Tom's Hardware's Community Manager, Joe Pishgar, eagerly anticipated the launch of SimCity. Now, a month later, he has something to say about EA's handling of the day-one issues and the continued problems plaguing a game he wanted so much to enjoy.
Most gamers who weren’t snookered in by the alluring siren call of pre-order goodies on SimCity saw what happened during the title's launch and smartly said “I’ll wait.” One month out, the verdict is in. Keep waiting.
In terms of games whose launches were the entertainment version of explosive diarrhea, and similarly unpleasant, SimCity has earned a place in history. It now joins those lofty, ignominious horrors wrought upon the world of gaming. Let us remember fondly the version of Anarchy Online that formatted your hard drive. A Final Fantasy XIV as being one of the most frustrating subscription-based screensavers you could have signed-up for. Ultima IX being so terrible at launch, the official forums were shut down. As for the grand-daddy of epic fails, well, no list would be complete without Daikatana.
At launch, SimCity was just short of aneurism-inducing, with its insistence that you download and install Origin, EA’s version of Steam, which occupies your computer in the same fashion a gas station breakfast burrito might occupy your intestinal tract. Think RealPlayer, without all of the frills and charm. Luck, patience, and an Internet connection with extraordinary stability were required if you were foolish enough to shell out cash to EA ahead of time for the chance to play on launch day. Servers were slammed, and I don’t mean in a way reminiscent of Diablo 3’s launch, where you were inconvenienced, but able to play once you got in. Servers were obliterated from users downloading the game due to a lack of preloading as an option, users attempting to log in, and angry users trying to log back in after having been booted due to synchronization errors. It was nightmarish, as though EA had not predicted the game they were spending millions to advertise was going to have a lot of people try to play it on the first day.
Objectively, how long should it take a development team to set up new servers? If your launch is an utter failure on Day One due to psychotic and entirely expected server load, isn’t the first response naturally to get new servers operational as soon as possible? I ask because it seemed to take weeks before the ability to connect to the servers stabilized. Blizzard’s Diablo 3, referenced earlier, is the perfect example of this. A catastrophic launch day was followed up by an immediate response to improve server capacity in a very short period of time. A stumble and a recovery for Blizzard on stability issues, and a lesson not learned by EA, despite numerous examples in the industry.
The half-hearted apologies from upper management at EA were not enough for most gamers. The statement that “SimCity was meant to be played online” was a bold-faced lie, as most astute users have come to understand. I know this because, as of this writing, most of the largest features involving online play with other users are turned off. The Global Market is deactivated. Leaderboards are not active. And finding a game to play with friends or other SimCity users is next to impossible due to the game browser lacking functionality a kindergartner would question the absence of.
The free game they gave away to “patient Mayors” had a five day window to claim it. If you bought your game after the announcement, like I did, thinking, “Hey, I’ll give it a shot. If I don’t like it, there’s another older game I can check out,” and had it shipped, chances are you missed the narrow window of opportunity. Tough. You deserve what you get. You bought SimCity after all.
I took the plunge because I knew, at some point, I was going to play it. I’ve played every one of the Sims games, as far back as SimEarth and SimAnt. I must admit, I’m guilty of a bit of schadenfreude when it came to watching the launch. It was like watching a 60-car freeway pile-up in slow motion. Having been on the receiving end of more than my fair share of patch days and game launches from the industry side, I’m glad I wasn’t involved, and it was intriguing to watch this one as a spectator. SimCity’s launch was around the same time that Tom’s Hardware was launching its new forum platform, and I have to say I was nervous that our roll-out was going to meet with a similar reception. I realized that we don't hate our users, whereas EA seems to. You are viewed by our staff as critically-thinking individuals. We prompt you constantly for your feedback, rather than treat you as miniature cash machines that we can pull a lever on to force you to spew up dough for pointless pixelcrack that by all rights should have been in the original feature set. Want the ability to post a new thread on the forums? That’ll be $2.99 please. Upload a custom avatar? $1.99. No. That’s not the way we play, and you’ll notice we’re now ad-free on our forums, too. But I diverge.

If you make a quality product and make it easily accessible (i.e. limited DRM) to people, they will pay for it.
/rant
I can't stress enough how EA, fake DLC, always-online is killing the industry, ruining franchises. I can't wait for the day games are given back to gamers, and the aggressive capitalism gets the fuck out of the gaming business.
/end rant
If you make a quality product and make it easily accessible (i.e. limited DRM) to people, they will pay for it.
I preordered Cities in Motion 2 (a €20 Paradox-title) and on releaseday it was excellent, though with a few minor, non-critical bugs. A team of 11 made a game that for my taste beat the crap out of the beta that SimCity in truth is. Maxis has shown through the years that they are able to make great stuff, so I guess I'm still waiting for a number of "huge patches". Still hoping it will become the perfect, aweinspiring citybuilder of epic proportions that I imagined when I heard about it one year ago. Doubts are growing however. *sad face*
/rant
I can't stress enough how EA, fake DLC, always-online is killing the industry, ruining franchises. I can't wait for the day games are given back to gamers, and the aggressive capitalism gets the fuck out of the gaming business.
/end rant
Traffic at intersections with stop lights is absolutely terrible, to the point where it simply doesn't work. Users have had to invent creative solutions in street layout to either minimize or avoid the use of stoplights altogether, which is ridiculous. Once you reach a certain population this can completely kill your city.
Path finding in the game is stupid, which further contributes to the traffic problem. Vehicles seem to take the shortest path (in terms of distance to destination) no matter what, even if there's a colossal traffic jam in the way and there are many other open routes available. Since practically everything in the game is dependent on this system (cars, public transit, trash, fire, ambulances, tourism, etc)... ya, things don't work so well.
Public services seem to randomly stop working, more specifically trash and recycling pickup.
Rail cars don't work, even on a simple loop, they're simply broken. But at least Maxis has acknowledged this one.
Oh ya, you can lose a city or even an entire region due to some sort of critical (and seemingly prevalent) server syncing bug. Yes, you could lose all your progress with no chance for recovery. Why? How? No one seems to know. It's the "City unable to process" error, and there's a 220+ page forum filled with users who have encountered this problem. Unfortunately I'm one of them. Luckily my city was able to recover after about a week of inaccessibility.
http://answers.ea.com/t5/Miscellaneous-Issues/Info-request-Cannot-process-this-city-at-this-time/td-p/731232/highlight/false
Tourism is broken, largely due to traffic problems. Tourists won't visit your city if you have heavy traffic around tourist destinations. So ya, path finding again. Also, tourist numbers seem to drop off a cliff and never recover for no apparent reason, even in the absence of heavy traffic. Maxis has supposedly addressed this specific problem in their latest 2.0 patch, but I haven't noticed a difference.
Intercity play, the core gameplay mechanic in Sim City, needs some serious tweaking. Lets just call this broken for now too. The idea is that you can share resources between cities so you don't necessarily need duplicate services in a region that can take a significant toll on your city budget, such as a university. The thing is at a certain point it seems like every city needs a copy of every service in order to progress, and certain services don't seem to contribute to the region in the way they're supposed to... such as universities. Also, money transfers between cities can take a ridiculously long time to go through. I waited almost a week once before another city in my region received a transfer I made.
Overall Sim City has been a bit of a disappointment, as you might imagine. There are tons of other critical, practically game breaking bugs out there, but I'm tired of typing. It's just sad because this game really seems like it has the potential to be great. For the first couple hours the experience is honestly fantastic. There's nothing like building up a city and watching it work. But then it breaks, and the reality of the broken features and mechanics sets in. There's no better way to sum up Sim City, the more you play the more frustrated you become.
As for always online games I will never buy any of them that includes Diablo III and SimCity. Both I had been looking forward to for quite some time but just like Blizzard and Diablo III EA has killed SimCity franchise. If they ever pull there head out of there ass and release a offline patch I will buy but not until then. And of course EA has said they can't do that because the game was built with always on DRM from the beginning and would require a complete re write of the game engine which most games know buy now is a bucket full of lie!
As the article pointed out, the game is boring and severely limited by map size. The game is single core only, which is why the maps are so small. These past two months they've managed to do nothing with the game.
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/04/22/the-power-of-silence-why-the-simcity-story-went-away/
Even the Age of Empires 2 HD launch has been very messy. Never got media attention though.
p.s. Joe, the new comments section under the news items is pretty bad...forums are fine, imo, though quoting is buggy.
bee144, I think what EA is counting on with their DLC and micro-transactions that Pishgar mentioned in his article is that people like you who have allready spent quite a lot of money will invest a few dollars more to get the content that in the past would have automatically been included in the retail price. It's like they're manipulating their customer base: "Have you invested $60+ for our incomplete game? Good! Pay us $10 more so you can enjoy it with full content or watch your initial investement circle down the drain"
One way for us to put the screws on publishers is to stop pre-ordering games. After the latest Aliens game debacle and now this... I'm definately waiting for credible reviewers and internet forums to chime in before I part with my money. Pre-order bonuses be damned!
However this will be an interesting test to see what happens with a terrible game that you know has many DLCs scheduled down the pipeline. How will EA price the DLCs? Will they even release them? Right now, it's almost a sure thing that these DLCs will lose money, very very few people who have the game will spend one more penny on it. If I were EA, I'd probably give up and scrap whatever DLCs are being worked on right now other than the ones that are required to be released due to contracts with advertisers.
On another topic: I liked the review. How about a section called Tom's gaming and review games (in conjuncture with h/w, or something like that?)
1. Server crashed multiple times: I build city for about 4 hours, then the server crashed. I load the city again, and there is just nothing - all gone. So, I start again, spend about 8 hours in building a city. While building it, the server crashes. I load my city again, hoping not everything is lost, and there is my old city I build in the first place. What the hell? I work as a software tester including server load testing, and Sim City is the most unstable game I have ever played.
2. Huge server lag: The server lag is just ridiculous. If you are building a big project, you have to send resources. Some resources arrive up 12h late or never arrive at all.
And what the hell is the deal about Origin? On the PC it works - more or less. But on my Xbox, it is a total disaster. Can not connect to server, after two weeks online gaming I have to enter another serial number (because I EA thinks I never entered one), takes more than 2 minutes to connect, and with Fifa I can not play online over Origin at all.
I really hope that DICE is able to let their developers make a great BF4, and that EA does not insist in implementing a stupid microtransaction > You are out of amo? How about 1.99 USD for a full magazine?