Maxis: 'We Could Have Built An Offline Mode' In SimCity

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Last week this woman said it was "impossible." Now she has changed her tune claiming that the company "could have" built an offline mode but it didn't "fit with our vision." :rolleyes:

Lucy Bradshaw, general manager at Maxis, directly addressed the possibility of offline play. Bradshaw answered the question "could we have built a subset offline mode" with a rather disparaging response: "Yes. But we rejected that idea because it didn't fit with our vision."
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what you "Could Do" and what your "Allowed to do" are two different things.

I think this is just going to sour the relation between maxis and EA, them EA will just shut them down.
 
It's bad enough that they totally BORKED the launch of a major game...but then they LIE to their customers! "Oh, it's not possible, because you know, servers" and then some hacker figures out how to run the damn game offline on his own!

You would THINK that they would learn. But NO, they continue their anti-consumer practices and continue to INSULT their paying customers right to their faces! Well, I am done, and I HOPE everyone else out there is too! No more EA games on my systems, PERIOD. You guys just added the straw that broke the camel's back, congratulations!
 
I don't understand why if your customers all want something, you don't provide it. It was clear the fans of SimCity wanted an offline mode, yet they chose to ignore that and do what they wanted.

I hope it cost them a lot of sales.
 
That's ok, word on the street is that an internal version is being worked on by the "scene" and will be released soonish and it will have an off-line mode :)
 
yeah just like they COULD have kept the 50 dollars I gave them via credit card.


Thankfully I got my refund and they can go fuck themselves.

Will I download a pirated version? Probably. EA had their chance, and they even had my money. Too bad they fucked up on both accounts.
 
Wow. fuck Maxis and EA. I stopped buying there products LONG ago, and this is why.
 
I may have misread, but the "impossible" comment seemed to be in regards to making offline mode available at this point in time would be impossible (which I'm sure was an exaggeration), which is very different to considering an offline mode while it was on the game was still on the drawing board.
 
Shotglass01 said:
Too bad this will probably never see the light of day. :(

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/institute-industry-wide-return-policy-video-games-rely-remote-servers-and-drm-function-properly/nMy1wrtC

Was a direct result of SimCity.
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Really? The White House has much more important issues to deal with than video game issues :rolleyes:

In all seriousness , is anyone honestly surprised? Did you all really think that Simcity *had* to have online drm?


"This just in , EA and developer lie about something".

As its already been said , if you want EA to stop doing this shit , simply do not buy the game the first 2 weeks of launch. The first 2 weeks of any gaming release are the MOST important throughout its retail history. The first 2 weeks make or break any game and this should be a clear message that preordering is now a BAD idea for any major publisher release. All you do when you preorder is give them a way to take your money and claim something random bullshit later when you want a actual refund and do not receive it. The easy way to deal with it is to not preorder such games.

EA has made its money on Simcity and drawn more attention to it then they ever probably thought possible. People love to watch a train wreck.
 
Unfortunately "their vision" just basically destroy the vision of everyone who's ever played a Simcity game in the past and what they were expecting.
 
Godmachine said:
Really? The White House has much more important issues to deal with than video game issues :rolleyes:
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It's nice to see someone started it. I think it was a Forbes editor or contributor. I know they have important things to take care of, but maybe they should get involved when you've got a company charging $60 bucks a pop for something that doesn't work out of the box (or DL stream) en masse. I actually can't see how more class actions don't spring up. Maybe EA quashed class actions in their terms with Origin. Not sure.

What I do know is that if they demand $60 from us to play a game then we should demand that it work when we buy it.
 
Godmachine said:
Really? The White House has much more important issues to deal with than video game issues :rolleyes:
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It is technically a consumer protection issue, not necessarily just a video game issue.

The crux of the matter is the last sentence:
"Consumer protection laws vary from state to state. Please institute a universal, industry-wide refund policy for defective entertainment both digital and physical."

It IS something that needs to be addressed. But I do agree that it is very low on the priority scale considering all the other crap going on with our government right now.
 
Shotglass01 said:
It's nice to see someone started it. I think it was a Forbes editor or contributor. I know they have important things to take care of, but maybe they should get involved when you've got a company charging $60 bucks a pop for something that doesn't work out of the box (or DL stream) en masse. I actually can't see how more class actions don't spring up. Maybe EA quashed class actions in their terms with Origin. Not sure.

What I do know is that if they demand $60 from us to play a game then we should demand that it work when we buy it.
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I don't believe they should be involved. Gamers should start being their own advocates and stop preordering games from a company that wouldn't even let you preload them before release.

We all have the ability to send a strong message to EA and force them to comply. When we buy the game anyway we send an entirely different message saying " Sure , anytime I bend over stick that big publisher dick right into my asshole".

The Government doesn't need to regulate something else so they can fuck it up even more than it already is.
 
jnemesh said:
:mad: And THAT is why I am not buying ANY EA games from here on out!

It's bad enough that they totally BORKED the launch of a major game...but then they LIE to their customers!

You would THINK that they would learn. But NO, they continue their anti-consumer practices and continue to INSULT their paying customers right to their faces!
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GREETINGS! & welcome to 1999 re EA (their complete & utter abandonment of UIX). Better late than never & glad to have you on board.
 
Godmachine said:
I don't believe they should be involved. Gamers should start being their own advocates and stop preordering games from a company that wouldn't even let you preload them before release.

The Government doesn't need to regulate something else so they can fuck it up even more than it already is.
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This is a good point, and I'd be in agreement with you if you had the option to return the product. Far as I know, software, of any kind, is the most reprehensible industry when trying to make a legitimate return. And, to your point, I did stop any pre-order. The last game I pre-ordered was BF3. I won't be pre-ordering BF4 or any other game for that matter unless we get some kind of return policy.
 
Godmachine said:
I don't believe they should be involved. Gamers should start being their own advocates and stop preordering games from a company that wouldn't even let you preload them before release.

We all have the ability to send a strong message to EA and force them to comply. When we buy the game anyway we send an entirely different message saying " Sure , anytime I bend over stick that big publisher dick right into my asshole".

The Government doesn't need to regulate something else so they can fuck it up even more than it already is.
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For every gamer on a website like hardocp that actually gives a crap what the industry is doing, there are probably 10 gamers that just buy things and don't care as long as they can eventually play it for 20 minutes and then forget about it. Bashing EA is not new, and EA has been getting crapped on for the past 5+ years over BS like this, in addition to Microsoft, Activision, zenibethemax or whatever the hell they're called now, and a pile of other publishers.

Now I'm not saying that having the FTC launch a 40 million dollar study on consumer affairs with regards to videogame publishers, but relying on the minority of gamers that have the sense to not just buy everything for the sake of buying it doesn't work. Hell, you know full well that if EA or any of the other big publishers could get away with collecting checking account info to do an automated withdrawl of funds for the launch of games, that there would be idiots lining up for it.
 
I just hope my paypal dispute goes through... Maybe if they have enough of them, they will get their paypal account frozen..
 
They did lose a customer, I am not buying the game although I was previously excited about it. Hopefully more of us will start voting with our wallets.
 
I boycotted EA when they put in-game advertising in Battlefield 2142, I haven't bought an EA game since.
 
Right... The vision being that you treat your customers like the criminals you already think they are and then fleece them of their money with a non-working product that they can only use the way you tell them they can. Got it. Die in a fire please.
 
Their vision cost them customers. Seems that their vision is not in line what the customers vision is with a lot of games. Sadly, it had to be Sim City. The game I loved and had high hopes for. :(

Well, I'll just play other games like Sim City never came out. I'll play SC4 and hope that someday a good sequel will be released. I wait for Sim City 5. The current one is about as bad as the Facebook version (Sim City Social).
 
PrincessDie said:
Okay, if you play an offline hack/crack err... offline, explain to me just how EA will patch that out?


Back at you genius...:rolleyes:
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Running Sim City cracked before they mauled important features like rain to replenish water.... I could go for that!
 
Everyone ridiculed me when I took a no compromise stance of refusing to buy any game that was single player and required something like Steam or Origin. Yet here we are when it blows up in everyone's faces and suddenly everyone has changed their tune.

Obligatory - I told you so.
 
Dallows said:
I don't understand why if your customers all want something, you don't provide it. It was clear the fans of SimCity wanted an offline mode, yet they chose to ignore that and do what they wanted.

I hope it cost them a lot of sales.
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Because generally in the age of "don't call my baby ugly" there will always be enough people who stand behind EA and buy their shit. That and money are the reasons.

Always online DRM is coming to a theater near you. Actually it already has. Always online DRM is about moving the masses to pay not per game but eventually per access or per view. The sad part of it is that people who liked to get screwed more than taking a stand against BS like this will keep companies like EA in business.
 
I just put my money where my mouth is. I didn't buy the game and complain, I just plain did not buy it.
 
jmilcher said:
I just put my money where my mouth is. I didn't buy the game and complain, I just plain did not buy it.
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This.

The worst thing for me to complain about is the damned Starship song is stuck in my head every time I see a Sim City bitchfest thread.
 
Give her a break, guys. She's a general manager and probably doesn't actually play video games or know how to operate a computer outside of Microsoft Office apps and Internet Explorer. She initially repeated what someone probably told her in a meeting and later some kind soul pulled her aside and quietly told her that they could have actually done an offline mode if some number pushing management types weren't so headstrong on trying to prevent the game from being pirated.
 
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