Sim City Beta

some details? i signed up for beta a few weeks ago. so why are they getting hammerd now?
 
i guess the registration closes Jan 20th thing prob got people moving to register before its too late.


1hour of play time isnt enough to properly test any thing. or really give them real feed back. sadly tho
 
Yeah, they didn't mention the one hour part on the website when I signed up. It was posted on their Twitter apparently.
 
One hour? For a game like this? That's laughable.

I signed up just to give it a try and see if the gameplay changes were something I'd actually like or hate (though what I really hate is the always-on and the cloud saving mechanics) but I had no idea about the one hour deal. Not even worth it, as you can do much in one hour.

EA, man... what is it they smoke over there?
 
KaOTiK said:
The 1 hour thing is totally LOL
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I know, I'm still baffled. Again, I ask, what the hell do they smoke over there at EA? Must be strong damn strong weed, man... or the ashes of cremated mental patients.

How the hell are you supposed to test a game like this in one hour?
 
M33X7 said:
I know, I'm still baffled. Again, I ask, what the hell do they smoke over there at EA? Must be strong damn strong weed, man... or the ashes of cremated mental patients.

How the hell are you supposed to test a game like this in one hour?
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i doubt EA takes any feedback from the community seriously, its probably just to get sales.


they cant get away with another medal of honor situation. still pissed i spent 30$ on that shit
 
M33X7 said:
I know, I'm still baffled. Again, I ask, what the hell do they smoke over there at EA? Must be strong damn strong weed, man... or the ashes of cremated mental patients.

How the hell are you supposed to test a game like this in one hour?
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Yea, I sincerely doubt the 1 hour user's feedback will get any attention at all. It's just a way of wetting the whistle of people interesting in the game and making them not feel quite so bad at being left out of the beta.
 
It is probably meant to be 1 hour on a city. So you could start playing again for 1 hour but have to start a new city. At least this makes more sense.
 
Ooh wasn't aware of this, one of the first games I played back in the day. Hope they do it right
 
FreiDOg said:
It's just a way of wetting the whistle of people interesting in the game and making them not feel quite so bad at being left out of the beta.
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A lot of these "beta's" - especially the ones from the Big Corp devs - have devolved into little more than a standardized part of the prerelease marketing blitz. That's it. So they're going to keep pounding the "Pre-order now and get access to the beta!" gimmick into the dirt long past the point of it becoming an embarrassment.
 
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dremic said:
i doubt EA takes any feedback from the community seriously, its probably just to get sales.

they cant get away with another medal of honor situation. still pissed i spent 30$ on that shit
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I was actually thinking the same thing, as I've never known EA to actually take any feedback from the community... ever.

Even if they're just trying to "whet the appetite", as it were, to drum-up more sales, do they truly believe one hour would give people enough time to even experience enough of the game to fall for it? The must, as usual, have an extremely low opinion of our intelligence.

Would be enough for an FPS, perhaps, as there's nowhere as many gameplay mechanics involved. But this...? Ha ha.

Even if it were one hour per city, it's still not enough to get to see any of the more "advanced" mechanics/scenarios develop in-game. No, that's not suspicious at all...
 
M33X7 said:
One hour? For a game like this? That's laughable.

I signed up just to give it a try and see if the gameplay changes were something I'd actually like or hate (though what I really hate is the always-on and the cloud saving mechanics) but I had no idea about the one hour deal. Not even worth it, as you can do much in one hour.

EA, man... what is it they smoke over there?
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quit crying. You get to try the game before you buy it or not.
 
Dion said:
quit crying. You get to try the game before you buy it or not.
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That's called demo, not beta. Though I'm not sure an hour of gameplay make any sense at all either way.

This is beta. Look at CS GO beta, you have full access, play as long as you want for the entire duration. Once beta is over, access is removed. How hard is that?
 
On one hand it's Sim City

On the other hand it's EA's simultaneously milking (and probably fucking up) something we all have fond memories of.

1 hour? that hardly seems worth the effort to download/install and have to jump through all their little sign up hoops.

Besides -- in my old age (31) I've learned that pretty much no software is worth more than $30 brand new. Unless it had some crazy fantastic awesome multi-player aspect I don't know about -- this will be a "wait and see" purchase.

I can already see the dollar signs in EA's eyes when it comes to paid DLC for this game.
 
The one hour test is probably more a scaled test of their backend elements, rather than for people to test out gameplay. Lot's of beta tests are kind of like that (though 1 hour is a bit short...people would be more compelled to buy it if they'd spent 5 hours on a city...)
 
EA getting hold of a gaming franchise is the kiss of death. They will find a way to fuck this up.
 
Here's a full quote regarding the "demo":

“We’ve crafted a one hour replayable experience that will let you enjoy the magic of the game and allow us to test critical features. Everyone will go through our ‘Getting Started Scenario’, which takes you through the basics of how to play the game and gives you a sneak peak at some late game content. After that, you’re free to start your own city and play for one hour. We’ve given you all the tools to build up a medium density city, given access to the Casino Big Business, all of the basic services, loads of public transportation options, and several options on how you can power your city. You can start up as many cities as you like during the 3 Day event.”
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The part that strikes me is:

...loads of public transportation options...
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The only transportation options I know of is railways, cars and maybe buses. But "loads" of options would suggest that something else has been added, or already included, that we don't know about. Perhaps the inclusion of subways, which weren't initially supposed to be included in the game?

Even then, that's just one extra option (though one everyone wants), so I don't see what "loads" is referring to here.

Unless they're being underhanded with that statement, and what they mean by "loads" is different kinds of roads, of which there don't even seem to be that many (no raised highways etc), being included with the few actual methods of transportation.

Knowing how EA double-talks everything, I'm going to make that assumption for now.
 
It's going to turn out just like Spore. So much hype. Expectations so large. And ends up being a gigantic piece of crap.
 
SilverSliver said:
It's going to turn out just like Spore. So much hype. Expectations so large. And ends up being a gigantic piece of crap.
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I enjoyed spore.

It let my creativity soar.

Could of had better end game but i thought it was fun seeing what creatures i could come up with. I got my monies worth out of the game.

You know if the Spore servers are still going i dont think you have to worry about EA shutting down Sim City server support any time in a near future.

Here are some of my creations

This first one actually ended up getting featured.
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Wildace said:
I enjoyed spore.

It let my creativity soar.

Could of had better end game but i thought it was fun seeing what creatures i could come up with. I got my monies worth out of the game.

You know if the Spore servers are still going i dont think you have to worry about EA shutting down Sim City server support any time in a near future.
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this would be all well and good, if it was marketed as a creature editor first and foremost, but they wanted to sell it as a game, so this is the criteria we measure it by. when users contribute more to its longevity than the devs, something is obviously not right.

great models btw, makes me wish their content sharing system didn't come out so terrible, too bad your releases were lost in a sea of genitals when we needed them most.
 
We’ve crafted a one hour replayable experience that will let you enjoy the magic of the game and allow us to test critical features. Everyone will go through our ‘Getting Started Scenario’, which takes you through the basics of how to play the game and gives you a sneak peak at some late game content. After that, you’re free to start your own city and play for one hour. We’ve given you all the tools to build up a medium density city, given access to the Casino Big Business, all of the basic services, loads of public transportation options, and several options on how you can power your city. You can start up as many cities as you like during the 3 Day event.
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Sounds reasonable to me, despite its limits. EA gets their test and users get a taste of the gameplay to see if it grabs them at all.
 
A one hour limit per session is pretty silly. Leave it to EA to implement something like that.
 
1 hour sessions doesnt bother me so much it will let me perfect how i want to start a city at release.
 
from the beta release eula:
EA Games said:
If you know about a Bug or have heard about a Bug and fail to report the Bug to EA, we reserve the right to treat you no differently from someone who abuses the Bug. You acknowledge that EA reserves the right to lock anyone caught abusing a Bug out of all EA products.
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LOL. gg, well played.
 
im guessing that is ment more for exploits not run of the mill game crashed and failed to report it type of bugs.

but ea has been known to lock you out of their games for badmouthing them on official forums in the past lol.
 
I just read this on RPS and was astounded at the absolutely absurd iron-fisted, and actual immaturity on EA's part with this nonsense.

First off, how the hell could they even prove you knew about a bug?

Unless the deranged employees working for EA have developed psychic powers, they've no way to know who the hell even knew what. They might be able to detect crashed etc., but if there's something more invasive going on, such as them being able to track things down to knowing you had a bug... then firstly, what the hell are we testing it for if they could find it themselves; secondly, I'd uninstall Origin right now and never touch another EA title again.

It's an extreme threat based on circular reasoning that's borderline psychotic, to make assumptions that if you haven't reported a bug, that you've been exploiting it.
 
DeathPrincess said:
I know right! SimCity has been going downhill since 1997! :D
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I miss the old EA. They used to make many great titles that become their large collection of popular franchise they hold today. I just don't know what has got into them lately that made them make decisions that are logically unpopular among the fans.

You don't need to have PhD to tell that after hyping up Generals 2, making it a F2P game is going to piss off your fans. Heck I would bet their developers would have raised the red flag on this, its so obvious. So who knows maybe EA is being run by thick headed people who doesn't even listen to the dev, who are so disconnected from the gaming community.
 
So, in the final game you will start to see the bugs after building for 1 hour? :p
 
Hornet said:
I miss the old EA. They used to make many great titles that become their large collection of popular franchise they hold today. I just don't know what has got into them lately that made them make decisions that are logically unpopular among the fans.

You don't need to have PhD to tell that after hyping up Generals 2, making it a F2P game is going to piss off your fans. Heck I would bet their developers would have raised the red flag on this, its so obvious. So who knows maybe EA is being run by thick headed people who doesn't even listen to the dev, who are so disconnected from the gaming community.
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Bobby Kotick got into EA.
He's always been adversarial with both the consumers and often with the in-house studios. The problem for us is that they can afford to do that because of the massive cash cows Madden and Call of Duty have become.
As long as they can bank on a billion dollars a year from a rehash of last year's titles they've got not reason cater to consumers.
 
Hornet said:
I miss the old EA. They used to make many great titles that become their large collection of popular franchise they hold today. I just don't know what has got into them lately that made them make decisions that are logically unpopular among the fans.

You don't need to have PhD to tell that after hyping up Generals 2, making it a F2P game is going to piss off your fans. Heck I would bet their developers would have raised the red flag on this, its so obvious. So who knows maybe EA is being run by thick headed people who doesn't even listen to the dev, who are so disconnected from the gaming community.
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I think the industry has changed, and they've changed with it (which is understandable, thouse that haven't, especially at their scale, tend to not be around anymore). THough they probably could cater more to certain groups of people, buisness wise, it probably wouldn't make much sense. Maybe the big companies need to start doing what the big film studios do and have "indie" wings, like Searchlight at stuff, who produce less mainstream titles, but are backed by the big studio.

Although forum users and "enthusiasts" are very vocal, they are probably a smaller percentage of the people buying it. F2p titles can be very popular, and potentially provide a long term income instead of a boost then nothing. Though their implimentation probably wasn't the best the idea from a buisness prospective was probably sound. Think about how much support their most popular franchise (the Sims, which is also the biggest selling game ever) gets on here and gaming sites.

FreiDOg said:
Bobby Kotick got into EA.
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But luckily EAs security reminded him he worked at Activision and escorted him back to Activision so he could work on Activision's titles like CoD MWInfinity and so EA's developers could continue working on Madden! :D
 
DeathPrincess said:
But luckily EAs security reminded him he worked at Activision and escorted him back to Activision so he could work on Activision's titles like CoD MWInfinity and so EA's developers could continue working on Madden! :D
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See,
Coffee, then post.
Otherwise you end up looking like an idiot.
 
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