Should I buy SimCity 2013?

Hmmm... good question.

I bought it, as an impulse purchase... it was there in the store, in its neat-looking 3d sleeve, the collectors edition of Simcity 2013. I have so many fond memories of playing Simcity 4, and Simcity 2000...

Now I wish that I could return it.

It does look fantastic, and there is fun to be had, for a few hours, but the thrill doesn't last much beyond that. There are many serious problems, and that is not even counting the whole "always-on DRM", and the controversy that rightly surrounds that issue.

OK... You need to be online all the time in order to play it. If your connection drops, it will continue for up to 20 minutes or so, then close. This just proves that the "always-on" internet requirement was unnecessary, and imposed by the designers as an over-zealous way of protecting the game from piracy.

Aside from all of that, the grid spaces for building cities are far too small. Basically, you can only build small towns. The AI of the game suffers from noticeable problems after playing it for a while - Cities demand more workers in spite of being 2/3rds residential, houses burn in spite of being within a block of a fire station, sim traffic blocks specific roads while ignoring the alternative routes, just because they are a little longer... that sort of thing. Maybe those problems will be fixed by patches over time. There is no way to shape terrain, which proves very frustrating, because sometimes you just cannot connect roads because the terrain won't let you, and plopping certain buildings down leaves awkward-looking cavities in the landscape.

I can't recommend Simcity 2013, and it totally burns me to say that, because I have been waiting for years for this game to come back in a new updated form. Graphically speaking, it looks brilliant, and there are some genuinely great ideas there. The technical problems could be fixed with updates, but as someone who cares about computer games as an artform, I am personally very uncomfortable with the fact that the designers (EA and Maxis) have chosen to force players to play online, and make their saves on the EA cloud, rather than their own hard drives. You can play alone, and elect to exclude any other players, but you are still playing online, and relying on their servers. Those servers will be shut down one day, and then no-one will play Simcity 2013. This is completely against the spirit of the previous Simcity games, and an example of a game publisher being willing to compromise their product, and treat their customers like potential criminals, in order to enforce an anti-piracy measure that has already been proven to be ineffective. I can understand a game company's need to fight piracy, I respect that, but this is a bridge too far - they have compromised the game for all of the honest purchasers as well.

EA will get their sales for this game, because it's Simcity, and gamers have been hungering for Simcity for a decade... but I for one, have vowed to never buy another EA game until they show proper respect to their customers, and drop the counter-productive "always-online" DRM policy. Multiplayer games like Battlefield 3, or World of Warcraft, that's a different story, they are inherently multiplayer games. Simcity should not be forced into that box. If the designers want to have a multiplayer option in Simcity, that is great, but they have shot themselves in the foot and created a storm for themselves by deliberately dropping any option to play offline.

I can only hope that there will be a Simcity 6 one day, which does not suffer from the same mistakes as its predecessor.

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RE:

Should I buy SimCity 2013?

It looks neat, and there doesn't seem to be any more server problems, but it has some bad reviews. Aye or nay for buying it?

You can only play it ONLINE, they made it that way to stop people stealing their products. So if you dont mine using the internet and have no usage limit, go ahead.

me personally, I refused to buy it the second I found out that i have to use an online server.

i sim city is kathmandu.