SimCity Review and Thoughts

Hello and sorry for my time away. I keep saying that I want to put something up at least weekly, but I guess I'll just have to settle with putting something up whenever I have a good enough chunk of something to talk about. Today, I'll cover some of the more talked about controversies of SimCity, because well, everyone seems pissed about the damned game except for me. Oh, who am I kidding. I'm pissed too, but for completely different reasons. After the jump.

Yea, my city doesn't look a damned thing like this.
But it's cool that it COULD someday, eh? Eh?

First Thoughts
So the newest installment of SimCity has come out and it's been out for about two weeks now, give or take. It's now referred to as SimCity, SimCity 5, or SimCity 2013. A "reboot" with the plain name "SimCity" sure does confuse internet searches. Hah. I've had it since the day it came out and I've already logged a good 60 plus hours on it. The game's gotten a _helluva_ lot of flak since it came out. And not for nothing, because starting with server capacity, to functionality, and the oh-so-teeth-gritting always-on DRM.

Instead, here's what my city looks like.
Not so flashy, but hey, not bad right?

Mind you, this is the first SimCity to have surfaced from the franchise in 10 years. Yea, that's right ladies and gents. Think about that for a while, because at first I didn't believe it. My friend Jun and I had this conversation over lunch and my "Noo waaay, it couldn't have been that long ago" soon turned into me looking it up on my phone and shaking my head in disbelief. Now, also note that the last SimCity game I personally played was way longer ago than 10 years. I played SimCity (the original) and SimCity 2000. I completely skipped over SimCity 3000 and SimCity 4. Which means that though I was playing the game likely a year or two after it was already out, I hadn't had my hands on being a mayor of my very own city grid since probably 1997 - that was 16 years ago. I was barely a teenager and likely knew nothing about what taxes were other than the fact that people paid them and that's how I was able to zone more buildings that way.

And so due to two or three of my friends that made a big wave of hoo-ha about this game, I decided to give it a go. Funny enough, out of these friends who went gaga over trailers and watched game development videos, I think I got the jump on them and got the game first and spent a good 15 to 20 hours on a few experimental cities before they even got the game the weekend after its release. I never watched any trailers, never cared to watch any videos of any kind, and wasn't even particularly stoked about the game. I even made fun of them - "Hey, the 90's called. They want their game back." Well was I wrong. I enjoyed the crap out of this game. For the first 50 to 60 hours. Then something happened. After that milestone, I've barely touched the game...

Server Connectivity
No, I wasn't at all concerned about all the server-side issues. Yes, new game. Capacity issues. Network failures and oversights on EA's side. Sure, I get that. Honestly, who would've thought that three million users would've wanted to hop on this game in the first 24 hours of it hitting physical shelves or otherwise? I actually forgive EA for that, and they've even offered me a digital game download on behalf of them. I bow and accept. Thank you, EA.

Besides, to tell you the truth, I didn't experience too many issues. It seemed as if they were constantly rolling out servers two to four at a time every 12 hours and whenever I wanted to play, I could - sure, I might have to switch servers and hit that "Connect" button a dozen times, but altogether, I spent far more time actually PLAYING and not complaining about not being able to. And I've had a couple of people say the same, though obviously there are several thousands (millions?) of others who were saying the opposite.

Yeah, the error is "not enough room". You're fooling no one.

Plus, all the while they maintained very connected to the userbase. They had an active Twitter account, post update blogs, and you can reliably find patch notes. So really, other than being ill prepared which I already didn't quite fault them for, I thought that their PR department handled server issues quite well.

Always-On DRM
The always-on DRM has been making waves. Everyone has been saying that "it's not necessary" and "EA is dumb for having us rely on their servers." ...I've said it before and I'll say it again. This is actually a multiplayer game. You know how everyone always says "I wish there were MMO type games other than MOBAs and the beat-to-death fantasy-style WoW MMORPGs." Well, here's one. This is an MMO City Simulator.

This game isn't really *meant* to be played single player. Don't believe me? Take a look at some of the requirements to build any of the Great Works. And then imagine having to do that by yourself. My best friend, Joe, basically equates this to: "That's a dungeon raid, SimCity style. Go hard or gtfo." Haha. A fantastic way of looking at it. And the *correct* mindset of how this game is supposed to function in my opinion. If only everyone else believed this.

And in this regard, I believe the marketing for SimCity is attempting damned hard to say that this is supposed to be an MMO game... only without touching the letters "MMO" even with a ten foot pole. Smart or not, this leads to a lot of entitled players who believe it is their Zeus-gamer-god given right to be able to play this game offline. Has anyone said that about, say, WoW ever? Would you even *want* to play WoW offline? In this same regard, even if there was an offline version of SimCity, I really don't think I'd care or want to use it. Out of all the hours of gameplay I've experienced, I can easily say that playing with friends in the same region and laughing about dumb stuff going on is far better than managing traffic, zoning, and asinine Sim resident requests all by your lonesome. So what do I try to do? I try and get as many people as I can to play with! Unfortunately, this really hasn't worked out that well. My friend Austin replied to my text: "I haven't heard anything but bad things about it." ...sigh. True though, right? I mean, kind of. I'm here to tell you right now that I had a blast playing it. And I still will have a good time playing it in the future.

Still, now there are "mods" and hacks to get around the always-on DRM. Yes kiddos, you can play this game offline now if you'd like by going into a debug-type mode and playing to your heart's content without the interaction between your city to any of it's neighbors. Unfortunately, this also shuts off all of the multiplayer-type functions. No Great Works. No commuters from neighbors. No sending your sims off to a neighbor's city's schools or jobs. Nope. It's WoW without any dungeons, raids group quests, or auction house (people want this?!).

Even funnier is the fact that my friend Joe K. showed me that the always-on has revealed vulnerabilities to hacks. Well, I laughed. I don't know about everyone else. All the while, everyone else is likely screaming at the top of their lungs "LOOK WHAT ALWAYS-ON DRM HAS DONE!" C'mon. Get real. Any online game can get hacked. See: WoW, any Diablo game, RIFT, SWtoR, and basically any other game that connects to an online server. As I said, this is an MMO game. MMOs get hacked one way or another. Now, in this case, this wasn't even account hacking. This is a vulnerability hack through that debug mode, where you can essentially start messing with things outside of your city's boundaries. Yippee.

Well, I guess for now then, either know and accept that any city of yours can be messed with (or utterly destroyed) or just play in a private region with people you actually know and trust. I wouldn't go onto my friends Sarah or Wes's cities and unleash Godzilla on them... or would I >.>. No, I wouldn't. And they know that. So it's not that big of a deal. And still -- even if it DID happen to my city? *shrugs* It's a city. I'd get over it pretty darned quick and just start a new city. I don't really know why I don't get attached to my cities like I would a character on an MMORPG, but I just don't.

Functionality
While everyone has their panties in a bunch regarding the always-on DRM feature, this is the portion I get pissed off about - the game functionality. Now on the surface, I believe that Maxis has made a lot of smoke and mirrors regarding how the simulation functions. This new GlassBox engine is made out to be some uber awesome Terminator-like calculation machine. Here's a mind-blowing quote:

”With the way that the game works, we offload a significant amount of the calculations to our servers so that the computations are off the local PCs and are moved into the cloud. It wouldn’t be possible to make the game offline without a significant amount of engineering work by our team." ~Maxis

Holy smokes Batman! You're saying this game churns out SO many calculations and numbers that my computer can't handle it?! Ooooo! I have to offload calculations to EA's servers to handle?! I'm there! I'm in! Let's do th--- wait, but then how can people play offline just fine? Oh, that... that was all a lie? Ok, so there are no calculations from my city being done on EA servers. "But Justin," you say, "This makes it sound like an always-on DRM issue, not a functionality one." It might seem like that at first, but what I'm trying to get at is that I expected a lot of innovation coming out of GlassBox. In my mind, I was ecstatic with glee thinking that any city would have millions upon millions of calculations going on that were so cumbersome that they would have to be offloaded on some remote supercomputer.

However, that's not the case at all. Instead, what we have are increasingly dumb algorithmic problems littering this game. Traffic? The code takes no account of traffic patterns in-game. Agents travel using a least distance calculation instead of a least time one. Proof:

Talk about group mentality

Population? Oh, you think your city has 170,000 sims living in it? Guess again. That's just what the game's UI tells you. In reality, looking at this bit of code from the game here, you'll see that you only have 23,284 (see a reddit post here for the population code used in-game). One question is "why would they do this?" I have a few guesses, most of which revolve around the fact that the city boundaries for this game is equivalent to SimCity 2000's "medium" city setting. I can get to my city's boundaries and build everything in it within... about two or three hours. So the idea of fudging and inflating population is to make the player think their city is larger than it actually is. To the right is the graph that shows real vs fudged population numbers.

Service vehicles - when was the last time you saw a police car, firetruck, or ambulance get stuck in the same spot of traffic for over an hour? Or stop in full for a red light? Or go all-out and empty reserves to respond all to the same incident because it is the closest one even though there are other incidents spread throughout your city? Well, if you play SimCity, these are common occurrences and I just don't get it. Here in SimCity your sims are just agents; they don't have their own houses or jobs. Instead, they will travel in the morning to the first available job and when they get off in the evening, they return to the first available house. This of course leads to traffic, because none of them talk to one another, and they all head to the same job/house at the same exact time until it fills up - at which point they choose the next closest available job/house until the street is full - and then they all uturn. AHHHH!!! *rips hair out*. Oh, did I mention that all mass transit (buses, trains, and street rails) and utility delivery (electricity and water) work like this too? Rock, paper, shotgun has been on the hunt to basically test out all these pathfinding issues, and this article does a great job at revealing all of GlassBox's algorithmic failures. I really hope that if you take a look at that article, it compounds with how much I'm throwing at you here and you get as pissed off at this engine as I am.

I feel like this is a graphical and UI upgrade from the SimCity game I played over a decade ago. There are new buildings, a bunch more options, and ways to specialize your city, but none of this makes me think that the engine or AI is any smarter than the coding developed ten years ago, and riddled with oversights and under-commitments. And that makes me really sad. Stress that: really really sad. This game has had more than enough time to flesh out all the minor details and it seems like even the major ones just have tarps thrown over them.

There are a ton of things I can pick on about the game, but this one really was the straw that broke the camel's back. This issue right here made me stop playing; see this picture:

One road to rule them all.

So what you are seeing here is the generally accepted solution to poor traffic pathfinding problems. One road through the entire city with no intersections what-so-ever. This strategy is called "road snaking" and many people are adopting it for their cities. As you can see, the road is mostly green, which means light to no traffic. This is because you have limited "decision making" of agents, so there is only one way of travel (and nowhere to u-turn) through the city, thus eliminating traffic.

My problem with this is as follows: when you make a game that is supposed to function as a fairly realistic simulation, I can totally understand when your city fails due to poor programming. When an intuitive decision fails because of oversights in programming, I can understand that. Besides, sometimes, due to variance, things fail when they shouldn't. That's life. When your city SUCCEEDS due to poor programming and people are getting rewarded for making unintuitive layouts because it is a black hole the programming doesn't even touch on... I get pissed. Basically, this is no longer a game where you "make a city how you want to and see what comes of it." Nope. This has instead turned into "make a city abiding by the simulation engine's poor algorithms to bypass poor code so you can have a successful city." And that's when I step out. Will these issues ever get fixed? Probably. Over time. I'm excited to see what this game eventually turns into. If more of my friends play, then you can expect me trying out different types of cities and crossing my fingers that as a mayor I can dig myself out of tight situations. That's the fun of things after all, right? So I hope. Until next time, feel free to leave your comments, questions, and/or experiences with SimCity for me in the comments.

PS: What do my readers think of my blog posts' length? Am I writing too much or just enough? I doubt anyone thinks that my posts are too short. Leave those shout-outs in the comments also. :)