I like it!

[tomfoolery_79 85]

I've been playing SimCity since SNES....blah blah blah.

EA/Online always/DRM sucks...blah blah blah

 

Frankly, compared to Diablo 3's launch, this has gone really well so far.  Jury is out on the rest of the world loggin in...

 

Trust me, I could write an entire page about it's short comings (park trails not lining up, imperfect routing, tile size, random
inconsistences, rampant fires, health care, meteor shower after 3 hours???, etc).  Could this game have been more after waiting for 10 years?  Absolutely, but it's still better than no SimCity.

 

This isn't a full review, just a counter to all the hate.  I've played for at least 10 hours so far and despite it's flaws, I really like it and do not regret my purchase.  It's quite addicting.  The graphical style that I originally didn't care for has grown on me and looking back at screenshots from SC4 and SC3000 they have largely remained true to the franchise.  Even still, the filters help with this (I like Soft).  Data maps are great.  I do like the Sim-lish, it's cute.  Originally, I didn't care for the city specialization, but I understand why they did it with their regional plans and it has grown on me too.  Upgradeable roads, precise controls, Glassbox, bus stops, expandable buildings are all great things.  The multi-player is quite fun too, but has a lot to be desired, see next paragraph.

 

I did want to harp on a few things though.  The multiplayer although fun doesn't appear to be optimized well.  For one, an hour after my friend and I started his city still said it had 0 population, but he told me he had 800.  Also, there isn't control for how much service you can use from another city (like SC4 did).  I'm paying for trash service from my neighbor and he has a huge excess, but it's still only let's me use a sliver, so I still have trash problems even though I'd gladly pay for more.

 

Lastly, the city sizes simply are too small.  There's no way to justify it or get around it.  After 20,000 people or so you start having to bulldoze stuff to build other things...sad.  I won't go into it more cause it's been discussed.

 

There is a lot to like here and admittedly a lot to be upset about, but it's still something a dedicated SimCity fan should buy.

 

 

[Zpike 79]

I agree!

 

I had almost a full day of play yesterday and had a great time.  I foresee weeks of learning before I will start my "real" region.

 

They have a few issues with server load and some of the inter-region transfers are having some trouble, but for the most part I think the launch went well considering all the people that logged in on day one to a brand new product.

[mastorofpuppetz 199]

The pathetic lack of build space alone has killed the game fro me, only hope is EA expands it....doubtfull.

[Zelgadis 638]

The city sizes are certainly an oft-held gripe. Understandably so. Maxis has already announced that they will be expanding them, though we don't have a date for when that's going to happen yet.  My guess is it'll happen once server use comes to more easily-manageable levels.

[shorty2 94]

Could this game have been more after waiting for 10 years?  Absolutely, but it's still better than no SimCity.

 

They could have just spent a bit more time on polishing the game and making something that was more complete, but instead they wasted loads of money on marketing what they had thus far. The way the game looks.. if they had polished the rest of the game this could easily be one of the top ranking PC games in a long time, but instead they rushed it. No doubt because of EA.. I'm sure the Maxis guys would have loved to polish the game further but were restricted by EA's iron fist.

[wilbursim 10]

I think the city sizes are fine.. you need to look at a Region as a city (or county)  everything flows between them.. so if you put all the cities in a region and combine them .. bam there you go plenty of room... I have managed to squeeze in two cities within a region already, both cities have a combined population of 200K and I still have a third city to go within my region..  if you remember SC4 you had to have multiple utilities multiple school etc all within the same city... well, no difference here. 

 

If you have a healthy city, once the sims can't expand hortizontally, they will begin to build vertically

 

its no different that SC4 if you split you city with highways into different regions.. you know your Industrial quarter, your commercial quarter and your population half....  except here you can better control your "quarters"

[Spatzimaus 77]

Last night was one of those "wait, it's 4am already?" nights, which haven't happened to me in a long time.  Once I was able to get into the server I wanted, it was great.  (Other than one crash a couple hours in, which didn't erase anything.)  Now, I can understand the frustration for people who wanted to log in on day one in prime time on their chosen server and play.  Of course, anyone who's played any MMOs will know how unlikely THAT scenario is, so I just created a city over on an East Europe server to learn the basics while I waited for the kiddies on my preferred server to go to bed.  Frankly, I might as well have stayed on that server; ping is not exactly a major issue for this game, so wouldn't it make sense to play on a server where the majority of its residents are asleep or at work when you want to play?  (Unless you want to play pickup games in public regions, of course.)

 

In the end, this is only a temporary problem for many reasons.  First, like any other MMO, everyone wants to play on day one, and will do so even if they'd normally be doing something else, but a week later people go back to their normal schedules.  Load will go way down, even if the number of players with accounts continues to increase.  Second, I'm sure Maxis is working behind the scenes to optimize the server code, so we'll probably get a patch that improves performance within the first couple weeks.  And finally, if it stays bad, Maxis might be able to convince EA to pony up the dough for a couple more American servers.

 

Now, this being said, I do have a couple complaints:

1> Look up the word "queue" in a dictionary.  Hint: it doesn't mean "try again in 20 minutes and hope for the best".

2> If you create a region and place a city, then delete that city before adding a second city, it deletes the region.  I know, it doesn't take long to set it up again, but it should be easier to restart a tile in general.

3> Protesters have really, really long memories.

But as you can see, these aren't game-breakers in any sense of the term.

[Zpike 79]

I agree, I had a great time last night and paid the price today at work.

 

They have a couple of issue, that happen to most MMOGs on day one, and they will fix them.  I would guess we will have about a week of strangeness and then smooth sailing from there on out.

 

One of the great things about online games is..... On the fly updates!  Can I get an amen please!

[Vihzel 9]

I actually am enjoying the game so far too. I've put in about 12 hours total so far and have enjoyed every minute of it. 

[Benzos4Breakfast 2]

I agree with the sizes of build space completely. Way too small and just square. That's boring.

 

The multiplayer seems quite buggy as well. My 2 roommates and I have been playing in a region since launch. I researched some projects at my School of Science at the University. My one roommate could build the new solar panel almost instantly. My other roommate didn't get the "Not Approved" flag lifted for upwards of an hour. Also, the sharing of resources like buying power off one another doesn't make a lick of sense to me. I could only buy 1.4MW of power for something like $3 and hour or whatever while I was in a deficit of -75MW and my buddy was producing over 200MW extra in stock. It just doesn't make sense to me at all.

 

In multiplayer cities just seem really, really out of sync. Hopefully this clears up as the game is out for a bit. Also, I wonder if one player is playing on Cheetah speed and another on Turtle speed, if your cities become out of sync due to the calendar time. Just a thought.

 

Anyway, still having fun! Cheers!

[Zpike 79]

Server load is slowing down city updates right now.  That should be cleared up soon.  I bet there are two or three IT guys building servers right now.   I know the devs are not getting any sleep.

 

Work today sucked as I only got about 4 hours of sleep last night.  I could use a night off tonight so I'm hoping the servers are getting updated when I get home so I can go to bed.

[tomfoolery_79 85]

Update: I haven't been able to get into the game in 24 hours...starting to turn into the Diablo 3 launch.

[tsinchai 0]

Seem like me too. Have been enjoying it for 2 days, until today after game update, I cannot get into the game anymore. (I'm on Oceanic server). Guess it related to European launch. 

[nhgriffith 179]

The pathetic lack of build space alone has killed the game fro me, only hope is EA expands it....doubtfull.

Have you actually played it?

[Decius 360]

Could this game have been more after waiting for 10 years?  Absolutely, but it's still better than no SimCity.

I completely disagree!

 

By buying EA's unfinished, unpolished and simplified game, you encourage them to keep doing it and just get away with it.

I rather had no Simcity than this incomple and unfinished thing!

 

[lars_city 23]

Gametime 63 hours says Origin... oh my! I think though the launcher might have been open and counted towards this number as well, perhaps 10 hours is allocated to that, meaning I've been gaming for somewhat 50 hours... I also had a 4 AM experience... yikes 3 hours sleep and work Silly Maxis taking my sleep like that.

 

This SimCity certainly rebooted my interest in SimCity, I really didn't play SimCity 4 for years, so I'm happy to return to it, eventhough it returned with tons of things to be fixed. I experienced worse releases than this, some game companies releases games which you don't expect to be properly working before ½-1 year after release... I hope Maxis isn't one of those companies. One great thing about MMO is that they get patched more often to my experience than SP games does.

[SuperDeluge 0]

               Yes the game can be enjoying in a different way than Sim City 4.   I remember the launch of SC4 bugs and all.  The modding community made that game, otherwise it would have died long ago.   
              
               The OP wrote:   "Trust me, I could write an entire page about it's short comings (park trails not lining up, imperfect routing, tile size, random inconsistences, rampant fires, health care, meteor shower after 3 hours???, etc).  Could this game have been more after waiting for 10 years?  Absolutely, but it's still better than no SimCity."

              

               The most troubling thing about Sim City (13)  is the misinformation.   There are sites saying that the game can be played offline and that the only reason for the online play is to deter piracy.  In one blog from Lucy Bradshaw she says they are looking into offline mode and then later in the blog she says the simulation is tied to the servers and offline mode is impossible. 

               

               No offline mode troubles me because all the saves are done on the "cloud".  If they were to ever allow mods, bigger city tiles, etc, I think it would make for bigger save files, which would put more stress on the servers.   I also wonder if EA backs up the servers.   If one were to crash would thousands of regions go with it?     I'm not computer smart so if I am wrong about these concerns, sorry for bringing them up.   If Ms. Bradshaw isn't misinforming us and the servers are used to help run the game, then again, bigger city tiles and mods?  In a way I'm glad that this has been the worst launch in history, so maybe DRM won't become the industry standard.    I just wish they would have used a franchise I didn't like so much to try it out on.

[SaiyanAscended 0]

I don't really have an issue with the size. It's the size of a SIm City 4 medium map. Spacing issues are a problem early on but now most of my people are building huge, skyscraper like apartments and it frees up a ton of space.  What people don't also realize is that cities aren't meant to specialize in everything. I have a University in one city and everyone in my region attends that university.  I have casinos in another city and everyone goes to that city to gamble and sight see.  It's made for teamplay in mind.