Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

This article is from the official account of Wechat: game Research Society (ID:yysaag), author: Zhaoyue

EA is responsible for this, but EA is not the only one responsible.

On March 6 (March 7, Beijing time), Cities:Skylines 2, a sequel to the city construction game developed by Finnish studio Colossal Order, was officially released and is expected to be released in 2023.

Coincidentally or as a tribute, March 6, a decade ago, coincided with the release of Simulator 5, the last orthodox work in the Sim City series, in Europe.

"simulated City", developed by Maxis Studio, launched its first work in 1989, creating a game type of urban construction. It is no exaggeration to say that it is the ancestor of "City: skyline".

In an interview with foreign media Pc Invasion, Karoliina Korppoo, chief developer of City: skyline, said in an interview with foreign media in 2016 that City: skyline was born to pay homage to the "simulated city", or rather, the old version of the "simulated city".

"if Maxis had made more new games similar to the traditional 'simulated City', we might not have made City: skyline at all.

But history has no ifs. "Simulation City 2013" ushered in a magnificent failure, resulting in the death of the whole series. After that, the headquarters of Maxis was completely closed, and the creators of the series left one after another, and players all blamed the game publisher EA, the familiar "studio killer", for the death of Sims and Maxis.

In 2009, Maxis and Will Wright, one of the founders of the "simulated City" series, left the studio. The last game he left to the studio before he left was the generally acclaimed "spores".

Spores is a game that simulates the evolution of species. In the same year, Maxis released the Sims 3, which sold 1.4 million copies in its first week and was rated by EA as "the most successful PC game to date."

The brilliant achievements of these two works have given Maxis employees plenty of free time to work on some less urgent projects. One of them is Auchan Quigley (Ocean Quigley), who has worked hard at Maxis for 14 years and has been involved in the development of almost every generation of Sims except the earliest one.

The last authentic work "simulated City 4" was in 2003, and its 2D visual effect can not be compared with the 3A masterpiece a few years later. Inspired by the already 3D Sims series, Quigley and others hoped to build a new 3D engine for Sims, which became known as the "GlassBox".

The LogoEA of Glass Box immediately decided to invest money and time to turn the new engine directly into a new work called "simulated City". Quigley soon became the creative director of the work, and other Maxis employees were also mobilized.

The chief designer of the new "simulated City" is Stone Librande. He is full of ambitions, waiting for new engines and new games to be realized. As he recalled in a 2023 PCGamer interview, he had hoped that the new engine would "more sensitively visualize the interactions of urban residents", "model the behavior of individuals, cars and businesses, and replicate city life in a more organic and realistic way".

At that time, there was a sign on LeBrand's desk: cities are people, not buildings. "you shouldn't think of a city as a collection of buildings and streets. You should imagine humans moving through the city's system, from one place to another."

Simulated citizen mobility is one of the features of the game. EA executives rarely do not get involved in the game development process, but only put forward one requirement: the new "simulated city" must be a real-time online multiplayer game.

Before the game was released, members of the Maxis team were basically happy to accept this request. After 2010, multiplayer online games belong to the general trend, most of the games on the market, have designed multiplayer online mode, or simply made into pure online games. In fact, it is also a more realistic plan to put the "simulated city" into the wave of fashion.

In addition, LeBrand has his own selfishness: he has two sons and hopes to play with them in the latest "mock city".

The multiplayer game has become the development core of the new "simulated City", and the whole game is closely built around this core.

In theory, the new "mock city" allows 4-10 players to manage their cities in the same area, exchanging needed goods and electricity, and sharing public facilities, educational resources, pollution and criminals.

In order to make the resource difference between the player and the city, the urban area of the new work has been reduced to 1/4 of that of the previous one. If the city operation improves slightly, it will be limited by the development of area and resources, forcing players to cooperate. To put it bluntly, "simulated city" has become "simulated countryside".

Touching the white boundary of the city is much faster than the previous one. As a multiplayer game, the new "simulated City" also needs to maintain a stable Internet connection. Urban construction is carried out in real time, there is no design revocation function, and rollback is not allowed, only a single archive in the cloud is available. Combined with the characteristics of small urban space, once you correct the wrong terrain and cover the wrong buildings, players will be out of touch with the perfect urban planning and have no regrets.

The terrain transformation function given by the 3D engine is also the highlight of the game. In March 2012, EA announced the new work "simulated City", which made it clear that the work needs to be connected continuously. But two months later, Blizzard's Diablo 3 was released, which also required full networking, and a large number of players flocked to the server, but few people could get into the game. As Blizzard added servers and the number of players stabilized, the problem was solved.

Since then, the community has never stopped questioning the "Error 37" dialog that prevents players from entering the game. Most players believe that EA suddenly pushes full networking and multi-player collaboration for a stand-alone series, only applying a digital rights management strategy (DRM) in disguise; in short, anti-piracy means.

According to LeBrand, full networking is indeed a DRM. "one way is to keep a lot of data on the server so that there is nothing that can really be cracked. Even if you crack your game, you still have to be verified by the server."

In December of the same year, Maxis's new "simulated City" development team posted a post on Reddit to say hello to players. But most of the responses they received were protests against the game forcing players to connect to the Internet. A clever netizen summed up the objections from 81 responses into one reply, which has received more than 7300 likes so far.

EA had to post a blog defense on his website. The blog claims that the new engine "Glass Box" can "track the data of up to 100000 simulated citizens in each city". This process requires a lot of computing, and the "glass box" works by allocating some of the computing to EA's cloud servers, so the game must be connected to the Internet. The blog was signed by Lucy Bradshaw (Lucy Bradshaw), general manager of Maxis.

In the days that followed, Maxis went its own way and conducted several small-scale tests. In late January 2013, a transcript of a conference call by EA executives to discuss the company's performance was released, which mentioned that the new "mock city" conducted a large test, which was attended by more than 100000 people, and "pre-orders increased significantly and the response was good."

3Simulator City 2013 went on sale in North America on March 5, 2013, and went on sale worldwide two days later. Players with 10 times more than 100000 players began to attack the game server, turning the hidden danger into a disaster.

In front of LeBrand and the entire development team, their city was falling apart. "when I walked into the office the next day, I remember EA sending staff support from the server and IT department, there was noise and newcomers everywhere, and everyone was confused. The fire alarm went off, as if to say,'Oh, what's going on?'"

EA and Maxis overestimated the state of the network in 2013, underestimated the enthusiasm of the majority of players, and no one learned from the lessons of Diablo 3. As a result, players are forced to put up with all the problems they can imagine around a continuous online game.

"when you buy an EA stand-alone game. Only to find that it requires an Internet connection" including physical disks and exchange codes for third-party platforms. All new "simulated City" games have to be bound to EA game platform Origin, register and run. Quigley believes that Origin is much more important in the eyes of EA than "simulated City", and that binding Origin to continuously online games is also a strategy to promote the use of Origin.

However, Origin's server quality and user experience are notorious, not only domestic players jokingly call it "rotten orange", foreign players also feel bad. Thanks to this rotten orange, the digital version of the game can not be downloaded normally, and the physical version of the game cannot be certified and unlocked by the platform.

As the EA does not have an open preload, the download time is greatly extended, it takes three hours to play the game alone, and you have to queue up to enter the server after the game, at least half an hour. It is possible to abort or reset the countdown to any errors that occur between Origin and the game client.

Since the "server is busy" can not get into the game, the so-called idea of multi-person cooperation to build a city is pure delusion. Not to mention playing games with friends or family, the friends on the rotten orange list are not even recognized as friends to play with.

There are also problems with Origin's cloud archive synchronization. Many players reported that their hours of hard work were wasted due to the failure of cloud synchronization, and the new buildings, with tens of thousands of simulated population, were unaccounted for overnight.

"now they are gone," the game media Polygon, which participated in the test in advance, once gave the new "Simulator City" a high score of 9.5 out of 10. On March 7, the score dropped to 4. The review authors added that "more server-related failures were encountered in about 5 hours than during 50 hours of testing".

IGN was even worse, failing to give a score for several days "because our reviewers had difficulty connecting to the server".

During the IGN news article, Maxis employees have been busy expanding server capacity around the world. They add server No. 2 to the original server in each area, and then remove server No. 1 to upgrade. LeBrand likens the hustle and bustle to "dredging the dam". When the flood reaches the next dam, all they can do is to dismantle the dam, but that doesn't stop the flood from flowing.

Maxis advises players through official tweets that if they can't connect to the server, try a different server. In fact, even those servers that are not prompted to be "busy" or "full" are somehow not connected.

"Server is under maintenance, restart time unknown" in addition to expanding the server, Maxis also has to disable a number of "non-critical" game functions to reduce server load and stabilize network connections. The ranking and achievement system have been temporarily removed from the game, and Cheetah, the fastest speed for players to skip junk time, has also been temporarily disabled.

The response time of the new "simulated City" server has been reduced to 1/40 and the number of players it can accommodate has doubled, according to an official statement on March 10. On this day, Guan Tui excitedly said that they had added the "Antarctic No. 1" server. EA's online games do have a precedent for setting up Antarctic servers, but players don't buy it.

"maybe the next server should be called Moon 1." to be fair, EA and Maxis respond and process faster than Blizzard. However, the disastrous PR of EA and Maxis has led the new "Simulator City" to a very different fate from Diablo 3. They lied on key issues and made up more lies in order to fulfill one lie, resulting in a complete loss of the trust of the players.

Since March 8, Maxis general manager Bradshaw has been blogging almost every day, not only apologizing, but also explaining server problems in technical terms and PR rhetoric.

After the connection problem improved on March 10, Bradshaw publicly admitted and politely rejected players' demands for offline mode. She stressed that the new "simulation city" cannot simply break away from the always-online architecture for the same reason as she said last year: games require a lot of computing and cannot be run offline without server assistance.

But the major media and players who do not believe in evil have put into the test one after another. On March 12, an editor of foreign media Kotaku successfully connected to the "simulated City" server and turned off his computer WiFi and played for 19 minutes before he was kicked out of the game.

Kotaku: "my 'mock city' flourished offline for 19 minutes." on the same day, an anonymous Maxis employee told foreign media Rock Paper Shotgun that cloud servers do not handle any real-time computing for simulated cities at all, except for archiving, and only play a role in sharing map information, checking players' cheating and so on. "Bradshaw may have been misunderstood or misled, but I don't know anything else."

On March 15, another British model maker named Azzer posted on Reddit and EA forums that he had removed the timer to detect players dropping and kicking out of the game and could go offline indefinitely, although it could not be archived properly. A day later, Maxis updated the game to prevent players from modifying files, while the EA forum banned discussion of modules altogether.

BBC: players hack into the "simulated city" to make it run offline at this moment, the evidence that the "simulated city" does not need to be connected continuously is all over the network. But Bradshaw, who may also be the EA behind it, refuses to apologize and compromise, but continues to be tough.

Instead of talking about DRM or the server, Bradshaw used a slogan that had never appeared before the game launch: Maxis is building a "MMO", or "massively multiplayer online game".

"[continuous networking] is not an order from the company, nor is it a secret strategy to control players," she wrote in a statement on March 15. "this is the basis of our vision (vision) of the SimCity." So can we build a separate offline version of the "simulated city"? "Yes, but we rejected the idea because it was not in line with our vision."

As unrepentant as Bradshaw's attitude is the refund policy. In the period of the worst quality of the server, the refund requests made by players were basically rejected by EA, and only a small number of third-party sellers were willing to refund. In dealing with the vast number of players can not connect with the game, the official push of the Origin platform also intimately reminded players: "generally speaking, we do not provide a refund for the digital version of the game."

He really, I cried to death as "part of repentance to players," Bradshaw promised that anyone who had activated Simulator 4 could pick and get an EA game for free, with options including Battlefield 3, Mass effect 3 and other masterpieces-no refund even if the money was spent. The game is still distributed through Origin, and later there are feedback from players that they have never received the game they deserve.

Origin released the game reminder window on March 18, EA announced that 1.1m copies of "simulated City" had been sold, 54 per cent were digital and 44 per cent came from the Origin platform; the number of Origin users was also pushed to a record level, "now reaching 1.3 million and rising". EA did not and dare not mention how many of the 1.1 million players who bought the game had asked for a refund and were rejected.

5 even after the server stabilized, the new "simulated city" failed to realize any "vision". Many cities never welcome back their owners, become ghost towns, cannot interact with other cities in the same area, and stifle the development space of active players, causing them to abandon the pit, forming a vicious circle.

Players have found that the "glass box" engine is as fragile as glass. Those mock citizens have no soul and will only blindly go to the nearest residential area or job. They only calculate the shortest distance to the destination, ignoring the width and congestion of the road, causing serious traffic jams.

The fact that Sims don't take a detour is that Maxis, discovered by Azzer, has released patches one after another, fixed vulnerabilities and balances, added removed game content, and released the feature film "City of the Future" in November. In January 2014, Maxis finally launched the offline mode that players had in mind, and the game archives were moved back from the cloud to local. At this point, the vision has changed from a bubble to a big joke.

EA has abandoned plans to launch more expansion packages for SimCity, but has not given up on draining the value of SimCity IP. At the end of 2014, the derivative mobile game "simulated City: construction" (Simcity: BuildIt) was launched, and the development speed was quite fast due to the use of ready-made resources of "simulated City 2013". This is a "free game" with a large number of micro-transactions, downloaded more than 100 million times, and is still being updated.

The Google Store page of "simulated City: construction", but this mobile game has little to do with the original crew of Maxis. In March 2015, EA disbanded Emeryville, where Maxis was headquartered; the rest of its divisions also went through a series of layoffs and restructuring. Maxis exists in name only, and "simulated City" becomes the last song. Almost everyone agrees that the failure of "Model City 2013" is the main reason why Maxis was killed by EA.

Bradshaw left Maxis six months later, and the lie is a rare stain since she took office. In 2023, Quigley became the creative director of Meta VR, while LeBrand went to Riot Games as a designer. In interviews with the media, they portrayed themselves as victims helpless in the face of disaster and capital rules, blaming EA for all the failures of the "Model City" and blaming EA for not jumping tickets and delaying the sale.

"they have an obligation to shareholders, one of which is to get SimCity to ship in that quarter." That's LeBrand's explanation.

"it's a really great project. We created an in-depth and fascinating simulation game. Admittedly, it could have been iterated and perfected for another six months. But most people didn't feel it, and they experienced nothing but being turned away." This is Quigley's explanation.

None of them explained an important fact: multiplayer collaboration, full networking, selfishness, and vision are all things that the EA and Maxis teams are trying to impose on players. Players do not need an urban construction game that forces them to cooperate online, or millions of veteran players of "simulated cities" do not need it. If "simulated City 2013" were made into a foreign work, it would not involve a whole series.

The death of "Simulator City" is regrettable, but the loss is not so heavy that it is difficult for veteran players to accept. Just a week after the dissolution of Maxis, the original "City: skyline" was released, quickly filling the market gap left by the collapse of the "mock city".

The praise rate of "City: skyline" in Steam is 93%. Some references:

Https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimCity_(2013_video_game)

Https://www.polygon.com/2013/3/7/4075284/simcity-server-origin-ea-launch

Https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/simcity-server-not-necessary

Https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihANkznQ-FA

Https://www.pcinvasion.com/cities-skylines-snowfall-interview/

Https://www.pcgamer.com/simcity-launched-a-decade-ago-and-it-was-so-disastrous-it-killed-the-series/

Https://www.gamesindustry.biz/always-online-simcity-burns-to-the-ground-10-years-ago-this-month

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