Maxis have confirmed that SimCity is to receive new content in in two weeks time. The expansion will allow SimCity mayors to build and manage an amusement park, just like that Theme Park game you played so much back in the 90s.
As head of Maxis, Will Wright designed the first two SimCity games and oversaw development of the series right up until its last offline iteration in 2003. After Spore, however, he ascended from the games industry to run an entertainment think tank, and has since been doing whatever those do. So what did he think of the new SimCity’s pronounced teething issues, which saw many players locked out of the game’s servers altogether?
EA rang their shareholders for a chinwag yesterday, and talked a great deal about the biggest event in their year so far: SimCity. Sales of Maxis’ messy mayoral reboot were “solid", thanks to an upsurge in direct downloads via Origin. But EA are working to ensure its disastrous launch, which saw servers swamped and inaccessible to a large proportion of players, “won’t happen again".
Good afternoon! Thanks for listening to PCGamesN travel news. All of you commuters out there stuck in the SimCity jam that began in March will be pleased to hear that commercial and industrial vehicles in 3.0 will now stagger their duties rather than carrying them out all at once, like total nutters. You should see the roads start to clear up by the end of the week.
Our Spotlight units plug content our journalists have made, that our advertisers want to promote. Sometimes the promotion is paid for, but the content they go to is always independent with no client oversight or approval.
Early this week, we reported that SimCity’s compulsory 2.0 patch had left cities overflowing with bugs and faeces. Curiously, both items had been omitted from patch notes prior to release. In fact, Maxis have since revealed a short-term plan for “additional fixes and upgrades" - beginning with a clean-up of players’ now-polluted environs.
EA have reportedly laid-off up to 10% of their entire workforce, with various sources reporting that the EA Partners label and two Vancouver game studios have become casualties of EA’s ongoing restructuring.
Over the past couple of weeks, EA have been cutting jobs across the company, particularly at studios focused on mobile platforms. In a statement explaining the lay-offs, EA have said they are pursuing new “priorities in new technologies and mobile". If EA really have let go 10% of their workforce, that would mean around 800 people have lost their jobs so far in this reorganization.
Just as EA and Maxis seemed ready to put launch issues to bed and march onwards with the development of their “MMO", SimCity’s 2.0 patch has infused the game with a colourful array of shiny new bugs. Fans have taken to Reddit and official forums to decry the mess, which has left some cities literally overflowing with waste.
One of the weirder side effects of SimCity being an MMO, or not-an-MMO, or whatever, is that updates are something that happen server-side. Rather than downloading the long-awaited 2.0 patch from a mirror site called something like GameFlib at your leisure, you’ll be getting the update later today at the same time as everybody else, whether you’re ready for casinos to become more profitable or not.
The anticipated SimCity 2.0 update has finally been announced, heading to mayors around the world on April 22nd. Containing mainly “top-requested" bug fixes and improvements, it also includes a smattering of new features as well. Mayors will now drive their fancy cars, helicopters or batmobiles to work if they have the modules available. Also in are huge improvements to the color blind mode and a colour filter to data maps.
Step 1) Be in North America.
Step 2) Buy specially marked Crest or Oral-B products.
Step 3) Enjoy humongous gnome statue.
When SimCity releases on Mac this June EA are doing two lovely things: first, owners of the game will be able to use their single purchase on either platform; second, Mac and PC players will no longer be kept at arm's length but will be able to play with one another.
Booting up SimCity today will see you presented with the choice of installing some free DLC - a rare occurrence in gaming, we can all agree. the pack only adds a single item, the Nissan Leaf Charging Station.
From the name it would be a fair guess that the building’s a power plant for foliage but, apparently, it’s a pseudo-fuel pump for electric cars.
Maxis are working to fix a number of the bugs so far identified by players, including improving traffic pathfinding in update 1.7, though they’ve still to return Cheetah speed and leaderboards to some servers.
The next update, 2.0, aims to centre on four particular issues: “addressing the Recycling Center bug, fixing the fire engine clumping, improving the efficiency of Street Cars, and increasing the radius of river water."
SimCity SimCity’s always-online requirement was necessary because Maxis dreamed up the game as an MMO, EA Labels president Frank Gibeau has said. It certainly wasn’t conceived as an ill-advised form of DRM - which he deems a "failed dead-end strategy".
SimCity is broken. Yes, we knew about the roads and the pathfinding and we even grew to love the rollercoaster-esque bridges but what shouldn’t be possible, what flatout should not work is a 100% residential city. Each city is supposed to be in equilibrium; a blend of industrail, commercial, and residential properties, each feeding into one another.
Redditor Photism has shown that’s not the case.
Some poor folk see a road simply as a way of getting from A to B quickly. However, thankfully, some visionaries exist, visionaries like MiguelM12345, who experiment with the scenic route.
Miguel has discovered that when drawing roads in Maxis’ SimCity you can make them rival the most vertically ambitious of Trackmania’s tracks, creating a highway to rival even Rollercoaster Tycoon’s grandest creations.
This is something like that dancing warden advert in reverse. Maxis may have managed to relieve the heartburn of players desperate to fall in love with SimCity by solving some of the game’s more crippling issues with traffic.
If you’re in the UK and have registered a copy of SimCity on Origin, you can log into the distribution service this afternoon for a free game-shaped apology courtesy of Maxis and EA.
Despite being plagued with launch issues as a result of the game’s always-online requirement, Maxis’ SimCity reboot has managed to sell 1.1 million copies in the two weeks since its launch. It puts some of those launch issues in perspective, after all: that’s a lot of mayors trying to make virtual cities on limited server space.
Has it really nearly been two weeks since SimCity first launched? Way back then, EA promised a free PC game to “get back in [the] good graces" of riled players on the wrong side of their extremely wonky servers. Today, they’re making good on that promise. Customers who register SimCity before March 25 will get to nab a game from EA’s wider portfolio for free.
KevFahey commented on SimCity: here's everything we know