Hasta La Gadget!

SimCity‘s reboot has seen its fair share of tumult since launching for PC earlier this year — massive queues to log in, downed servers, and a messy (attempted) public relations cleanup. Things have more or less leveled off for the game since its rocky start, and its developer, EA Maxis, is now ready to launch the game on OS X. Or rather, as we read this, “You can finally delete that version of SimCity you’ve got on your Windows partition and play it natively in OS X.” Huzzah! The OS X version of SimCity launches on June 11th, and you can snag it for free if you’ve already purchased a PC version (and vice versa). Even better, both PC and Mac players can play together, cross-platform.

Similarly thrilling, the game’s “cheetah” speed (its fastest speed) is back, and EA Maxis is promising a 2.0 version of its game. Beyond fixing a variety of bugs, it’s unknown what’s in the update, but we’re fairly confident it won’t enable an offline version of the game (as so, so many players have requested) given EA’s repeated refusal to enable as much. When pushed on a release date for the update, EA reps told Engadget it’ll arrive “well ahead of the June 11 Mac launch.” Sounds to us like that Mac version will ship with Update 2.0 enabled, but EA wouldn’t confirm as much.

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Via: Joystiq

Source: Facebook, EA

One thing is for certain, gamers aren’t exactly fans of games that require always on internet connectivity. This is evident from the backlash SimCity received for its always on DRM. Microsoft seems to be going in a completely different direction with the yet to be released Xbox 720. According to multiple sources the next Xbox might require gamers to have an always on internet connection just to play games on the console, and that the console will only continue to let them playing for three minutes in case the connection is disrupted.

That’s not all, according to the sources, no games or apps will be launched unless the console is connected to the internet. Previous rumors had suggested that Microsoft would require users to be connected to the internet while playing new games so that their activation codes can be verified, and users can be prevented from playing used games. Xbox 720 being useless without an internet connection is the first we’ve heard of this, Microsoft might want to rethink if it is actually planning on imposing this, considering Sony has already confirmed that PS4 will not require an online connection for starting or running any game.

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EA and SimCity have been in the news quite a lot this past couple of weeks. SimCity was released in the first week of March and despite the fact that it was very highly anticipated by gamers, it still managed to bring in a lot of negative press. This due to the fact that SimCity features always-on DRM, which requires players to be connected to the internet at all times. EA sold more copies than it had anticipated, which in turn caused server issues at their end. They started deploying more servers and that particular issue has finally been resolved. (more…)

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It seems like SimCity is just full of bad news. SimCity has received a lot of negative feedback for its ridiculous Always-On DRM feature. At first, EA stated that the Always-On DRM was added mainly because of security issues, but now its saying that it was added because the developers envisioned SimCity as “always-connected”. Lucy Bradshaw, the General Manager of EA’s Maxis label, stated that they had designed SimCity “with multiplayer in mind”. By having the always-connected feature, they were able to create essentially an MMO.

Bradshaw explained that they envisioned a game where cities would constantly be up to date. Players would be able to help each other out with supplies and services, send gifts to each other, promote trading in the Global Marketplace, and more. Simply, they wanted players to always be connected to each other. Even if players wanted to play alone, Bradshaw stated that they’d eventually want to play with other players.

Now here’s the part where everyone gets pissed off. Bradshaw says, “So, could we have built a subset offline mode? Yes. But we rejected that idea because it didn’t fit with our vision.” Essentially, SimCity could have operated with both an online multiplayer mode, as well as a single-player mode that many of the series’s fans asked for. Bradshaw justifies her case by saying that there are “thousands” of people who love SimCity’s always-connected feature, a statement that has been debunked by thousands and thousands of other fans.

Obviously Bradshaw’s statement drew in a huge list of angry SimCity gamers. Many came out to call Bradshaw and the SimCity developers liars. They commented on how the “always up-to-date” trading services sometimes take up to an hour to update, and how even online saving is unreliable, with many players losing multiple cities due to an error in the cloud-based servers. The SimCity launch was a massive failure due to the Always-On DRM, and EA has experienced continuous PR damage since then. This may be the last nail in the coffin for the SimCity series.

[via EA]

EA lied about SimCity not being offline-capable is written by Brian Sin & originally posted on SlashGear.
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EA has certainly upset plenty of people with their recent SimCity release that had plenty of issues with the server. In fact, folks who have played SimCity are even more upset with the company now that they realized they were lied to – as EA did expressly mention that SimCity is unable to run in offline mode, resulting in a hacker managing to get down to the bottom of things, and show the world that you can continue playing “God” in your own SimCity title, never mind that your machine is offline.

Indulging in a little bit of package editing within SimCity, messing around with some of its code, allows one to enable debug mode. From there, it is possible to “break” the game, and enables editing outside of the artificially small city boundaries. Not only that, one can remain disconnected “forever” so to speak, and the population count will also reflect the actual figure instead of the “artificially inflated” one, which was why the hacker’s large cities showed a population of around 15k instead of 100k. How now, EA? It would be nice for you to man up on the situation and provide the relevant restitution.

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