“In all the fuss and mess of the disastrous SimCity launch, one refrain has been repeated again and again. While legions may be begging for an offline mode, EA representatives have been abundantly clear that this simply isn’t possible. Maxis’ studio head, Lucy Bradshaw, has told both Polygon and Kotaku that they ‘offload a significant amount of the calculations to our servers’, and that it would take ‘a significant amount of engineering work from our team to rewrite the game’ for single player. A SimCity developer has got in touch with RPS to tell us that at least the first of these statements is not true. He claimed that the server is not handling calculations for non-social aspects of running the game, and that engineering a single-player mode would require minimal effort.” This keeps getting worse and worse for EA. It’s also clear that Maxis’ own developers are not happy with EA’s meddling.
The way to beat this is to focus efforts into hacking a version of this game to run without an internet connection. Prove that even this bullshit can’t stop piracy. I don’t pirate a damn thing (I believe you should support content producers to encourage more of what you love being made), but screw it I’m in favor of piracy in this case, just to make it clear to EA the futility of their locked down shit.
In any case, there’s a veritable army of highly motivated, highly qualified people who are going to do everything in their power to crack it.
I disagree. Cracking this game to allow it to run in SP offline mode still means someone paid for the game in the first place.
The REAL way to win is to quit buying games from EA. There are plenty of companies out there that are worth your attention, after all.
Edited 2013-03-12 23:56 UTC
I agree but you have to wonder at content makers who cripple their work so that the pirate versions are in every way superior to the legitimate product. Then are shocked that their product is pirated.
Greed seems to make folk stupid.
You don’t have a right to pirate it, though. If you don’t like it, don’t buy it. You don’t have a God Granted Right to run SimCity. If you think that as it is, it is shit, but it could become better by sprinkling some pepper on it, well, that will not be your problem unless you buy it.
Now, if you buy it, I think it is ethical (though not necessarily legal) to modify it to suit your needs.
Not only that, but piracy still gives EA mindshare.
Only talk about how it sucks, and focus on the DRM. Don’t buy it, don’t pirate it, and discourage others from buying it or pirating it.
I disagree. I believe this is already happenning and is actually the cause of the problem.
1. People are pissed off with EA for some intrusive DRM and stop buying their games.
2. EA says “Oh noez, sales are down, it must be all of those pirates.”
3. Increasingly obnoxious DRM “to combat pirates”.
4. GOTO 1
I am not pretending to have a solution. I think that in the long run, the only developers left will be those who respect their customers… it just might take a while and the transitory period will be tough.
Edited 2013-03-13 08:40 UTC
Check out civitas on kickstarter:http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1584821767/civitas-plan-develop…
On that same note I probably should mention Good Old Games ( http://www.gog.com ) and their “Pick 5 games. Save 80%” – promo at http://www.gog.com/pick_5
I’m sure almost everyone here who cares is already aware of GOG, but I just thought to mention it just for the sake of promoting DRM-free gaming.
I will definitely invest in that game.
What about forking an OSS game like simultrans and extend it to something better than SimCity?
Quite simply it costs money. Pure Open source gaming, as a whole, is quite inferior to their commercial counterparts. Commercial gaming companies use commercial products that has licensing costs that far exceeds an ordinary person’s budget. We’re talking programs such as Autodesk’s Maya, Qualoth, SideFx’s Houdini, The Foundry’s Nuke, and all the other smalltime outfits that have special niche SW for modelling lighting, animation, and rendering, etc.
In the case of a successful Sim City clone, just to enable the multiplayer aspects, you’ll need hosting, maintenance, paid staff to maintain, etc. So the costs are steep.
I would encourage an open source hybrid game. The software is free, but to access the cloudbased multiplayer aspects, you would need paid access and closed source binary connector that would handle security, paid, non-intrusive ads, etc. The proceeds would encourage capitalism, while keeping the project and structure of the game alive. The same foundation can work on other games as well, since games come and go like a fart in the wind. I know I may be missing some more aspects of game making, but the jist of it are there. This is not to discourage the investigation of open source games. Some are quite good, such as Xonotic (Formerly Nexuiz). But the fact of the matter is, that in order to create games that are on par with commercial counterparts, would require a professional infrastructure, SW, resources, management, workflow, etc. The work would also have to be done in an efficient, and expedient manner, since the pace of gaming fads change so frequently.
My point was mainly to steer developers efforts from “piracy” to legal OSS work. I agree it is a lot of work, but not unlike linux. Take a look at ManaWorld, it will surprise you what a community can achieve. It is not 3D but still quite fun MMORPG to play with a great community behind it.
Sure Mana Word is “satisfactory” or even “good”. But can it hold a candle to the current commercial offerings? Until such games can, they will Never sway the masses to turn their attention away from their commercial DRM crippled, counterparts. I never said that it can’t be done. All that it will take is a Mark Shuttlesworth of gaming to initiate and bankroll a project of such a magnitude.
Well, judging from the massive amount of major and minor bugs in SimCity (QA? Ain’t nobody got time fo’ that), holding a candle to commercial offerings wouldn’t be that hard.
Bad example. Spaceman’s been throwing money at Ubuntu for years now, and it’s still a half working hodgepodge. It’s not enough to bankrole a project and throw money at the problem, you also have to know how to pick the right people and have a clear vision of where the project needs to go. If you don’t know how to pick the right developers and designers, and don’t have a clear idea of what you want to accomplish, you’ll be paying a lot of money for no gain.
That the community you mentioned can achieve Commodore-like graphics?
And the developers in question are good at hacking on x86 asm to disable DRM.
Great if you’re trying to disable DRM, horrible if you want an artist or a story writer or something like that.
As a youngster, Popular games were from Sierra, such as Space Quest, Kings Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, etc. And in the IT field, Unreal (Original) and Unreal Tournament…
When I feel nostalgic, I can fire up a DOS emulator, pare down my CPU, and play the old game. I can still play Unreal Tournament with my friends with my old Mods, etc. Young people now, do not have that kind of future under always n DRM. Once their game is EOL’d, new tech introduced, their game that they’ve PURCHASED and enjoyed is gone forever. Right now, a person can rationalize that you can move on to newer games, but as someone with a few years under my belt, you WILL get nostalgic and want to play your favorite games with your choice of hard liquor or beer and junk food. That is yet another area that DRM fails modern gamers.
Did anyone ever really want multi-player simcity? I don’t.
Although just ditching multiplplayer reduces the complexity and effort from “completely insane” to “Mostly insane”.
How about beating the addiction for computer games or 24 hour stimulation?
Then, you’d be satisfied with playing unencumbered games and won’t bother with games from companies that give customers a big finger.
I have only one question: why?
Because there is much more to life than nonstop gaming?
Because there is much more to life than nonstop gaming? [/q]
There may be more than that, but who is to say it’s somehow better?
Before I respond I must ask: Are you trolling or serious?
Before I respond I must ask: Are you trolling or serious? [/q]
I am actually serious: why would other forms of entertainment somehow be so much better than gaming? Entertainment – value is a wholly personal experience and therefore cannot be quantified, and if someone just happens to enjoy gaming then who are you to say that that person is screwed up? If we were to just look at quantitative values we would see that gaming can be one of the cheaper methods available to people with low income thanks to things like the regular sales on Steam or GOG, gaming doesn’t involve consuming alcohol or other unhealthy substances, it may allow one to socialize with hundreds of people around the world that one likely wouldn’t otherwise meet and so on.
Some would say the immense amount of sugar and salt involved in gaming is just as bad. Not to mention the constant sitting down aspect of it.
As always, quality, not quantity. Still, as Stalin says, quantity has a quality all of its own, but I’m pretty sure the statistics would show most of the socializing is shallow and so is like nothing is being achieved.
While those two often go hand-in-hand, salt and sugar are not an inherent part of gaming. Your argument is like saying that the job of a car mechanic and smoking are inseparable.
And? There are plenty of these “real life” things, too, that are all about sitting down. Since you’re not specifying any more details this argument, too, becomes moot.
Ah, that’s the whole: how do you define what kind of socialization is of higher quality and what is of lower quality? And according to whose standards?
Not everyone values the same kind of socialization the same, so there obviously cannot be some blanket statement about what kind of socialization is higher and what is lesser quality. Similarly, you’ve never experienced e.g. extremely poor, shallow small-talk in real-life and creative, deep discussion about a topic online? It happening in real life is no guarantee of any sort of a level of quality.
And? There are plenty of these “real life” things, too, that are all about sitting down. Since you’re not specifying any more details this argument, too, becomes moot. [/q]
I didn’t make an argument based on those things. I brought up those things in ADDITION to my argument, since you mentioned alcohol.
See my other posts for a few points regarding my actual argument.
That doesn’t matter, because you only mentioned one metric: socializing with hundreds of people all over the world that they may not meet.
You’re the one that has to demonstrate that it is meaningful in anyway. Otherwise, it is similarly a moot point. I shoot down that metric to show how inadequate, if not completely irrelevant, it is.
You realize you’re kind of questioning werecalfs entire way of life. Anyone who has invested that much of their life in gaming, isn’t going to admit that they’re terribly terribly wrong and have wasted most of their life. Its like trying to explain why quantum mechanics is right to plato. Yes, you’re right, but you aren’t going to get admission from the person you’re arguing with that you are.
“My values and tastes in life are the only correct ones and if you have anything different you are wrong and have wasted your life” is a terribly convincing and mature argument. Just saying.
Its not an argument.
Because there is much more to life than nonstop gaming? [/q]
There may be more than that, but who is to say it’s somehow better? [/q]
I have no problem with people playing computer games. It’s when it gets into addiction territory that’s the problem.
I’m NOT making a comparison to drug addiction, but there’s certainly an analogue in it when someone suggests the course of action is to find anyway you can to play a game, rather than not play it and play another game.
Personally, I like to encourage people to be creators rather than consumers. SimCity is a bit of a grey area because you are a creator when you play it.
Because, you know, personal computers today cant handle such immense calculations and everyone knows its much more efficient to do calculations only needed locally on a remote server.
You fail system design 101.
The system is designed to stop piracy, it has nothing to do with needing servers to offload processing.
She’s just giving a p.r. line.
You don’t say.
We have 4-8 core cpus with 16-32GB of memory. And most games use at most 2 cores. A few newer games are starting to use 3 cores. Now you are telling me that a simulation of a city smaller than Sim City 2,3,4 needs more than that extra 3Ghz core that is sitting idle? What would happen if 1 core of your pc is on a remote server? It would need that same GB/s that your local cpu uses. And this game won’t run on an Atom. You know why don’t you?
And you accuse other people of failing system design 101…
You know, he was sarcastic.
Damn! My sarcasm detector wasn’t on.
I think you failed Sarcasm 101.
Yup he got me.
If it is so hard, how come you can start the game, pull the ethernet cable and continue playing for a few hours before it starts nagging you to reconnect? And the only traffic i have noticed is to update the region mode, which it does a very poor job of anyways. (has anyone’s city population been correct so far on the NA or EU servers?)
Buy the game install, make a duplicate of the game folder, apply the crack. Then use the cracked version for singleplayer and the uncracked version if you want to play with a friend. Simple as that.
Because Lucy Bradshaw got told by the head of game development that was the case.
Or… put your money where your mouth is and refuse to buy the game on the grounds you won’t put up with this type of crap. Simple as that.
The SimCity download edition is back and No. 2 in video game hardware and software sales at Amazon.com. [11:50 AM ET Wed]
No 1 in PC simulation games.
In the end, it comes down to a single painful truth: EA has tremendous strength in genres where nerd rage is impotent.
The core demographic for TheSims is the same as that of the soap opera and telenovela and it doesn’t read Rock, Paper, Shotgun.
The sports sim fan wants the game day experience as he see it on TV or at the stadium. Presentation is important. Teams, rules and rosters are important.
The old school dungeon crawl is well within the reach of any Indie developer.
The RPG with a deep serialized story and theatrical production values is something only the big boys can deliver.
The online component — competitive or cooperative — implies that the game is not forever.
What it is, is six months or more of entertainment for $60, retail list. It is not the end of the world if the servers are down the first week.