New SimCity to require constant internet connection

[ibegurpard]

http://www.edge-online.com/news/simcity-use-always-drm/

i cannot begin to describe how pissed off this makes me. I've played every version of SimCity since it came out in the late 1980s. I don't have a problem with them creating some robust multiplayer options but SimCity is, at heart, a single-player game and there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to have an offline sandbox mode.

[SilveryMoon]

1. I hate non-MMORPGs that require internet to play.

It saddens to see some games going in this direction.

[jp11]

2. Obviously there's a need because you are stealing the game

as are all players of the game.

In order to combat whatever perceived theft of their products, and it is just a perceived theft because if their products were not available for free/ie pirated or stolen then those people would of course pony up and buy the game, they must include these idiotic requirements to prevent anyone from stealing their property. Of course history has shown there are no methods to subvert this brilliant and innovative solution to a problem that they made up.




This kind of DRM behavior just pushes more people to pirate products as publishers/developers treat potential and historic customers as thieves, pirates will circumvent their so called protections and to avoid the BS more people will pirate the products over buying them legitimately and legally over having to deal with the BS that is forced upon them.

Just another stupid idea from people that think that everyone who plays or uses their product would of course pay for it were it not a hassle to use/play or get.

I avoid DRM infested crap ever since it rendered one of my CDRW drives unusable and only bothered with them for two games Saint's Row the 3rd Internet connection required to activate/play w/ steam account and Diablo III because a friend pushed me to play it. There are so many good/great games out there that don't shove DRM BS in your face I find it very rare to ever HAVE to deal with their BS.

I'd add that my own belief that developers/publishers will only continue to chase the BS idea that you don't own anything you buy so they can have even more control over how much access you are allowed/given as they hold back content and/or try to sell you more shit for the product you supposedly 'bought'.

[ibegurpard]

5. that's it exactly

and them trying to market the idea that they're doing it for "compelling gameplay" purposes is just insulting and makes me even angrier.
Try Torchlight II if you like Diablo. It's cheap and pretty fun. You can play if offline too.

[Occulus]

6. "try to sell you more shit for the product you supposedly 'bought'."

I'd like to point out that's how porn sites work, too.

Just sayin'.

[DainBramaged]

3. I post against it on every Sim City facebook post, fuck them, I won't buy it

[ibegurpard]

4. haha same here

except a lot of people who don't seem to know what they're in for are just seeing a new SimCity and going "oooh...shiny!"
their facebook poll contest over which SimCity version was the best ended up with SimCity 4 by a landslide...I think most people are expecting a bigger better SimCity...they're in for a rude awakening. Not only is it going to be online-only, the scale of the game has been cut drastically and they're cutting out features that people have grown to love...in order to fit it into the online-only mulitplayer gaming model.
I actually like and play MMOs...but this trend to make everything online-only needs to be stamped out like the cockroach it is. Trying to market the idea that their stupid resource trading and leaderboards add such compelling gameplay to the franchise that they just HAD to make it online-only is weak.
There are some die-hard defenders...I suspect that are EA astroturfers because I just cannot imagine that anyone would be in favor of reducing the scope of a game and shackling it to the internet just to get curved roads, resource trading and leaderboards.

[DainBramaged]

7. They want to make it the Facebook of online gaming

Sim games are solitary games. I don't want to talk to no body at 3AM building a city, or letting it run overnight

[Occulus]

8. I am against this horrible trend

for all the reasons stated on this thread. I just don't have anything to add.

There is nothing good about this and I'm going to wait until it's out before I decide I might want it.

In the meantime, I might crack open SimCity 4 again.

[mjrr_595]

9. that's just bull

[LeftOfSelf-Centered]

10. Agree completely.

As I said in the "Metro: Last Light" thread, EA seems to be going out of their way to make people hate them.

Ubisoft (who finally seems to have canned the always online DRM) was always complaining about supposedly high piracy numbers, despite the always online DRM. Not surprising: the pirates probably had a much easier time than the buyers playing their games. So what was it good for? It didn't curb piracy (according to their own numbers), but it did succeed in pissing off a bunch of potential buyers, who then passed on your games.

Another thing that publishers can't seem to wrap their head around is that a lot of people don't want multiplayer. I like story driven games which are very hard to do in multiplayer. And I don't care that Jimmy, who lives half a world away from me, is playing the same game as me, and, no, I don't want to talk to him, so what is he doing in my game??? Yahtzee made a similar point (much more eloquently than me) in one of his recent Zero Punctuation vids.

I was never that big into city building games, but I did play some SimCity 2 in my youth and some CitiesXL more recently. With this DRM they just made the decision for me of whether I'd even consider buying this game.

[ibegurpard]

11. More on this from an "ask the devs" forum

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/14umm1/we_are_the_simcity_dev_team_from_maxis_amaa/c7gmhqu

check out this on reddit from yesterday.
There have been people claiming that you can continue to play if your internet goes out...it just required an internet connection to start up.
This is the dev answer to that:
"We will allow you to play for as long as we can preserve your game state. This will most likely be minutes."

I've been playing MMOs for almost ten years. Every single annoyance and pain-in-the-ass of being required to be online to play a game I have experienced...luckily I seem to have avoided any hacking or theft due to it though.
There is absolutely NO benefit to the player to require anyone who isn't interested in multiplayer or an MMO to be connected to the internet to play. NONE.
Piracy is not the gamer's problem. It's the problem of the game producers. If it is such a big problem for them then it is their responsibility to come up with a solution that doesn't antagonize and inconvenience legitimate customers.

[CabalPowered]

12. I think the EO author has jumped to conclusions

The dev says nothing about DRM. It's about regions and econs. This is SimCity 5, in the year 2012.. of course they're going to put most of this in the cloud. What I see is a sort-of meta economy with real-time demand indicators. SimCity 4 was cool becaue it had a built-in meta economy with regions but it was very simplistic in nature. They need to get your session state at the end of the session because you're contributing to a real-time, virtualized economy. I see no more evil here than usual..

[ibegurpard]

13. nope

the devs' explanations are tired marketing rehashes of what they've been saying all along. They're saying that the simulation is so complex a top of the line computer can't handle it? seriously what kind of BS is that?
Even if it's true...it was a horrendous design decision.
Antagonizing a fair number of what should have been their bedrock customer base was not wise.

[CabalPowered]

14. My machine chugs on a big single-player Civ5 game

And I have beefy machine. What they're trying to do is much larger in scale. There is no smoke screen here, just big data.

If you want a sandbox, try XL or Tropico.

[AZCat]

15. I've never been able to get into XL.

I've played the Tropico series for years and have enjoyed it immensely, although the AI pathing still sucks. The latest (Tropico 4) is freaking gorgeous on a machine capable of running it.

[CabalPowered]

16. Same here

Tried and tried with XL but always defaulted back to SC4. Tropico is great fun but it gets boring after a few games. I wish the maps were bigger.

[qazplm]

17. that is true

I have a 4K dollar desktop with dual 1G video cards, the whole works, and it still can take 30 seconds to a minute between turns during the latter stages of a game.