I played SimCity 2013 a few months after launch, and I quite liked it, especially the gorgeous visuals.
I've read TFA, and honestly they also failed to mention maybe the worse issue of SimCity 2013: how limited it was compared to the previous instalments. The playable area was tiny, so you quickly felt constrained by the border of your playable area. The fact that you could build multiple cities in the same region alleviated it a bit, but it really felt limiting compared to it's predecessors.
Another point, which I feel is a good representation of an 'EA'-fied game: I was a bit miffed to discover that you couldn't create a subway system, you were limited to roads (I don't even remember if you could create a bus system). A few months in, I see that there was a 'Subway' content pack, which got my hopes up... until I realized it was to add 'Subway' sandwich shop in your city.
Same, they had a cross-promotion with Nissan, so your Sims would feel happy when they recharged their electric car, and the charging station has the effect of a park in your neighborhood.
Add to that the server issues, the fact that they said it was because so much computation was offloaded to their servers (which was quickly disproved, and felt bogus to being with), and the whole affair had a vibe of "Don't piss on my shoes and tell me it's raining".
It was particularly sad, because it really still is an enjoyable game.
EDIT: After a bit of fact -checking, I realize that I've mis-remembered the "Subway" DLC story. It was instead the "Metro" content pack (metro is french for subway), which was for a newspaper distributed for free near French subway entrances. There is also a Subway sandwich mod, but for SC4 only.
The playable area was tiny and the game was weird in the way it cycled boom and bust development seemingly at random. And then despite the game selling incredibly well they abandoned it after launch and never really improved the game much.
The marketing hype leading up to it featured lot of outright lies in terms of how the game works. Compute was not offloaded to the cloud, but bigger than that there was the lie that every sim had a daily routine that was simulated and when a factory had an output it was an input somewhere else and that was all simulated like Factorio. It wasn't. It was all faked and not even convincingly well.
I have been hoping for a new city builder for awhile. Cities Skylines was great, but I am looking for something a bit more in depth. I think I want the original promise of SimCity (2013) with the transportation flexibility of Cities Skylines. Solving transportation issues and bottlenecks to make sure your city is operating efficiently sounds incredibly rewarding.
> Another point, which I feel is a good representation of an 'EA'-fied game: I was a bit miffed to discover that you couldn't create a subway system, you were limited to roads (I don't even remember if you could create a bus system). A few months in, I see that there was a 'Subway' content pack, which got my hopes up... until I realized it was to add 'Subway' sandwich shop in your city.
> Same, they had a cross-promotion with Nissan, so your Sims would feel happy when they recharged their electric car, and the charging station has the effect of a park in your neighborhood.
That's kind of insulting. If you were to ask me "what's an environmentally friendly piece of mobility infrastructure that should count as a park" the answer is very obviously a bike trail.
> When SimCity launched on March 6, it required players to maintain an active online connection to the game's servers. If that connection dropped, they'd be booted from the game.
SimCity, at it's core, is an offline single player game. EA really fucked this one up.
Also EA already had the reputation of ruining every franchise they bought.
The series lives on through Theotown and City Skylines.
EA really did screw up a lot of franchises around that time period. I was just watching some retrospectives about Dead Space, and the pattern plays out time and time again with pretty much ever big series they bought.
It seems like EA's MO in the early 2010s was to buy the rights to a successful game, strip the stuff that makes it unique, add some more cover shooting, multiplayer, and boobs, spend $100mil on advertising, then close the studio when they didn't get a return.
Yea I think the article understates this. From my recollection players were not swayed by the multiplayer arguments and saw it for the DRM that it was.
I wonder if they had let people host their own servers the game would have flourished better. Require an authentication from the central server once when you start the game to appease the DRM cultists if you must, then let players themselves provide server hardware if they can and want to. With central servers there is just no way for discrete communities to really form, since everyone is funneled into the same pot, and that is against the game's core design.
Some single player games in the same broad genre as Sim City have successfully been adapted to multiplayer, so the premise of doing so wasn't poorly conceived. Transport Tycoon to OpenTTD in particular. The problem in this case was they botched the execution (which was no surprise given EA's abysmal reputation, as you mention.)
Correlation does not imply causation. Requiring an internet connection is correlated with poor game sales, but is not the cause of the poor sales. The actual cause is poor programming. You see, when you require an always-on internet connection to play a game, most programmers would implement that by having an ugly, in-your-face loading screen where the game "connects to the game servers" and "downloads your profile" and then "uploads your profile" and it always takes much longer than it should. That's what people don't like.
CS is a poor replacement for the otherwise incredible game that is sim city 4. The issue being that the traffic and population simulation engine in CS isnt very good.
There are still modders and a very active community for SC4 for that reason alone. Reminds me, I need to install some city again
The interview snippets make it clear that SimCity 2013 was hopelessly compromised from minute one
If nothing else, consider the mandates from EA:
1. Make it "unpirateable" even if it compromises gameplay
2. Make it depend on EA's online service, b/c we need to sell that even more than we need the game to succeed
3. Make sure it can handle a steady trickle of "expansions" like The Sims
If you are going to implement those mandates, you are gonna end up with something bad. Even if SimCity 2013 had not been otherwise brain-damaged or screwed up, just EA's goals for the product were damning.
(Of course, it is not JUST the mandates -- the game was screwed up in many other ways as well. But the mandates alone would have been bad.)
Looks like they first asked “how can we suck the money out of customers?” instead of asking how to make a milestone game. They repeated that a few more times as I recall. Not sure how they do it now.
I think if SimCity wasn't such a complete disaster, City Skylines wouldn't have taken off how it did. The big misstep I think they made is hinging the gameplay around multiplayer. While SimCity thought that collaboration would be done through "neighborhoods" and "resource sharing", City Skylines took the opposite approach and introduced collaboration through Steam Workshop.
The developers of SimCity should have realized that people don't play sim building games to play with others, it's a very much a solo game. City Skylines navigated this beutifully by letting players still play the game alone but also letting them collaborate through assets rather than through gameplay.
I personally believe that the SImCity version of multiplayer could have been impressively successful had it not supplanted everything else in the game. I like the idea of building cities that somehow interact with the cities my friends build, or whatever everyone else is doing. I like the idea of a game that asynchronously "breaks the meta". It just has to be a good SimCity game first and then have that stuff layered on top. SimCity 2013 was never a good SimCity game to begin with.
FWIW, the game is called simply SimCity, and the HN title is the same as the title on the article, so, no, not really. HN also tends to put dates on articles that aren't from the current year. If you're totally unfamiliar with the series, it doesn't matter. If you're a little familiar with the series (like me), then you know that the original was released more than a decade ago and pretty much defined the genre, so you know this isn't talking about the original game titled SimCity. If you're familiar with the series, then you know exactly what's being talked about.
Maybe "Simcity (2013)" to be extra clear. After all, SimCity 2000 came out in like 1994. OTOH the ambiguous naming was intentional by EA. They faced the consequences for all the other bad decisions made around the game, so any confusion about the rebooted name is on them IMO.
But I'm more of a Cities:Skyline fan anyways-I'm glad the Maxis devs aren't too sour grapes about the competitor.
Nowadays SimCity seems wholly replaced by City Skylines. I had to look up when that was released, but it turns out the release of City Skylines was directly caused by the failure of SimCity:
> "While the developers felt they had the technical expertise to expand to a full city simulation game, their publisher Paradox held off on the idea, fearing the market dominance of SimCity. After the critical failure of the 2013 SimCity game, however, Paradox greenlit the title."
I recall playing on launch day and being shocked to discover that, aside from the internet connectivity requirement, the entire UI was written in HTML using WebKit [0].
I'd been looking forward to SC2013 for years and it was beyond disappointing.
I know I'm probably not a typical gamer in EA's eyes, but SC4 was such a solid release. It just needed playable regions (build multiple cities, join them together) and some more graphical polish. I'd buy that game in an instant.
Such a shame, I was very excited for this game and though hated it I did enjoy the graphic style, it looked great. (What a palava with the "online" simulation that was found out to be faked)
Cities Skylines really put a nail in the coffin of SimCity for me, the huge playable area, no faux online requirement, realistic cim routines and the amazing mod support (I've only used the steam workshop)
Now Colossal Order just need to make a sequel with more in depth mechanics akin to some of the mod tools made available (traffic management, I'm looking at you), also I don't know much about the Unity Engine but making the sequel more efficient on multicore CPU's is a must.
Ah, that's the interesting bit: the actual simulation was 100% local. Networking was actually only required for region play, and I don't think it even communicates in real-time; just occasionally syncs certain variables between cities.
The always online requirement was just a form of DRM, and wasn't actually necessary for the game. EA even patched in an official offline mode in 2014.
the actual simulation was being done on the servers, rather than on the client
I remember that's what they said, but I doubt it was ever the case. Wikipedia says the cloud functionality "enable[d] cloud saves and multiplayer functionality", and shortly after launch it was determined you could patch the game to run offline for an indeterminate length of time. To me, it was pretty obvious back then that it was purely an attempt at copy protection.
Beyond that, the game was just bad. The simulation just didn't live up to the hype, and while it did have a lot to live up to given its fantastic predecessor, SimCity 4 was old by then, and people expected a big upgrade. Specifically, I remember "sims not living persistent lives but rather going to the nearest available workplace for work and nearest available house after work" (Wikipedia again) as being a huge deal in the community back then. And then there was the limited play area, which was just ridiculous when you consider what people want from these games.
> The main problem was that the actual simulation was being done on the servers
That was bullcrap. Soon after launch a crack showed up that made the game playable without a server connection, for the features that didn't actually need a server connection. EA just lied.
Not to mention that they made an official patch available 1 year after launch that enabled a proper offline mode :)
But that's the problem: it was really a multiplayer game, sold to a crowd who wanted a predominantly single-player experience. So users were effectively angry from day 1 simply because they were being sold something they didn't want; the fact that this also precluded them from salvaging a bit of entertainment from it (since you'd be booted out even if you had little or no intention to ever interact with other players), was a further slap in the face.
> The main problem was that the actual simulation was being done on the servers, rather than on the client…for a single player game.
As I understand it, this wasn't the case, and the claims that it was were primarily bullshit to justify requiring always-online access for DRM purposes.
Most of the game worked perfectly fine offline with a minor hack released shortly after the game came out.
There were some game journalists muddying the waters with some assumptions about it back then, which can make it difficult to get an accurate retroactive historical context today.
> The main problem was that the actual simulation was being done on the servers
While that was the marketing line "simulation so complex it can't run on your PC", I remember there being an offline crack shortly after release and later one of the official patches even enabled it officially.
I remember following every update to this game prior to launch. I hated that it required an Origins account and all that but I signed up regardless just to play this game. And I recall having a good time with this game... for a while.
Unfortunately EA's lack of support for the game was definitely felt by us consumers. It started off well enough but instead of becoming a better game they turned it into a brand-tie-in DLC-fest.
It's hard working at an organization on such a long, ambitious project that the leadership wasn't prepared to support and didn't really believe in to begin with. As a developer I've been on such projects and I recall being invested in the work itself, the project, and our users: but getting management on-board to give it the funding and direction it needed was always a struggle.
> "Every time they would unblock one pinch point, then they would just discover the next one," says Librande. "You were unblocking the dam and then the flood goes and hits the next dam. Then everybody scrambles, tears that one apart, ok, but it keeps going".
Apple hit this problem a lot too in the early days of the iTunes and App stores. Marketing wants a huge midnight release with all the hype but the scale just isn't there.
The only way to go imo for this sort of thing is a staggered release, an invite system, or an open beta.
And it also sucks that stupid management and marketing decisions killed such an important franchise in gaming history.
KSP2 seems like it might be like that.. It seems quite star-citizeny with final AAA graphics and audio, but the core mechanics and UX rather fucked. I reckon it could take them years to fix it if they do. Fixing the core core stuff in a game with final assets already done is like repairing an engine thats running.
There was so much dodgy slimy stuff going on with the publisher also,
https://wccftech.com/kerbal-space-program-2-dev-fired-employ... the fact that they kept development closed for years, then release garbage into early access and charge €50.. I think they might have no intention of fixing it and are just making a cash grab now while there is still so much goodwill floating around from KSP1.
Imo there is an opportunity here for a smart small indie team to scoop them and make the real successor to KSP faster than the KSP2 team can fix their crap.
this felt like the apex of the post facebook/zynga monetise everything always online era
ea have always ridden trends mercilessly. and ms with its bungled launch of always online xbox. the hubris of those executives is a staggering in hindsight.
I never thought about it, but that is so true. It also seemed like it was roughly the peak of bad DRM as well as trying to curtail resale of console games.
It had so much promise. It was rocky to start for sure. The playable area was so annoyingly small and I felt like I wind up in the same pattern every time. I did play it again a few months ago. It has so much promise, still, as a base for the next level. Ultimately it feels like you have to graduate to using megatowers as the cities pretty much could only advance if you included them... and they were limited by count and eventually those would become stagnant.
If they could make the maps larger and improve things like homeless/park issues (I've placed parks like crazy, increase the property values and density, etc) but always wind up having to bulldoze and deal with homeless people which seems like it shouldn't happen based on my understanding.
Go the no man's sky route and give us an infinite world to build on.
One thing I think the article leaves out, that is critical, is the damage done to the franchise image by SimCity Societies (2007), SimCity 2013 was the second bad miss in a row for the franchise (and a big part of Societies problems—on top of radical and not well recieved changes to the basic concept—were performance/reliability problems, which IIRC, included a persistent connection requirement even though it was single player.)
[+] [-] mablopoule|3 years ago|reply
I've read TFA, and honestly they also failed to mention maybe the worse issue of SimCity 2013: how limited it was compared to the previous instalments. The playable area was tiny, so you quickly felt constrained by the border of your playable area. The fact that you could build multiple cities in the same region alleviated it a bit, but it really felt limiting compared to it's predecessors.
Another point, which I feel is a good representation of an 'EA'-fied game: I was a bit miffed to discover that you couldn't create a subway system, you were limited to roads (I don't even remember if you could create a bus system). A few months in, I see that there was a 'Subway' content pack, which got my hopes up... until I realized it was to add 'Subway' sandwich shop in your city.
Same, they had a cross-promotion with Nissan, so your Sims would feel happy when they recharged their electric car, and the charging station has the effect of a park in your neighborhood.
Add to that the server issues, the fact that they said it was because so much computation was offloaded to their servers (which was quickly disproved, and felt bogus to being with), and the whole affair had a vibe of "Don't piss on my shoes and tell me it's raining".
It was particularly sad, because it really still is an enjoyable game.
EDIT: After a bit of fact -checking, I realize that I've mis-remembered the "Subway" DLC story. It was instead the "Metro" content pack (metro is french for subway), which was for a newspaper distributed for free near French subway entrances. There is also a Subway sandwich mod, but for SC4 only.
[+] [-] etempleton|3 years ago|reply
The marketing hype leading up to it featured lot of outright lies in terms of how the game works. Compute was not offloaded to the cloud, but bigger than that there was the lie that every sim had a daily routine that was simulated and when a factory had an output it was an input somewhere else and that was all simulated like Factorio. It wasn't. It was all faked and not even convincingly well.
I have been hoping for a new city builder for awhile. Cities Skylines was great, but I am looking for something a bit more in depth. I think I want the original promise of SimCity (2013) with the transportation flexibility of Cities Skylines. Solving transportation issues and bottlenecks to make sure your city is operating efficiently sounds incredibly rewarding.
[+] [-] actionablefiber|3 years ago|reply
> Same, they had a cross-promotion with Nissan, so your Sims would feel happy when they recharged their electric car, and the charging station has the effect of a park in your neighborhood.
That's kind of insulting. If you were to ask me "what's an environmentally friendly piece of mobility infrastructure that should count as a park" the answer is very obviously a bike trail.
[+] [-] antifa|3 years ago|reply
SimCity, at it's core, is an offline single player game. EA really fucked this one up.
Also EA already had the reputation of ruining every franchise they bought.
The series lives on through Theotown and City Skylines.
[+] [-] yoyohello13|3 years ago|reply
It seems like EA's MO in the early 2010s was to buy the rights to a successful game, strip the stuff that makes it unique, add some more cover shooting, multiplayer, and boobs, spend $100mil on advertising, then close the studio when they didn't get a return.
[+] [-] mentos|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DaiPlusPlus|3 years ago|reply
C&C, WingCommander, Bullfrog, le sigh…
Nightmare prompt: “What if EA acquired Wube (Factorio)?”
[+] [-] Asooka|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slackdog|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phendrenad2|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] weatherlight|3 years ago|reply
https://www.paradoxinteractive.com/games/cities-skylines/abo...
[+] [-] ozarker|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] freitzkriesler2|3 years ago|reply
There are still modders and a very active community for SC4 for that reason alone. Reminds me, I need to install some city again
[+] [-] shaunxcode|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hapless|3 years ago|reply
If nothing else, consider the mandates from EA:
If you are going to implement those mandates, you are gonna end up with something bad. Even if SimCity 2013 had not been otherwise brain-damaged or screwed up, just EA's goals for the product were damning.(Of course, it is not JUST the mandates -- the game was screwed up in many other ways as well. But the mandates alone would have been bad.)
[+] [-] prox|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _fat_santa|3 years ago|reply
The developers of SimCity should have realized that people don't play sim building games to play with others, it's a very much a solo game. City Skylines navigated this beutifully by letting players still play the game alone but also letting them collaborate through assets rather than through gameplay.
[+] [-] Loughla|3 years ago|reply
SimCity was a resource manager and city planning game.
City Skylines is a traffic manager.
This is the hill I will die on.
[+] [-] delusional|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seszett|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dfxm12|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Rebelgecko|3 years ago|reply
But I'm more of a Cities:Skyline fan anyways-I'm glad the Maxis devs aren't too sour grapes about the competitor.
[+] [-] zymhan|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pdntspa|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bearmode|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcv|3 years ago|reply
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cities:_Skylines :
> "While the developers felt they had the technical expertise to expand to a full city simulation game, their publisher Paradox held off on the idea, fearing the market dominance of SimCity. After the critical failure of the 2013 SimCity game, however, Paradox greenlit the title."
[+] [-] bromuro|3 years ago|reply
Finally EA pushed the project too far and it imploded. Too bad, because Maxis didn’t reserve it.
I play sometimes Cities Skyline but - to me - CS misses the vibe of SimCity.
[+] [-] ianhawes|3 years ago|reply
[0] https://twitter.com/MaxisScott/status/310835756107177984
[+] [-] doublerabbit|3 years ago|reply
https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/SimCity
[+] [-] petepete|3 years ago|reply
I know I'm probably not a typical gamer in EA's eyes, but SC4 was such a solid release. It just needed playable regions (build multiple cities, join them together) and some more graphical polish. I'd buy that game in an instant.
[+] [-] bromuk|3 years ago|reply
Cities Skylines really put a nail in the coffin of SimCity for me, the huge playable area, no faux online requirement, realistic cim routines and the amazing mod support (I've only used the steam workshop)
Now Colossal Order just need to make a sequel with more in depth mechanics akin to some of the mod tools made available (traffic management, I'm looking at you), also I don't know much about the Unity Engine but making the sequel more efficient on multicore CPU's is a must.
[+] [-] tomca32|3 years ago|reply
I’m sure the development team knew everybody was going to hate that so it couldn’t have been a surprise.
[+] [-] paavohtl|3 years ago|reply
The always online requirement was just a form of DRM, and wasn't actually necessary for the game. EA even patched in an official offline mode in 2014.
[+] [-] morsch|3 years ago|reply
I remember that's what they said, but I doubt it was ever the case. Wikipedia says the cloud functionality "enable[d] cloud saves and multiplayer functionality", and shortly after launch it was determined you could patch the game to run offline for an indeterminate length of time. To me, it was pretty obvious back then that it was purely an attempt at copy protection.
Beyond that, the game was just bad. The simulation just didn't live up to the hype, and while it did have a lot to live up to given its fantastic predecessor, SimCity 4 was old by then, and people expected a big upgrade. Specifically, I remember "sims not living persistent lives but rather going to the nearest available workplace for work and nearest available house after work" (Wikipedia again) as being a huge deal in the community back then. And then there was the limited play area, which was just ridiculous when you consider what people want from these games.
[+] [-] nottorp|3 years ago|reply
That was bullcrap. Soon after launch a crack showed up that made the game playable without a server connection, for the features that didn't actually need a server connection. EA just lied.
Not to mention that they made an official patch available 1 year after launch that enabled a proper offline mode :)
https://www.eurogamer.net/simcity-can-now-be-played-offline
As for this interview, I guess mr lead designer isn't allowed to be honest by his contract.
[+] [-] toyg|3 years ago|reply
But that's the problem: it was really a multiplayer game, sold to a crowd who wanted a predominantly single-player experience. So users were effectively angry from day 1 simply because they were being sold something they didn't want; the fact that this also precluded them from salvaging a bit of entertainment from it (since you'd be booted out even if you had little or no intention to ever interact with other players), was a further slap in the face.
[+] [-] jcranmer|3 years ago|reply
As I understand it, this wasn't the case, and the claims that it was were primarily bullshit to justify requiring always-online access for DRM purposes.
[+] [-] anonymousab|3 years ago|reply
There were some game journalists muddying the waters with some assumptions about it back then, which can make it difficult to get an accurate retroactive historical context today.
[+] [-] josefx|3 years ago|reply
While that was the marketing line "simulation so complex it can't run on your PC", I remember there being an offline crack shortly after release and later one of the official patches even enabled it officially.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] agentultra|3 years ago|reply
Unfortunately EA's lack of support for the game was definitely felt by us consumers. It started off well enough but instead of becoming a better game they turned it into a brand-tie-in DLC-fest.
It's hard working at an organization on such a long, ambitious project that the leadership wasn't prepared to support and didn't really believe in to begin with. As a developer I've been on such projects and I recall being invested in the work itself, the project, and our users: but getting management on-board to give it the funding and direction it needed was always a struggle.
[+] [-] CoolGuySteve|3 years ago|reply
Apple hit this problem a lot too in the early days of the iTunes and App stores. Marketing wants a huge midnight release with all the hype but the scale just isn't there.
The only way to go imo for this sort of thing is a staggered release, an invite system, or an open beta.
And it also sucks that stupid management and marketing decisions killed such an important franchise in gaming history.
[+] [-] everyone|3 years ago|reply
There was so much dodgy slimy stuff going on with the publisher also, https://wccftech.com/kerbal-space-program-2-dev-fired-employ... the fact that they kept development closed for years, then release garbage into early access and charge €50.. I think they might have no intention of fixing it and are just making a cash grab now while there is still so much goodwill floating around from KSP1.
Imo there is an opportunity here for a smart small indie team to scoop them and make the real successor to KSP faster than the KSP2 team can fix their crap.
[+] [-] spiffytech|3 years ago|reply
"When SimCity got serious: the story of Maxis Business Simulations and SimRefinery"
https://obscuritory.com/sim/when-simcity-got-serious/
[+] [-] nottorp|3 years ago|reply
Maxis / SimCity
BioWare / need i say what?
Bullfrog / Populous, Dungeon Keeper
--
Blue Byte / Settlers, Battle Isle
New World Computing / Might and Magic and Heroes of...
And that's just what I remember off the top of my head.
[+] [-] sniglom|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mouzogu|3 years ago|reply
ea have always ridden trends mercilessly. and ms with its bungled launch of always online xbox. the hubris of those executives is a staggering in hindsight.
[+] [-] hudsonjr|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mike503|3 years ago|reply
If they could make the maps larger and improve things like homeless/park issues (I've placed parks like crazy, increase the property values and density, etc) but always wind up having to bulldoze and deal with homeless people which seems like it shouldn't happen based on my understanding.
Go the no man's sky route and give us an infinite world to build on.
[+] [-] dragonwriter|3 years ago|reply