Maxis: That's Rain on Your Leg [Dec 22, 2012, 12:22 pm ET] – Share – Viewing Comments
The SimCity Blog has a follow-up to recent outcry over plans to require an internet connection to play the upcoming SimCity revival (thanks GameSpot). Lucy Bradshaw explains to players how this will make the game "even more fun." Here's a bit:
Running the regional simulation on our servers is something we also use to support features that will make this SimCity even more fun. We use the Sim data to update worldwide leaderboards, where you get to see your city or mayoral standings as compared to the other cities in your region and between all of the regions in the world. And since SimCity is a live service, we're also using the data to create weekly global and local challenges for our players that keep the gameplay fresh and surprising.
We think this is the best SimCity ever and it wouldn’t be possible without the technology that powers our game. SimCity was designed to be connected from the ground up. We built the game around GlassBox, which takes the game to another level. And, we’ve given the player control over how to play. You can set your region to private and never interact with other people, or you can play exclusively with friends or join a public region.
entr0py wrote on Dec 23, 2012, 00:03:
You don't know that Steam, Origin and GFWL all have offline modes? I believe Steam has some requirement whereby every couple of months you have to authenticate or offline mode stops working. But that is pretty friendly to people with laptops or crappy connections. Still bones people with no internet access at all though.
Yep exactly. The comparison between something like Steam and an individual game like Simcity is completely flawed anyway. One is a service to sell games, the other is an actual game. There is a pretty big feature gap between them. Digital distro services have to implement DRM as per publisher requirements, publishers on the other hand get to choose what goes into their games.
EA chose this path because they like under pinning their games with online connectivity now as it gives a convenient excuse to retire unsuccessful ones that aren't generating an ongoing revenue stream. Look at the rather pitiful list of online features and tell me with a straight face that they couldn't have done that on demand instead of requiring always on.
Anyway sorry Rolling but you're 100% wrong here. People definitely hate EA for a variety of reasons but in this case it's 100% justified, their rather long standing tradition of shitting on older franchises is pretty well documented.
Oh well hopefully they learn their lesson from this. I'm off to my familys place for a few days, merry christmas everyone!
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