Sim City 5

[CaptainJaneway]

I am so glad I did not buy this piece of crap. I was going to preorder it but something told me to hold off.

EA has not learned from the SPore debacle or any of it's predcessors.

DRM is shit and always being connected to the net is shittier.

You can not even play offiline as a single player.

I miss the good old days. I am going to find my copy of sim city 4.

EA is not giving refunds and if you try to do a charge back they will ban your entire orgin account. So if you have any other games in there you are SOL.

Amazon had taken it down but they put it back but with a link to EA's site.

Right now people are angry and up in arms because they paid for a game they can not play. None of the servers are working correctly or there is not enough of them to go around. They stripped the game of certain features to get it to work. You can not move your city to another server. Your city is server specific. Also your city is saved in the cloud too. Heaven forbid if you have been playing for a while and the server goes down you lose your city altogether. I would be mad and frustrated.

Also there are limits on how big the city can be. Whats the point?

THere is a article from ARS technica discussing it. I will have to dig through my history for the links. I will post them later.

A lot of it stems from the DRM they are using. I think it is called Glassbox? This is causing the meltdown. Though i also think that EA was not prepared and got caught with their pants down with not providing enough servers for people to get on.

I really wanted to play the new sim city too.

I guess i will have to wait for Sim City 6 and Windows 9. Hopefully they will get it right. LOL

[smileyeagle1021]

I was going to pre-order too... until I was watching a pre-release promo and I heard the exact words "we have not included subways, but we are sure our fans won't miss them".
Umm, yeah, we never included subways on our wish list, which is why you think we won't miss them, because they have been in the last three versions of the game, why would we wish for something we already have? Also, I saw beta play and just how small a "city" was (seriously, most neighborhoods are bigger than that, it is only 2km by 2km... hell, in Nevada we have buildings almost that big). I didn't have a problem with the always online requirement (I didn't have any problems with Spore), but it looked like a crappy SimCity.

I'm not holding out hope for SimCity 6 either. I'm just going to stick with CitiesXL for now and when Cities in Motion 2 comes out, I'll probably give it a look. Other than not having control over zoning, it seriously has most of the wish list that we had after SimCity4 came out.

[Bloodsoul]

I've never gotten past SimCity 2000, mostly out of nostalgia, I s'pose, and because of the Urban Renewal Kit and extra scenarios that my copy came with.

[Aethian]

I've actually been playing it. My only fault with it is you can take over other cities and your stupid sims take forever to head over there to work. Just want to beat them over their little heads for being dumb. Unless of course I'm doing it wrong and then nevermind.

[mikoyan29]

Why are they putting more and more stuff in the cloud? I like it the other way better where if you want to play solo you can, you didn't have to play online. But then, I haven't really played SimCity much because I didn't like having to add sewers and what not. It seemed like powering the city was more complicated too. although I did enjoy SimCity Societies when I played it.

[wraiths_crono]

I bought it, and I am enjoying it, yes the first three days it was nothing but trouble but... I think a smaller map makes is more challenging, I do miss subways and things going from city to city take forever but: at least I get a free game out of EA for my troubles now, mwa ah ah.

[lordlundar]

I've actually been playing it. My only fault with it is you can take over other cities and your stupid sims take forever to head over there to work. Just want to beat them over their little heads for being dumb. Unless of course I'm doing it wrong and then nevermind.

Only the city you are actively playing is running. Any other cities are frozen in time unless someone else is playing them.

SimCity 4 does the same thing which led to a utility exploit that is used to make large scale cities. In the case of SC5 it's to (poorly) force multiplayer.

[Aethian]

No actually I was doing it wrong. I was jumping back and forth to often and wasn't giving them enough time to realize that there was another city over there that had the jobs they were clamoring for.

I love that I don't have to place power lines or water lines.

[MadMike]

I'm really not liking a lot of the trends in gaming lately. Besides requiring an online connection to play a single-player game, these companies seem to think that gamers everywhere are saying, "You know what I really hate? Being able to save my game whenever I want to!" I'm seeing more and more games that use these stupid checkpoints instead of letting you save your game when you want. It gets very frustrating when you keep having to start from the same place a bunch of times because you keep getting killed before you can make it to the next checkpoint that they decided on. It gets frustrating pretty damn quick, and takes all the fun out of the game.

The worst one I had to deal with was Far Cry. I was stuck at the same spot for two weeks at one point. And now, sequels of games that let you save before are switching over to those damned checkpoints. I found this out the hard way when I picked up Max Payne 3. That wasn't my only complaint, it was also buggy as hell, the controls sucked, and the story line sucked, but that's a whole other ran altogether.

I've been burned enough times by that that now, if I see a game that looks interesting, I go online and download a copy of the manual before I buy it. If it uses checkpoints, I don't buy it. It's a shame, because quite a few of them looked good, but if it's only going to get me frustrated, I'm not having any fun, and it's not worth it.

[mikoyan29]

I could understand checkpoints in the days when you weren't sitting on a ton of hard drive space but not now.

[crashhelmet]

I, too, was all set to pre-order this game until I learned about the Always Connected requirement. After the FUBAR experiences Blizzard had with Diablo 3, you'd think EA would've been more prepared. Sadly, they weren't

I still want to play the game, but I've decided I'm not going to pay $60 for it. If I have to wait a year before it drops, then so be it.

[CaptainJaneway]

I am going to wait and see if they decide to make it offline. I want my subways!

I really wished they had made it like the old sim city. They could of updated it and then given everyone a choice to play off or online if they wanted too.

People are complaining that the AI is really messed up too. LOL

I was reading over at the ea forum that a lot of people lost their cities that they have worked on for a couple of days. They are really upset.

I am thinking that EA has had a lot of returns.

Here is the link from ARS Techinca i promised

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/0...ears-for-this/

Also there is some backlash in regards to EA hiring people from china to talk up the game and boost the ratings.

I will have to search for that link again.

[lordlundar]

Honestly, the "always on" requirement for me is probably one of the least reasons why I won't be buying it. It's on the list mind you, but near the bottom.

It's a number of reasons that all formulate around an almost total reliance on multiplayer. Small areas, forced resource specialization, etc. that is all designed around a requirement to have multiple cities and dance around them or go multiplayer as really the only way to advance beyond what could qualify as a "hick town". The removal of terraforming as well was painful.

Basically, to push the multiplayer, they removed a lot of capability that was in the games all the way back to the original and even if they make it offline (which more evidence is coming out it's entirely possible despite EA claims) I see it as nothing more than a regression of the series and won't waste my time or money with it.

[crashhelmet]

If they wanted to force it online/multiplayer, they should've just called it "Sim City Online" and billed it as an MMORTS. Not hype it as a single player game with multiplayer options.

Hell, they probably would've had zero server issues with it too, considering they launched the Star Wars MMORPG without fail.

[Salted Grump]

Hell, they probably would've had zero server issues with it too, considering they launched the Star Wars MMORPG without fail.

I long ago came to the conclusion that any MMO's launch is impossible to be considered 'smooth'; SW:ToR's launch was textbook 'Not enough servers allocated for the intial rush, too many servers allocated once players realized the game was crap and abandoned it'.