macvirt

Already the case. And to be honest, while there is a big element there of "inspiration of design" (can anyone say who "invented" a mod or a DLC or a package which gives the user say, Parisian boulevards or buildings), in terms of quality what Maxis sofar is showing is rather lacking. Those parts of Paris, terrible in comparison to what some people have created for SC4 (textures, details, functionality). Agreed in full. To be blunt, it is entirely possible to make more money out of that kind of synergy. Not to mention how that tends to not just reward financially for a specific project, but how it builds customer loyalty and retention which is a magic currency for any company that aims to grow. Maxis has stated they do not even know yet whether they will release modding tools, when or even how they might do it. On the contrary, they have already put together a first offensive of DLC's and given clear hints on what to expect further (from regional styles or individual objects, transit elements, terrain tooling, data visualisation gimmicks, maps, regions and so forth - both art, content and entire feature sets, many of which we have seen in earlier versions prior to beta but which were removed from game because DLC sells more than the actual game). It's clear already, DLC comes first and foremost. EA risking what they see as competition with their own customer? No.

Honestly, all due respect for those who do the real work. But extremely rarely do they have any notion of why they are basing what work with which requirements for what purposes. This has been a fundamental shift within this industry the past 10 years, what many of those developers call the "crappy corporate side" of things. The games industry became just that, an industry. Look at EA's own evolution, as what exactly did it start out, how the heck did it become an investment firm Devs tend to be completely honest, but this is unfortunately always a case of "statements are based on the information resulting from decisions elsewhere while working in the trenches of the job and not on the cloud of the executive elsewhere". Design choices are derivative in their nature. This is unfortunate, but it cannot be avoided. It is principle to game design as part of the venture management. Look at the situation around the online play requirement. We've seen the Maxis statements The devs are honest in their statements. Whether they have any idea of how EA's presentations on strategic policies & directives are translated into what become their conditions for goal based work is a completely open question. From my own experience I'd say that most tend to really have no idea of how these things come in to play. A substiantial amount tends to have some idea, and bitches about it but accepts it as part of the work being in an industry. Fresh meat tends to have no idea, they come in believing the marketing of the industry But on the online play requirement topic, we know there is a higher reality above that of Maxis. They work with what is set. Server limitations? What are the specifications for that part of the project management .... faciliation on a feature level there is a derivative of other decisons resulting from directives. What is the primary focus of online play? DRM and user profiling. Ergo. Too much of all this really is just marketing. Even when people are truthful, it still tends to be secondary to other things resulting from completely different perspectives and priorities.

hilarious! Hilarious, but completely accurate. The foundation beneath this kind of marketing and sales ventures is a concept known as "I want to believe". It's a combination of variable specific triggers and patterns of user profiles underneath a set of models & inventory of methods for utilising these. At least within this industry, it's not like people do not use this elsewhere Let's be honest, most of our politics and modern economics rest on that syndrome. One of the more interesting parts of that on a psychological level is how easy it is to generate user trends of "X versus Y" where the concept of criticism is very easily translated in to a state of "anti" which gets equated with disfunctional membership of group dynamics or guidance towards exclusion of those. On a slightly larger level this can also be used very efficiently to enable customers to mobilise themselves based on what is known as unreasonable participation. Maybe some people remember how years ago the drama was between communities and users of Nvidia versus ATI. That history is actually a textbook case of research for this type of marketing today Very handy when it is required to engage in competition between titles / products of same genre and same potential markets.

Right. That is the whole point. There's no way the EA server can be doing much of the work. Ergo, computational power is a fake excuse. I am completely lost now. The city size is restricted because of computational limitations on the user's computer. This has been stated by several Maxis developers. Marketing. In simple terms: it is part truth, and part bullshit. These are matters of design choices resulting from strategic directives. Most of the time people who actually work on a game work with goals set for them and approach those on the basis of what is provided to them. They rarely get exposed to the steps from strategic policy to directives for studios and projects. That is an executive level. Such statements are not necessarily wrong, but they are based on conditions created out of decisions elsewhere. If other decisions are made, other conditions reign for design goals and project targets, and the technical foundation for these are suddenly quite different. That is why EA is so strict with directives. Hardware and platform requirements are always a topic, absolutely. But the project orientation towards managing those can take very different shapes and forms. EA has a clear strategy, the consequences of which leave no other path than the online play requirement. That developers fill in design requirements within the EA directives should not be a surprise. So ofcourse as a consequence they code and design to cater to the feature sets made required. That can actually be very beneficial, on a tactical level. We should however not forget that it is a consequence of decisions elsewhere. EA has made clear over the past years, both in media and at developer & industry conventions that prt of their strategic focus is the evolution of anti-piracy, user profiling and other elements towards an integrated platform service model. Online play combined with multiplay combined with profiling and DRM in one go, conditional to the strategic goals of profiling and DRM. They also made clear that this strategy is executed in directives to the various subsiduaries and studios as part of project scoping and planning. To be blunt, I heard the "story" of making the pitch for marketing and sales of this evolution several years ago already, as part of a public panel at a convention on the case of Spore and as part of a presentation during a GDC by an EA rep. The talk there was in every respect identical to the marketing talk we are given now as consumers. I'm still grinning over the statement of how a required online play model is the best course for a least resistance model of anti-piracy methods with the added foundation bonus for furthering the potential of user profiling for research and commercial interests. After which the guy actually winked.. Simply put: we say online play is required for technical reasons, we say how that enhances the experience of the user, we use that to strengthen DRM control and to deepen our insight into what people do, when & where and how, so we can use that for R&D and sell the data. It's not hard to punch through that. It really isn't. After all, this is a logical and commercially very viable evolution of strategy. The business interests are substantial to say the least. And it does make sense. Not just on the sales side, but also on the costing side of project development.

I get the idea that would take quite a bit of work for scalability mechanics for the different modelling and transaction systems (for example the agents), in order to address the SimZipcode syndrome. But the empty dividers yeah, that really breaks the experience too often. You know, with modding I am sure someone would figure out a way around that problem But landmarks, or other artificial filler constructs? Probably for 20 bucks a pop, yeah. I can see some neat commercial options there. Sure, let's give them more ideas on DLC

Its not advised that you mod the game until we release official tools. Not sure what will happen, but nothing good can come from it. and no, i dont know when we will be supporting mods. I don't really read too much into smileys but that's an interesting way to phrase that answer. I wonder to what extent we can already modify the game if someone were to figure out something like the algorithm they're using for the package files. In a practical sense, even if, you still can't. You'd get banned. One of the things that does take place between server and client is validation of packages and packets. Mismatches do not yield good results. But yeah, the wording there is interesting. In simple terms: we first want to milk you for tons of stuff which all combined might make a complete game experience, and once we move towards new projects and plan for discontinuing primary maintenance of this product then we may give you some tools so you, the paying fan, can do our work for us and keep it alive and growing like you guys were so nice to do with SC4.

"YOU are the lead designer at Maxis. What will you imagine?" Heh. A studio independant from EA.

You would think EA would have learned from UBI. I still think it will be a flop like SCS the audience they are trying to attract wont be interested just like SCS. How does one degrade customer resistances to change? By consistantly staying on course, adjusting for lessons learned without deviating from targets set. Along the way you pick up better marketing, audiences change, resistances erode, and you can continue nurturing corporate strategy over time. A single title having issues means nothing in these matters, the only thing that matters is the set of corporate strategy targets over the course of 10 to 15 business cycles. That's more than a decade's worth of "vision".

Welcome to our wonderful industry. When engaging in a project we create an as complete as possible design and project specification which incorporates a flexible but - again - as complete as possible branching structure of features, functionality, content and the various interdependancies between these and requirements rooted in marketing and sales directives. To make a long story short, we have learned that not only is it cheaper to not release a full game by means of cutting out (feature creep, limits of resource allocations but most of the time conscious decisions to move elements to the side) parts which we can then take back from the shelve and sell to you for increasingly more financial gain than the actual sales of the core game itself. We do this because it works. Y'all buy everything anyway, pretty much because of a whole lot of marketing & psychology but we can summarise it as we do everything to ensure that y'all "want to believe". Farming, power lines, terraforming, underground infrastructure elements, regions supporting agent scaling, larger maps, modding tools, it does not matter what it is or even why something slipped down on a priority list, was sidetracked or ended up as part of a post-mortem. What matters is that we know that the reasons have zero significance, because we know that anything we chipped off we can wrap up and sell you seperately. Come on people, it does not matter whether there is a morality attached to that or not, that is entirely subjective and individually determined. But these things should be clear to anyone who ever buys a game these days. The people who do the hard work of design and development, they want to make a game, they make the effort to try and create entertainment. But they are not the ones who make these decisions, because it is not just about making a game and having fun with that. It is business. There are a lot of you out there, you are easy to reach and easy to lure, so we emphasise on strategy based on zero-sum thinking. Like every industry this one is subject to change, yet as we are here and now and for the next decade a few simple things are cast in iron and gold alike: - we do not have to make a complete game - we do not have to make a niche game - all we have to do is build, market and sell as cheap as possible There are exceptions. Sometimes because a company does not want to be a sheep, sometimes because they have discovered a niche that is a match for their ability to secure funding and serve that niche. Most of the time such companies are small and independant, on occasion there's one that is big and who sees through the illusions of the DRM mentality. Overall there is an interesting observation to make: the larger a company and the more complex the ties to investment funding the more likely the guarantee that it will treat you, the customer, as nothing but a resource.

Fixed elements.

We'll have to wait whether it is a mere visual approach fix, or whether it actually focuses on the root issues.

Actually, we do. People with access to the GDC Vault can look up the various interviews and panels and presentations with awesome EA folks explaining the evolution of anti-piracy and DLC strategies into a combined format supported by the commercial interests of profiling research. The result of such ventures is translated in to revised strategy and that is ultimately translated in to directives for projects and subsidiaries. Don't except a hard working game developer to even be in the loop by the way, this is the corporate side of just another industry. Directives are translated into research targets, from there we move to design targets, and so forth. It's simple. It's old stuff by now, to be perfectly honest. And, it is not like EA is the only one to pursue such roads. It's business, it pays, ergo it is done.

So on top of the mention of charging for individual building downloads, what would you all feel / think if modding tools were made dependant for availability on expansion / DLC packs .......

Hardly. I'll readily admit that SC2013 has a lot more design packaging and emphasis on creating the perceptions of overview and influence on a set of simulation elements. But the simulation itself is much more limited than that of SC4. Which is only natural, because the design scope is so different. SC4 aims towards an immersive experience of detail management based on complexity and the aspiration of finding realism in replication of the real in the virtual. SC20132 aims towards a low treshold fun experience of placing elements in order to create the perception of a simulation without the constraints of the real (world). In terms of game design, that is very well done. It is one of the biggest reasons why this will sell very, very well, to today's mass markets. We should just accept that we should not compare the two, because they serve different scopes. Yes, SC2013's messaging of realism and simulation is mostly just marketing, but that can hardly be a surprise to anyone. It's fine, for the purpose of design it fits the shiny shoes. But the deeper simulation is not part of SC2013. For a quick bit of fun with less puzzle factors our experience can go deeper, but that is something else.

It's properly named I think. The title is a break from an expectation of "next SC4" (which it is designed to not be), it still is visible as a title within the franchise of SimCity, etc. Sure, it might have been more correct to call it "SimSocialZipcode", but that hardly sounds as a sales pitch does it.

No. These things are part of a larger strategy, across multiple titles and releases. The "backing down" with Spore was expected as part of an introduction of methods for an audience less accustomed to it, now these things are more common and people have less awareness and resistance. Add to that how the game is designed to cater to types of customers who really are not the typical SC4 type of customer, plus how it is marketed, and the sum of it all is an overall very decreased likelyhood of having to back down.

Isn't that what you get when you let convicts build their own prisons? Kidding

Yes it is limited, but that is the scope, it is fine for what the game is. Cities in Motion 2 has a completely different design specification and focus.

I hate that there are people who think this way. Please don't give me a game that isn't complete and then sell me DLC to complete it. Heh, too late. We already figured out is is more rewarding to sell a shell title and complete with DLC

Indeed. Sometimes I wonder how serious EA was a few years ago when at a panel discussion it was said that they wanted to get to a system where their customers would equate to individual sims complete with both virtual and real life profiling. But, a bit more on topic, as solid as that post was, and as it is hardly an exception, I find it interesting that even when people do not compare SC4 to SC2013 or approach SC2013 from an SC4 direction there does appear to be a quite strong segment of people that actually do not like the shallowing of immersion. Or perhaps better worded, the adaptation of games to mass consumption for leisure play as primary focus of development and sales. A segment of people placing value on a deeper experience, on their own as much as with others. Maybe "dumbing down" is easier, but at this rate it is going to build an interesting market in its own right as a trend of people who do not want to fall in to the categories of casual or leisure or passive In this industry it only takes one title to upset carefully established trends by publishers.

I see your point. Though after playing with the beta I think the new SC is kind of different than the SC4. I mean not a sequel or replacement. The GlassBox enginge is a great thing and the whole agent-based simulation is a great advancement. Personnaly I think about buying the new game and if I have the time I will keep playing with SC4 with all those awesome plugins. .. and I hope for a future where the good parts of SC4 will be included in SC. Also I will post some screenshots later. I know, there is no comparing the two. Different targets, different customer focus. I was simply mesmerising options over time for those who prefer the immersion of SC4. I saw the recent demo video of NAM developments, and quite frankly new functionality demonstrated in it does already rival the transit options in SC2013, except the full circle stuff. Here's the thing though, SC2013 is a nice bit of quick fun, it's just designed to appeal wider rather than go deeper. Perfectly understandable, just not for me. At least not until it becomes part of a summer sale for 10 bucks on Steam and there is open moddability without artificial limitations on that.

The only limiting factor for SC4 in terms of continuity is that of operating system compatibility. There will come a time where enabling SC4 to run will become impractical or even impossible. In the first case that will stop the flow of novice users to it gradually, in the second case that will phase out the core users marginalising the game as viable. The only way around that really is either platforms like Steam convincing studio's to make modifications, studio's releasing code or customers being extremely inventive (though since this is an EA title I would be very cautious exploring any such angles).

Economics is basically an extension of the reward system (think achievements) used as enablers. For example City Hall enables XYZ - plus the market system on a regional level (which is like any game market system a fixed model of transactions with options for the devs to smooth hiccups).

Twisted, so much for the statements of "you only need to be online to start playing". Aside of the savegame functionality putting a torpedo in that, running for 10 minutes without a connection results in a message that the game will be closed Turned off all services and got a zombie attack. I've also seen screenshots of earthquakes and UFO sightings. Don't believe you can. I usually just select the road type i want to build, mouseover an existing road to get the guide overlay to show up then create the roads. But I will say, not being able to have an active grid toggle-able is quite frustrating. I have a new concern that I was thinking about this morning. Is the content in the current beta, including locked content, going to be all that ships with the final product? Feels like its lacking more content but then again, I'm another SC4 w/mods player. As explained before, the current paradigm of the industry is that a game cannot and must not be complete on release. What consumers know as DLC is rapidly and purposely becoming the main revenue stream of the industry. The game itself is a portal to that, an enabler. But again, do not compare SC4 and SC2013. Different beasts from different times, for different audiences.

That is the kind of message devs that frequent forums should pick up on for round table discussions between departments that include the marketing team. By the way, on the note of customisation versus DLC as a topic. Is it not interesting how the concept of "rewards" was tied to the concept of "achievements"? Something extremely interesting, commercially, for implementations of further DLC tracks. Not so much pay to win, though often gamers seem to reach for that shout, but pay to enable / show off.