Why has the SimCity story gone away? It’s a good question. And the answer for it reveals much about how both the games industry, and the games journalism industry, work.
Rock, Paper, Shotgun
Posts Tagged ‘Electronic Arts’
Sticking your fingers in your ears helps too.
The Power Of Silence: Why The SimCity Story Went Away
By John Walker on April 22nd, 2013.
Hutt Hutt! The Old Republic’s Scum & Villainy 2.0
By Jim Rossignol on April 10th, 2013.
What I mean is, the 2.0 update for Star Wars: The Old Republic is live (and trailered with a video entitled “Scum & Villainy”, in reference to something Spock once said in Star Trek). The update adds a hard mode to operations and flashpoints (weird dissonance there) which preps the ground for the Rise Of The Hutt Cartel expansion, which arrives in a couple of days (or right now if you pre-ordered). That’s an actual expansion that you will have to pay $20 for, just like they did when my pappy was a boy.
2.0, meanwhile, also overhauls PvP, changing the way that characters are “bolstered” when they enter a PvP area. Wow, that really does seem like a band-aid sort of mechanic, doesn’t it? Hmm. Anyone with extensive SWTOR PvP experience able to shine a light on that?
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Maybe SimCity’s Balance-Breaking Ad DLC Isn’t All Bad
By Nathan Grayson on April 3rd, 2013.
Good news! SimCity‘s gotten a potentially substantial piece of DLC, and it’s totally free. Bad news! It’s a gigantic ad for car company Nissan. Worse news! Its in-game functionality seems to make your city planning decisions even less consequential than before, which is quite a feat. Worst news! SimCity isn’t a very good game at all, even with its online issues mostly cleared up. Contrary opinion! This is one seemingly asinine move I think we should only partially leap down EA’s throat for. So maybe, like, just put in one leg. And do it kind of gently. Avoid the teeth, if you can.
And Mulch More: Plants vs Zombies 2 Mere Months Away
By Alec Meer on March 27th, 2013.
Happy face: PopCap’s Plants vs Zombies 2 will apparently arrive this Summer. I love PvZ. I want more PvZ.
Worried face: PopCap now belong to EA, who want to put microtransactions in everything they can. I’m crossing fingers, toes, unmentionables and internal organs that PvZ2 can somehow escape this disease and just be a lovely, complete little game of its own.
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Why can't those fields find peace?
Battlefield 4 Prattle Feed For All The New News
By John Walker on March 27th, 2013.
Tonight EA lured us in to a darkened cinema, on the promise of news about the only-just-announced-even-though-everyone-knew-about-it-for-ages Battlefield 4. But while we knew it existed, we didn’t know what it might contain. Um. Yeah, about that…
Teased: Battlefield 4 Will Have Boats, Awful Slogan
By Nathan Grayson on March 22nd, 2013.
On principle, I despise blink-and-you’ll-miss-it brief, nearly information-free teasers. Unfortunately, they’re also almost exclusively the chosen language of triple-A publishers these days – at least until they open the floodgates on enough footage to spoil the entire game a month before it comes out. I would, however, be remiss if I didn’t mention that a) Battlefield 4 very clearly exists and b) year of the boat (the previously discussed year of the bow successor) sails ever onward, major franchises crashing against its monolithic hull like brittle kiddie pool waves. Watch both of the thus-far released (ugh, argh, grr, bleh) teasers after the break and pluck delicious, delicious proof from the pudding.
Road Squalor
Wot I Think: SimCity
By Adam Smith on March 21st, 2013.
We’ve had quite a lot to say about SimCity but I haven’t told you wot I think yet. I posted my initial impressions two weeks ago, feeling like I’d only just scratched the surface. I’ve been scratching away since then, off and on, and now I’m ready to tell you what lies beneath.
Offline: EA CEO John Riccitiello Has Stepped Down
By John Walker on March 18th, 2013.
Well another person has learned: you don’t mess with Rock, Paper, Shotgun. It seems our coverage of the SimCity… no, not really. The rather more unfortunate reason for EA’s CEO, John Riccitiello’s stepping down is due to the publisher’s struggles to turn a profit, alongside warnings that the next quarter’s targets won’t be met.
A Sorry Tale: EA Offering SimCity 4 To SimCity 5 Buyers!
By John Walker on March 18th, 2013.
EA wants to say “sooorweeeee”. For pretending the game had to be online for server computations, and then ignoring us when we pointed out this wasn’t the case? No, not because of that! But for launching SimCity in the most extraordinarily inept fashion, with barely functioning servers, massive queues, frequent crashes, and the rest of the mess everyone in the whole world except EA and that one reviews editor predicted would happen. To make this up to everyone who’s activated a copy of the game, and rather madly to people who buy one any time up to the 25th March, there is a free game available. And they’re proper good ones, too. One of them is a rather fine city building game, called SimCity 4.
Always Offline
SimCity Modder Tells Us Offline Regional Play Easily Done
By John Walker on March 16th, 2013.
A key moment in the week’s SimCity shenanigans was unquestionably the appearance of a video from a modder, Azzer, announcing he’d found a way to remove the game’s offline timer. The final nail in the ridiculous-claims coffin, this mod demonstrated that everything but the asynchronous multiplayer was running on your home machine. We got in touch with the man behind the mod, one Azzer, and he had a lot more to say. In his opinion, the information coming from the servers is so rudimentary that despite Maxis’s claims, there shouldn’t be any problem at all in simulating the regional play offline.
Arguing With Themselves
SimCity Boss’s “Straight Answers” Seem Pretty Wiggly
By John Walker on March 16th, 2013.
What Maxis are doing is frankly peculiar. Earlier this week we posted a story revealing that claims that SimCity required online servers to run non-regional computations were not the case. That night we were promised a statement from the studio, but heard nothing. Repeated emails to EA have resulted in no response since, and the whole situation has become more muddy with each day. It’s since been revealed that population numbers are nonsense, even down to leaked Javascript code featuring “simcity.GetFudgedPopulation” as a function. We’ve learned that city size limits are arbitrary, pathfinding is rudimentary at best, and Eurogamer’s absolutely superb review lists many more bugs, broken features, disappearing pretend-money and never-arriving resources.
So it’s all the more odd to see Maxis head Lucy Bradshaw acting as if none of this is happening, and instead just carefully rewording her mantra of how SimCity is only supposed to be played online, but this time leaving out the bit about server-side computations for local play.
Respond to our gibber
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- Faldrath : “Ugh, I thought the expansion would be released this week, but apparently it's only on the 28th :(” on Pagan Prose: Crusader Kings II – The Old Gods
- Gap Gen : “Needs more Jazz Boatman.” on Ferry Good: Sinking Ship Simulator
- Gap Gen : “Sonar, and yet sofar.” on Ferry Good: Sinking Ship Simulator
- Urthman : “I loved Sanctum and Orcs Must Die and played each game right up to a difficulty wall about half-way in that I couldn't get past, ...” on Wot I Think: Sanctum 2
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