P*Funk

Basically you're agreeing with me, but for different reasons, users who don't understand the software they're using. Basically you're saying that we have to assume that all users of software are dumb enough to not understand the limitations of their own hardware. When I was a teenager even I had the aptitude to appreciate the fact that my computer wasn't bleeding edge and that if I set the graphics and any other scalable performance hitting features too high and I got snail frames or even a game that wouldn't load that my computer just wasn't up to snuff. I dunno, maybe its because I was bred as a gamer on PCs and not on consoles that I can understand this. Maybe the console generation and all those people that play low fidelity mobile/facebook games don't understand this concept. None of that actually explains to me why things should be scaled back to meet the hardware limitations of the 14% on Win7 32 bit. What are you doing blaming hard ware companies for holding us back? My friend has owned a 12 core Intel CPU for 2 years, granted he paid ridiculous amounts of money for it, but if thats the upper limit of ridiculous then where's the average? Fact is that quad core is the new standard. Not the future, its here now. If you buy a computer today its a quad core. The only thing that was holding back the quad core shift was the fact that SOFTWARE wasn't able to handle multiple cores for the longest time so dual cores were generally favourable for performance obsessed people because 2 cores at 3.0 was better than 4 at 2.3 because the software would only use one core at a time. Thats not the case anymore, not as much anyway. But we'll never be in the 64 bit era and the multi core era properly until software is correctly designed to take advantage of where we're going, not where we are now. There's nothing wrong with having the game meet the needs of lower level hardware, but that doesn't explain why the engine wouldn't be able to scale up for multiple cores. It doesn't make sense that a game would meet 4 gigs as a minimum but not be scalable up to 8 or 12 gigs, same with cores. Its just a matter of expanding the demands on the system. Limitless resources usually means the upper end is firmly embedded in the design of the software. With multi core software support there's no logical reason you can't scale the game up, unless the engine itself falls apart when you throw more stuff at it regardless of the hardware running it. I don't now what the upper limit of PA's agent load is. From what I've read theoretically there is no limit, as long as you have the hardware to support it, server side. Unit AI also with regards to pathfinding is pretty much the main focus in any RTS. We'll see how that works out, but I still think that hard limits imposed by antiquated hardware is a stupid way to design things. Frankly you still haven't explained why there can't be scalability other than some lame marketing oriented limited goal nonsense. Its one thing to acknowledge this as the reason, its another to say its a good reason. Everyone knows that big box publishers are morons with no ambition who milk the market for what its got without doing any of the labour to move it forward. The work of pushing the limits will come from kickstarter projects and independent thinkers who'll hit it big then get bought out by the EA's and THEN we'll see mainstream games embrace the new paradigm, built by the fringe thinkers. So yea, I get it, we have limitations for this reason or that And if consumer perception of the product is such a big deal I don't know why they can't just come up with normal "Detected best setting for your machine" stuff with some "Warning, gameplay settings exceed recommended hardware minimum requirements" or something. In any Total War game you can scale the size of the units on the battlefield. Plenty of games cope with this. The only thing that this makes me think is that they're targeting such a passive and uncommitted gaming market that we can't even expect them to visit one forum, one web site or anything to acquire knowledge about the game and its limitations or its potential growth, which would be ironic given this is supposed to be some emerging game within the social media revolution.

Basically thats the thing that alot of very inarticulate and instead much more argumentative people seem to be trying to get at. This doesn't feel like its going to be a sandbox, because frankly most people I meet in the gaming world treat talk of sandbox games with hostility or apathy. Goal and accomplishment oriented gameplay is the mainstay of the mainstream market these days. Choice is a function of predetermined flows. Its almost like balancing an MMO's class interdependent gameplay. Its obvious this'll still be sandboxy-ish, but not to the same degree as SC4 most likely. Its not my thing, I prefer to make my own choices and have the game able to handle them in a way that turns really creative thinking into emergent almost unanticipated results. This style for 2013 looks like a more conservative approach, easier on the uninitiated. Its yet to be seen if the "accessibility" will nerf the depth that long time fans have invested in.

Well if Origin is charging $60 for the base copy while most new games on Steam are $50 with the only real exceptions being super super popular ones like CoD then they're already showing me an inferior option. They know this too, thats why they do exclusive product availability. Basically they bank on your interest being strong enough to make you shrug off that extra $10 that comes from doing business on Origin for a new game.

I don't buy this line of reasoning. We're firmly into the 64 bit era. We have moved past the 4 gig Ram limitation and we're getting to a stage of development where its more than just easy but expected that games are able to handle and utilize multi-core architecture to full effect. Any failure to embrace these changes are just uninspired design. Lets take the upcoming game Planetary Annihilation for instance. This is an RTS game which seeks to create a sense of scale on a galactic level but in an RTS combat environment. This means planets with moons orbiting them in solar systems with multiple planets. Once you conquer your planet you can go fight the winners on their planets and so on. This is a game that has the potential to scale to meet insane demands of dozens of players playing 12 to 24 hour games if they want. All of this I might add involves hundreds, even thousands of robots executing complex AI driven behavior, all of which is also being developed to be smarter than in the past. They're designing it around a client-server model so that big games can be hosted on game servers either made by the developer or by someone with a powerful box to support it. Now, this sounds exciting but what if you just want to play a small game with some friends, without a big server? What if you just want to play a LAN party with 4 people on a modest map? You can do this too. The game is designed to scale to the demands of the players. The game engine is being built to deal with multiple cores, 64 bit architecture, basically to take anything you can throw at it, but also to scale down for people of modest hardware capability. This is the sensible thinking that all PC games should be designed around, but they tend not to because of a lowest common denominator mentality that is more in keeping with these big publisher models. I firmly believe that they intentionally don't create these scalable potentials within games because people feel like they're missing out on something if they can't experience what someone else can. If I have 8 cores and 12 gigs of ram why shouldn't I be able to build as big and illustrious a city as I want? Why should I be limited by the hardware a bunch of broke mid-core college laptop gamers have available? I would think that given the direct agent based model they're using they'd want to let me scale it up to handle as much as possible, to push the game as far as I can. Its a lack of creative vision that I've come to expect from big budget publishers. If this is purely about hardware requirements then the game is holding itself back intentionally. If its really just the engine though, not being able to handle the scale no matter the hardware, then thats again closer to what I was talking about in my first post. Also, for the record Planetary Annihilation is a kickstarter project with no publisher and a budget of around $2.2 million. If they can do all that (and we're going to find out inside a year I believe) then the limitations of Sim City 2013 may just be incomprehensible and laughable in short order.

I think the engine limitations are interesting. People seem to gloss over it despite it being supposedly a step forward. I don't see how a brand spanking new engine that has more limitations on scale than something from 10 years ago has as being progress, just a bad decision. Certainly a new engine that does new things is an advantage but engine limitations aren't something to be overlooked. The Old Republic MMO uses a new engine and it all looks very nice and all that but they're in trouble. Moving forward its basically been said by the developers that they're not able to do open world PvP because the engine can't handle it. Imagine that, an MMO designed around an engine that can't actually handle massive numbers of online players in the same instance. Bad planning. Bad design, and its limiting the potential of the game going forward. Some people think MMOs without good open world PvP aren't worth their time, and they're right for them at least, but the problem here is that all that optimism people might espouse about the future of that game... well none of it applies to the rather substantial core of open world PvP fans. They're out of luck it seems. Who knows what this engine's limitations might do to the rosey and as yet unexplored future of SimCity 2013. They could miraculously fix the engine to handle bigger maps and more stuff, but... my suspicion is that they won't bother wasting lots of money on that. I believe that these engine fixes may come from brilliant community modders, should the tools be given to them, in time just like modders have managed to create 128 player servers for Battlefield 2, and even then without an SDK. The thing that strikes me though is that engine limitations are an awfully big elephant to be ignoring. Its not something you can brush aside. It poses serious implications for the future of this particular title, at least in terms of those who want to see things get bigger and at least return to SC4 size. I'm curious to see how this hashes out, and whether the developers will be honest about it or BS their way around it like the SWTOR devs have been doing (in terms of firmly saying absolutely no).

I don't agree with this sentiment. Its easy to attack the subculture as the root of a perception but I share this perception and I never post on reddit and its all a result of me being a gamer who looks at my options and sees clearly the stunts that some companies pull to try and take control of a market. I view origin as a cynical attempt to muscle in on the market that Steam has established. The problem I have is that its exclusivity isn't healthy. You can get as many games on steam as you can elsewhere, but the protectionistic aspect of Origin is not good in my opinion. I don't want to have to remember multiple different log ins and have companies try and get me into their proprietary community just to play my games. My general opinion on all of this log in services is that they've significantly lowered average password security. Either everyone is using one really tough password for everything they're doing or they're using a handful of really weak passwords that are easier to remember. I'm not Commander Data, I don't have multiple blocks of complex non-sensical information in my head. I however take the last and only sensible option which is to have a physical log book of all the varied and numerous passwords I keep with the endless lists of places that need me to log in. Everytime something tells me to create an account I have to fight the urge to use a throw away password thats easy to remember.

You're of course assuming that they're going to let us achieve this without spending in time $100+ in DLC. First thing anybody thinks when they see heavy emphasis on an online component is a clear indication that they're going to push for DLC as the focus moving forward. The problem with DLC is that it tends to have a much looser standard and as such you have to decide which part of it you want to use, but you also come into the problem of compatibility in this online aspect. Can you really play with your friends if you don't buy everything? Thats the genius of day 1 mappack DLC with shooters. I believe I read that they're not shipping with mod support either, which scares me. Is that going to be a DLC addon? Is that maybe just going to become a phantom feature that gets lost in the inevitable budget shrinking that comes with any game release? The problem with this title is assumptions. Wide open modding possibilities create a clear future for a game with a strong community, but with nothing promised yet who knows what you'll get. Its a lot to invest $60 in. I can wait for a mod pack, and if I dont like the mods out there make my own. If we have gimped modding capability we might never get what we wanted. Look at the lack of terrain modification. Is this going to come with the future mod capabilities? Will this forever be lost? I think in a modern EA driven paradigm you can't take anything for granted. EA has wrapped up prematurely as many projects as its pushed forward post release, and the online requirement indicates that the future of this product lies entirely within EA's desire to support it. Whats to stop them from killing the online support, thus killing the game itself, just to motivate you to buy the next iteration? Or just killing it because the sales suffer? I preferred games when the future was clearly in the hands of the community. I also trusted developers do good work in expanding the game. Lately DLC is just as likely to be useless fluff as it is to be something that drives the game into a greater standard of polish and completion. Lastly you can't overestimate the dangers of EA's desire to target the casual audience. Its not just enough to make the game run well without needing to understand complex game mechanics, but I find that people react poorly to the sense that a game is beyond them. People want to feel like they can accomplish everything, often without needing to really put much effort into (preferring time as the measure of their effort, not actual concentration). People want to zonk out and still feel like they've achieved something. That threatens the depth of a game because if thats who they really cater to then it puts the real nerds out in the cold. I'm a wait and see person, but the online only aspect in particular shuts me off. Even without that though I fear this will be a diminutive cousin to its elder siblings of past decades.