I tend to stay out of this other then not buying products and maybe a note to in a review site why... but that is a load of hog wash (IMO). We are computing so much we need to screw distributed computing but keep the network overhead from it and centralize all are calculations to one server AND add network overhead. [email protected] Ya I don't buy it.
Yeah but Sim City is not an offline game. That's the point. I wish people would stop using those hypotheticals. The entire game, from top to bottom, is designed for connected play.
You need to stop blending two separate issues together. It's lazy thinking.
EA is at fault for many different things here. But they are different. And if you lump everything together then you just become white noise.
They skimped on server infrastructure. So they're cheap or lazy or nearsighted.
They retrofitted a traditionally single player game series into a multiplayer only space. So they're greedy or lazy or unimaginative.
They don't trust their customers enough to allow them to choose the experience they want. So they're ignorant or evil or too conservative.
These are all terrible things but they're not the same issue. They're separate issue so please stop saying Sim City isn't working only because of DRM, or only because of EAs cheap investment. Come on. We're better than that.
The_Scarab on
+2
HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
Let it be a lesson that multiplayer/online play isn't the only thing people want then.
0
MordaRazgromМорда РазгромRuling the Taffer KingdomRegistered Userregular
The new thing is to make games "social". The Penny Aracde comic was spot-on. The developers are trying to fit their products into the social networking boom that we have going on. The features they're adding to the game are core gameplay components to them. In order to have those features work, the game has to be perpetually connected. If you're not a fan of social-networking being in your game, you're probably in for a rough couple of years, like me.
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+1
HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
The new thing is to make games "social". The Penny Aracde comic was spot-on. The developers are trying to fit their products into the social networking boom that we have going on. The features they're adding to the game are core gameplay components to them. In order to have those features work, the game has to be perpetually connected. If you're not a fan of social-networking being in your game, you're probably in for a rough couple of years, like me.
I don't even CARE if they add social functionality to games. But the key is adding it, not forcing it.
The new thing is to make games "social". The Penny Aracde comic was spot-on. The developers are trying to fit their products into the social networking boom that we have going on. The features they're adding to the game are core gameplay components to them. In order to have those features work, the game has to be perpetually connected. If you're not a fan of social-networking being in your game, you're probably in for a rough couple of years, like me.
I don't even CARE if they add social functionality to games. But the key is adding it, not forcing it.
That's absolutely the wrong way to do things. If you add more and more disparate features to a base game you end up with a pile of shrapnel and disconnected elements.
You say forcing it, as though it is some single player game they have wrenched into being online only. No. This is an online game from the start. You might as well complain that Metroid Prime was forcing a first person perspective, instead of adding it.
+1
MordaRazgromМорда РазгромRuling the Taffer KingdomRegistered Userregular
If you divorce social networking functionality from SimCity...what would you be left with?
There are things they can add as far as gameplay mechanics go with technology improvements from the last iteration of SimCity, but they need to do something new, not just reskin an old version into "pretty". I mean we can discuss whether what they added was something we like, but it's not viable for them to just keep updating graphics and rereleasing the same shit over and over. Fans of a particular franchise seem to be so opposed to change, and I'm guilty of it myself. I guess the only real response would be "get with the times." Although, it's not necessarily a comfortable one. Like with all franchises that I love, if I don't like the current iteration, I just don't get it and keep playing the older titles. I don't like Risen very much, so I keep playing Gothic, the same can be applied to games that introduce social networking as a new core gameplay feature. The jury's still out as far as how successful SimCitySocial will be, maybe it will be a smash hit and we're going to see more of it...Civilization Social, Mario Social (although it's already going there sorta), Multiplayer Zelda. As a society, we love that social networking shit, so I guess we'll just see if that translates into gamer culture as well. So far it is, people are buying games with social networking built into them, and despite the hate that they get, companies that attach "always on" don't seem to suffer for it at all.
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0
HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
The new thing is to make games "social". The Penny Aracde comic was spot-on. The developers are trying to fit their products into the social networking boom that we have going on. The features they're adding to the game are core gameplay components to them. In order to have those features work, the game has to be perpetually connected. If you're not a fan of social-networking being in your game, you're probably in for a rough couple of years, like me.
I don't even CARE if they add social functionality to games. But the key is adding it, not forcing it.
That's absolutely the wrong way to do things. If you add more and more disparate features to a base game you end up with a pile of shrapnel and disconnected elements.
You say forcing it, as though it is some single player game they have wrenched into being online only. No. This is an online game from the start. You might as well complain that Metroid Prime was forcing a first person perspective, instead of adding it.
That is a load of shit and you know it. Oh the horror, some people are playing this way and some people are playing that way. The horror.
Please, dude. We're talking about having a singleplayer experience, and a multiplayer experience. Two functions are not going to reduce people into drooling zombies unable to decide what to do. What, are you going to say World of Warcraft is awful because it has PvE AND PvP content? Oh noes, disconnected elements!
MordaRazgromМорда РазгромRuling the Taffer KingdomRegistered Userregular
edited March 2013
There is one thing that I unerringly agree with the people that are against Always On, even though I am a disciple of the feature myself: the loss of options. Allowing the OPTION to get out of always on is something that should be added to games, even my beloved Diablo 3. I think we'll see it eventually, where games have an always on feature, however give people the option to opt out of it under certain conditions. Having options is a fantastic thing, and, perhaps, after the developers are done testing the waters, they'll look for ways to implement it more smoothly and make it not so grating to some people.
With that said, of course, the sky's the limit regarding what conditions the developers will impose on us to turn the always connected thing off.
MordaRazgrom on
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The new thing is to make games "social". The Penny Aracde comic was spot-on. The developers are trying to fit their products into the social networking boom that we have going on. The features they're adding to the game are core gameplay components to them. In order to have those features work, the game has to be perpetually connected. If you're not a fan of social-networking being in your game, you're probably in for a rough couple of years, like me.
I don't even CARE if they add social functionality to games. But the key is adding it, not forcing it.
That's absolutely the wrong way to do things. If you add more and more disparate features to a base game you end up with a pile of shrapnel and disconnected elements.
You say forcing it, as though it is some single player game they have wrenched into being online only. No. This is an online game from the start. You might as well complain that Metroid Prime was forcing a first person perspective, instead of adding it.
Last I checked Metroid Prime's first person camera didn't make you completely and utterly blind in game for the first week after launch. I mean if you wanted me to I could dig out my old Gamecube and backdate it, just to make sure. But I think we can agree that while Metroid Prime's camera was a major departure from the Metroid norm it didn't literally break the game.
The same cannot be said for SimCity's DRM.
And the fact that the game is somehow able to be run for at least 20 minutes without an internet connection is rather telling about the necessity of the DRM.
+3
Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
The new thing is to make games "social". The Penny Aracde comic was spot-on. The developers are trying to fit their products into the social networking boom that we have going on. The features they're adding to the game are core gameplay components to them. In order to have those features work, the game has to be perpetually connected. If you're not a fan of social-networking being in your game, you're probably in for a rough couple of years, like me.
I don't even CARE if they add social functionality to games. But the key is adding it, not forcing it.
That's absolutely the wrong way to do things. If you add more and more disparate features to a base game you end up with a pile of shrapnel and disconnected elements.
You say forcing it, as though it is some single player game they have wrenched into being online only. No. This is an online game from the start. You might as well complain that Metroid Prime was forcing a first person perspective, instead of adding it.
Except this is a Simcity game, where the core of the game is building a city. Which is, even now, almost entirely a singleplayer enterprise.
If Nintendo took something like Mario Galaxy and made the core of the game running around and playing levels alone, then shoehorned in social elements so that stuff other players did indirectly affected the levels you play on and then demanded the game be always online, it would be the same dumb situation, just a lot more obvious.
The "disconnected elements" here are the ones essentially forcing people to participate in social stuff that adds little to nothing to the actual game for shitloads of players instead of letting them play the traditional way, which had no real reason to not be included. "Old" doesn't mean "bad" if people still like it, and if Maxis really did always design Simcity to be online at all times from the start with no alternatives at all, then that was one helluva terrible idea. Having a neighbor with stuff that bleeds into your city is in no way enough of a game-changing feature to force people to deal with this nonsense, especially when they could've let players run multiple cities in a region themselves without ever needing online play.
The new thing is to make games "social". The Penny Aracde comic was spot-on. The developers are trying to fit their products into the social networking boom that we have going on. The features they're adding to the game are core gameplay components to them. In order to have those features work, the game has to be perpetually connected. If you're not a fan of social-networking being in your game, you're probably in for a rough couple of years, like me.
I don't even CARE if they add social functionality to games. But the key is adding it, not forcing it.
That's absolutely the wrong way to do things. If you add more and more disparate features to a base game you end up with a pile of shrapnel and disconnected elements.
You say forcing it, as though it is some single player game they have wrenched into being online only. No. This is an online game from the start. You might as well complain that Metroid Prime was forcing a first person perspective, instead of adding it.
Last I checked Metroid Prime's first person camera didn't make you completely and utterly blind in game for the first week after launch. I mean if you wanted me to I could dig out my old Gamecube and backdate it, just to make sure. But I think we can agree that while Metroid Prime's camera was a major departure from the Metroid norm it didn't literally break the game.
The same cannot be said for SimCity's DRM.
And the fact that the game is somehow able to be run for at least 20 minutes without an internet connection is rather telling about the necessity of the DRM.
You can play FF7 for 20 minutes if you pop the playstation one disc tray up and don't go anywhere that causes the game to load data from the disc. If you are not connected to the server, you are fine until you switch cities. Then the game boots you out. You are pretty limited as to what you can do without a connection to the server.
The new thing is to make games "social". The Penny Aracde comic was spot-on. The developers are trying to fit their products into the social networking boom that we have going on. The features they're adding to the game are core gameplay components to them. In order to have those features work, the game has to be perpetually connected. If you're not a fan of social-networking being in your game, you're probably in for a rough couple of years, like me.
I don't even CARE if they add social functionality to games. But the key is adding it, not forcing it.
That's absolutely the wrong way to do things. If you add more and more disparate features to a base game you end up with a pile of shrapnel and disconnected elements.
You say forcing it, as though it is some single player game they have wrenched into being online only. No. This is an online game from the start. You might as well complain that Metroid Prime was forcing a first person perspective, instead of adding it.
Last I checked Metroid Prime's first person camera didn't make you completely and utterly blind in game for the first week after launch. I mean if you wanted me to I could dig out my old Gamecube and backdate it, just to make sure. But I think we can agree that while Metroid Prime's camera was a major departure from the Metroid norm it didn't literally break the game.
The same cannot be said for SimCity's DRM.
And the fact that the game is somehow able to be run for at least 20 minutes without an internet connection is rather telling about the necessity of the DRM.
You can play FF7 for 20 minutes if you pop the playstation one disc tray up and don't go anywhere that causes the game to load data from the disc. If you are not connected to the server, you are fine until you switch cities. Then the game boots you out. You are pretty limited as to what you can do without a connection to the server.
Up to and including everything except for log in.
Very limited, yes.
EDIT: Or switch cities, yes. Which is solved by saving locally.
EDIT2: okay edit 1 was a little over the top. But the point is that it feels like the DRM is just making problems for itself to solve. We've had local saving since forever.
MechMantis on
+1
Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
The new thing is to make games "social". The Penny Aracde comic was spot-on. The developers are trying to fit their products into the social networking boom that we have going on. The features they're adding to the game are core gameplay components to them. In order to have those features work, the game has to be perpetually connected. If you're not a fan of social-networking being in your game, you're probably in for a rough couple of years, like me.
I don't even CARE if they add social functionality to games. But the key is adding it, not forcing it.
That's absolutely the wrong way to do things. If you add more and more disparate features to a base game you end up with a pile of shrapnel and disconnected elements.
You say forcing it, as though it is some single player game they have wrenched into being online only. No. This is an online game from the start. You might as well complain that Metroid Prime was forcing a first person perspective, instead of adding it.
Last I checked Metroid Prime's first person camera didn't make you completely and utterly blind in game for the first week after launch. I mean if you wanted me to I could dig out my old Gamecube and backdate it, just to make sure. But I think we can agree that while Metroid Prime's camera was a major departure from the Metroid norm it didn't literally break the game.
The same cannot be said for SimCity's DRM.
And the fact that the game is somehow able to be run for at least 20 minutes without an internet connection is rather telling about the necessity of the DRM.
You can play FF7 for 20 minutes if you pop the playstation one disc tray up and don't go anywhere that causes the game to load data from the disc. If you are not connected to the server, you are fine until you switch cities. Then the game boots you out. You are pretty limited as to what you can do without a connection to the server.
That's sarcasm, right?
Because it should be pretty obvious that there is a massive difference between FF7 having the mechanical necessity of loading from a disc and Simcity having the corporate "necessity" of being authorized remotely. I mean, in one case, the game won't run forever because of something you do; in Simcity's case, somebody else is basically saying it's okay for you to run your game. On your PC. With the game all downloaded to the hard drive. Because of artificially-created constraints, not technical ones.
The new thing is to make games "social". The Penny Aracde comic was spot-on. The developers are trying to fit their products into the social networking boom that we have going on. The features they're adding to the game are core gameplay components to them. In order to have those features work, the game has to be perpetually connected. If you're not a fan of social-networking being in your game, you're probably in for a rough couple of years, like me.
I don't even CARE if they add social functionality to games. But the key is adding it, not forcing it.
That's absolutely the wrong way to do things. If you add more and more disparate features to a base game you end up with a pile of shrapnel and disconnected elements.
You say forcing it, as though it is some single player game they have wrenched into being online only. No. This is an online game from the start. You might as well complain that Metroid Prime was forcing a first person perspective, instead of adding it.
Last I checked Metroid Prime's first person camera didn't make you completely and utterly blind in game for the first week after launch. I mean if you wanted me to I could dig out my old Gamecube and backdate it, just to make sure. But I think we can agree that while Metroid Prime's camera was a major departure from the Metroid norm it didn't literally break the game.
The same cannot be said for SimCity's DRM.
And the fact that the game is somehow able to be run for at least 20 minutes without an internet connection is rather telling about the necessity of the DRM.
You can play FF7 for 20 minutes if you pop the playstation one disc tray up and don't go anywhere that causes the game to load data from the disc. If you are not connected to the server, you are fine until you switch cities. Then the game boots you out. You are pretty limited as to what you can do without a connection to the server.
That's sarcasm, right?
Because it should be pretty obvious that there is a massive difference between FF7 having the mechanical necessity of loading from a disc and Simcity having the corporate "necessity" of being authorized remotely. I mean, in one case, the game won't run forever because of something you do; in Simcity's case, somebody else is basically saying it's okay for you to run your game. On your PC. With the game all downloaded to the hard drive. Because of artificially-created constraints, not technical ones.
If this were true, there would most likely be a hack on pirate bay to just let you play the game locally. Regions are on the server, as well as saves.
Robes on
"Wait" he says... do I look like a waiter?
+2
HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
@Ninja Snarl P - SimCity being online-only actually does have to do with cloud computing. A link to an article was just provided like an hour ago confirming it. It was probably something long known, but it's the first I saw of it. The Glassbox engine tracks the sims, population count, on THEIR side.
Granted, population count is something that can be tracked and managed on the client's end. Just because a game was built one way doesn't mean it was the best or only way. But there it is. :?
You know what? I bet it's because they had issues with scaling. Cities with a population of 1000 probably run fine on every machine, but then you get up to 100,000 people and the minimum spec'ed computer probably starts having issues handling it.
The new thing is to make games "social". The Penny Aracde comic was spot-on. The developers are trying to fit their products into the social networking boom that we have going on. The features they're adding to the game are core gameplay components to them. In order to have those features work, the game has to be perpetually connected. If you're not a fan of social-networking being in your game, you're probably in for a rough couple of years, like me.
I don't even CARE if they add social functionality to games. But the key is adding it, not forcing it.
That's absolutely the wrong way to do things. If you add more and more disparate features to a base game you end up with a pile of shrapnel and disconnected elements.
You say forcing it, as though it is some single player game they have wrenched into being online only. No. This is an online game from the start. You might as well complain that Metroid Prime was forcing a first person perspective, instead of adding it.
Last I checked Metroid Prime's first person camera didn't make you completely and utterly blind in game for the first week after launch. I mean if you wanted me to I could dig out my old Gamecube and backdate it, just to make sure. But I think we can agree that while Metroid Prime's camera was a major departure from the Metroid norm it didn't literally break the game.
The same cannot be said for SimCity's DRM.
And the fact that the game is somehow able to be run for at least 20 minutes without an internet connection is rather telling about the necessity of the DRM.
You can play FF7 for 20 minutes if you pop the playstation one disc tray up and don't go anywhere that causes the game to load data from the disc. If you are not connected to the server, you are fine until you switch cities. Then the game boots you out. You are pretty limited as to what you can do without a connection to the server.
That's sarcasm, right?
Because it should be pretty obvious that there is a massive difference between FF7 having the mechanical necessity of loading from a disc and Simcity having the corporate "necessity" of being authorized remotely. I mean, in one case, the game won't run forever because of something you do; in Simcity's case, somebody else is basically saying it's okay for you to run your game. On your PC. With the game all downloaded to the hard drive. Because of artificially-created constraints, not technical ones.
If this were true, there would most likely be a hack on pirate bay to just let you play the game locally. Regions are on the server, as well as saves.
So it is just DRM with no other purpose than to make it difficult for paying customers to play.
Good to know.
And Henroid, if it DID actually require cloud computing to any great degree, it would simply immediately kick you off once the game lost connection. It does not do this. It only does this when it phones home.
It's also pretty apparent that their coders are lazy as fuck (go look for information on how well the pathfinding AI works with regards to path choice, for instance).
So I'm going to take the "We totally and absolutely do vital calculation on the servers that you could simply not play the game without" argument from Maxis with a frankly gigantic grain of salt.
+3
HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
That is amazing that it is tracked to the sim. Why would they put so much pressure on a server?
It fits the Maxis MO, that's for sure. But this is pulling the trigger on an innovation/idea way earlier than we can practically manage. Look what it has resulted in.
I would actually draw a parallel to Dwarf Fortress now - that game tracks literally everything. When a dwarf is out in the rain, every single body part gets labeled as being wet. And it tracks that. As you can imagine, the game runs like shit after a while.
Yeah but Sim City is not an offline game. That's the point. I wish people would stop using those hypotheticals. The entire game, from top to bottom, is designed for connected play.
You need to stop blending two separate issues together. It's lazy thinking.
EA is at fault for many different things here. But they are different. And if you lump everything together then you just become white noise.
They skimped on server infrastructure. So they're cheap or lazy or nearsighted.
They retrofitted a traditionally single player game series into a multiplayer only space. So they're greedy or lazy or unimaginative.
They don't trust their customers enough to allow them to choose the experience they want. So they're ignorant or evil or too conservative.
These are all terrible things but they're not the same issue. They're separat issue so please stop saying Sim City isn't working only because of DRM, or only because of EAs cheap investment. Come on. We're better than that.
What does SimCity's status as a game which was "designed from top to bottom for connected play" even amount to?
I haven't actually played the game, of course, but from what I've heard, the gimmick is that adjacent cities provide you with resources or services that your own can't have, and some of their economic pressures spill over into your city. If you're playing in a random region with strangers (as opposed to with friends in a private region), then you're probably not communicating or coordinating with these people. So those external resources and pressures are basically just an arbitrary, uncontrollable set of conditions that you have to respond to.
That being the case, why not just simulate a city by giving you a random set of conditions from each direction? Or make some prefabbed regions that ship with the game and let you delete one and make your own city in its place? Or, hell, do a one-time download of other players' cities to set the initial conditions and let you play offline from there? How much difference would it really make?
So the way I see it, there are two broad possibilities:
1) EA chose to use always-on DRM at the outset and the actual multiplayer was shoehorned in after the fact.
2) Maxis had some ideas for online mechanics that they thought would be cool and then chose not to put any effort into adapting those mechanics for offline play.
But either amounts to the same thing. EA/Maxis wanted the game to be always-online, a lot of players wanted the game to not be always-online for various perfectly understandable reasons, and EA/Maxis chose to not care what the players wanted. Or, more abstractly: many players find always-on requirements innately dangerous and cumbersome, and yet publishers are still bending over backwards looking for excuses to make their games require always-on connections. I don't see how that doesn't ultimately amount to one overarching problem with the industry.
Switch: SW-2431-2728-9604 || 3DS: 0817-4948-1650
+1
HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
And the obvious question becomes, "Why?"
Why do we need each individual sim tracked, regarding their daily schedules and jobs and such? Where is the practicality in that when you're doing it for thousands of sims? Not just in the function and mechanics, but from the enjoyment side. You're telling me people are sitting there right now reading the data on each individual sim? Not fucking likely.
That is amazing that it is tracked to the sim. Why would they put so much pressure on a server?
It fits the Maxis MO, that's for sure. But this is pulling the trigger on an innovation/idea way earlier than we can practically manage. Look what it has resulted in.
I would actually draw a parallel to Dwarf Fortress now - that game tracks literally everything. When a dwarf is out in the rain, every single body part gets labeled as being wet. And it tracks that. As you can imagine, the game runs like shit after a while.
Dwarf Fortress is also made by one whole guy relying on donations to survive, and tracks probably an order of magnitude more information than SimCity does (I don't think SimCity tracks beard growth rates for every single living entity, for instance). Completely locally, I might add.
Unless Maxis has a grand total of one underpaid coder, they don't really have an excuse for requiring cloud computing.
I seriously doubt that they are doing computations that would overwhelm the average PC on their servers. If you think about it, that would make the launch basically impossible. I mean out of $60 retail, exactly how much are they planning to spend on servers and how much server will that buy.
So yeah, not buying that story.
(Please do not gift. My game bank is already full.)
+5
HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
That is amazing that it is tracked to the sim. Why would they put so much pressure on a server?
It fits the Maxis MO, that's for sure. But this is pulling the trigger on an innovation/idea way earlier than we can practically manage. Look what it has resulted in.
I would actually draw a parallel to Dwarf Fortress now - that game tracks literally everything. When a dwarf is out in the rain, every single body part gets labeled as being wet. And it tracks that. As you can imagine, the game runs like shit after a while.
Dwarf Fortress is also made by one whole guy relying on donations to survive, and tracks probably an order of magnitude more information than SimCity does (I don't think SimCity tracks beard growth rates for every single living entity, for instance). Completely locally, I might add.
Unless Maxis has a grand total of one underpaid coder, they don't really have an excuse for requiring cloud computing.
I didn't mean to excuse the cloud computing or the tracking of sims in any detail aside from whether they are present or not. I've ranted in the Dwarf Fortress thread about how I think tracking such information is absolutely ridiculous and I'm not sure how much of it is actually important or useful or entertaining. I was meaning to draw parallel to features / functions that literally do nothing for the user.
In SimCity, sims have always just been a statistic. That's all they are and ever should be.
The new thing is to make games "social". The Penny Aracde comic was spot-on. The developers are trying to fit their products into the social networking boom that we have going on. The features they're adding to the game are core gameplay components to them. In order to have those features work, the game has to be perpetually connected. If you're not a fan of social-networking being in your game, you're probably in for a rough couple of years, like me.
I don't even CARE if they add social functionality to games. But the key is adding it, not forcing it.
That's absolutely the wrong way to do things. If you add more and more disparate features to a base game you end up with a pile of shrapnel and disconnected elements.
You say forcing it, as though it is some single player game they have wrenched into being online only. No. This is an online game from the start. You might as well complain that Metroid Prime was forcing a first person perspective, instead of adding it.
Last I checked Metroid Prime's first person camera didn't make you completely and utterly blind in game for the first week after launch. I mean if you wanted me to I could dig out my old Gamecube and backdate it, just to make sure. But I think we can agree that while Metroid Prime's camera was a major departure from the Metroid norm it didn't literally break the game.
The same cannot be said for SimCity's DRM.
And the fact that the game is somehow able to be run for at least 20 minutes without an internet connection is rather telling about the necessity of the DRM.
You can play FF7 for 20 minutes if you pop the playstation one disc tray up and don't go anywhere that causes the game to load data from the disc. If you are not connected to the server, you are fine until you switch cities. Then the game boots you out. You are pretty limited as to what you can do without a connection to the server.
That's sarcasm, right?
Because it should be pretty obvious that there is a massive difference between FF7 having the mechanical necessity of loading from a disc and Simcity having the corporate "necessity" of being authorized remotely. I mean, in one case, the game won't run forever because of something you do; in Simcity's case, somebody else is basically saying it's okay for you to run your game. On your PC. With the game all downloaded to the hard drive. Because of artificially-created constraints, not technical ones.
If this were true, there would most likely be a hack on pirate bay to just let you play the game locally. Regions are on the server, as well as saves.
So it is just DRM with no other purpose than to make it difficult for paying customers to play.
Good to know.
And Henroid, if it DID actually require cloud computing to any great degree, it would simply immediately kick you off once the game lost connection. It does not do this. It only does this when it phones home.
It's also pretty apparent that their coders are lazy as fuck (go look for information on how well the pathfinding AI works with regards to path choice, for instance).
So I'm going to take the "We totally and absolutely do vital calculation on the servers that you could simply not play the game without" argument from Maxis with a frankly gigantic grain of salt.
I like how you think you know what you are talking about, like you designed the engine or helped design it and know how it works.
Oh wait.
You don't. So don't act like you. You basically lost all creditably when you called the coders lazy. You got proof to show me otherwise, let's see it.
Why do we need each individual sim tracked, regarding their daily schedules and jobs and such? Where is the practicality in that when you're doing it for thousands of sims? Not just in the function and mechanics, but from the enjoyment side. You're telling me people are sitting there right now reading the data on each individual sim? Not fucking likely.
Because in the scope of the entire gaming industry, nobody gives a shit about Sim City while almost everyone cares about The Sims. People want to populate these cities with Sims, not statistics. For a lot of people that is a huge draw and is front and center on the Sim City website as a major feature of the title.
Plus, who knows what they have planned for the future. Surely this is the beginning of a wholly connected, seamless and coherent Sims experience. I have no game development background but even I can see that a system that populates player's Sim Cities with actual Sims from a Sims 4 game is an attractive experience for a lot of consumers.
Imagine if The Sims 4 connected seamlessly into Sim City and the plots in the city were designed by players in a separate title.
This isn't rocket science, chumps. This is obviously their strategy.
0
HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
The new thing is to make games "social". The Penny Aracde comic was spot-on. The developers are trying to fit their products into the social networking boom that we have going on. The features they're adding to the game are core gameplay components to them. In order to have those features work, the game has to be perpetually connected. If you're not a fan of social-networking being in your game, you're probably in for a rough couple of years, like me.
I don't even CARE if they add social functionality to games. But the key is adding it, not forcing it.
That's absolutely the wrong way to do things. If you add more and more disparate features to a base game you end up with a pile of shrapnel and disconnected elements.
You say forcing it, as though it is some single player game they have wrenched into being online only. No. This is an online game from the start. You might as well complain that Metroid Prime was forcing a first person perspective, instead of adding it.
Last I checked Metroid Prime's first person camera didn't make you completely and utterly blind in game for the first week after launch. I mean if you wanted me to I could dig out my old Gamecube and backdate it, just to make sure. But I think we can agree that while Metroid Prime's camera was a major departure from the Metroid norm it didn't literally break the game.
The same cannot be said for SimCity's DRM.
And the fact that the game is somehow able to be run for at least 20 minutes without an internet connection is rather telling about the necessity of the DRM.
You can play FF7 for 20 minutes if you pop the playstation one disc tray up and don't go anywhere that causes the game to load data from the disc. If you are not connected to the server, you are fine until you switch cities. Then the game boots you out. You are pretty limited as to what you can do without a connection to the server.
That's sarcasm, right?
Because it should be pretty obvious that there is a massive difference between FF7 having the mechanical necessity of loading from a disc and Simcity having the corporate "necessity" of being authorized remotely. I mean, in one case, the game won't run forever because of something you do; in Simcity's case, somebody else is basically saying it's okay for you to run your game. On your PC. With the game all downloaded to the hard drive. Because of artificially-created constraints, not technical ones.
If this were true, there would most likely be a hack on pirate bay to just let you play the game locally. Regions are on the server, as well as saves.
So it is just DRM with no other purpose than to make it difficult for paying customers to play.
Good to know.
And Henroid, if it DID actually require cloud computing to any great degree, it would simply immediately kick you off once the game lost connection. It does not do this. It only does this when it phones home.
It's also pretty apparent that their coders are lazy as fuck (go look for information on how well the pathfinding AI works with regards to path choice, for instance).
So I'm going to take the "We totally and absolutely do vital calculation on the servers that you could simply not play the game without" argument from Maxis with a frankly gigantic grain of salt.
I like how you think you know what you are talking about, like you designed the engine or helped design it and know how it works.
Oh wait.
You don't. So don't act like you. You basically lost all creditably when you called the coders lazy. You got proof to show me otherwise, let's see it.
The new thing is to make games "social". The Penny Aracde comic was spot-on. The developers are trying to fit their products into the social networking boom that we have going on. The features they're adding to the game are core gameplay components to them. In order to have those features work, the game has to be perpetually connected. If you're not a fan of social-networking being in your game, you're probably in for a rough couple of years, like me.
I don't even CARE if they add social functionality to games. But the key is adding it, not forcing it.
That's absolutely the wrong way to do things. If you add more and more disparate features to a base game you end up with a pile of shrapnel and disconnected elements.
You say forcing it, as though it is some single player game they have wrenched into being online only. No. This is an online game from the start. You might as well complain that Metroid Prime was forcing a first person perspective, instead of adding it.
Last I checked Metroid Prime's first person camera didn't make you completely and utterly blind in game for the first week after launch. I mean if you wanted me to I could dig out my old Gamecube and backdate it, just to make sure. But I think we can agree that while Metroid Prime's camera was a major departure from the Metroid norm it didn't literally break the game.
The same cannot be said for SimCity's DRM.
And the fact that the game is somehow able to be run for at least 20 minutes without an internet connection is rather telling about the necessity of the DRM.
You can play FF7 for 20 minutes if you pop the playstation one disc tray up and don't go anywhere that causes the game to load data from the disc. If you are not connected to the server, you are fine until you switch cities. Then the game boots you out. You are pretty limited as to what you can do without a connection to the server.
That's sarcasm, right?
Because it should be pretty obvious that there is a massive difference between FF7 having the mechanical necessity of loading from a disc and Simcity having the corporate "necessity" of being authorized remotely. I mean, in one case, the game won't run forever because of something you do; in Simcity's case, somebody else is basically saying it's okay for you to run your game. On your PC. With the game all downloaded to the hard drive. Because of artificially-created constraints, not technical ones.
If this were true, there would most likely be a hack on pirate bay to just let you play the game locally. Regions are on the server, as well as saves.
So it is just DRM with no other purpose than to make it difficult for paying customers to play.
Good to know.
And Henroid, if it DID actually require cloud computing to any great degree, it would simply immediately kick you off once the game lost connection. It does not do this. It only does this when it phones home.
It's also pretty apparent that their coders are lazy as fuck (go look for information on how well the pathfinding AI works with regards to path choice, for instance).
So I'm going to take the "We totally and absolutely do vital calculation on the servers that you could simply not play the game without" argument from Maxis with a frankly gigantic grain of salt.
I like how you think you know what you are talking about, like you designed the engine or helped design it and know how it works.
Oh wait.
You don't. So don't act like you. You basically lost all creditably when you called the coders lazy. You got proof to show me otherwise, let's see it.
Thats been addressed already in a update. (1.2 I believe.)
Edit- Sorry it was 1.3
General
• Fix for a crash related to the highway interchanges and vehicles.
• Traffic was optimized for complex road sections.
• Fix for a specific case of city processing that forced players to rollback their cities to a previous state.
• Fix for a crash some players saw when exiting their city.
• Rapidly clicking or accidentally double clicking the Claim city button will no longer create multiple regions.
• We temporarily removed filtering by friends and maps on the Join Game screen to better support database performance. Players can still find friends' regions by going to their friends' profile pages.
Servers
• Various database optimization to address issues with connecting to our servers
• We added 8 new servers!
Why do we need each individual sim tracked, regarding their daily schedules and jobs and such? Where is the practicality in that when you're doing it for thousands of sims? Not just in the function and mechanics, but from the enjoyment side. You're telling me people are sitting there right now reading the data on each individual sim? Not fucking likely.
Because in the scope of the entire gaming industry, nobody gives a shit about Sim City while almost everyone cares about The Sims. People want to populate these cities with Sims, not statistics. For a lot of people that is a huge draw and is front and center on the Sim City website as a major feature of the title.
Plus, who knows what they have planned for the future. Surely this is the beginning of a wholly connected, seamless and coherent Sims experience. I have no game development background but even I can see that a system that populates player's Sim Cities with actual Sims from a Sims 4 game is an attractive experience for a lot of consumers.
Imagine if The Sims 4 connected seamlessly into Sim City and the plots in the city were designed by players in a separate title.
This isn't rocket science, chumps. This is obviously their strategy.
It's a shit strategy. You can tell me what they're possibly up to, and I may agree with some of that, but it doesn't mean I think any of it is feasible or entertaining. Well, axe the entertaining part - whether I enjoy something or not doesn't dictate if other people could or should. Feasibility, practicality, that's what this is all about. Maxis took a big bite trying to establish something or just show something can be done, and for what purpose? To what end?
They don't need an excuse. They made the game they wanted to make. And some people are perfectly happy with the way the game functions when it functions correctly. Assuming the game would work perfectly fine without being always online is an assumption, one that goes against things stated by the developers of the game.
Take fault with the shitty situation as far as the servers go, but as far as the game itself, if you don't like the fact that it's a multiplayer focused SimCity that requires connections to servers in order to function as intended (ie, it's balanced based upon the multiplayer features), then it's not the game for you.
I've attempted again and again to play this game singleplayer (I'm not having nearly as many issues finding a server the last 3 or 4 days), with me controlling all the cities in a region, and it's just not fun. At all. Get on a region with a ton of other people, and it all the sudden becomes a really compelling and fun game.
Separate the issues with the servers from the game when it works as intended. They are two separate things, and any assumptions made by people who haven't played the game at how easy it'd be to have single player offline added into this game are completely born out of ignorance. Even when people try to explain why it wouldn't work, it's handwaved away as excuses.
Yes, the server issue sucks. No, they more than likely shouldn't have released this game as designed without either being super prepared for the serverload, or advertising the game as an MMO with a subscription fee. But yes, the game as design is super fun if you play it not as one of the previous SimCity games, but as what it actually is.
No I don't.
+1
HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
And Henroid, if it DID actually require cloud computing to any great degree, it would simply immediately kick you off once the game lost connection. It does not do this. It only does this when it phones home.
And Henroid, if it DID actually require cloud computing to any great degree, it would simply immediately kick you off once the game lost connection. It does not do this. It only does this when it phones home.
Thats been addressed already in a update. (1.2 I believe.)
Edit- Sorry it was 1.3
General
• Fix for a crash related to the highway interchanges and vehicles.
• Traffic was optimized for complex road sections.
• Fix for a specific case of city processing that forced players to rollback their cities to a previous state.
• Fix for a crash some players saw when exiting their city.
• Rapidly clicking or accidentally double clicking the Claim city button will no longer create multiple regions.
• We temporarily removed filtering by friends and maps on the Join Game screen to better support database performance. Players can still find friends' regions by going to their friends' profile pages.
Servers
• Various database optimization to address issues with connecting to our servers
• We added 8 new servers!
WHILE IT'S GOOD THAT THEY FIXED IT, the fact the pathfinding launched in such a sorry state that the Sims, who we have previously noted require cloud computing to work (apparently), couldn't figure out that "HMMmmmmm, maybe we shouldn't be taking this one lane dirt road when there's a massive avenue just a little down the road" really puts holes in the "We absolutely totally need the additional processing power to make your citizens work" argument, since it displays that perhaps they aren't actually using any of the processing power available to its fullest potential.
It's silly to point out the bugs of the game. Every game has bugs. SimCity 4, 3000, etc. Bugs should discredit the developer's voice on why they made the game the way they chose to?
I wouldn't be surprised if they're talking about the size of the data and not actually the computations done on it. From everything I've read the actual simulation side of the the sims is rather simple, the roads are pipes that basically flow the sims through to a destination. The roads are the AI, not the sims themselves. However, what comes from that is sent to the server, information is extrapolated from that, and then sent back to the end users when it's requested. The amount of data extrapolated is rather large, and is used in region play.
Because again, playing in a single city "works" if disconnected from the server, but all region play elements are stuck how they were when the last connection was made. The region simulation I believe is just as complex, if not moreso, than the city simulation itself.
But again, this is all assumptions, I don't know exactly how it works, but the cloud computing effeminately isn't necessary on the city scale. On the region scale, I believe it's doing some interesting and complex things involving the data from all the cities in the region, that requires a lot more storage than a single end user would want to have for a single game.
Posts
You need to stop blending two separate issues together. It's lazy thinking.
EA is at fault for many different things here. But they are different. And if you lump everything together then you just become white noise.
They skimped on server infrastructure. So they're cheap or lazy or nearsighted.
They retrofitted a traditionally single player game series into a multiplayer only space. So they're greedy or lazy or unimaginative.
They don't trust their customers enough to allow them to choose the experience they want. So they're ignorant or evil or too conservative.
These are all terrible things but they're not the same issue. They're separate issue so please stop saying Sim City isn't working only because of DRM, or only because of EAs cheap investment. Come on. We're better than that.
WiiU Username: MordaRazgrom
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I don't even CARE if they add social functionality to games. But the key is adding it, not forcing it.
That's absolutely the wrong way to do things. If you add more and more disparate features to a base game you end up with a pile of shrapnel and disconnected elements.
You say forcing it, as though it is some single player game they have wrenched into being online only. No. This is an online game from the start. You might as well complain that Metroid Prime was forcing a first person perspective, instead of adding it.
There are things they can add as far as gameplay mechanics go with technology improvements from the last iteration of SimCity, but they need to do something new, not just reskin an old version into "pretty". I mean we can discuss whether what they added was something we like, but it's not viable for them to just keep updating graphics and rereleasing the same shit over and over. Fans of a particular franchise seem to be so opposed to change, and I'm guilty of it myself. I guess the only real response would be "get with the times." Although, it's not necessarily a comfortable one. Like with all franchises that I love, if I don't like the current iteration, I just don't get it and keep playing the older titles. I don't like Risen very much, so I keep playing Gothic, the same can be applied to games that introduce social networking as a new core gameplay feature. The jury's still out as far as how successful SimCitySocial will be, maybe it will be a smash hit and we're going to see more of it...Civilization Social, Mario Social (although it's already going there sorta), Multiplayer Zelda. As a society, we love that social networking shit, so I guess we'll just see if that translates into gamer culture as well. So far it is, people are buying games with social networking built into them, and despite the hate that they get, companies that attach "always on" don't seem to suffer for it at all.
WiiU Username: MordaRazgrom
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WoW/Diablo 3 Battlenet Battletag: MordaRazgrom#1755
Me and my wife have a gamer YouTube page if interested www.youtube.com/TeamMarriage
That is a load of shit and you know it. Oh the horror, some people are playing this way and some people are playing that way. The horror.
Please, dude. We're talking about having a singleplayer experience, and a multiplayer experience. Two functions are not going to reduce people into drooling zombies unable to decide what to do. What, are you going to say World of Warcraft is awful because it has PvE AND PvP content? Oh noes, disconnected elements!
With that said, of course, the sky's the limit regarding what conditions the developers will impose on us to turn the always connected thing off.
WiiU Username: MordaRazgrom
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WoW/Diablo 3 Battlenet Battletag: MordaRazgrom#1755
Me and my wife have a gamer YouTube page if interested www.youtube.com/TeamMarriage
Last I checked Metroid Prime's first person camera didn't make you completely and utterly blind in game for the first week after launch. I mean if you wanted me to I could dig out my old Gamecube and backdate it, just to make sure. But I think we can agree that while Metroid Prime's camera was a major departure from the Metroid norm it didn't literally break the game.
The same cannot be said for SimCity's DRM.
And the fact that the game is somehow able to be run for at least 20 minutes without an internet connection is rather telling about the necessity of the DRM.
Except this is a Simcity game, where the core of the game is building a city. Which is, even now, almost entirely a singleplayer enterprise.
If Nintendo took something like Mario Galaxy and made the core of the game running around and playing levels alone, then shoehorned in social elements so that stuff other players did indirectly affected the levels you play on and then demanded the game be always online, it would be the same dumb situation, just a lot more obvious.
The "disconnected elements" here are the ones essentially forcing people to participate in social stuff that adds little to nothing to the actual game for shitloads of players instead of letting them play the traditional way, which had no real reason to not be included. "Old" doesn't mean "bad" if people still like it, and if Maxis really did always design Simcity to be online at all times from the start with no alternatives at all, then that was one helluva terrible idea. Having a neighbor with stuff that bleeds into your city is in no way enough of a game-changing feature to force people to deal with this nonsense, especially when they could've let players run multiple cities in a region themselves without ever needing online play.
You can play FF7 for 20 minutes if you pop the playstation one disc tray up and don't go anywhere that causes the game to load data from the disc. If you are not connected to the server, you are fine until you switch cities. Then the game boots you out. You are pretty limited as to what you can do without a connection to the server.
Up to and including everything except for log in.
Very limited, yes.
EDIT: Or switch cities, yes. Which is solved by saving locally.
EDIT2: okay edit 1 was a little over the top. But the point is that it feels like the DRM is just making problems for itself to solve. We've had local saving since forever.
That's sarcasm, right?
Because it should be pretty obvious that there is a massive difference between FF7 having the mechanical necessity of loading from a disc and Simcity having the corporate "necessity" of being authorized remotely. I mean, in one case, the game won't run forever because of something you do; in Simcity's case, somebody else is basically saying it's okay for you to run your game. On your PC. With the game all downloaded to the hard drive. Because of artificially-created constraints, not technical ones.
If this were true, there would most likely be a hack on pirate bay to just let you play the game locally. Regions are on the server, as well as saves.
Granted, population count is something that can be tracked and managed on the client's end. Just because a game was built one way doesn't mean it was the best or only way. But there it is. :?
So it is just DRM with no other purpose than to make it difficult for paying customers to play.
Good to know.
And Henroid, if it DID actually require cloud computing to any great degree, it would simply immediately kick you off once the game lost connection. It does not do this. It only does this when it phones home.
It's also pretty apparent that their coders are lazy as fuck (go look for information on how well the pathfinding AI works with regards to path choice, for instance).
So I'm going to take the "We totally and absolutely do vital calculation on the servers that you could simply not play the game without" argument from Maxis with a frankly gigantic grain of salt.
It fits the Maxis MO, that's for sure. But this is pulling the trigger on an innovation/idea way earlier than we can practically manage. Look what it has resulted in.
I would actually draw a parallel to Dwarf Fortress now - that game tracks literally everything. When a dwarf is out in the rain, every single body part gets labeled as being wet. And it tracks that. As you can imagine, the game runs like shit after a while.
What does SimCity's status as a game which was "designed from top to bottom for connected play" even amount to?
I haven't actually played the game, of course, but from what I've heard, the gimmick is that adjacent cities provide you with resources or services that your own can't have, and some of their economic pressures spill over into your city. If you're playing in a random region with strangers (as opposed to with friends in a private region), then you're probably not communicating or coordinating with these people. So those external resources and pressures are basically just an arbitrary, uncontrollable set of conditions that you have to respond to.
That being the case, why not just simulate a city by giving you a random set of conditions from each direction? Or make some prefabbed regions that ship with the game and let you delete one and make your own city in its place? Or, hell, do a one-time download of other players' cities to set the initial conditions and let you play offline from there? How much difference would it really make?
So the way I see it, there are two broad possibilities:
1) EA chose to use always-on DRM at the outset and the actual multiplayer was shoehorned in after the fact.
2) Maxis had some ideas for online mechanics that they thought would be cool and then chose not to put any effort into adapting those mechanics for offline play.
But either amounts to the same thing. EA/Maxis wanted the game to be always-online, a lot of players wanted the game to not be always-online for various perfectly understandable reasons, and EA/Maxis chose to not care what the players wanted. Or, more abstractly: many players find always-on requirements innately dangerous and cumbersome, and yet publishers are still bending over backwards looking for excuses to make their games require always-on connections. I don't see how that doesn't ultimately amount to one overarching problem with the industry.
Why do we need each individual sim tracked, regarding their daily schedules and jobs and such? Where is the practicality in that when you're doing it for thousands of sims? Not just in the function and mechanics, but from the enjoyment side. You're telling me people are sitting there right now reading the data on each individual sim? Not fucking likely.
Dwarf Fortress is also made by one whole guy relying on donations to survive, and tracks probably an order of magnitude more information than SimCity does (I don't think SimCity tracks beard growth rates for every single living entity, for instance). Completely locally, I might add.
Unless Maxis has a grand total of one underpaid coder, they don't really have an excuse for requiring cloud computing.
So yeah, not buying that story.
(Please do not gift. My game bank is already full.)
I didn't mean to excuse the cloud computing or the tracking of sims in any detail aside from whether they are present or not. I've ranted in the Dwarf Fortress thread about how I think tracking such information is absolutely ridiculous and I'm not sure how much of it is actually important or useful or entertaining. I was meaning to draw parallel to features / functions that literally do nothing for the user.
In SimCity, sims have always just been a statistic. That's all they are and ever should be.
I like how you think you know what you are talking about, like you designed the engine or helped design it and know how it works.
Oh wait.
You don't. So don't act like you. You basically lost all creditably when you called the coders lazy. You got proof to show me otherwise, let's see it.
It sure does.
Because in the scope of the entire gaming industry, nobody gives a shit about Sim City while almost everyone cares about The Sims. People want to populate these cities with Sims, not statistics. For a lot of people that is a huge draw and is front and center on the Sim City website as a major feature of the title.
Plus, who knows what they have planned for the future. Surely this is the beginning of a wholly connected, seamless and coherent Sims experience. I have no game development background but even I can see that a system that populates player's Sim Cities with actual Sims from a Sims 4 game is an attractive experience for a lot of consumers.
Imagine if The Sims 4 connected seamlessly into Sim City and the plots in the city were designed by players in a separate title.
This isn't rocket science, chumps. This is obviously their strategy.
Okay
EDIT:
Wait, it seems they might have patched that. Which is very, very fortunate.
Because uh
that's just embarrasing.
Thats been addressed already in a update. (1.2 I believe.)
Edit- Sorry it was 1.3
It's a shit strategy. You can tell me what they're possibly up to, and I may agree with some of that, but it doesn't mean I think any of it is feasible or entertaining. Well, axe the entertaining part - whether I enjoy something or not doesn't dictate if other people could or should. Feasibility, practicality, that's what this is all about. Maxis took a big bite trying to establish something or just show something can be done, and for what purpose? To what end?
"Because we can," is all I'm seeing.
Take fault with the shitty situation as far as the servers go, but as far as the game itself, if you don't like the fact that it's a multiplayer focused SimCity that requires connections to servers in order to function as intended (ie, it's balanced based upon the multiplayer features), then it's not the game for you.
I've attempted again and again to play this game singleplayer (I'm not having nearly as many issues finding a server the last 3 or 4 days), with me controlling all the cities in a region, and it's just not fun. At all. Get on a region with a ton of other people, and it all the sudden becomes a really compelling and fun game.
Separate the issues with the servers from the game when it works as intended. They are two separate things, and any assumptions made by people who haven't played the game at how easy it'd be to have single player offline added into this game are completely born out of ignorance. Even when people try to explain why it wouldn't work, it's handwaved away as excuses.
Yes, the server issue sucks. No, they more than likely shouldn't have released this game as designed without either being super prepared for the serverload, or advertising the game as an MMO with a subscription fee. But yes, the game as design is super fun if you play it not as one of the previous SimCity games, but as what it actually is.
Okay, so the guy from EA was fucking lying.
Now you're getting it!
WHILE IT'S GOOD THAT THEY FIXED IT, the fact the pathfinding launched in such a sorry state that the Sims, who we have previously noted require cloud computing to work (apparently), couldn't figure out that "HMMmmmmm, maybe we shouldn't be taking this one lane dirt road when there's a massive avenue just a little down the road" really puts holes in the "We absolutely totally need the additional processing power to make your citizens work" argument, since it displays that perhaps they aren't actually using any of the processing power available to its fullest potential.
Because again, playing in a single city "works" if disconnected from the server, but all region play elements are stuck how they were when the last connection was made. The region simulation I believe is just as complex, if not moreso, than the city simulation itself.
But again, this is all assumptions, I don't know exactly how it works, but the cloud computing effeminately isn't necessary on the city scale. On the region scale, I believe it's doing some interesting and complex things involving the data from all the cities in the region, that requires a lot more storage than a single end user would want to have for a single game.