simcity

So...  simcity.

They released the game back at the beginning of August and the 7th (I think - I've lost track a bit) patch came out in August/September.  That's 6 months.  And I think it's only now that they've finally addressed all of the stuff that was either broken or (more depressingly) badly designed/implemented.

In some ways this isn't uncommon nowadays.  Modern games are super complicated things that have to excel both in terms of visuals as well as content.  During the early days it was all about the content - the game itself - but nowadays there's an expectation that games will look great too.

That obviously makes them expensive to develop, so there's always going to be a temptation to rush them out before they're really ready.

This is particularly the case for testing.  It must be very tempting to just do some basic testing, rather than big-scale betas.  It must be quite expensive to do proper testing and fix the game before it some out.  The temptation to release it quickly and effectively treat the first few months an extended test (one where they're paying you to test the game!) and then fix stuff later in patches.

Which is pretty much what's happened with SimCity.  Some of the stuff they've finally fixed with the last few patches makes the game operate like it probably should have done at the beginning.  Don't get me wrong - I think plenty of the stuff they've put out was probably always intended to come out as extra content and some of it has occurred to them after release (like the road height thing), it's more that some of the stuff is effectively the final version of the code that simply wasn't ready at release, or they've had to come up with because their original design was broken.

I find it all a bit disheartening and the time this has all taken and my desire not to waste time on a game that wasn't ready has meant I've not played it a great deal recently.

However, they've just announced the first proper expansion for the game, and it looks rather interesting.  It's basically a raft of things to make your cities "future cities", and includes some nice stuff

The problem is that I also think he fundamental "model" is broken.  It was clearly the intention to make a multiplayer SimCity, which is fine as it goes, but the problem is that SimCity isn't a multi-player game.  The mechanic they've chosen to achieve multiplayer seems okay - smaller cities that are interconnected, but the problem is that when you play single player, the method they've used for "simulating" other cities is just a mess.  You have to keep exiting the game (this is the only way you can force it to save) simply in order for the other cities to look even vaguely like they did when you last played them, and even then they still don't work like they should.

I mean, this whole notion they had of one city "doing garbage" another "doing industry" another "doing education/research" only looks like it might work in proper multiplayer, with all the players playing at the same time.  I say this, because I've never played multiplayer and have no interest in doing so.  I've therefore only played single player, and I can assure you this mechanic doesn't work like it should when played that way.

The thing I find bizarre is that it seems like such a simple thing to achieve.  We're simply talking about storing some basic numbers for each city - they don't need complex simulation, you just store the fact a city has x litres water spare somewhere.  Why do I have to exit the game for it to even save that number in a place that my other cities can see it updating?