No More "Undo"? (possible saving issue)

[meowza 230]

Can we still undo mistakes, experiments, and disasters by reloading our saved game?

How are we supposed to create our perfect utopia if the game constantly saves itself onto the cloud?

What are your thoughts?

If anyone has any official information regarding this matter, kindly share.

[Dewm 177]

They haven't "officially" said whether or not you'll be able to load up old saves, BUT with this rumored "world economy" it seems like saving, and loading up old saves would screw it up pretty badly.. So like you, we await E3.

(But to be honest I am not holding my breath, EA has destroyed to many games and companies for me to get disappointed anymore)

[Blurque 9]

Well if you only require to be online when you start the game, I think you'll be able to start the game, get into your city, cut off the internet, build your city, do your experiments etc. and get online if you like it so you can save, and just shut everything down without going online if you're not fine with it.

[Odainsaker 2,135]

Also unknown is how many separate saves you will be allowed, or even more broadly, how many different cities or regions each account can have stored at any given time.

I do not know of very many commercial online games with subscriber accounts, free or paid, which do not put a limit on available active play slots.

The Global Economy concept would become completely skewed nonsense if players can setup on their own hundreds of dummy cities or regions as macroer resource pools or macroer dumping pits. A limit on the number of active cities or regions per account would be the obvious initial means to control against this, along with inactive account suspensions and automated deletion sweeps of cities or regions that had not been accessed over a long time. There is no guaranteed saved game permanency over time in The Cloud.

  Edited April 24, 2012 by Odainsaker  

[Ocram's Razr 964]

I think that expansive, chunk based (possibly procedurally generated) regions would be ideal so a maximum of 2 regions (taking into account that there will be region-wide pollution) would be fine. There would obviously be no undo in multiplayer though the asyncronous saving might allow you to play for a couple minutes without saving.

  Edited April 24, 2012 by OcramSeattle  

[Mark Waybill 242]

I think if this game is good enough we will play it more in earnest and not be so happy go lucky about creating cities, but focus more on one or two anyway. I would agree saving would screw up the global economy. What would happen regarding sharing of cities at an exchange? Also modding would have to be pretty tightly controlled.

If single player didn't affect the economy but was just affected by it, then this could be the aren a for saved cities, ideal cities, sandboxing etc.

[NCGAIO 562]

What are your thoughts?

If anyone has any official information regarding this matter, kindly share.

Official only what is in the FAQ on the Origin title Cloud Saves

- http://www.origin.com/us/fa q

[Odainsaker 2,135]

Official only what is in the FAQ on the Origin title Cloud Saves

- http://wwwcom/us/fa.origin. q

I guess it should be pointed out that the Origin FAQ states that accounts are limited to 100MB of cloud storage per game.

How much storage space do I have on the cloud?

For those games that are Cloud Storage enabled, you have up to 100MB of space per game.

What this means for the average number of SimCity account saves, cities, regions, or custom content is uncertain, as we do not known their filesizes or even where they will be stored. Also, this storage allowance is not guaranteed and naturally subject to suddenly change at any time, as many of us saw with ImageShack.

[Mark Waybill 242]

100 mb eh. Is it just me or does that sound limiting?

[LivingInThePast 364]

It honestly seems like a true "sandbox" mode is what the SimCity franchise needs to attract players.

[Mark Waybill 242]

If as Maxis says the game is still pre alpha I don't see how they can't include something like that in the release version. It would just be the same game but with a fixed or simulated global economy like in previous versions. The issues arise when one decides for some reason one wishes to become part of the actual global economy, or one is already part of it and decides to become a lone ranger. This would unrealistically affect said economy.

My idea is to begin with two modes, offline single player or at least single player, and multiplayer online. In the former you are playing the same game but just without the global ecnomy aspect. At some point in future, if the game becomes popular enough to support the maintenance costs, new 'worlds' are created online, and one can choose to add ones city to one of these. These would be like mega regions, that would branch off from the main stem.

Cheats and mods would be an issue for world administration to decide about, and in the ideal situation we could create a SimWorld as easily as a region. However as the game is built around this world economy concept, I don't believe too much resources will be spent on single player experience as apart from the global economy.

If all one wished to do was to create an ideal city of ones dreams without having to worry about economic factors, one could make a mode in which one was essentially using a sandbox system like in SCURK, but whether any priority would be given to such an idea remains to be seen. If enough opinion is towards having a sandbox then perhaps a poll should be created about that?

Going back to the topic, I can't imagine saving and loading will remain their good old 90s selves. I think with real time simulation and the global economy that if a fire happens, it happens. If it gets out of control then that's too bad. What this means for sharing city files on exchanges and so forth I can't tell, I just have this vague idea that in future we will have multiple worlds to choose from.

[Supertask 29]

This doesn't really bother me. I can understand the need to simply try wild experiments with disasters etc, but for those occasions as Blurque pointed out there are probably get arounds like cutting off the internet. But as for just "woops I didn't do that right, reload!" I can't understand that attitude at all. If I make mistakes in simcity, I live with them, I consider that a big part of the experience and part of what makes your cities unique.

[Linoa06 1,374]

I'm liking this game less and less with each passing day...

[Ocram's Razr 964]

Asynchronous saving (which they are using) allows you to make changes without saving.

[Mark Waybill 242]

I have to agree with Supertask on this one. If IRL cities we could just redo things, we'd still have the twin towers, we'd still have the Sydney trams (I'd like to think) etc etc In SC, especially with GB and proper simulation... I just don't see a future for 'ideal' cities outside of a disconnected sandbox mode or a planning tool.

[baertooth 330]

This is definitely an area to consider. I use software that has a teamwork element to it and it's a pain to make big changes in the project while the project is being shared vs making big changes to the project when it's in solo mode. If it doesn't work out or the unaltered version might be helpful in fixing an error, I can just load the project again. When I'm working on a shared project I can't just reload it as I'm working on it already. I can choose to not sync with the server and loose my work to reload, but I can't just reopen the project.

While some won't mind this (most of the time), there will be people who are very specfic about their cities and use "techniques" such as playing with the save to manipulate their cities even more. I know I've done it several times with SC4 and previous versions.

Is it really that big of a deal? Depends. The trade off for working in shared mode for the software I had mentioned before is pretty worth while as many people can work on project at once.

Since I have experience with software that behaves this way I've wondered if what's going on is one creates a region on the EA servers and then invites others to join the region if the region's owner wishes. If no one is invited then the region would be in a kind of solo mode where one person playing the whole region even though the whole region is hosted on the EA servers. As well as in a LAN game every one is connected to the net and talk via EA's server rather than a locally hosted server such as in Minecraft.

Hopefully E3 will reveal the answer to this and other questions.