimCity‘s fairly abysmal launch (analysed in detail here) has been the return of offline mode. Although it’s not going to happen anytime soon, Maxis have confirmed via their official Twitter feed that they’re looking into it.

“We have no intention of offlining SimCity any time soon,” reads the tweet, “but we’ll look into that as part of our earning back your trust efforts.”

Public relations around the launch have been unusually honest and frank, with Maxis General Manager Lucy Bradshaw taking full responsibility for the issues that have plagued the game.

“I’d like to say it’s not fair that the game’s score should be punished for a server problem,” she explained to her staff in an internal memo obtained by Polygon. “But it is fair.”

“SimCity is an online game, and critics and consumers have every right to expect a smooth experience from beginning to end. I and the Maxis team take full responsibility to deliver on our promise. Trust that we’re working as hard as possible to make sure everyone gets to experience the amazing game we built in SimCity.”

In a new blog update posted over the weekend, Bradshaw also estimates that server response time has increased by 40x as they continue to build capacity, and certainly many Australians now appear to be able to play without interruption — although not all game features have yet been returned to life.

To apologise and compensate for SimCity’s tremendously troubled launch, EA has decided to offer a free game to everyone who purchased Maxis’s latest effort. According to an emailed statement, if you’ve activated a copy, you’ll be emailed with instructions on how to redeem your free game, which will become available on March 18.

“I know that’s a little contrived – kind of like buying a present for a friend after you did something crummy, but we feel bad about what happened. We’re hoping you won’t stay mad and that we’ll be friends again when SimCity is running at 100%,” Maxis head Lucy Bradshaw said. She went on to say the experience has improved dramatically over the last few days.

“A lot more people logged on than we expected. More people played and played in ways we never saw in the beta. OK, we agree, that was dumb,” she added.

Meanwhile, in an interview with Polygon, Bradshaw confirmed EA has requested marketing affiliates cease all promotion of the game.

SimCity’s launch isn’t going very well.

Far from the smoother European and Australian launch EA were hoping for, things have actually gotten worse. In fact, they’ve begun disabling “non-critical gameplay features” in an effort to bring their servers back under control — even taking the somewhat extraordinary step of disabling the game’s highest speed setting in the latest patch. Amazon has thrown them a vote of no confidence and is actively warning users of persistent problems with the game.

EA and Maxis are working hard. They’re working around the clock. And, eventually, they’ll get it under control. But in the meantime, hundreds of thousands of users are outraged about a game they can’t play.

What does this mean for gamers? And what does it mean for those of us who write about the games they play?

Who even understands numbers

Many games sites, including this one, were offered access to a review event where SimCity could be played in a controlled environment prior to launch. Many sites (although not this one, for reasons detailed here) published their reviews based on these events or, in some cases, on additional playtime on specific dedicated review servers. Some sites waited, played on the live servers — or tried to! — and then published their reviews. That’s fine — after all, what other options are there?

High-profile site Polygon initially gave the game a glowing 9.5 out of 10. Then, they knocked it down to 8. Then, they knocked it down to 4. There’s a collective gasp from the crowd. A four out of ten! That’s a genuinely bad score! That ain’t no seven.

No. It’s not. And it doesn’t matter, because Metacritic — which is the only reason publishers actually care about review scores — never alters a score, once it’s been published. So the Metacritic entry for SimCity from Polygon still stands at ‘95’. In fact, according to Metacritic, the critical consensus is sitting at a nice, healthy, 81. The servers could catch fire tomorrow, EA could shut down the servers, fire everyone at Maxis and flood the entire office with venomous snakes, and the Metacritic score would remain unchanged forever. Bonuses for everybody! Or not, as the case may be.

Meanwhile, the average user score is 1.7. Out of ten. Is anybody surprised?

It is broke, but can we fix it

We ditched review scores nearly a year ago here at games.on.net, for a number of reasons, one of which was of course that situations like this prove what we have felt for a long time: that review scores are utterly meaningless — especially when the independent third-party that collates them doesn’t even think they’re meaningful enough to bother keeping track of.

Games are changing from a product to a service, and this has been true for a long time. What SimCity shows us that attempting to apply the review model a service is at best difficult, and at worst impossible. In the review event, the service works! 9/10. On days one through fifteen, it’s broken. 4/10. On day twenty, everything is stable but it’s still missing features. 8/10.

When does it end? Are you going to keep updating your review for every major patch? Is this a score for the game as it should be, or for the game as you want it to be, or the game that it could be if only it worked?

As Tom Chick over at Quarter to Three puts it, “anyone who has reviewed it favorably at this point is reviewing it entirely on its promise.”

“If that’s how you want to evaluate games, have at it. There is pretty much no reason any game shouldn’t get a stellar review. The industry should be grateful for your enthusiasm.”

Harsh words. But, at the end, reviews are consumer advice for people who buy games, and it’s fair to say that consumer advice shouldn’t be based on promise. And with the entire model of buying and returning is changing, what does it all even mean?

Nowhere to turn

As Australian PC gamers, we often look to CD key sites to help us in our hour of need. Such is the volume of chaos brought about by this launch, however, that even key sites have been sucked into the mess. CJ’s CD-Keys, a popular key retailer, has offered free refunds and exchanges after all the CD keys they were supplied with turned out to be Russian language only. Their Facebook page is a PR nightmare, littered with angry complaints and shrieking demands from customers to see the key they forked over for.

Meanwhile, customers who do have keys and turn to EA for a refund are being told that Origin, in general, does not offer refunds on digital download games (unless you’re in the EU, where it’s mandatory). So you buy a game that doesn’t work (yet) and then if you change your mind and want your money back, well, you can’t. Unless you purchased it through a physical store, apparently — but good luck trying to convince EB Games to give you a refund on a game you’ve already redeemed to your Origin account.

(That said, the stories you’ve probably seen about EA banning people who ask for refunds are, flatly, untrue. Mr. Mark Serrels over at Kotaku Australia has written in-depth about whether or not Australians can demand refunds, and that’s worth reading too.)

The end

It’s in the interest of games publishers — if they’re confident in their product — to get reviews out early, to encourage more pre-orders. If on the other hand they’re not confident in their product, reviews will often be delayed as much as possible to ensure that any existing pre-orders aren’t cancelled, and people don’t have a chance to read it before they hit the shops.

EA were confident in their product. They had no reason not to be. But they vastly underestimated just how good a job they’d done in marketing it, and they didn’t learn from mistakes of other high-profile titles which also suffered launch woes.

Within 48 hours, Diablo III had sorted out nearly all of their problems. 48 hours on, SimCity’s actively appear to be getting worse.

The difference, one might argue, is that Blizzard have experience launching MMOs and Maxis do not. But the end user doesn’t care about that. The end user just knows that they’ve paid money for something they can’t use, money that they can’t get back. They shouldn’t have to wait and see, and they shouldn’t have to keep an eye on reviews and hope — hope! — that those reviews update to reflect the latest service status.

In an ideal world, Origin would have allowed pre-loading, to keep the server traffic at a minimum on launch day. Beta tests would have gone for longer than 24 hours at a pop, and actually allowed users to try out the multiplayer features that are, supposedly, the key to Maxis’ new approach and, apparently, the number one cause of the current problems. Server capacity would have been scaled up hugely for launch, to handle that demand — or, hell, maybe even the drastic step of delaying the European and Australian launches could have been taken.

This is a bad situation, and it doesn’t appear to be getting any better. It remains to be seen whether EA will take any lasting PR damage from it all, but one thing is clear: situations like this do nothing, nothing at all, to convince consumers that always-online DRM and un-refundable digital download policies are acceptable.

Waving your hand and saying “It’ll all go away in a few days” or “online games are always a fustercluck at launch” isn’t an answer, and it ignores the very reasonable expectation that products paid for should actually work. We don’t have any answers, and certainly I don’t have any grand solution. But this is another straw on the back of the camel, and is a huge, huge missed opportunity on EA’s part to reassure people that always-online DRM needn’t impact their gaming lives.

Three months from now, when the financial year ends and we get a look at EA’s investor reports, we’ll have a better picture of whether or not any of this was more than a blip on the radar.