SimCity Offline Is Coming

http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/article/simcity-offline-is-coming

by simias • 13 years ago

71 96 13 years ago

macinjosh• 13 years ago

Sweet, I might actually start playing this game again!

I'd be interested to see the data of how Simcity sales did averaging out past the launch date compared to other sim city games. Or, since it's all online, a view of active players past the first few weeks of play.

I know I bought it because the articles about the game failed to mention the size issues or any of the faulty AI issues (like traffic). I was amazed the reviewers didn't find any of those faults because they happened pretty fast and ruined the game for me.

Offline or not, Simcity was a huge step back for me and not worth all the hype it got.

djkz• 13 years ago

I believe that they used online mode as an excuse to limit reviewers to only be able to play for 8 hours, so many of the limits were not apparent.

The game really only starts showing it's shallowness once you filled up one city space and started on your next one, only to come out with a homogeneous clone of the first city.

belorn• 13 years ago

They sold 1.1 million copies in its first two weeks, and around 2 million copies in total.

Compared to Sim city 3k/4k, that is less than half the sale numbers in a growing industry. I would also guess that Sim city 2013 had a much higher production cost, server costs, administration cost and support costs.

And most wonderful thing, they can't blame pirates.

uptown2• 13 years ago

Worse for them - though they'll continue to have some new sales, the initial spike is over, and the costs of maintaining their online infrastructure will continue to eat into any sales revenue for as long as they keep it active.

Makes you wonder how big a margin there is between sales revenue and ongoing costs.

llamataboot• 13 years ago

So much for all the excuses about needing the cloud to run the simulation engine, etc

debaserab2• 13 years ago

Chances are those excuses were true considering it took them nearly 8 months to release an offline patch that pretty much every SimCity fan immediately wanted upon (and prior to) release of the game.

serf• 13 years ago

doubt it; their solutions from earlier bugs included such gems as disabling the fastest play speed in order to improve stability.

I wouldn't give EA the benefit of the doubt about an 8 month patch. They probably began work on it late last week. The company has shown time and time again that they don't give a fuck about you -- the offline patch is just the minimum amount of work they have to do in order to unplug the servers on a new game without total outrage.

"Look, we pushed an offline patch before terminating the servers, WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT FROM A GAME LESS THAN A YEAR OLD!?"

valarauca1• 13 years ago

Actually no. People were able to hack the game to run offline within 2 weeks of its release.

streetnigga2• 13 years ago

Seems like EA should be hiring the crackers who patched the game then considering they got the job done within a week or so.

SimHacker18• 13 years ago

No the excuses were not true. It was Origin's fault, and Maxis had to take the blame. The people working at Maxis opposed it, and it didn't actually need to be online to play, but the people at Origin insisted it only run online.

mmanfrin• 13 years ago

Chances are those excuses were purely FUD considering it took people who had no access to the source code less than a week or two to make it work offline with a crack.

Vaskivo• 13 years ago

Well, the harm is already done, but it's good to see Offline mode coming.

But, to me, the most interesting news is the mod support. If you want to at least double your game's lifetime, make it easy to modify.

anonyfox• 13 years ago

See Skyrim as an example for a successful modding culture. The community is just awesome.

freehunter2• 13 years ago

And the complete Skyrim game (all expansions/DLC) still sells for $60 on PC, two years after release. People still buy it at this price, and it's still a pretty good value.

sirkneeland• 13 years ago

File under: "breaking news from 1989" :)

libria• 13 years ago

It's cool if they're responding to the user base and meeting the demand. It's not cool if they're unveiling this like a feature sans apology for prior behavior.

They're restoring original, sane functionality. The GM should be expecting relief/forgiveness, not excitement.

mkautzm• 13 years ago

The damage is done, and if they actively enforce their modding rules, specifically:

"Mods may not modify any .com, .exe, .dll, .so or other executable files."

Then what's the point? The game is still awful, and the means to fix that aren't available.

tinfoilman• 13 years ago

EA, desperately trying to force life in to a product they did not understand and now attempting to recover the large part of their fan base they alienated.

Not going in to the rant, there were many around the time this PoS hit the market. All I can say is, as an avid sim city player, Sim city 4 had it. This new thing called Sim City, was more a city based sims level. I was just waiting for the "sim City delux edition where you could get +5 more houses, and some new cars"

Honestly I used to love sim City, but after spending £50 on sim city, it really is (and i said this before sim city) the last EA game i buy.

Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me

timje1• 13 years ago

fool me consistently for a decade or two... why aren't more people boycotting EA yet?

jamesaguilar2• 13 years ago

Because many of the games they publish are quite good? Just in games that are current, AC4: Black Flag and BF4.

bane2• 13 years ago

I'm still playing and enjoying SC4k. There's tons of people who love SC3k, and even 2k. I pretty much exhausted all I care to do with this new SC inside of 2 weeks and uninstalled it. It's easily the worst city sim game I've ever played. And not just because of the issues with the AI and city size and all that. It just has no joy in it.

This is what happens when the marketing department takes over a company.

(I would have been perfectly happy with SC4k with curved roads, mixed-use zoning and a few fixes for highways and such).

webjunkie• 13 years ago

This is it. There is not much challenging to the new SimCity. It is just not the same experience as SC4. Even with all things fixed, offline mode etc. it makes fun for just a couple of hours.

fennecfoxen2• 13 years ago

I think even the unwanted abomination they called Societies is more challenging and rewarding than newSimCity.

3JPLW• 13 years ago

It'd be so wonderful to have a SC4.5k. Or, hell, could you imagine what the modding community could do with the source? No chance in hell of that ever happening, but one can dream...

zanny2• 13 years ago

Existential quandary here, but I loathe how we are now hitting the 20 year mark on the modern PC gaming era. 1993 opened the floodgates with Doom, and we are already seeing the loss of many games from that era that just don't run on a modern computer but have never seen a source release to let anyone update the engines.

And it only is poised to get worse over time, especially now that ARM is superseding x86 for a lot of computing. Is it reasonable to expect everyone to know how to run VMs of old operating systems (where you are already in questionable legal water if you download isos of, say, Windows 98, which is no longer available for money but still is copyrighted forever).

And titles like "Baldurs Gate Enhanced Edition" I feel hurt the industry hugely by presenting the legal departments an excuse to deny source release, because later on they could touch the game up for a few weeks and sell it all over again. Same way companies like Square will re-release 20 year old games like Final Fantasy rather than do source releases on the original engine code. Except for most games they won't see a re-release, and they will just drift into the binary purgatory of unrunnable titles.

SimHacker18• 13 years ago

The source code for the original SimCity Classic is open source, called "Micropolis": https://code.google.com/p/micropolis

While it's nowhere near as fancy as the latest version, there are other directions to take it than adding lots of bells and whistles and complexity.

It's simplicity makes it idea for general education, as well as specifically learning about programming, game development and modding, and it's much easier for younger children (and even adults) to grasp and understand.

Doreen Nelson wrote the original SimCity teacher's guide, and her life's work has been "Design Based Learning", like Seymour Papert and Alan Kay's "Constructionist Education" philosophy. I believe SimCity Classic could be developed into a fun and wonderful educational tool, inspired by that work.

About Design Based Learning: http://www.csupomona.edu/~dnelson/intro.html http://www.csupomona.edu/~dnelson/library.html

These are delightfully retro but timeless videos that are inspirational and still totally relevant to SimCity:

City Building Education: A Way to Learn. Written and produced by Doreen Nelson and David Olney through the Office of Charles Eames, l976. 11 mins. (This is well worth watching for the music by Morton Subotnick!) http://video.csupomona.edu/DNelson/CityBuilding-245.asx

Classroom City. Written, directed and produced by Doreen Nelson, l981. Looks at City Building's methods in various classroom settings: traditional, migrant teacher training and educationally handicapped. Students from the first City Building class of l969 are revisited. 16 mins. http://video.csupomona.edu/DNelson/ClassroomCity-245.asx

wil4213• 13 years ago

Exactly I have been playing simcity for as long as I can remember playing computer games. Possibly even before I played Doom.

The new Simcity is nothing I wanted and really broke the game for me. I dont think I will be playing this franchise ever again, sadly.

freehunter2• 13 years ago

I keep trying to play SC4k again, but it feels so out-dated. I haven't tried the new SC, but I've tried Cities XL. I want a new Sim City with the gameplay of SC4k in the engine of Cities XL. SC4k's zones are too small and the road structure is too limiting as you mention, but Cities XL has the horrible resources and trading structure and after your city reaches a certain level the gameplay lags and become unstable.

I even tried Cities in Motion, and dear god is that micro-management hell for me.

uptown2• 13 years ago

I was a lock to give them my money - and that's extremely rare for me to be committed to buy a game. But their delayed Mac version, the botched launch of their PC version, and the outright lies from their executives changed all of that. I've moved on.

SimHacker18• 13 years ago

I think Origin deserves the blame for making bad decisions and forcing them on Maxis, and I feel sorry that it was Maxis's job to repeat the lies they were told to say, because they didn't agree with the bad decisions (i.e. offline play, and needing more servers for launch), but it was their job to take the credibility hit, while Origin got to have their way.

sarreph• 13 years ago

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

Oh wait... It was just the worst of times.

ry0ohki• 13 years ago

The servers/DRM ended up being one of the least of this game's problems. Tiny plot size and oversimplification of the engine made this beautiful game basically no fun.

dalacv• 13 years ago

I'd be curious to know how many of the folks making such negative comments actually purchased and have played the game recently.

jaredmcateer2• 13 years ago

Didn't purchase and never will, but my friend did and he's played it recently, lost his city to the ether after just 10 hours of play before he rage quit again.

johnward2• 13 years ago

Purchased played. Uninstalled several time and reinstall after "updates". The game is just not up to SC4 standards. Once it was stable I could only be entertained for a little more than an hour and then there was nothing more to do.

Danieru• 13 years ago

It's amazing how close this iteration has followed in the path of the original Cities XL.

Take for example the Sim City world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3oFKhftK88

If you didn't play the Cities XL beta nor were around for the first bit of Cities XL there was something called the "Planet Offer". The world map Maxis shows 12 seconds into the trailer looks just like the Planet Offer's globe. Maxis even shows a commodities market at 22 seconds which looks like the Planet Offer's trading.

Just like the Planet Offer things did not work out as planned. Core components of the city builder were left undone such as the terrain manipulation or map creation. In part I suspect both were business decisions made to allow a DLC market.

From the beginning EA promised DLC. In the case of Cities XL the DLC was less obvious. The way things worked out the developers of Cities XL went bankrupt and the game was bought out by its current publisher. Every Cities XL game since has just been the original edition plus some extra maps and buildings.

The real shame is that both Cities XL and Sim City 2013 were beautiful and did not lack anything art wise. Instead they just failed at game play. Part of said problem was crippling the game to open DLC avenues. The other part was horrible balancing.

In the case of Cities XL there was no balancing. Every city service cost the exact same with no room to adjust service level like in Sim City 4. Cities XL also made the mistake of tying medium and large density zones plus most services to your city's population. In effect every new city felt the same since you had to bootstrap everything every-time. Of course finances were also dead easy to balance.

During Cities XL beta my biggest problem was opening enough inter-city transport capacity to export my over supply of office services. For a while I could just open international airports one after the other but I soon ran out of space. My city got so big I triggered a rare bug where the game replaced my entire city with a hilly field. Since said hilly field had no export routes I couldn't rebuild. This was a shame since the glitch managed to delete everything which was costing me money but leave all the export revenue. Thus despite being a hilly field I must have amassed more money than any other city during beta.

Sorry back on topic: just like Cities XL's planet offer Maxis is now stepping back from the online. In theory online would be fantastic but first you need to make a fun city builder. Maybe in the future we'll get one.

sentenza• 13 years ago

What surprises me is that they didn't realize that SimCity doesn't have the right game mechanics for classic DLC.

Instead of going the DLC route, they should have gone the user-gernerated content route. Allowing users to not only share and rank their cities but also to create additional content (3D models, conversions) and to interact with the game mechanics using an in-game scripting language.

By that last part I mean things like programming the logic of the in-game traffic lights, train schedules, and so on.

Pure, raw, script-based micro-management.

Had they managed to implement a game incorporating content-sharing, they might have seen the sales of their core game skyrocket, fueled by the positive marketing feedback of a content-generating community.

DanBC3• 13 years ago

Someone needs to write a short essay about the power of user generated content to sell product.

Doom was released as shareware. You got the first few levels for free. You paid and got the rest. Doom had a huge amount of user generated content, but the community was careful to make sure it would only work if you had the full paid version of the game. Obviously some people didn't, but you'll always get pirates. That's an early example of the community protecting the ip while helping to boost sales.

Minecraft is a more modern example of user generated content driving huge sales of a game.

We just need a short easy to read essay to point the accountants and suits at.

shaggyfrog• 13 years ago

The real shame is that both Cities XL and Sim City 2013 were beautiful and did not lack anything art wise. Instead they just failed at game play.

Then it's not really a game; it's a graphics demo.

You can't fail at gameplay and still have a game; conversely, you can have great gameplay but terrible graphics (e.g. roguelikes).

wil4213• 13 years ago

Too bad I returned my purchase to Amazon after I was unable to play during the first week.

Corporate Execs from companies like EA and even Microsoft/Xbone are ruining gaming.

jaredmcateer2• 13 years ago

Don't feel bad about returning your game, the game is still horribly broken in many ways that an offline mode won't fix.

wil4213• 13 years ago

Mostly I feel bad for Amazon more than Maxis/EA. They probably ate the cost of the game just to satisfy me and a bunch of other people.

Aardwolf• 13 years ago

Is Coming? Isn't it there for a long time already? SimCity 2000 etc...

lmkg• 13 years ago

My understanding is that SCO was designed and balanced around player-player interaction between cities, to the point that a single free-standing city couldn't really be "complete." Cities functioned better when they were specialized and interacting with neighbors, than when they tried to be self-sufficient. I didn't play the thing myself, but that's how the devs seemed to portray things.

Given that (and other ways in which the online-ness was pervasive in game design), this seems like the epitome of a band-aid fix on a bullet wound. Just inserting an offline mode won't make the game better, because the game design was based around online play from a very fundamental level, and it's not a feature that can be removed simply. I.e., 'you can take SCO offline, but you can't take the online out of SCO.'

mratzloff2• 13 years ago

Given that you can play solo regions, I assume you could simply create several specialized cities (I haven't played the game).

wmf• 13 years ago

You can, although when I do this I end up switching between cities constantly to keep resources flowing and each switch takes about a minute so it's kind of un-fun.

bane2• 13 years ago

That's partially true. But the online plays was screwed from the start since you simply couldn't delete cities. So that city you built when you were screwing around with the build tools and made a giant happy face out of the roads and didn't really have any intention of making it self-sustaining or part of a larger region play? It's there forever.

SC4k also had region play, cities weren't really as effective until they were part of a region. The mechanic should have been to let you and some friends start a region, each pick a zone or two and start cooperatively developing them over time. Enhance things like cross-city usage fees (so I can recoup cost for putting up a huge airport in my city that my friends use) and it would have completely satisfied the multi-player requirement.

What you ended up with was a bunch of half-asses cities that nobody wanted to play with in regions that nobody wanted to be multi-players in, that the only benefit was regional construction projects that never really worked right and had cryptic requirements in order to construct.

Coupled with impossibly small city sizes and broken AI and the game is fundamentally broken in ways that no amount of patching or fixing is ever going to solve. Time to deep six this failed experiment and move on to Sim City 2.

kisielk• 13 years ago

Hey, that actually sounds a lot like regional planning in real life :)

SimHacker18• 13 years ago

I think SimCity is essentially a game that you can approach and play many different ways. Some of those ways work just fine offline, and some of them don't.

tunap• 13 years ago

RE: offline play & non-mod modding:

   Too little, too late.

yngccc• 13 years ago

Is it just me but simcity was the best game I played in 2013, maybe I am just new to the genre, but it was like playing video game for the first time.

fennecfoxen2• 13 years ago

It's just you. SimCity 4 / Rush Hour is widely regarded as better. Give it a try: http://store.steampowered.com/app/24780/

Allow me to lift a review: "While you cannot build crazy windy roads, SimCity 4 is perfect for building a city with grid street plan and you'll get everything you didn't get in SimCity 2013: huge maps, multiple entrances, zoning lots, detailed statistics/graphs/budgets, multiple transportation options from subway, elevated train, freeway, toll gates... the list goes on."

Heck, I think even SimCity 3000 will give you more raw City to play with.

mratzloff2• 13 years ago

Why exactly are people willing to blame EA but not Maxis?

ForHackernews• 13 years ago

I don't think Maxis even exists as separate entity anymore. Aren't they just a small division within EA now? EA kept the brand name because Maxis used to be good, but it doesn't mean anything today.

SimHacker18• 13 years ago

Maxis has a separate studio in Emeryville (by Berkeley), where Spore and SimCity were developed. Maxis isn't exactly small, since The Sims franchise has been responsible for a large share of their profits: A few years ago EA reorganized into three parts, and The Sims division was one of them, but I don't know how they're organized now.

johnward2• 13 years ago

I think it has more to do with the fact that Maxxis made a good Sim City in the past and now it sucks.

forgottenpass• 13 years ago

Maxis is no longer comprised of the people or direction that made the company once known as "Maxis", it is an EA subsidiary and run as such.

People assume (with good reason) that the design choices that made Sim City a poor game were made with the publisher's interest placed above the player's.

SimHacker18• 13 years ago

The lead designers and artists who developed the latest version of SimCity were old time Maxis people, but they've left since it launched. They weren't very happy with what Origin forced them to do with their game.

SimHacker18• 13 years ago

Serious question:

Would anyone be interested in a version of SimCity Classic that ran in the browser? (Playable offline, of course!)

In what ways do you think it could be brought up to date with modern technology, without spoiling the fun of the original game?

What do you like about the original SimCity Classic? And what do you think should be changed or added?

What I'd really appreciate is advice on how to fund the development. Kickstarter is out because I'm not in the United States, but I'm considering Indiegogo, but open to alternatives, especially ones focused on open source and educational software.

DanBC3• 13 years ago

I used to play simcity classic on a hercules monitor.

I would like to play it in the browser.

Things I'd like to see:

Nice graphics. Doesn't have to be high res or anything, just nice. Perhaps allow tilesets to be used so the community could easily create and share tiles.

Easy laying of road and track. I remember the odd rubber banding of classic being a bit frustrating.

Some nice easy to use terrain editor.

Some social features? Allow more than one person to work on a terrain map at a time? (I understand this raises complexity significantly). Or Allow people to passively view the terrain and sent chat suggestions?

Have a free play version, and a well tested challenges version with a wide variety of challenges. Eg "last X years", "grow to Y size", "survive these disasters", "earn Z money" etc.

Have a way for me to pay you. I much prefer a single payment for full access rather than a freemium model. (Wait x hours to collect enough coins to build this road, or unlock coins for $x now!!" Would not be pleasant.

Hope these are some use!

SimHacker18• 13 years ago

Definitely it needs user editable tile sets, for 2D mode. And nice info visualizations of the simulator state and data layers.

And I think it would be great to create buildings with digital bricks (Legos), and render them in 3D -- that would make it fun and easy to create your own buildings with existing tools. And integrating browser based building editing tools into the game would be even better! See my other post with details and links: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7052399

SimHacker18• 13 years ago

I think the easiest way to lay road and track is to drive a road laying vehicle around: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkVBg_-OviI

Definitely a terrain editor, plus more tweakable procedural terrain generation.

There are many interesting ways to support multiple players, beyond the "cooperative committee with god mode limited by unanimous voting on expensive things" approach I implemented with the X11/TCL/Tk version: http://www.donhopkins.com/home/movies/SimCityNetDemo.mov

Your friends could fly helicopters around your city, reporting on problems, or just chatting with you as you drive your brick laying machine around to make roads.

Your enemies could fly drones around and turn your citizens into terrorists by bombing their wedding parties.

Your governor could conspire to cause terrible traffic jams by closing lanes on your bridges.

Deconstruct the god mode tool pallet into something more like Magic the Gathering cards, that have particular tailored zones, purposes and budgets that multiple players can win, trade and play.

The code must be open source, and the basic game free down download and play (online or off), but I'd like to think of a revenue model that will support the development of the game, as well as educational courseware (for free educational use).

I don't think many people would pay to download other people's cities, but maybe artists/architects could sell their buildings in an online real-estate (virtual-estate?) market like eBay.

I'm seeking advice and suggestions about how to fund the development and support running it! It's futile to pitch an educational game to a big publisher like EA, but Indiegogo may be a good route. Are there other alternatives focused on open source or educational software? I would really appreciate some mentoring and guidance from people experienced with that.

BlackDeath37• 13 years ago

Why would it run in a browser?

SimHacker18• 13 years ago

Because I rewrote it in JavaScript! ;)

lingben• 13 years ago

now? after people have been playing it offline by hacking it since the second week it was release? incredible!

ihsw• 13 years ago

Will we get an apology for being so obstinate and narrow-minded, too?

How about a promise to never again shove always-on down the throats of their customers, and admit that it's a fruitless effort to exert absolute control over the ways users play their games?

How about Blizzard and Diablo 3, where you feel lag in a game that's predominantly single player?

jackmaney• 13 years ago

Way too little, way too late.

mcv• 13 years ago

Offline? What a brilliant innovation! I can't believe nobody thought of that before.

SimCity Offline Is Coming

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