SimCity V

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S13_love
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~2,700 one star reviews, and counting. :eekdance
MinisterofDOOM wrote: As they should be! If publishers are going to force "services" and online connectivity on games, those services should be reviewed as the components of the game experience that they are. If EA won't let us play a game without Origin, we shouldn't let it be reviewed without Origin, either. This goes for U-Play, GFWL, and all other "feature-added online services" that restrict how I user my game. I hate to appear biased, but even Steamplay-enabled Steam games can be played offline.
Oh, I definitely agree with you... I guess what I was trying to get at is even if Sim City was DRM free, the game itself is a huge disappointment, imo.

For instance:
(this is what I've read from various posts online)

The population of your city, if you want a well-tuned one, will max at around 200-300K.

The size of the maps is a complete joke.

You can't do any terraforming or control natural disasters.

Etc.

...but yeah above all, having to be online in order to play a single-player game is absolutely absurd. In addition, to me at least, Maxis (like Bioware) appears to have made a pathetic attempt to shoehorn multi-player into single-player. :squint:
Last edited by S13_love on Fri Mar 08, 2013 7:27 pm, edited 1 time in total.


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alms24sebring
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Wow. Really upset at such bad reviews. Ill just stay on Sim City 4 (That I keep going broke on :( )

Phatman
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Back from the dead.

I bought it. Yeah, a lot of things are different from 2K and all that. I grew up on the DOS based SimCity where you needed a book to look up something to play a game.

Disasters can now be turned off. Theres an addon that allows the city to build upwards, but since it follows the DLC traditions, you have to buy it. Population makes no sense, zoning demand can take off in stupid ways. You can have a 120k citizens but there's not enough workers, yet the citizens can't find work. Watching the SimCity posts on Google+ are hysterical. They talk about new updates, media, etc and all you see is people complaining about whats been brought up here.

Still no chance of offline play, etc. I'll still play it for hours on end, but it does get infuriating.

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MinisterofDOOM
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Lack of offline frustrates me more these days because I live somewhere with unreliable internet. Diablo III will become unplayable in singleplayer mode because of latency. I don't even know where to begin with that last sentence.
Phatman wrote:Back from the dead.

I bought it. Yeah, a lot of things are different from 2K and all that. I grew up on the DOS based SimCity where you needed a book to look up something to play a game.
I did, too. I still have it, with the original box. But I lost the little red book with the "DRM" codes so I can't play it.

Phatman
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That's awesome that you still have it. Dad also had the Super Nintendo one as well. Man those were good times.

Phatman
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So I hopped onto Google+ (don't hate) and discovered that offline mode for this here fancy pants game will be available soon. ^-^

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MinisterofDOOM
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Awesome! Fantastic news! We're making progress.

Now if only inanely-stubborn Blizzard would get rid of always-online for Diablo so I can play singleplayer in the middle of effing nowhere (where I happen to, you know, live) without lagging out of my OWN SINGLEPLAYER SESSION.

Phatman
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Amen brother! Oh wait, I live in the city. :P

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Hijacker
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MinisterofDOOM wrote:Awesome! Fantastic news! We're making progress.

Now if only inanely-stubborn Blizzard would get rid of always-online for Diablo so I can play singleplayer in the middle of effing nowhere (where I happen to, you know, live) without lagging out of my OWN SINGLEPLAYER SESSION.
Not gonna happen. They pulled the RMAH, which I always believed to be the root of the always on disaster (force them on, they're more likely to purchase crap on the AH). But even with removed the RMAH, Blizz has stood fast on its always-on requirement. I think that it would be a serious code overhaul on their part to remove the internet requirement as I"m sure they house a lot of scripting server side like they do for WoW. I've done some WoW emulation in the past, and it's staggering what's housed server side and even though you can trick the client with an emulator, you still miss a ton of scripted events with the minimal recreation of the game world. I'd look into seeing if any progress has been made on creating an offline emulator for D3, but I don't own the game and don't have the care/drive to do even some rudimentary research into the matter anymore.

As for SimCity, it was evident from Day 1 that the internet requirement was a forced service that was tertiary to gameplay. Modders took the game offline early on while Maxis kept insisting it would take a massive coding effort to do so. None of the cloud features that were harolded by the devs actually exist in game, and the fiasco was so horrible, a lot of senior staff left the company in the wake of the launch. Very quietly I might add. I don't know why Maxis is dragging its heels on implementing offline mode since a bunch of guys already did it in their spare time /shrug.

Phatman
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I think EA had more of a say in offline mode than Maxis honestly. And to say the servers were needed to sim the region is ridiculous. I don't have more money in my pocket when I resume a game. :P

Anywhore. The Cities of Tomorrow pack is half off, for now. I grabbed it last night. So far, from what I've seen, a well worth picture. There is a power amplifier you can research for solar/wind and it makes a huge difference on output. I was struggling with a current city with power and once I put the academy in place and did the research, I've got something like 1.2k Megawatts available. :O

There's also things for pollution reduction from the industry, utilities stuff and what not. I only got about 20ish minutes in last night as I had to reinstall 3 different times, plus multiple failed attempts of recovery due to some credentials issue with the game that made no sense. I'll have to dive into more when I get a chance.


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