(Winner of "Blunder of the Year" Award, speech below)
What happens when you take a beloved franchise, and shove always-online DRM right up its ass for no reason than to force people to play online? You get Diablo III. And that’s the point where EA looked at Activision and said “We’re not going to make that mistake, no sir, we are not launching with a broken online service, We’re going to do one better and break the whole fucking game AND the service ” and so in 2013 EA gave us Sim city, a bloated shambling corpse of a game that hardly worked even if you could get it to run during the launch. And sure, the game works -now-, but the damage is done, after many people’s saves were deleted or ruined by griefers using exploits, we all moved on, and Sim City will forever serve as a reminder how Electronic Arts got its name, because their ability to fuck up electronic entertainment is truly an art form.
(Winner of "We're Sorry®" Award for most egregious technical problem, speech below)
Did anyone NOT see this one coming? SimCity took the same route as Diablo 3, and believed that, in a vain attempt to stop online piracy, they would release a game with an always-online internet connection. Here we are not even a full year later, and they’re already patching it out due to their idiotic mistakes.
Getting down to the meat of why this game was chosen, it’s fairly obvious to say that the always-online DRM didn’t work. The game was unplayable on launch, for up to three days afterward as well, and finally started to open up after everyone returned their copy and gave up. Even after the servers came up, the game was unresponsive, and usually had a 500+ ping for even the best, and closest connections to the servers, and wouldn’t even refresh neighboring cities, the major feature of the online functionality, for several hours at a time. Overall, it’s just the game that should have never been, and as a fan of the SimCity franchise, it really does hurt me to say that.
But hey, at least… they’re “sorry.”
What happens when you take a beloved franchise, and shove always-online DRM right up its ass for no reason than to force people to play online? You get Diablo III. And that’s the point where EA looked at Activision and said “We’re not going to make that mistake, no sir, we are not launching with a broken online service, We’re going to do one better and break the whole fucking game AND the service ” and so in 2013 EA gave us Sim city, a bloated shambling corpse of a game that hardly worked even if you could get it to run during the launch. And sure, the game works -now-, but the damage is done, after many people’s saves were deleted or ruined by griefers using exploits, we all moved on, and Sim City will forever serve as a reminder how Electronic Arts got its name, because their ability to fuck up electronic entertainment is truly an art form.
(Winner of "We're Sorry®" Award for most egregious technical problem, speech below)
Did anyone NOT see this one coming? SimCity took the same route as Diablo 3, and believed that, in a vain attempt to stop online piracy, they would release a game with an always-online internet connection. Here we are not even a full year later, and they’re already patching it out due to their idiotic mistakes.
Getting down to the meat of why this game was chosen, it’s fairly obvious to say that the always-online DRM didn’t work. The game was unplayable on launch, for up to three days afterward as well, and finally started to open up after everyone returned their copy and gave up. Even after the servers came up, the game was unresponsive, and usually had a 500+ ping for even the best, and closest connections to the servers, and wouldn’t even refresh neighboring cities, the major feature of the online functionality, for several hours at a time. Overall, it’s just the game that should have never been, and as a fan of the SimCity franchise, it really does hurt me to say that.
But hey, at least… they’re “sorry.”