Sim City

humanji

Reekwind wrote: »

But it's not an MMO; that's the point. The core gameplay, unlike WOW, remains the same old city-building as it always has been. Adding in a spot of online trading does not in any way change this. We have to get away from the idea that this is a multiplayer game or an MMO; it's a singleplayer game (with a multiplayer option) that must be played online. And that's the problem

The Devs' excuses are, as you note, rubbish but we shouldn't let them change the definition of what a multiplayer game actually is

But they're not trying to change the definition of multiplayer. They're trying to change how SimCity is played. They've designed a game for people to play together. That's the one thing they've been going on about since they first announced the game. Playing on your own means that you have to fill the role that other players would, by building other cities in your region. So it's still multiplayer, just with one person doing more work.

Sephiroth_dude

Sofiztikated wrote: »

4 doesn't have the random encounters (aliens/earthquakes/etc) that 3000 did. I know you can go into god mode, and turn them on, but expecting them takes the "F**KF**KF**KF**KF**KF**K" out of it.

That sounds awesome,I wonder if the new one will have random encounters again.

ShaneU

Soby wrote: »

Or http://www.amazon.co.uk/SimCity-Limited-Edition-PC-DVD/dp/B007HLNLZ6/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1361259350&sr=8-1 :P - works out to 40 euro

have to wait for delivery though

VinLieger

ShaneU wrote: »

have to wait for delivery though

Saving 10-15 quid is worth a small wait

TheDoc

Why is this thread nothing but talk of DRM and online requirement?

Can we get some chatter going about the game.

Its an online persistent environment, where you connect and trade with other cities, so yeah, you need to be online for it. If you want the single player experience you can get Sim city 4, this isn't a single player game.

dazftw

Probably going to pick up my copy here: http://www.cjs-cdkeys.com/products/SimCity-Limited-Edition-CD-Key-for-Origin.html?setCurrencyId=3

€37 is decent enough. I've bought BF3 and 2 copies of premium on here legit.

cherryghost

TheDoc wrote: »

Why is this thread nothing but talk of DRM and online requirement?

Can we get some chatter going about the game.

Its an online persistent environment, where you connect and trade with other cities, so yeah, you need to be online for it. If you want the single player experience you can get Sim city 4, this isn't a single player game.

Because there's already a decent chat thread on the Strategy forum and another one on The Sims forum

Reekwind

semper fi or dye wrote: »

Sim City is using a glassbox engine which replicates almost every transation in the game, ie.. Each lump of coal is actually mines, processed, shipped, sold and burned. Each person wakes, drives to work, goes to the shops etc etc. This requires massive processing power. You need to be online to connect to ea servers which will do a lot of this processing for you

I would be amazed if Maxis have a couple of supercomputers chugging away in New Mexico doing work that is beyond the capability of local processors. It's possible but I highly doubt it. Not least because all you'd be doing is shifting the bottleneck from the local computer to the internet connection. This is why the likes of Gaikai have failed: doing the computational heavy lifting remotely rarely produces a smooth game experience

humanji wrote:

But they're not trying to change the definition of multiplayer. They're trying to change how SimCity is played. They've designed a game for people to play together

I can play Civ 5 with other people but that doesn't make it a multiplayer game. It makes it a primarily singleplayer game with multiplayer options

The reality is that the new Sim City will have a singleplayer mode. It will be possible to play solo without any other people. All you will miss by doing so is having other cities in your region and (perhaps) having prices calculated in a different way. The rest of the Sim City experience (you know, the actual building of a city) will remain unchanged. Yet this is supposed to be a multiplayer game?

Is Civ 5 a multiplayer game? Does Far Cry demand always-online DRM to play the singleplayer campaign? Rhetorical questions. Even UT didn't demand that you be online to play with bots

What we have here is a cynical attempt to shift singleplayer content online, as an intrusive DRM measure, under the guise of it being a 'multiplayer game'. And that's a worrying erosion. What if the next Civ game is suddenly classified as multiplayer-only (because you have the option of playing with others) and thus demands a permanent internet connection?

gizmo

Reekwind wrote: »

I would be amazed if Maxis have a couple of supercomputers chugging away in New Mexico doing work that is beyond the capability of local processors. It's possible but I highly doubt it. Not least because all you'd be doing is shifting the bottleneck from the local computer to the internet connection. This is why the likes of Gaikai have failed: doing the computational heavy lifting remotely rarely produces a smooth game experience

If Gaikai was a failure then Sony wouldn't have bought them for $380m. At worst they were a little ahead of time but as I said above, we'll see what they do with them for the PS4.

As for how it applies here, well again the connection with the EA servers is asynchronous so, unlike those streaming services, a constant connection and thus flow of data isn't required. The data being sent over this connection would also be considerably less than that required by Gaikai/OnLive as it's just the output of the computations for the in-game systems that's needed.

Myrddin

If its nothing to do with cloud processing, I'd expect it cracked with an offline patch within a week of release like 99% of other similar examples. All that happens is it makes a pirated version a better experience if there's server/internet issues for the legit user.

If it is true about cloud processing, the game will effectively be useless if & when they drop support for it. Being a collector of games as much as a gamer, this is a big no for me.

Grumpypants

There is more to worry about than an online connection. How about no water pipe network, power, or sewage. It all automatically runs through the road network. The road network stops you putting junctions close to each other so you can't make mistakes and create bottlenecks. Zoning is free, no more light, medium or heavy. You now increase the value of the area by building parks etc. (although this might still work if it's linked to infrastructure not just looking pretty). Far more interaction with the sims living in the city. At times it seems like it's "the sims" city builder rather than a city simulator like the old sim city.

I will spend a lot of time with it but I worry about it too.

meoklmrk91

I'm not going to buy this right away as I had planned, simply because I have a pretty crappy Internet connection and want to see how it pans out for other users before I go spending cash on something that may not even work for me

maggy_thatcher

meoklmrk91 wrote: »

I'm not going to buy this right away as I had planned, simply because I have a pretty crappy Internet connection and want to see how it pans out for other users before I go spending cash on something that may not even work for me

You won't be buying it at all. If you do decide to get it, you're only leasing it (with no minimum time agreement), as they can decide to turn off the server at any time.

meoklmrk91

maggy_thatcher wrote: »

You won't be buying it at all. If you do decide to get it, you're only leasing it (with no minimum time agreement), as they can decide to turn off the server at any time.

Sure but I expect a crack within a week of release.

humanji

Reekwind wrote: »

I can play Civ 5 with other people but that doesn't make it a multiplayer game. It makes it a primarily singleplayer game with multiplayer options

If you were meant to control several civilisations in Civ 5 at the same time, then the comparison could be made. In SimCity you get to specialise your city after a while. So if you decide to go for the gambling specialisation, then you're reliant on other cities to get things like coal or electronics or an educated workforce. The cities are too small to do all of this.

So you can either play with other players, as Maxis want people to do, or you end up having to build several cities and run them all, logging in and out of each game as you have to make adjustments to help the others.

It's a moronic system, but it's what they've said they were doing all along.

maggy_thatcher wrote: »

You won't be buying it at all. If you do decide to get it, you're only leasing it (with no minimum time agreement), as they can decide to turn off the server at any time.

Like Steam?

maggy_thatcher

humanji wrote: »

Like Steam?

Almost, though at least with Steam you can set it up to play games without an internet connection; and if/when they decide to shut down the service it would still be feasible to crack a lot of the games to continue playing. With the new SimCity game, by moving some of the game logic onto the servers, they're dependent directly on those servers being up and running 100% of the time for all eternity, unless the "crack" includes adding whatever the extra game logic is.

Reekwind

gizmo wrote: »

If Gaikai was a failure then Sony wouldn't have bought them for $380m. At worst they were a little ahead of time but as I said above, we'll see what they do with them for the PS4

Sorry, I was thinking of OnLive. Either way, cloud gaming has not set the world on fire and there's little to suggest that it will do so in the future. No more than Network PCs did in the 1990s. Again, Valve is backing away from this for a reason

(On your actual point on Sony's purchase, how much did News Corp pay for MySpace?)

As for how it applies here, well again the connection with the EA servers is asynchronous so, unlike those streaming services, a constant connection and thus flow of data isn't required. The data being sent over this connection would also be considerably less than that required by Gaikai/OnLive as it's just the output of the computations for the in-game systems that's needed.

Which would contradict the assertion made above that the reason for the always-online is to ease the computational load on the PC by doing this "massive processing" remotely

humanji wrote:

If you were meant to control several civilisations in Civ 5 at the same time, then the comparison could be made. In SimCity you get to specialise your city after a while. So if you decide to go for the gambling specialisation, then you're reliant on other cities to get things like coal or electronics or an educated workforce. The cities are too small to do all of this.

So it's co-op then. Replace Civ 5 with, say, Borderlands 2 in my above analogy. You could tackle a map with one character, or you could play with friends in co-op mode

The key point is that you can; both play styles are optional. Not everyone who buys this game (or even, I'd suggest, the majority) will site a city in a multiplayer region. And nor will they have to. They won't have to specialise to that degree if they don't want to. If they do, well, everyone will end up founding several cities anyway. That's how Sim City 4 worked and that's how most games work - there are singleplayer and multiplayer options

What is new is this insistence that merely having the option to play with friends makes this a multiplayer game. But I've said a lot on that already. What I will say is that if this was only about encouraging people to play with others then there would be no reason why the game could not include an offline mode; that is pure DRM

gizmo

Reekwind wrote: »

Sorry, I was thinking of OnLive. Either way, cloud gaming has not set the world on fire and there's little to suggest that it will do so in the future. No more than Network PCs did in the 1990s. Again, Valve is backing away from this for a reason

(On your actual point on Sony's purchase, how much did News Corp pay for MySpace?)

This is actually a perfect example of what I was talking about before. It's a case of technology vs. implementation. The theory behind the streaming tech is a sound one, OnLive's implementation (and business model for that matter) was not. If Sony were to offer streamed PS3 games on the PS4 via Gaikai then it would gain an immediate advantage over the 720 by bringing a larger catalogue / backwards-compatabilty to the next-gen. Similarly Ubisoft screwed up with their always-on DRM in Silent Hunter et al and then replaced it with the UPlay system which is more similar to Steam and as a result, palatable to more gamers. Hell, the mere fact that people decry DRM yet almost idolise Steam, which is in itself a massive DRM platform, demonstrates this perfectly.

Anyway, back to Sim City...

Reekwind wrote: »

Which would contradict the assertion made above that the reason for the always-online is to ease the computational load on the PC by doing this "massive processing" remotely

Not really, given the data being processed it wouldn't need to be received in real time.

As for the rest of your points, I should probably mention that I actually agree with them to a point. Yes, it would be nice if there was an option for fully offline play but the theory behind moving certain calculations server-side makes sense, as do the gameplay benefits from the kind of persistent shared world they're talking about, should you want them of course. Given the costs involved in developing and maintaining those systems though, I just don't find it wholly unreasonable that they would design the game around them rather than both it and (possibly) more simplified local systems for offline play. As a result, I just don't subscribe to the, imo, overly simplified view that they want to all of this effort just to eliminate piracy via the always-on connection.

humanji

Reekwind wrote: »

So it's co-op then. Replace Civ 5 with, say, Borderlands 2 in my above analogy. You could tackle a map with one character, or you could play with friends in co-op mode

The key point is that you can; both play styles are optional. Not everyone who buys this game (or even, I'd suggest, the majority) will site a city in a multiplayer region. And nor will they have to. They won't have to specialise to that degree if they don't want to. If they do, well, everyone will end up founding several cities anyway. That's how Sim City 4 worked and that's how most games work - there are singleplayer and multiplayer options

What is new is this insistence that merely having the option to play with friends makes this a multiplayer game. But I've said a lot on that already. What I will say is that if this was only about encouraging people to play with others then there would be no reason why the game could not include an offline mode; that is pure DRM

But it's not a singleplayer game with a multiplayer option. It's a multiplayer game with a singleplayer option. The way it's described is more akin to having a private server that you decide not to let other players play on.

The game is designed so that no one city can completely provide all the needs of it's citizens. The specialisations that I mentioned above, aren't self chosen to the extent that you can add a casino here and an oil rig there. You have to select a specific option and go 100% towards that selected specialty. It wasn't available in the beta, so I'm a little worried about how that'll work.

Maxis are trying something incredibly ambitious in having a player created economy spanning every single person who plays the game. To be honest, I assume it'll go tits up fairly quickly. And it goes with the foolish assumption that the majority of players will have reliably continuous connections. No doubt EA are rubbing their hands with glee at the thought of no lost sales due to always being online, but this is more a happy side effect for them.

As I said before, it really should have been called SimCity Online.

maggy_thatcher

humanji wrote: »

But it's not a singleplayer game with a multiplayer option. It's a multiplayer game with a singleplayer option. The way it's described is more akin to having a private server that you decide not to let other players play on.

The game is designed so that no one city can completely provide all the needs of it's citizens. The specialisations that I mentioned above, aren't self chosen to the extent that you can add a casino here and an oil rig there. You have to select a specific option and go 100% towards that selected specialty. It wasn't available in the beta, so I'm a little worried about how that'll work.

Maxis are trying something incredibly ambitious in having a player created economy spanning every single person who plays the game. To be honest, I assume it'll go tits up fairly quickly. And it goes with the foolish assumption that the majority of players will have reliably continuous connections. No doubt EA are rubbing their hands with glee at the thought of no lost sales due to always being online, but this is more a happy side effect for them.

As I said before, it really should have been called SimCity Online.

So it's not really Sim City then, more like Sim District? A real city doesn't "specialize" in one thing, districts within a city do (and then over time their "specialty" changes, and the city evolves along).

humanji

maggy_thatcher wrote: »

So it's not really Sim City then, more like Sim District? A real city doesn't "specialize" in one thing, districts within a city do (and then over time their "specialty" changes, and the city evolves along).

Pretty much. Now again, this is all what I got from the beta, so things may change and there may have been hidden unlocks that I haven't heard of. But it's a really small area.

Here's the first in a series of youtube vids from the beta, so you can get an idea for yourself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6DvleqnyDU

As you can see, the map isn't that big and it's very "The Sims 3" in style. It still has a lot of the depth of the old SimCities, but it just doesn't feel the same. And I don't know how much is going to change when the full game is available.

nesf

humanji wrote: »

Pretty much. Now again, this is all what I got from the beta, so things may change and there may have been hidden unlocks that I haven't heard of. But it's a really small area.

I'd heard it was small but I hadn't watched any gameplay videos yet.

VinLieger

Watched all those videos humanji posted, cant wait to build a crime ridden gambling mecca.

Sephiroth_dude

http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2013/02/22/what-does-will-wright-think-of-the-new-simcity.aspx

Kiith

Surely the map in the gameplay video is only the tutorial (i.e. tiny portion of the actual map)? Cause if that's the size of all the cities, then **** that. Way too small.

nesf

Kiith wrote: »

Surely the map in the gameplay video is only the tutorial (i.e. tiny portion of the actual map)? Cause if that's the size of all the cities, then **** that. Way too small.

In another video he's doing a "free play" and it's the same size. Honestly, I would be astounded if that was the only map size. It would go so far against the grain of previous games that even the extreme cynic in me thinks there are bigger map sizes.

Kiith

Yeah, i can only imagine it's all they've released for the beta version. Easier to bug test a smaller city, and they'll release larger maps as it goes on. It can't be that small. It would make no sense, as the best thing about previous game was making massive interconnected cities. There better be the option to have massive maps filled with cities.

If it is that small, they may as rename it Sim Suburban Village.

ShaneU

They have interconnected cities in this too

nesf

My big worry Kiith is these bigger maps being DLC packs. Ditto an expanded transport network (infrastructure being my favourite part of Sim City 4, build a big city and then try to get the transport system perfect).

Kiith

nesf wrote: »

My big worry Kiith is these bigger maps being DLC packs. Ditto an expanded transport network (infrastructure being my favourite part of Sim City 4, build a big city and then try to get the transport system perfect).

If that is the plan, then that'll be the final straw regarding dlc for me. You can't take the core features of the game, remove them, and then add them as dlc at a later date. It would put any other bad dlc to shame, and would be an absolute disgrace.

I can only hope it's not the case.