How to fuck up an established games IP: SimCity Edition
SimCity 2013 launched a couple of days ago, and oh boy. It does not seem to have gone very well. I'm gonna take a look. Very important disclaimer: I have not played this game. Something I share with many people who've actually bought the game (more on this later).
Short recap: SimCity is a series of simulation games by Maxis, the first instalment came out in 1989 (this was actually the first SimWhatever game by Maxis, and the first game by Maxis to boot). You basically have a big chunk of land and some money and you can buy infrastructure and MAYBE it will turn into a thriving city. It is a classic sandbox game, with no real goals - just rules and parameters for how things work. You can bulldozer land, fill up holes with water, build roads and powerlines and mass transit systems, residential and commerical zones, power plant and airports and a bunch of different stuff. You could set tax rates, keep an eye on population and crime, etc. It was pretty fun - you could try to make an actual city that worked, or build nuclear power plants everywhere and blow them up, or spawn horrible catastrophes - whatever you wanted to within the parameters of the game. I remember biking to a friends house and I'd exchange copies of cities we'd made by copying them onto FLOPPY DISKS OMG.
It's been a decade since the last SimCity came out - SimCity 4 came out in january 2003, so there's been a lot of excitement about this new SimCity. Will it be the greatest thing every, or will Electronic Arts (who now own Maxis) fuck things up again. Well, by the looks of things they have fucked things up again.
It seems that if an existing games IP gets acquired by another company and then a decade goes by before they make a new game in the series, it usually goes to hell. See Duke Nukem and Diablo and now Sim City. (Deus Ex, though deeply flawed, is an ok game). It seems that when this happens, the people developing the new titles completely miss the point of the game. The good news is that now that games are being Kickstarted, old IPs are being revived and developed by the original devs, who seem to have a vague idea about what made their games good in the first place.
So what went wrong with SimCity 2013? I don't know HOW it went wrong, but these are the points which are most apparent to me.
1) requiring for a persistent online connection.
This is particularly interesting in the case of SimCity because it is bad on both technical AND design grounds, with regards to how I have perceived the gameplay to be. We can deal with the technical first, since this is the most immediately apparent.
EA require you to connect to their servers to play SimCity. There are several reasons for this, which I will get to in the design section. The servers have, as expected, not coped with the traffic, and people are unable to play since they are unable to connect. In addition, the handling of busy servers and queueing is poorly implemented, resulting in completely unreliable estimates for when you'll be able to log in.
Ostensibly the reason for requiring a connection to EA servers is that key gameplay calculations are run on the servers. This is also a neat way to enforce that you have a legitimate copy, so this can be viewed as a form of DRM. Also , EA have a history of shutting off servers for games that are end-of-life'd (http://www.ea.com/1/service-updates) This doesn't mean they're going to deactivate authentication servers, so will be interesting how that pans out.
Now, one of the biggest trends in gaming since the last SimCity title is social gaming. I believe the decision to require an online connection was both a business decision (despicable but understandable) and a design decision (far more tragic).
The tragedy of persistent online connectivity from a design point of view is that, in the way it is implemented, it completely ruins your freedom to experiment and goof off, and by extension fundamentally ruins the point of this type of sandbox game. Here is a quick checklist:
* you cannot Save a copy of your city - it is persistently stored. This means you do not have the freedom to experiment with different solutions - where to place an airport, how to build your water supply chain, how to deal with fires or traffic jams. This is perhaps the most egregious mistake.
* due presumably to needing to simplify the calculations on the server and to 'make the game more accessible', all infrastructure seems to have been consolidated into just roads. This has removed a lot of the complex decision making you had to make in earlier SimCity games
* the maximum size of the city you can build is now estimated to be about 81x81 tiles. The biggest map available in SimCity 4 was 256 x 256. A SimCity 4 city could geographically be 10x bigger that a city in SimCity 2013.
* NO TERRAFORMING holy crap you guys what were you thinking. I want to level mountains, form reservoirs, make crazy walls, etc.
What does the persistent online features actually ADD to the gameplay? So far, seems to be leaderboards and achievements.
Due to the massive load on the servers, EA have now disabled a number of game features in order to desperately try to create a gaming experience which is at least tolerable. This means you cannot run the game in fast mode, so you need to sit around a lot and wait while the simulation plays out. Also they have disabled much of the actual social features of the game. Amazon have pulled the game from sale due to all the complaints, demands for refunds, and low user ratings.
These problems are no surprise to anyone who, for example, bought Diablo 3. But the core market for Diablo 3 is a pretty hard core gamer group. My hope is that the customer base for SimCity 2013 is a more mainstream group of people, and that they will get burned by how fucking awful this type of consumer experience is, and become aware of what causes it, and then not give money to those types of solutions in future.
Meanwhile, a sequel to Planescape: Torment got funded with millions of dollars, and I just saw the first 20min gameplay footage video from Shadowrun. The future of games looks fucking awesome! Maybe not so much for mainstream games but that's a good thing.
TL;DR: Making SimCity 2013 non-single player is directly counter to what made SimCity a great sandbox game
Short recap: SimCity is a series of simulation games by Maxis, the first instalment came out in 1989 (this was actually the first SimWhatever game by Maxis, and the first game by Maxis to boot). You basically have a big chunk of land and some money and you can buy infrastructure and MAYBE it will turn into a thriving city. It is a classic sandbox game, with no real goals - just rules and parameters for how things work. You can bulldozer land, fill up holes with water, build roads and powerlines and mass transit systems, residential and commerical zones, power plant and airports and a bunch of different stuff. You could set tax rates, keep an eye on population and crime, etc. It was pretty fun - you could try to make an actual city that worked, or build nuclear power plants everywhere and blow them up, or spawn horrible catastrophes - whatever you wanted to within the parameters of the game. I remember biking to a friends house and I'd exchange copies of cities we'd made by copying them onto FLOPPY DISKS OMG.
It's been a decade since the last SimCity came out - SimCity 4 came out in january 2003, so there's been a lot of excitement about this new SimCity. Will it be the greatest thing every, or will Electronic Arts (who now own Maxis) fuck things up again. Well, by the looks of things they have fucked things up again.
It seems that if an existing games IP gets acquired by another company and then a decade goes by before they make a new game in the series, it usually goes to hell. See Duke Nukem and Diablo and now Sim City. (Deus Ex, though deeply flawed, is an ok game). It seems that when this happens, the people developing the new titles completely miss the point of the game. The good news is that now that games are being Kickstarted, old IPs are being revived and developed by the original devs, who seem to have a vague idea about what made their games good in the first place.
So what went wrong with SimCity 2013? I don't know HOW it went wrong, but these are the points which are most apparent to me.
1) requiring for a persistent online connection.
This is particularly interesting in the case of SimCity because it is bad on both technical AND design grounds, with regards to how I have perceived the gameplay to be. We can deal with the technical first, since this is the most immediately apparent.
EA require you to connect to their servers to play SimCity. There are several reasons for this, which I will get to in the design section. The servers have, as expected, not coped with the traffic, and people are unable to play since they are unable to connect. In addition, the handling of busy servers and queueing is poorly implemented, resulting in completely unreliable estimates for when you'll be able to log in.
Ostensibly the reason for requiring a connection to EA servers is that key gameplay calculations are run on the servers. This is also a neat way to enforce that you have a legitimate copy, so this can be viewed as a form of DRM. Also , EA have a history of shutting off servers for games that are end-of-life'd (http://www.ea.com/1/service-updates) This doesn't mean they're going to deactivate authentication servers, so will be interesting how that pans out.
Now, one of the biggest trends in gaming since the last SimCity title is social gaming. I believe the decision to require an online connection was both a business decision (despicable but understandable) and a design decision (far more tragic).
The tragedy of persistent online connectivity from a design point of view is that, in the way it is implemented, it completely ruins your freedom to experiment and goof off, and by extension fundamentally ruins the point of this type of sandbox game. Here is a quick checklist:
* you cannot Save a copy of your city - it is persistently stored. This means you do not have the freedom to experiment with different solutions - where to place an airport, how to build your water supply chain, how to deal with fires or traffic jams. This is perhaps the most egregious mistake.
* due presumably to needing to simplify the calculations on the server and to 'make the game more accessible', all infrastructure seems to have been consolidated into just roads. This has removed a lot of the complex decision making you had to make in earlier SimCity games
* the maximum size of the city you can build is now estimated to be about 81x81 tiles. The biggest map available in SimCity 4 was 256 x 256. A SimCity 4 city could geographically be 10x bigger that a city in SimCity 2013.
* NO TERRAFORMING holy crap you guys what were you thinking. I want to level mountains, form reservoirs, make crazy walls, etc.
What does the persistent online features actually ADD to the gameplay? So far, seems to be leaderboards and achievements.
Due to the massive load on the servers, EA have now disabled a number of game features in order to desperately try to create a gaming experience which is at least tolerable. This means you cannot run the game in fast mode, so you need to sit around a lot and wait while the simulation plays out. Also they have disabled much of the actual social features of the game. Amazon have pulled the game from sale due to all the complaints, demands for refunds, and low user ratings.
These problems are no surprise to anyone who, for example, bought Diablo 3. But the core market for Diablo 3 is a pretty hard core gamer group. My hope is that the customer base for SimCity 2013 is a more mainstream group of people, and that they will get burned by how fucking awful this type of consumer experience is, and become aware of what causes it, and then not give money to those types of solutions in future.
Meanwhile, a sequel to Planescape: Torment got funded with millions of dollars, and I just saw the first 20min gameplay footage video from Shadowrun. The future of games looks fucking awesome! Maybe not so much for mainstream games but that's a good thing.
TL;DR: Making SimCity 2013 non-single player is directly counter to what made SimCity a great sandbox game