launch day

I've made a bit of an error when it comes to my plan to play SimCity all weekend.

I ordered it through amazon, but I always use the free delivery by default and I've forgotten to change it to first class for the SimCity order.  Since I almost always order a bunch of stuff all at the same time I would have had to order SimCity separately and didn't.

Bit of a blow, but then given a lot of people still seem to be having huge problems with accessing and playing the game, perhaps it's not too bad if I have to wait a while before I start.  I understand there's a bunch of patches being applied to the servers so hopefully that will help.

The game also seems quite buggy.

The slightly odd thing about some of the bugs is that they were identified back in the first beta over a month ago.  Terrain and roads seems to have quite a few issues and you'd think that, even if they couldn't change the game code for launch (production and shipping issues) then that would be one of the first things it patches.

Games of course are generally like all forms of entertainment for me in that I have huge stacks of them sat waiting for me to play.  Occasionally I do of course and I remember one time I launched a game that had been quite big and popular at release and the first thing it did was download a gigantic patch that was bigger than the game code itself.

This of course was months after it had been released so it was a combination of all the patches most people had gotten over a long period of time, but it shocked me just how much had clearly been broken in the game when it was shipped.  Apparently this is quite a normal thing nowadays.  Games cost so much to make they want to get them out as quickly as they can so things like proper, in-depth play-testing and bug fixing fall by the wayside.

You can kinda see the logic and it's actually a consequence of the ever-improving complexity and capability of computers and technology.  A good few years ago if you did an FPS people didn't expect it to be utterly gorgeous to look at, but now they do and that sort of thing is quite costly to do, even though it doesn't impact he game itself.

Of course there are potential shortcuts in that you can use some else's game engine, but that's never really going to be possible with a game like SimCity, so I image a lot of the money had to go on making the fundamental engine (glassbox) work right, rather than fix some visual clipping bugs to do with terrain and roads.

There might be a side-advantage of not getting the game until next week.  Since I've got the Monday off I might be able to use that time to clear up some other stuff I need to do.  This is going to be a horribly busy month for me (I'll write a blog about it next week hopefully) and it might be useful to tick a few of the more tedious boxes this Monday.