SimCity: Disaster

In a bid to increase buzz for their latest SimCity offering, EA has decided that the in-game disasters needed to feel a bit more real.  They felt the best way to really bring the experience to life would be to turn the whole game into a disaster.  A few months ago we at Dream Nexus wrote an article about the new SimCity game and it looks like we were right on the mark.

Now that the game has officially launched, people are having loads of issues.  Many users haven’t been able to even download the game.  Those that have been able to download it have had lots of difficulty getting logged in to actually play the game.  To compound matters even further, those that have been able to play haven’t been overly impressed.

Expectantly, users have vented their frustrations the only real way they can.  As of this writing, SimCity’s rating on Amazon is sitting at 1.2 out of 5 stars and Metacritic’s average user score is at an amazing 2 out of 10.  On the bright side this is more proof that aggregating user review scores can yield pretty accurate results.

The question that seems to keep coming up is why these issues exist on a game that everyone would prefer to play in single-player fashion.  That is how the previous games were and they were successful because that is what’s fun to play.  EA obviously had other plans in mind and wanted to create some sort of SimCity / Zynga-style hybrid abomination all in the name of supporting the game’s ecosystem . . . right.

While EA would like to pin all the negative reviews on the self-inflicted DRM issues, people are starting to realize that is only part of the problem.  Anyone who actually reads any of the posted reviews will see that there are a lot of complaints about the actual game.  People aren’t happy making small micro-cities and are wondering what happened to the large and enjoyable maps all the previous iterations had.   I guess these people must be wrong because the infinite wisdom of EA says that everyone wants their games to be more social, casual, and to exist in a ‘supportive ecosystem’ where there are plenty of things to spend more money on.