Sim City

the_syco

I wonder how the pirate release will fare, esp as EA claims those pesky servers are needed so much?

Kirby

the_syco wrote: »

I wonder how the pirate release will fare, esp as EA claims those pesky servers are needed so much?

Pirate release will reveal nothing new. It was proven a couple days after release that the servers cloud computing was doing exactly nothing. It was a single line of code that made sure you got disconnected after 20 minutes. If you deleted that line, you could play forever offline with zero downside.

As per usual, it was just lies and marketing bullsh*t.

the_syco

Kirby wrote: »

As per usual, it was just lies and marketing bullsh*t.

Seems I forgot the smilie :P

Anyhoos, won't be touching it, as it still uses Origin. Yes, I have a legit copy, but can't play it due to stupid server problems any time I try.

Mc Love

Not going to play it until the city size is increased (if ever)

Laviski

ok guys EA have reduced the price until the 20th of june
digital deluxe is at €60
regular is at €40

those that played it recently can you tell me most of the game breaking bugs gone? i think i can deal with the small space to build but wanna know if traffic etc is fixed?

I defo won't pay full price for this game so its either now or wait till xmas for the half price.

Wossack

not worth it at 40e imo

(think I paid that for it 2-3 months ago iirc)

Azza

G2Play have it on sale for €31.99 at the moment I see.

Laviski

any thoughts on the expansion content?

Slutmonkey57b

I wouldn't buy it or play it at any price, given the lies of the developers and the disastrous product delivered to date.

Laviski

Slutmonkey57b wrote: »

I wouldn't buy it or play it at any price, given the lies of the developers and the disastrous product delivered to date.

that is true but love sim city.
but i will not pay full price for the reasons mentioned. however 32e is a bit more realistic price for the game. I defo thinks its worth 20e hence the price i expect it to be at near xmas for a sale. but do i want to wait that long....

Slutmonkey57b

I love Sim City too. I even spent hours recreating Sim City 2000 icons on a mac by hand. But I'll never buy this pile of crap because it's not Sim City, and neither should you.

cherryghost

15 euro and I may be interested. Because it just feels like a 1/3 finished game. Sure it's got polish but in the end it's lacking a lot of features Sim City fans have come to expect.

Morpork

This is the only game I've bought were I actually felt like I'd been robbed.
My gf plays it from time to time and complains to me all the time about it.

Don't buy.

nesf

Laviski wrote: »

that is true but love sim city.

That'll be your problem. The simulation is far shallower than previous iterations if you were into that side of it. The plot is tiny so you can't do the big sprawling metropolis that you could in SC4. The bugs and whatnot you could get over but it's hard if either two of the above are important to you to recommend this game basically ever without some very large changes to it that don't seem to be happening.

I think this is the first time that I've wanted to see a game flop badly and die in the after-release period and people to lose jobs over, preferable the EA execs heading this and the development/design leads. Unfortunately The Sims will mean Maxis continues to exist in some form or another. Pity.

Mc Love

Really feel robbed by this and if i knew now what I did back when I bought I wouldnt have taken it off EA's hands for free. The city size is just too small

wyrn

I actually got this free and I had awful trouble getting it to work. I had to download it three times to no avail. I updated my drivers, went through a whole checklist only to discover it's a well known issue. I eventually got it to work after hours. I just gave up and haven't tried it since. After the tutorial it started making noises about not being able to find the server, so I just dumped it.

It's a huge let down. I've always been a fan of the Sim franchise ever since Sim Copter. I doubt I'll ever go near another Sim City. Going to dig out my old copies. It's the same with Red Alert, hated RA3, ended up reloaded RA and RA2 instead.

Dcully

I find it hard to believe people are only seeing how much of a fail this is now and not months ago like the rest of us.

Azza

People should always be able to discover things for themselves, there tastes might not align with your own. The game is working as advertised now so the game can be at least judge on its own merits and not on the connection issues.

Shiminay

is it actually working? I may take a look at it tonight so.

the_syco

For all the haters; http://www.gog.com/gamecard/simcity_2000_special_edition has been released, and it works on Windows 7

Azza

Apparently that's the inferior dos version not the Windows 95 version which is mean't to be significantly better.

Dcully

Azza wrote: »

People should always be able to discover things for themselves, there tastes might not align with your own. The game is working as advertised now so the game can be at least judge on its own merits and not on the connection issues.

lol ofcourse people should be able to discover things for themselves.
Stating the obvious there mate.

nesf

Azza wrote: »

People should always be able to discover things for themselves, there tastes might not align with your own. The game is working as advertised now so the game can be at least judge on its own merits and not on the connection issues.

If it's working as advertised agent behaviour will now be very different with agents responding to job calls sent out by the workplaces not agents making a bee-line for the nearest open job. Has this happened? It would actually make for a massive improvement.

Azza

nesf wrote:

If it's working as advertised agent behavior will now be very different with agents responding to job calls sent out by the workplaces not agents making a bee-line for the nearest open job. Has this happened? It would actually make for a massive improvement.

Agents making a bee-line for the nearest open job is what they advertised, they said that was how it was going to work in one of the first if not the first pre-release video. But its seems no one got the message as alot of people where expecting it to be different.

nesf

Azza wrote: »

Agents making a bee-line for the nearest open job is what they advertised, they said that was how it was going to work in one of the first if not the first pre-release video. But its seems no one got the message as alot of people where expecting it to be different.

Do I have to go hunt down the video of one of their developers showing us the agent model and the signals being sent out from the factory down the road to find a house which resulted in a worker leaving and heading for that exact factory?

Actually here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxTcm1YFKcU

Azza

nesf wrote:

Do I have to go hunt down the video of one of their developers showing us the agent model and the signals being sent out from the factory down the road to find a house which resulted in a worker leaving and heading for that exact factory?

That doesn't happen in that video, it show what I said they advertised in my previous post. At 1.07 he states the cars (which contain the sims) are going to travel to the first available job.

There is no exact job request going from one exact factory to one specific house and one specific sim. All the factors send out a request and the sims fill them on a first come first serve basis.

nesf

Azza wrote: »

That doesn't happen in that video, it show what I said they advertised in my previous post. At 1.07 he states the cars (which contain the sims) are going to travel to the first available job.

There is no exact job request going from one exact factory to one specific house and one specific sim. All the factors send out a request and the sims fill them on a first come first serve basis.

You're correct, I apologise, I attributed some degree of intelligence to the designers, my error.

Kirby

Azza wrote: »

That doesn't happen in that video, it show what I said they advertised in my previous post. At 1.07 he states the cars (which contain the sims) are going to travel to the first available job.

There is no exact job request going from one exact factory to one specific house and one specific sim. All the factors send out a request and the sims fill them on a first come first serve basis.

While this is technically accurate, it's also very misleading. I, and many others, took that to mean that an unemployed sim would go to the nearest available job. But that once he had that nearest available job, that sim or agent would keep going back to it.....not that he would pick a random job every day and it wasn't tracked or didn't matter in anyway what his class, status, or education dictated.

I watched nearly every developer video in the lead up to the game and they used this terminology a lot. Whether it was intentional or not, they never flat out said the whole truth here. When people hear "nearest available job", they assume it's because in the demo that the the town is brand new which it always is in demo's and everyone is unemployed. They never told us that employed sims would just go the the nearest random job each morning. I'd love to hear a developer diary saying that.

It's just sneaky PR speak Azza. You can't blame them really, everyone does it, but this sort of stuff that you heard pre-release wasn't accurate. Just like the claim about always on being built into the game and being unable to be removed. Which was a lie. And the cloud doing complex computations that the game couldn't run without. Which was another lie. And the game having no single player because it couldn't function without the online component. Which was another lie.

People just feel burned by the game man. Even months later. If they were upfront about it from the start, people wouldn't feel so bitter. The "go to the nearest job thing" is just their lying in a microcosm.

I'll put it to you this way man, I've spent money on games I barely played or games that I didn't really like. Full price stuff. And I didn't feel that bad about it even though it was a waste. Because the game was upfront with me. It didn't tell me there would be cake on the box and then have no cake in the game........if you will excuse the five year old joke. But people feel annoyed because they were taken for idiots regarding the bulk of the game. It's not a bad game....but it's not the game we were told about.

the_syco

Kirby wrote: »

I'll put it to you this way man, I've spent money on games I barely played or games that I didn't really like. Full price stuff. And I didn't feel that bad about it even though it was a waste. Because the game was upfront with me. It didn't tell me there would be cake on the box and then have no cake in the game........if you will excuse the five year old joke. But people feel annoyed because they were taken for idiots regarding the bulk of the game. It's not a bad game....but it's not the game we were told about.

This, I agree with. I've gotten games where I knew the cake was a lie, and I've bought games which are only in their beta of alpha phase, but I'd have known this whilst getting it. Sim City, though, was massively broken when I got it, and when I found out that most of what they told us was completely false, I began to question everything else that they told us, to the point where I don't believe anything they say

If they came out and said that the traffic, DRM... everything was fixed, I still wouldn't rush back to the game, as I wouldn't believe them...

Azza

I, and many others, took that to mean that an unemployed sim would go to the nearest available job. But that once he had that nearest available job, that sim or agent would keep going back to it

There is no denying that's what a lot of players where expecting. I don't think its a conclusion I would of come to from watching this video alone. I think this expectation must of been set else where in interviews with developer or previews by game journalists. However when you think could such a system actually work. Follow millions of indvidual sims around, seems like that would of been extremely taxing if not impossible to run.

Kirby wrote:

I watched nearly every developer video in the lead up to the game and they used this terminology a lot. Whether it was intentional or not, they never flat out said the whole truth here.

Yeah I don't think the clarified some stuff possibly deliberately, where there was a definite expectation you could follow individual sim's around all day and that they had consistency in where they worked and lived.

Kirby wrote:

When people hear "nearest available job", they assume it's because in the demo that the the town is brand new which it always is in demo's and everyone is unemployed.

I think that's a stretch to say that, I didn't assume that. That's a very select interpretation.

Kirby wrote:

It's just sneaky PR speak Azza. You can't blame them really, everyone does it, but this sort of stuff that you heard pre-release wasn't accurate. Just like the claim about always on being built into the game and being unable to be removed. Which was a lie. And the cloud doing complex computations that the game couldn't run without. Which was another lie. And the game having no single player because it couldn't function without the online component. Which was another lie.

I never believed the claim about the online requirement being there for multiplayer to function I always suspected it was a purely an anti piracy measure. But just because there guilty in certain area's doesn't make everything they say a lie either.