SimCity? Or SimDisaster?

Go home building, your drunk.

Maxis/EA has been in some hot water lately with its buyers of SimCity(5) who have been finding out numerous secrets EA and Maxis deliberately lied about for the sake of business. Luckily, my ass didn't get cheated into buying a game that totally debunks most theories of what scumbags EA is made up of. Here's some more insight on the whole fiasco after the jump.

Regions clearly have grid markers for possible construction outside of those pathetic borders.

To start off, SC5 started off with a fair success, beta testers either seemed to love or hate the new changes, I personally did but was torn over the lack of viable building space. The full release then sold like wildfire but only to the buyer's disappointment, the downed servers. The game was supposedly dependent on those said servers, fixing them solved the problem, but the second wave of crap hit the consumers face after that, the DRM system. This essentially is designed to combat piracy by only allowing play if the user is connected to the internet. Most people have falterations in their internet connections, whether it be Ethernet or WiFi, a screw up in your internet could jeopardize the confined metropolis you built. Some people couldn't play period due to this.

Are the servers there for a reason? Yes. Are the servers necessary? Hell no. Kotaku found out the game with no internet whatsoever can run fine for about 20 minutes before it realizes there's no internet. EA/Maxis said that the servers do a majority of the game's actual workings and single player is near impossible. First of all, if the game is mainly server based, why does the install take like a couple hours perhaps. If it was server based, an install would take a fraction of that time as all it contains is menus, base scripts, and such. Second of all, the DRM hardly prevent pirates. It encourages people; REAL actual customers to go out of their way and crack the game to run offline. Essentially the server only manages base multiplayer and and the DRM, nothing that of the game itself and is entirely unnecessary.

The way EA/Maxis is addressing the problem is what is really pissing everyone off. EA took the time to solve the server problems but take everyone's complaints about the DRM and anything else with a grain of salt, even going as far as to offer a free game to compensate for all this. So instead of fixing demanding problems, you give your customers a free game and expect them to think you care. The fact that EA/Maxis deliberately lied about nearly everything the servers are doing isn't going to blow over with the fact that they are still sitting there twiddling their thumbs while hackers unlock a secret and debunk a lie each time.

People have found out about these in the in game files so far.

• Debug/Developer mode- With the change of a script value, this enables you to build out of bounds and even build properly working highways, proving the game is capable of expanding out of those tiny borders your supposed to build a full blown city in. This may also mean terraforming is capable.
• Possible Offline Save File- (C:\games\SimCity\SimCityUserData\EcoGame\) In there, there are subdirectories from which each of them contain a city or region of yours. Upon disconnection it starts to write 1MB files that disappear when you reconnect. The server uploads these files into its cloud storage, technically the games saves onto your drive, the server and the lack of proper load menu prevent you from doing such.
• Offline Mode- Hackers already debunked this via the debug file and it works fine past the DRM's 20 minute timer. If EA claims that its impossible to implement single player, then how did some run of the mill user manage to break those claim with a simple edit?

So far, this shows that the game, said to be unsupported for mods, can be modded. Maxis could EASILY fix the current problems and implement proper tools for Terraforming, Highways, Single Player, and even proper mod tools.(They could also fix that damn congested, bottlenecked access ramp into a city too) EA is just standing over their shoulder dictating everything, and standing there wide eyed as we unravel what liars and cheats really look like. Pfft... I bet Will Wright would be turning in his grave right now(If he was dead of course).

To wrap it it all up, things are getting cleared up and changes have to happen. EA's stock has dropped drastically since last year and they are desperate to earn some cash. Even if it means shipping a relatively broken game out and expect customers to take it like its not a problem. A game, to have a successful run, MUST work from the start, contain things fans want, and improve on but not ruin old systems if any. SimCity(5) is far more capable than what EA wants us to think it is. Maxis knows its capable of great things but having EA puppet them around is not part of the idea. I've seen many great names get sunk by EA(Namely Westwood Studios) and I would hate to see Maxis share the same fate. I'd imagine this to go down as one of the worst failures in gaming history, and to all the people out there, keep harrassing EA, demand refunds, whatever! Something has to happen, otherwise I'd like to see Westwood smiling down on EA in corporation hell. Other than that, I got some SimCity 4 to catch up on.