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.”

(more…)

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.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

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

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 when it works, it’s still got that spark of magic to get you engrossed for hours at a time — even if that time is two weeks from now, when everything is hopefully actually 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 they 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?