"EA Admits SimCity Could Have Run Offline"

[kane_magus]

No shit. And it still could if they'd stop being assholes about it and just get rid of the stupid DRM.

"but it conflicted with the vision the developer had for the game." Their vision was to have a broken game that failed to work at all on launch and which a lot of people, such as myself, still refuse to buy thanks to the DRM, huh? Yeah, that's quite a shitty vision you have there, EA. (Note: I don't think of the current incarnation of Maxis as anything other than yet another used-to-be-great, watered-down tentacle of the writhing, dev-destroying monster that is EA. Thank goodness Will Wright abandoned that sinking ship years ago, before it got this bad.)

Seriously, why is it that when game developers (typically at the behest of their publishers, no matter what they claim to the contrary) talk about their "vision," it's almost invariably in defense of shitty things like this?

Comments

[owsf2000.livejournal.com]

Regardless of what she claims, the developer "vision" being spoken of in the article is basically to use it as DRM. Otherwise their supposed vision would have been just as easily satisfied by making it possible to play online without REQUIRING it to play online. (unnecessarily as well as modders have already demonstrated.)

The fact that they lied about it being necessary due to the server handling various parts of the mechanics just makes this a bit more blantant imo.

[hikarugenji.livejournal.com]

All indications are that the game sucks even if they were to patch it to get rid of the always-online.

[kane-magus.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've been hearing the same thing, unfortunately. So, in a way, I guess it's kind of a good thing that they shoehorned this DRM in which kept me from buying it on principle, so that I was able to avoid buying a lemon. Despite the dealbreaker DRM, I wasn't actually expecting the game itself to suck as much as it apparently does, though. :/