EA Caves: SimCity Offline Mode Coming

iONiUM writes "After EA staunchly denied any offline mode, it would seem the disastrous SimCity launch and continual gamer community anger (as well as a CEO firing), EA finally caved and has now going to make an offline mode. However, the obvious question still remains: is it too little too late?"

Re:Maybe next time

[PsychoSlashDot]

Not a chance. I predict there will be relatively few sales because of the "too little, too late" status, and EA will simply conclude that they were right all along... offline mode doesn't matter.

Re:too little too late?

[erroneus]

Gamers are picture perfect examples of addiction. Not "all gamers" but there is a subset of gamers significant enough to predict that no matter how bad things get, they will wait in line to spend lots of money so they can "earn achievements." And why? Because they can't get them in real life as easily or as well. That sense of achievement is addicting and even necessary.

But it's not just gamers who suffer from this. How about all those football fans who rejoice when their team wins or gets sad when their team loses? How about those soccer fans? Have they decapitated and dismembered anyone lately? There's no end to the lunacy. None. And because of that business out there sees unlimited potential for exploitaiton.

Not sure this is a "Cave"

[Ksevio]

With offline mode, EA can now shut down the servers that were once required while still selling the game. Since SimCity isn't subscription based, the servers are just a drain of money for them at this point since the hype died down and not many are going to pirate it.

Come a few months they'll be announcing that the online portion will be shuttered, but look forward to the next great EA release!

Re:Not for me

[tepples]

The market is not free for several reasons, two directly related to EA and one not so directly.

• EA holds the exclusive license to several major sport leagues' rosters.
• EA has claimed in a lawsuit (EA v. Zynga) that its copyright in The Sims Mobile extends to ownership of gameplay elements. This lawsuit was settled out of court, but it still contributes to a chilling effect on development of video games in the same genres as certain flagship EA titles.
• Currently, there are three companies, whose names start with M, N, and S, with effective veto power over playing a video game on a television. I'm told only a commercially insignificant fraction of game buyers use a television as a a desktop PC's monitor, and this will remain true unless and until Steam Machines become popular.

Re:Not sure this is a "Cave"

[JoeMerchant]

I can't express how disillusioned I was when GT5 Prologue killed their (lame, stuttery) online racing servers. For me, $60 is a damn investment, and I didn't expect to be losing features a couple of years after making that investment.

TO LITTLE TOO LATE!

[Anonymous Coward]

EA GAMES - we fuckup everything

Seriously. They killed a giant cash cow with the death of simcity. 2k and 4 are still in the most popular games of all time catagory. How they managed to fuck that up is simply amazing. That took serious work and skill to fuckup so completely! They even had the perfect model handed to them with all the custom mods out there for simcity4. All they had to do was grab a few of those. Slap it on a new compile that plays happy and nice with vista+. Upgrade the graphics some. And bam. Continue to rake in millions for another decade or more!

The fact they could not do this is astounding.

And now? Fuckem.. Simcity is dead to me.. (anything after 4 anyway) A game i have paid for a total of 9 times because i LIKED it and wanted it everywhere.
Dead. Not one cent will they ever get again from me.

Hopefully a bunch of stupid fuck managers get fired over all the monumentally stupid things that killed the simcity cash cow. Because they deserve it.

(still blows my mind how they managed to fuckup something so completely like that. when they had how many years of past code and experience and customer feedback to build upon)

Re:Sweet.

[Dan Askme]

Most pirates stay away from dogshit.

Re:Ya that is near as big a problem

[ultranova]

Apparently they aren't fixing it either. They say the performance isn't good on larger cities, which translates to "We fucked our engine up bad so it can't scale at all."

If, as EA claimed, every resident - and everything else to the last spark of electricity - actually gets simulated individually at the level of walking on street, then the engine likely scales linearly (twice the residents require twice the computing power); it's just that even a small town requires route-finding for tens of thousands of agents in realtime, which is not feasible.

Not that this should had been a surprise to anyone, given that other games that simulate individuals at this level - such as Tropico - aim for a few thousand residents tops.