Why all the Simcity hate?

[Miketorngren 0]

There is no question the server fiasco the first week was bad, but that's mostly fixed. There are some major bugs that need squashing and traffic pathing issues. My only complaint right now is the school and city bus AI. Nothing a few patches won't fix. So why all this talk about it being "broken". What's broke?

The only thing I see is a lot of people complaining about always online which was clearly advertised before release so if that's a deal breaker then just don't buy it.

The city size is because this is fundamentally a different game than SC4. If you want a massive sprawling megalopolis then play SC4. Simcity 2013 is about deeper micro management of a smaller area. Which you can expand across multiple cities.

So again tell me what's broke?

[Mr Saturn64 742]

You stated it yourself.  The always online.  We don't want to play city builders with everyone.

[Frode789 70]

Pathfinding is another major thing that they messed up..

[dogma555 187]

The online aspect and bugs have nothing to do with it for me.

 

You have to remember we are talking Sim City here.. the name used to carry a certain prestige. People hold the series to a high standard, and EA did a good job tricking people into thinking this may just be an SC5.

 

This new release is just the weakest yet.. a terrible entry to the SC series, even for a non traditional spin-off type.. the graphics look two generations old, the features are extremely lacking, and there is no depth or sophistication to be found.

 

But anyone expecting much from this game only have themselves to blame. I said from day one, this is going to be a complete joke of a sim city game.

[Indiana Joe 1,750]

It's being hated on because this website had become mostly a SimCity 4 community, and we all wanted a successor to that game.  When this game was announced, we were partying hard.  Then it turned out to be a reboot that went in a different direction.  What Maxis did was like holding out a juicy ham to a starving man and then throwing it out as he reaches for it.

 

That's why it's being particularly disliked here.

 

But it doesn't matter that much, because the SC4 community has really made that game immortal.  We can go on playing it for a long time yet.

[Board_Marshal 104]

Sure there's some hate just because its EA and "always-online DRM" but I'd like to think that more than 50% of its frustration and disappointment which is being delivered in a very passionate way using crude but often effective angry language or "hate" as you've called it.  It has its challenges and charm but its still new.  Once the "newness" wears off so does the charm.  People navigate convoluted systems all the time IRL and there is some satisfaction to be had in accomplishing the goal of successfully doing so but it remains convoluted none-the-less.  There are many strange and unintuitive things in SC2013 and because of the silence of EA/Maxis it is hard to determine what's WAD (because some of it seems so peculiar), what's WAD but just not very good, and what is in fact not WAD, i.e., broken.

 

If they (Maxis) would be clear about which it is for the various things people are taking issue with then we could move towards resolution but instead the frustration and disappointment continues untreated.

[clarkmp 0]

There are quite a few things that are broken. 

 

1. Region play is not working efficiently. This is a server side issue which has improved but marginally. This is were many of the problems i have experienced occur.

2. Recycling centers bug out sometimes by not producing/shipping.

3. Some aspects of the AI are not functioning as intended. Random circles. 

4. Buildings on curved roads require more spacing that those on grid patterns

5. Water tables draining to quickly to be replenished by rainfall. This may not be broken, just unbalanced.

6. Commuters from other cities with sometimes spawn duplicates resulting in far more traffic than you should have (this seems to have improved with the last patch)

 

These are just a few off the top of my head. I have to agree with you though that many people are getting hung up on the only online aspect, small city size, and the fact that its not what people what people thought it was going to be. This is not a successor to SimCity 4 and has a style of its own. Personally i like some of the new features and hope they can get everything sorted out. I'll be looking forward to patches and updates to see were this game may go!

[Hitandrun127 0]

Maybe it's just me, but I have a feeling this game will get a lot better after the major bugs are patched, and the modding community gets hold of it.

[Board_Marshal 104]

Personally i like some of the new features and hope they can get everything sorted out. I'll be looking forward to patches and updates to see were this game may go!

 

Yes, I too look forward to the patches and I think this game has a lot of potential.  You might say that it has no place to go but up.  I'm on a wait and see plan (I've no choice, they already have my money )

[Gulch 0]

So again tell me what's broke?

 

Well for starters, you can just zone R and grow your city to a million population.

with only water and electricity.

[pickerscreeks 0]

Despite all of bad mouthing the game is getting I have to admit I'm quite enjoying it. Yeah there are a few bugs in the game (understatement much? ) but I'm fairly confident they will be ironed out eventually. I guess like most people my main gripe with the game is the online only bit, I really cannot understand why they couldn't have just put in a single player region mode that didn't require to be online all of the time... Even if you only had to authenticate with the servers once before being able to play would have been something.

[yigald1 1]

In general, I agree with you, I.e. after the first days when I could not play because of the server problem, I believed it will get solved soon, and it did. I start to adopt the new concepts of micro planing, and taking care of intr-relation between 2 cities. Still it is annoying when jus tonight (9 days after release) money I sent from one city to the othe, does not get there, and I just lost the money. Let's be honest, the game needed few more month of thorough testing and debugging.

But I like to play the game, better than SC4.

I hope that in next few months, they will fix all or most of the bugs.

[Mr. Flibble 134]

I don't have it, and won't be purchasing it so take my opinion with that understood, but I never played SimCity ever at all with the wish in my head that it would be so much more fun with other people playing in the sandbox, too. SimCity once upon a time strived to be a simulation, not a mere game which is what it has become now. Every feature they remove is evidence of that. Sure there was minutiae that was unnecessary like needing to drag pipes around and whatnot, but instead of making the simulation more lifelike and open to exploration in 2013, they've made it far less so. The cities in the game have houses and roads and cars, but from what I've seen online in various places it's just a sugar-coated topping about as correlative to reality (to me) as a built out Monopoly board. Canned regions with even more canned starting locations is not at all going to provide me the same enjoyment as importing a DEM of my home area and recreating models of where I live (and totally different versions thereof).

 

Do I think it's a hopeless mess? Absolutely not. I think the agent system and engine is an amazing accomplishment that they should be proud of and it appears capable, with some modification, of creating a level of fidelity that the old games could only approximate with the grid-based statistical methods. To accomplish that, though, it needs to have a true freeform sandbox mode unchained from its online cooperative stuff. Ideally they would both exist, then everyone will be happy. Otherwise, I agree fully with a comment I read before about this being as forever divisive to the SimCity community as the changes from Civ4 to Civ5 were for that franchise's fans.

[fieryflare 1]

No, this game is complete garbage.

 

Everything is a step back:

 

No terraforming, and no highways. Tiny city tiles.

 

And the whole game is broken and made up of lies, just read this article and watch the videos:

 

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/03/13/simcitys-sims-dont-seem-that-smart-after-all/

 

Plus these ones:

 

http://wegotthiscovered.com/gaming/simcity-users-complain-broken-traffic-ai-fake-sims-populations/

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/03/12/simcity-server-not-necessary/

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/03/fans-press-uncover-massive-holes-in-simcitys-ai-server-connection/

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/03/14/modder-runs-simcity-offline-maxis-remains-silent/

 

Watch this vid:

 

http://youtu.be/ACdu1ho2Ic4

 

Basically, everything is a lie:

 

Sims are mindless drones, they just head to the nearest workplace, and then come back to the nearest house, they don't actually have a real job or real residence, and this causes extreme traffic backup. It's funny how primitive the massively hyped Glassbox engine is, it's far inferior to old SC4 and every other city builder out there pretty much, with sims that had real jobs and real places where they lived. And they tried to hype GlassBox up as super realistic, complex, and revolutionary when it's the complete opposite. The way this system works makes it so that the best pathing is this just one road zigzagging through the whole city. Also traffic lights slowed down traffic, so people actually had an optimal road layout using just dirt roads and having no lights.

 

 

Yes, SC4 had traffic problems, but this is 2013, Maxis didn't improve anything regarding the traffic and road systems.

 

Maxis even uses the old traffic model that makes vehicles take the shortest distance roads, instead of moving cars to less congested roads, this was fixed in 2004 by the NAM team, and yet Maxis still couldn't fix it in this new piece of garbage.

 

They lied about the internet connection being needed because some calculations needed to be offloaded onto EA's servers which was complete BS, a Maxis member even came out and said it.

 

The population is faked to be higher than the real number of agents to make the game more impressive and your cities feel like they aren't so tiny.

 

This game is just a shallow illusion that lets you build a small, successful city real easily, then move onto the next one, people have no trouble getting millions of simoleons within a few hours and maxing out a city in that time too.

 

We have the technology to create a truly fantastic city building game that is amazing and in every way better than SC4, and yet, this is what we get, and city building fans deserve a much, much better game than this piece of garbage. You should always want better, not less, because we always want to progress as we head into the future, there's always improvements.

  Edited March 15, 2013 by CaptCity  
Name calling is not permitted.

[macvirt 361]

Never confuse constructive criticism with hate.

 

Hate, according to Yoda, comes from anger, which comes from suffering and so forth. I'm sure we all know Yoda's wisdom. The guy has a point.

 

But that is not the case here. People are voicing concerns, as much as they are voicing willingness to embrace. That is not hate. Hate is what kills people. Every day.

[Marla_Singer 46]

Never confuse constructive criticism with hate.

 

Indeed. As a matter of fact, I tend to find the Simtropolis community a lot less harsh with the game than what I can read elsewhere on more mainstream forums, twitter or reddit.

 

We do feel most people attached with the game and wanting it to be a success. Most people here simply ask for patches and are ready to wait for them the time needed to make them operate properly.

[BravoGreenONE 120]

Yeah its a matter of dissapointment more than hate. I saw the game in the store and I picked it up. Sadly I had to put it back on the shelf. Shame really. I would have paid 120 for the thing if it was stellar. Now I have to wait for the pathfinding to be fixed and decent tile sizes. After that ill wait for it to go on sale as a mater of principle.

Honestly if I were a major shareholder at EA alot of people would be losing their jobs over this. From the CEO on down. This was low quality workmanship.

[Mr_Maison 2,426]

Take all the spicy words as an indication of how much this community loves SimCity. If we didn't care, there wouldn't be so much noise. It would just be one of those games that come and go to be found on abandonware sites. But SimCity has a certain character and legacy with a particularly interesting community that are more "tech-creative" than players of games. I see architects and engineers as well as game developers in this community. If you are looking for your Call of Duty or Facebook game crowd, this is the wrong place to look. Not saying I don't like COD. There is a time for that, and a time for this.

[tosuzu 0]

Hmm why not use the same model of networking like we do with real IP networks? I mean look at OSPF and EGRIP, they work well to a degree.

[Akyhne 3]

Basically everything they changed in SC2013 are things I don't like.

 

SC4 in a new shell with better graphics and some of the work done here and on other sites regarding traffic and roads would have satisfied me.

 

I'm not buying!

[Districtopia 23]

It has some issues but it's not garbage. I am disappointed the city plots aren't as large as SC4 and the terraforming is gone. I'm disappointed there aren't more transportation options. I'm disappointed in the space between buildings and I'm disappointed in the way zones advance from low/medium/high. I don't like the fake population or the fact that you can get skyscrapers with a population of 15,000. But I just think back to the problems I had in SC4 and most of those got fixed with the patches, modding or with the expansion pack. I'm optimistic this game gets better in time. They got the server situation resolved faster than I ever thought they would.

 

SN: I'm by no means a huge gamer so the hatred for EA escapes me. Maybe it's deserved, maybe it's not. Everyone is entitled to their opinion. They were behind SC4 too, though.......

[mrbisonm 1,620]

Seriously , I don't think that it is actually a matter of "Hate", but more of a dissapointment. We expected something, after TEN years, much better than it was presented here. This Simcity was created too quickly, it was meant to earn as much money as possible and as fast as possible, still having to be tweaked (again) Funny, how EA can't bring us something totally finished and working.

I can't play this Simcity because of its online needs, while the only free time I have to actually play computergames, is in my weekend home up north in a non civilized region. No internet there, so no Simcity for me. Besides of what I hear, it only works in "pieces" as most of the players mention.

 

Sorry Maxis and EA, you're not on my list anymore. I had enormous problems with other games from them.  Now I am waiting for the next Settlers and Tropico.......these have better graphics and....believe it or not..... work without problems

 

mrb.

[AIX 270]

I will echo the others here and say it is more disappointment than hate. I personally have been playing Sim City since 1994. 19 years of my 26-year life. I am not an avid "gamer" - other genres of games (with few exceptions) are of no interest to me. First-person shooters: yawn. Sports games: pointless money grabs.

The Sim City franchise has been a huge part of my [recreational] life. It would be impossible for me to enumerate the number of hours, number of cities/regions, etc I have played. You will find [obviously] that I am not alone on this perspective.

 

Actual game play issues aside, I do take severe objection to Origin and its ability to snoop around your hard drive and report back to EA. I have seen spyware and malware that is not as invasive as Origin's software. Because of that, I had to use a separate "quarantine" system to try the "beta" because I will not have my privacy violated.

[PapasGigantes 3]

This is a region-focused game, even in single-player mode.  I am enjoying this game immensely, but I can't wait for the region/multiplayer to function better.  I think that is where the real fun begins (for me) and my gaming buddies.

[mastorofpuppetz 199]

There is no question the server fiasco the first week was bad, but that's mostly fixed. There are some major bugs that need squashing and traffic pathing issues. My only complaint right now is the school and city bus AI. Nothing a few patches won't fix. So why all this talk about it being "broken". What's broke?

The only thing I see is a lot of people complaining about always online which was clearly advertised before release so if that's a deal breaker then just don't buy it.

The city size is because this is fundamentally a different game than SC4. If you want a massive sprawling megalopolis then play SC4. Simcity 2013 is about deeper micro management of a smaller area. Which you can expand across multiple cities.

So again tell me what's broke?

 

Besides the always online the game once you get into the simuation is a mess as well.