In this, our ELEVENTH DAY of the equivalent of PC gaming’s Leveson Inquiry, Senior Director of worldwide communications at EA Maxis Erik Reynolds has written a series of ‘transparent tweets’. These tweets indicate that a post on the Simcity forum about a hack for offline mode violated their Terms of Service, and the discussion would have to be moved elsewhere.
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Posts Tagged ‘Electronic Arts’
Schrödinger’s SimCity: EA On Hacks vs Mods, Fixing Traffic
By Cara Ellison on March 15th, 2013.
Modder Runs SimCity Offline, Maxis Remains Silent
By John Walker on March 14th, 2013.
Two days ago, RPS published an article in which a Maxis insider revealed to us that SimCity does not, in fact, require the servers to run its non-regional game. Maxis reps had repeatedly insisted to the press that the game had to be online as it ran local computations on their own servers – a feature our source told us doesn’t exist at all. Extraordinarily, we’ve still yet to receive a statement from Maxis on the matter. Nor indeed have any of the rest of the games media who contacted EA for comments at the time of our story.
And now, if any further proof were needed, a modder has hacked the game to run entirely offline, and even play outside of the game’s ridiculously small borders.
SimCity’s Sims Don’t Seem That Smart After All
By John Walker on March 13th, 2013.
Alongside the peculiarities of the server matters with SimCity, many are reporting that the game itself doesn’t perform as had previously been claimed. This is especially the case when it comes to the AI and pathfinding.
Disappointingly, the Glassbox Engine doesn’t appear to offer quite the independent nature of individual Sims as many had believed, and it really seems to be struggling with seemingly simple pathfinding and congestion issues.
Service Fault
Maxis Insider Tells RPS: SimCity Servers Not Necessary
By John Walker on March 12th, 2013.
In all the fuss and mess of the disastrous SimCity launch, one refrain has been repeated again and again. While legions may be begging for an offline mode, EA representatives have been abundantly clear that this simply isn’t possible. Maxis’ studio head, Lucy Bradshaw, has told both Polygon and Kotaku that they “offload a significant amount of the calculations to our servers”, and that it would take “a significant amount of engineering work from our team to rewrite the game” for single player.
A SimCity developer has got in touch with RPS to tell us that at least the first of these statements is not true. He claimed that the server is not handling calculations for non-social aspects of running the game, and that engineering a single-player mode would require minimal effort.
Always-Awful
SimCity Is Inherently Broken, Let’s Not Let This Go
By John Walker on March 11th, 2013.
EA reports that SimCity is slowly getting into a state where it’s playable. Many of the launch issues are getting sorted, and soon it may well be in such a place that it becomes functional. So we should forgive and forget, right? Wrong.
Alarming: Dead Space 3 – Awakened DLC
By Adam Smith on March 11th, 2013.
Somewhere in the back of my space-scarred and delirious mind, I knew that there was some DLC for Dead Space 3 in the pipeline. I’d intended to write a reminder to be annoyed about it on a post-it note because it was announced before the game had even been released and contained what sounded very much like the end of the story. Even though I enjoyed Isaac’s latest escapade, it didn’t leave me wanting more, which is perhaps why I’d forgotten all about The Awakened. It’s out tomorrow and there’s a trailer below.
Duplocity
Initial Impressions: SimCity
By Adam Smith on March 8th, 2013.
I hadn’t played SimCity until the UK version unlocked at midnight and I’ve barely slept since then. Intravenous coffee, fresh from the bean, and a sumo wrestler’s weight of dry roasted peanuts have seen me through the night and now I shall convert the experiences of the last twelve hours into words. This is not ‘Wot I Think’, it’s just a step toward a closer study of the slickness of the systems as well as their shortcomings, and it’s also a minor chronicle of the European launch.
Serve Us, Service
SimCity Vs The People: Why Apologies Aren’t Enough
By Nathan Grayson on March 7th, 2013.
Here’s an unpopular opinion: I think EA’s done a decent job with SimCity’s launch.
Aha! It’s also a misleading opinion, because I’m definitely not referring to the part where servers gasped and puked and died under the immense strain of North America’s unquenchable entertainment lust, recently leading to halting of sales on Amazon, among other things. It’s what happened afterward that sort of impressed me. EA responded fairly quickly (especially by its usual standards), communicated clearly what was happening, apologized profusely, went through the five stages of grief, and offered refunds to some people (not all, perplexingly) who felt like the early meteor bombardment of issues wasn’t worth waiting out. As far as disaster control goes, I’m more than willing to concede that EA’s mostly Doing It Right. But that does not – even in the slightest – change the fact that there shouldn’t have ever been a disaster in the first place.
EA ‘Confident’ Origin Issues Won’t Plague Euro SimCity
By Nathan Grayson on March 6th, 2013.
In the words of RPS’ totally unneeded, never sighted on a semi-regular basis error screen, SimCity’s having a bit of a wobbly. Some people, however, haven’t even been lucky enough to get into its now-infamous queues – let alone experience the majesty of realizing they might eventually get to play the videogame they purchased. So then, is this a preview of the hoops Europe gets to squeeze its oh-so-sensual landmasses through on Thursday? EA’s claiming it’s mobilized its force of spline reticulating drones to make sure everything’s shipshape, but obviously, there’s still plenty of reason for skepticism.
Updated: Dead Space Is Isn’t Pining For The Fjords
By Alec Meer on March 5th, 2013.
Update: despite earlier declining to comment, EA have since told Eurogamer that the report is “patently false”, while Viceral’s UI lead has tweeted that “The reports of our death were greatly exaggerated.” Perhaps it would have been better to say that when a whole bunch of people asked the first time?
Update 2: EA’s Peter Moore has claimed, in comments on GI.biz, that the entire story was made up by Videogamer in the pursuit of traffic. Who knows the truth? Certainly, we shouldn’t have run the story here without some kind of confirmation – frankly, I let myself be too guided by the fact EA were initially giving out ‘no comment’ comments. Live, learn, update posts.
It’s not pinin’! It’s passed on! This franchise is no more! It has ceased to be! It’s expired and gone to meet its maker! It’s a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! Its metabolic processes are now ‘istory! It’s off the twig! It’s kicked the bucket, it’s shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible! It’s f-ckin’ snuffed it! This is an ex-franchise!
This post brought to you by a sense of humour from 1969. You know us Brits, always with our Monty Python gags. Perhaps it’s the only way I know how to pay tribute to Dead Space, the EA action series which has reportedly uh, taken a holiday in the wake of lacklustre sales for the recent third game.
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Gamers Line Up To Play SimCity…
By John Walker on March 5th, 2013.
Hey, want to play the freshly US-released SimCity? Well, stand in line. As Total Biscuit reveals (video below), there are already 30 minute queues. And this is just for those who’ve stayed up past midnight to be able to play. In just one country.
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