SimCity: The Story So Far

So, SimCity got it's release, after a 10 year wait. Fans of the series were excited. I was excited! Following the game’s development, from its announcement back on March 5 2012,  all the way up to its release a couple of weeks ago, only added to my excitement and eagerness to get stuck into this new version of my favourite city-builder. With the new Glassbox engine and the simplistic-looking interface of the game, it was set to be a major week for budding city planners - and it was major, for many reasons. It's just that not all of those reasons were good.
SimCity launched in the US on 5 March 2013, but all was not well in the Maxis/EA camp; the launch was plagued with server issues. Like Diablo 3, SimCity has an "always-online" requirement, meaning that an internet connection is required to play the game - even if you're playing alone. This always-online requirement has caused controversy amongst fans of the series, who argue that an offline mode - for when servers are down and for players uninterested in the multiplayer features - is a no-brainer.

Many players couldn't connect to the servers to play the game, and the players that did were hit with a myriad of problems, such as server disconnections, inter-city trades of money and  resources that took hours to register or never even registered at all, and a host of bugs. As the week progressed, SimCity launched across other regions of the world, and the server issues didn't seem to be easing up. By the time it reached me here in the UK, on 8 March, Maxis had added new servers and upgraded some of their original ones. Social features such as leaderboards and challenges were disabled to ease the server load and help players connect – and these features are still unavailable now, almost a month after release.

The crime data layer view - the orange shows the concentration of crime, and the blue shows the police coverage. Due to the initial broken traffic system, all of my police patrol vehicles seemed to enjoy lining up on one street - much to the delight of the criminals!

The crime data layer view - the orange shows the concentration of crime, and the blue shows the police coverage. Due to the initial broken traffic system, all of my police patrol vehicles seemed to enjoy lining up on one street - much to the delight of the criminals!

My download of the game launcher from Origin was seamless and swift, but apparently it wasn't my time to connect. I was immediately hit with a message stating that I had been put into a queue - a queue for “attempting” to connect me to my chosen server. Yes, “attempt”; not even a guaranteed connection! Well, I had no other choice but to sit tight and wait the whole 18 minutes that EA had allocated me. “18 minutes, is that all?”, I hear you say. Well, to me it felt like a lifetime, especially after being so keen to play.

Once my 18 minutes were up, I immediately attempted to connect - and BINGO, I was in! I played through the introductory tutorial, which didn’t take long at all. Upon choosing my first region, I was ready to become mayor of my pioneering city: Nubtown.
 
Nubtown wasn’t given the best start; trying to plan for future growth, I immediately placed a long straight High-Density Avenue from the highway, which would serve as the main street of my soon-to-be bustling metropolis. Not noticing that this cost me most of my 50k starting budget, I had to take out a loan to ensure I could afford to supply Nubtown with power and water. Despite the rocky start, Nubtown blossomed into a prospering coal mining town, and after a solid 4 hours of play time, things were looking good. But the good times came to a sudden end when I was disconnected from the server and sent packing, straight back to the main menu screen.

For the next couple of days this would happen again and again: I would play for a few hours and then suddenly be disconnected from the server. This meant that each time I would re-connect, my city would usually load from a state it was in way before I was disconnected - any changes I had made to my city leading up to the disconnection were lost.  Over the course of the last few weeks conditions have vastly improved and I've suffered very few disconnections, although I still don’t trust that my cities are in the exact same state that I left them as there is no “save/load game” option. Your cities are synced to the server you’re on and you can resume exactly where you left off when re-connecting – well, that’s how it’s supposed to work anyway.

Aside from the initial server issues, I have also experienced some engine-based bugs. Buildings have appeared on top of other buildings, traffic is insanely congested (despite excellent public transport coverage and high capacity roads) and roads “disappear” when I zoom out the view. But all of the bugs I have come across, and more, are being addressed by the developers and patches are already quite frequent.

Somehow I don't think that the addition of a penthouse was in keeping with the architectural style of the building.

And the time I have spent playing has been, on the whole, enjoyable. The graphics and tilt-shift effect give a toy-town feel, and once you zoom down to street-level the sound can pull you right in to the world, with the noise of the traffic and the hustle-bustle of your sims going about their daily lives giving the feeling you’re looking at a real living, breathing city. The data-layers are concise and very easy to use, allowing you to quickly see what your city needs or could do without. There is also a filter feature which allows you to change the colour palette, letting you make your city look like something from an old black and white movie if you so choose. My favourite is “Black and Red”, which changes the colours to make your city look like the one from the movie Sin City – which, for me, is more than fitting as my cities always seem to end up being havens of sin (completely unintentional, I assure you)!

The filter options can give your cities a completely unique feel.

The filter options can give your cities a completely unique feel.

Multiplayer mode is tonnes of fun. Okay, the bugs and server issues made this a little less than what it was meant to be, but a friend and I still managed to rack up a good amount of time managing our region. Working together to make the cities in the region prosper is quite a challenge; you must be in regular contact with your fellow mayor(s) to inform each other of any problems you are facing – for example, my gambling city was nothing short of a breeding ground for criminals and undesirables, much to the dismay of my friend who “benefited” from such individuals commuting to his city to murder, commit arson and generally cause him nothing but grief. Sorry mate!

Despite the unsavoury nature of my city on the top-left of the screen, our region still looked impressive.

Amongst the anger-fuelled complaints of players, Maxis released several blog updates, addressing the issues. One of the updates offered a free EA title as a gesture of goodwill in hopes that “you won’t stay mad and that we’ll be friends again when SimCity is running at 100 percent”. Another blog update appeared soon after, detailing the titles available and the terms at which they could be redeemed. The titles on the menu include Battlefield 3, Mass Effect 3, Dead Space 3 and - get this - SimCity 4. Perhaps EA believe that by offering an offline version of SimCity, albeit a 10 year old member of the franchise, it would appease players shouting out for an offline version of the latest addition? Perhaps not. Oh, and I chose Dead Space 3… I should get around to playing that in about a year, after I play Dead Space and Dead Space 2.

Regardless of all the problems faced at launch, SimCity is a good game. It has kept me and many others hooked, even though I have spent heaps of time waiting to even attempt to connect to servers and play; that says something. The fact that a game can be so bogged down with issues, yet players keep coming back for more, also highlights the game's entertainment value. I think with regular updates we’ll see this SimCity become what we all initially expected and more - minus the offline mode, of course.

Have you played this latest iteration of SimCity? What do you think about the always-online requirement; do you believe an offline mode should be introduced?