UPDATE: 03/07/2013
SIMCITY REVIEW UPDATE 2
As expected, the question of whether or not EA would be able to support a large, enthusiastic audience for SimCity with a robust server system has been answered with a resounding "no," at least for the time being.
Since the official release of SimCity I have repeatedly tried to replicate the experiences I had reviewing the game with pre-release code on EA's development servers, and repeatedly I have not been able to — not entirely.
The server issues have been more troublesome, and have prevented me (and many players, we learned anecdotally) from connecting to the game at all. On launch day, during a period of roughly five hours, I experienced the same number of server-related game failures as in my entire 50 hours of review the game pre-release. That the experience of connecting to the game was, effectively, 10 times worse contributed to Polygon's decision to lower the score for SimCity (from 9.5 to 8).
In all other respects, however, when I have been able to access the servers to play SimCity, the experience I have had with it post-launch has been the same as it was pre-launch.
Until today.
EA's decision to remove certain features of the game in order to attempt to stabilize server performance has resulted in a dramatic change to the waySimCity is played and, in my experience, has not stabilized the server situation.
In attempting to play SimCity today, it took me over half an hour to load a game, during which time my connection to the servers dropped repeatedly, multiple attempts to load the city were aborted, and I finally had to "trick" the game into showing me (and then, finally, loading) my city by accessing the list of games present in the drop-down Origin profile menu. The main "Resume Game" button and the list of games in progress both would not show or load a city.
Even then, immediately after finally managing to load my city (New Pittssex), I received a notice that connection to the servers had dropped, suggesting my ability to actually load a game had been blind luck. Had the process taken a second or two longer, it would most likely not have loaded at all, as happened in approximately ten tries previously.
That said, the experience of connecting to a game and loading a city can not be said to be measurably worse (or better) than it has been since launch. Merely bad in a slightly different way. These same issues (and more) have been present since the game was released. What has changed is the experience of playing.
One of EA's major changes to the game has been the removal of "Cheetah" mode. SimCity allows you to alter the sped at which time passes so that you can make changes to your city and then see the results more quickly, or slow things down to address problems in "slower than normal" time. There are three speed settings, and they are "Turtle," "Llama" and "Cheetah." Corresponding roughly to slow, normal and fast.
With the removal of Cheetah mode, SimCity is now stuck with merely slow and normal, which would at first not seem to be too great an imposition, but in reality has drastically changed the manner in which the game can be played. The short version of which is: It's less fun.
EA has also (temporarily, they say) disabled SimCity's leaderboards, which allow players to see how well they are doing against other players worldwide, and the achievements system. I was able to access the achievements I had unlocked previously, but I will not accrue any new ones with this feature turned off. That's not a huge issue for me overall, but as a feature that was once present, but now is not, it's a big deal.
More problematic are the leaderboards. For a game advertised to be connected and social experience, the loss of the ability to see how you rank against other players is devastating. And, more troubling, accessing neighboring cities and finding the cities of my friends, using the Origin Friends service, has taken a dramatic stability hit. Even attempting to load a neighboring city causes my game to crash.
Given this currently horrendous state of both accessibility and playability, and acknowledging the fact that even the drastic changes EA has made to the game in its attempts to address them haven't worked, it is hard to continue to recommend SimCity. The experience currently on offer is now significantly altered from what was reviewed, and there is simply no guarantee that the existing server issues will go away, nor what further changes may be made to the game in order to address them. - Russ Pitts, Polygon Features Editor andSimCityreviewer
