How Sim City 5 will fail

First of all, the popular city-simulator Sim City is one of my favorite games. It has been one of the games that had a large impact on my childhood and inspiration for my username I use everywhere as well. I first got into playing Sim City 3000 on an older computer running Windows 98. Those where the times, and I could sit forever until my parents did forbid me to use the computer rest of the day. Years passed on and I saw Sim City 4 was out. However, my computer could not run it because I was stuck on the Windows 98 machine. Many years later I got a new computer which was far far better (Pentium 4, Dell pc). However, I could not seem to find the game in the stores. Therefore, I had no other choice to download the game from the Internet from piracy websites. 

In my opinion, Sim City 4 was THE BEST Sim City game I have every played. It was a lot like Sim City 3000, but better graphics and more modern. Even though there was one small detail I did not agree with - the teraforming tool, Sim City 4 was a game I enjoyed, for years. 

A few years later, Sim City Societies came out, and I was so lucky to get the game for my birthday. However, when I was playing the game, it did not feel like Sim City, at all. The purpose of the game was to make your sims happy, not control healthcare, traffic system, crime, fire hazard and all the stuff from Sim City 4. The community raged, and Maxis indirectly admitted they don't own Sim City Societies. Even though I called Societies Sim City 5, it was still far from what I would call a good Sim City game. 

It was to my big surprise during my summer vacation in Sweden, two years ago, I was able to find Sim City 4 Deluxe Edition. Finally, I had found the game I had been looking basically everywhere for, and I paid gladly the price for it (around 15$). It really felt good I had finally been able to purchase a game I really wanted to buy and I did not have to use those cracks that crashed my game all the time.

Last year, I heard about Sim City 5. Really, Sim City 5? WOAH! The gameplay videos and all the material EA had posted on Youtube was blowing my mind. It looked like Sim City 4 in 3D. When pre-ordering became available, there was also an option to become a beta tester, if selected. And to my surprise, me and some friends got selected a few days ago, and it sure was like the Christmas eve when I saw the email I had been selected as a beta tester of Sim City 5. 

It was like magic when I had installed the Sim City 5 and was in-game building my own town. However, during playing, this so-called beta-version had quite a few restrictions. First of all, I was not able to save my town. I had one hour of gameplay available at a time, and there was a lot of features in the game that "was not available in beta". I was here to test out the game and give EA Games feedback on the game. Not get my own opinion on the game and make me want to go buy the game.

I have been testing several beta versions of the Windows operating system. Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8. Most of those where feature complete when I was testing them and giving feedback to Microsoft. I do not really see why they call the "beta-version" a beta. When I am testing something, I need to use it as close to real-usage as possible in order to give accurate feedback on the product. Imagine how it would be like if Windows shut down each hour, it would just be annoying and I would not even want to test the new operating system. 

The release of Diablo 3 caused world-wide attention with its DRM technology. It made people rage quite hard when they had bought the game, and it said "The servers are busy at this time. Please try again later". Sim City 5 will most likely have a technology familiar to this. It is also ironic that Maxis had issues with the launch servers when starting Sim City 5. I do not know what these issues are, if it is some overflow issue or scaling issue, but the fun part is we have technology that can solve this really easily and it is called the cloud. 

One shock I got while testing SC5 was all the restrictions. There was restrictions everywhere. While playing Sim City 4, I was used to have a huge map I could form the terrain, place out highways, create complex road systems and then hook them up to my neighbour towns. My feeling in SC5 was like "here is a small part of a region (one region size is almost equal to the size of a large map in SC4), now build the down which is connected to this highway". Sim City is more about building the town. It is about designing efficent road systems to transport your sims, create a beautiful landscape and design a huge metropolis. There was no highways, elevated railways, and I was not able to create new connections to the highway. A lot of my freedom from SC4 was taken away, even though the graphics was awesome and the co-op system looks cool as hell. 

It is some years since Sim City 4 was released. We got far better internet connections and hardware is dramatically increased. While I was playing Sim City 3000, I was thinking how amazing it would be if a friend was working on one of my neighbour towns, while I was working with this. It can now be real! However, a lot of the good stuff I recognize with Sim City, is not there any more. Filling the map took only 45 minutes on SC5, and the map is even smaller than the smallest map on Sim City 4. It would not surprise me if there came DLCs available for the game when it gets released. "In order to have this police station with such and such capacity, you need to buy the DLC pack X for Y credits". I just purchased a game, can I please play it, FULLY? I did not buy a game to buy more parts to the game, I bought the game to play the game. 

After playing the closed demo beta, I am rather sitting as a frustrated question mark than someone looking forward to a new game that would "change everything". I do not even want to call this a beta, rather a demo for wanting people to go buy the game. Having feedback and such poor bug-report functionality in the game makes me feel that EA does not even care what you think about the game. They just want you to buy it, then give you more money later on through DLCs. But this time, they want to simplify the game so smaller kids can play the game, so they did this by removing functionality that was vital for previous releases. The community is really upset. Out from the forums, another guy wrote a blog entry where he also expressed his frustration about Sim City 5. It is about 5 weeks until the game gets released. I have already pre-ordered the game, I am not going to cancel it, but I do not think there is much hope left for EA Games and large parts of the gaming industry. I know we are consumers. But I do not want to be a consumer slave for EA games. Indie games are good, when they write their games properly so they run on normal hardware, but when it comes to large gaming companies, they don't even care about the game any more, they just want your money.