freewaytonowhere

I already started a thread on this:

I won't disclose much, other than to say that my company is partnered with EA and Origin. Today I got an e-mail telling us to suspend all promotion of Sim City until further notice. I guess they are in damage control mode with all the people demanding refunds. Maybe this is good news?

Glad to see everyone is enjoying their $80 copy of Farmville

I'm moaning about it in hopes the developers see this thread, I tried to itemize as best I could the most blatant issues I found with the game that I also thought could be easily fixed. Not saying I'll never buy it, just saying I won't buy it until they have at a minimum the features I listed above.

I never said I was the majority, but judging by the popularity of the NAM (and the fact that this game attracts the same demographic that blows his top if his HO scale train set gets mixed with a piece thats 1/100th of a scale off) I would say they stand to alienate a very large number of players. Will they still sell copies? Obviously, they already have, but they are limiting themselves to the casual demographic by not paying attention to what users want, when they could have easily satisfied both by looking at how we modded. And yes I expect a brand new game to have all the features of a previous game that came out ALMOST TEN YEARS AGO. If you notice all the new games that attempt to replace World of Warcraft do their best to imitate most of the features. I'm not even asking for them to have every feature, but freeways and streets without painted lines are as basic to city building as having a manual shift is to a racing game.

That looks like a roller coaster not a freeway. All they really had to do to make this a best seller was remake SC4 with its most popular mods in full 3D, add glassbox and curved roads and call it a day. That would have been amazing. Adding all this micromanaging of individual lots but failing to have even the most basic of road types is like sculpting intricate details of an exotic car (like a Ferrari) and then putting a cloth interior in it. It's mind boggling. If you feel this game is worth buying with the extreme lack of realism then that's your choice, but I laugh at anyone who defends EA for not bothering to research (at the very least) the NAM and re-create it. If you want to use the argument that "oh we don't need highways in such a small city" ok maybe I can roll with that, but the lack of streets without road lines? Please show me any city in real life that has absolutely no side streets without markings on them. This is something they could fix with a simple texture swap, but the fact that they overlooked that detail just shows how out of touch they are. They would have been better off making a Facebook game like Farmville if all they wanted to do was make a social game. Roads and traffic are the heart of city building, and they blatantly ignored them, leaving out roads that were standard in their old vanilla SC4.

OMG from what I read there will be no freeways?????? HAHAHAHA wow....... Yea something tells me this game is going to flop big time. I personally couldn't care less about it always being online, but not being able to build freeways inside the city? That takes the cake.. Sim City 2013 is like a Mercedes with a cloth interior and hubcaps. Way to waste millions EA.....

So far the only roads I saw from videos were dirt roads, low density streets, four lane roads and 6 lane highways. How many lanes can the freeways have? What types of interchanges? I can deal with no turning lane avenue, but it looks like there is NO option for a street with no road lines except for a dirt road. That is completely unacceptable if this is the case. Also, it looks like to have a 2 lane road with stoplights its only a dotted yellow line. WTF? They had it right in the last Sim City 4 with a constant double yellow. Absolutely unrealistic if its a dotted line the whole time. Basically as expected, EA totally disregarded looking at what the NAM did and made what appears to be an unrealistic batch of roads. This would be fine except since its online it cannot be modded, not even textures, which means I won't spend a dime on it and I'm sure many others won't either. EA, unless you want this game to flop fast, fix the road issues. Really at a minimum they need: Paved streets with no road lines (only stop sign intersections) Paved streets with double yellow lines (that have stoplights) Four lane roads (like they have) Six lane roads (like they have) At least a TLA5 (But I am willing to wait for this) And at least an RHW4 - RHW8. If it doesn't have all of the above at launch its not wort buying IMO. I just cannot get into a game that's completely unrealistic at such a basic level (i.e. dotted yellow line all the time instead of double yellow) or the complete lack of paved streets with no markings on them. That's basically as bad as Cities XL having a stoplight at every intersection (even the tiny 1 lane roads). How do developers spend millions on market research and overlook such glaringly obvious details?