Why I'm Bidding Farewell to SimCity

[Shawn Zipay]

As promised, I am offering up a follow up review to my original SimCity review that was posted on March 11th.

As you may recall, I was perhaps foolishly optimistic that things would have changed for the better when a few more patches came out for the game. When the 2.0 patch was announced, I held onto that optimism though it seems as though it was all for not.

Most of the issues I initially reported in my review still seem to hold true. Yes, some aspects have gotten better from a month prior. However, just days after my review went live I ran into a snag with just one of my cities. Out of the three cities I have in a region, one city would constantly and reliably lock up my game and generate a "Not Responding" message in Windows Task Manager.

Every. Single. Time.

I even had some friends visit my city and they too reported the same lockups that I encountered. I changed resolutions, graphical options, I even tried different speeds to see if any of those had any impact on this issue. Nothing helped. Nothing worked. 2.0 did not fix this and it's a shame, as there are numerous reports of this and similar issues at the EA support section for SimCity.

The problem here is that there has not been any acknowledgement from EA or Maxis that they are working on this issue, that they know what the issue is, or anything of the sort.

True to what I said in the follow up video above, I have uninstalled the game.

[CptainCrunch]

Good follow up.

It saddens me. I loved Sim City and this reboot looked great. The city you had was awesome looking, but their sight into this game was sooooooo short. Its obviously not ready and the game follows the normal trend in the industry of releasing "almost" ready games.

You shouldnt have to destroy your city on an error like this. Its your most built and profitable one. Why should the gamer be punished to "fix" something that they spent so much time on?

Im glad I waited on the game.

[stilla-killa]

I never could get into games like SimCity and the Sims.

[Porkfist]

It appears EA is on track for worst company of 2013.

[K-16]

Porkfist: Being voted the worst company from The Consumerist polls won't mean anything if EA and its subsidiaries refuse to learn from the creation of their mistakes. And given their attempts to discredit The Consumerist's system of voting, I doubt they are even interested in knowing why we villify them (even CliffyB seemed to have missed some of our points as a community). So voting them to be the worst company won't matter if shareholders continue to support them.

Zips: I'm sorry to hear that your most productive city consistently locks up on you. It's ironic that Maxis' core design decision (without any intervention from EA) on making several elements of the game to be server-side cause so many problems, because they were aiming for customers like you who would try a more multiplayer-oriented co-op experience. To be honest, I would've been more interested in SimCity if I get to play it live with friends, but it seems this isn't the end product of that vision given its (not even subliminal) advertising features, and lack of capacity to handle the gamers who (surprise surprise) play this game.

What disturbs me even more is how the patch has not only skipped your (possibly client-side) problem, but it created new ones that crashes the game according to SimCity's support forums. Is this seriously Maxis' idea of rebooting SimCity? This doesn't look very appealing if that was their intention, I'd rather go "retro" then with SimCity 4 or SimCity for the SNES/SF, because at least that works out of the box (I miss games that work out of the box). Like I said, I'm sorry to hear that the game has played with your patience for the last time.

By the way, Aliens: Colonial Marines has also gone through some patches, so any thoughts on doing a review on the game in its current state? The glass in the tunnels finally crack now... *Grins sheepishly.*

[Porkfist]

Porkfist: Being voted the worst company from The Consumerist polls won't mean anything if EA and its subsidiaries refuse to learn from the creation of their mistakes. And given their attempts to discredit The Consumerist's system of voting, I doubt they are even interested in knowing why we villify them (even CliffyB seemed to have missed some of our points as a community). So voting them to be the worst company won't matter if shareholders continue to support them.

You got that right. They are concerned with dollars and not their customers. It's unfortunate. So far I have been successful in "voting with my wallet" and haven't purchased anything from EA since BF3. I'm doing my part to drag them down one over priced title at a time.