Or maybe EA is willing to suffer through weeks of terrible optics if it means achieving the long-term goal of converting traditionally single-player genres into online experiences. So maybe there's a chance that this debacle, whenever it ends, will conclude with Electronic Arts allowing players to enjoy the game without having to connect online. By the next year, it had dropped the always-online schemes, and Assassin's Creed III only required a single activation. What happened there? In fact, the bad PR and outcry from fans over an anti-piracy scheme that seemed to hurt legitimate players far more than it did pirates caused Ubisoft to reconsider. If your internet connection dropped during play for some reason, you'd immediately lose all your progress since the last save point. Another recent game that did was Ubisoft's PC version of Assassin's Creed II, released in 2010. Of course, Diablo didn't also have the issue of erasing players' progress. The lesson there was: If you screw up and don't properly plan for the launch of your service, so what? If the game's good enough, players will stop complaining the second they get in. Half-Life 2 was celebrated as the game of the year. It reported that fake programs promising to unlock your copy of Half-Life but that actually contained a virus were spreading around to impatient players.Īnd now? The once-reviled Steam service, required to play Half-Life and looked upon as useless bloatware in 2004, is now a beloved addition to any gamer's desktop. "Message boards on Half-Life 2 fan sites were buzzing with talk about the delays and the frustration people felt about being kept from playing," the BBC News reported at the time. But gamers, used to instant gratification, were up in arms when this process resulted in some slight delays. Remember the great wailing and rending of garments over the launch of Half-Life 2 in 2004? That game simply required you to pop on Valve's server for a split-second to do a one-time confirmation that you had a genuine game, and then you could get to playing. This is hardly the first DRM-related controversy that's come up as a new game was released. And Amazon removed both the downloadable and physical versions of the game from its store, with a note that reads, in part, "at this time we do not know when the issue will be fixed."īut once this is all solved, she said, it'll be like nothing happened. There had certainly been short-term ones: On Metacritic, the game currently has over 1800 user reviews that average out to a 1.7 out of 10. There won't be any long-term repercussions, my now long-suffering fiancee said as we drove to work Thursday morning, as the blackout stretched into its third day. She did not give a timeframe for the resolution. In response to Wired's request for comment, an EA spokesperson referred us to a blog post by SimCity senior producer Kip Katsarelis, who wrote that Electronic Arts would be adding new servers until the player base could be fully accommodated, and that it would prioritize stabilizing this situation before it turned the game's features back on. What's next? Will EA determine that the skyscrapers are just too tall? By the end of the day EA had ripped out the "Cheetah" gameplay mode, which speeds up the passage of time so you can develop your city more quickly. At first it was non-core features like achievements and high score leaderboards. Electronic Arts' attempts to fix the problem have not only been unsuccessful, they've been making the SimCity blackout even worse, at least from a public relations standpoint: EA said Thursday that it would actually begin removing features from the game in an attempt to get it to run. In other words, SimCity is currently in the midst of a disaster that makes zombie attacks and nuclear meltdowns seem tame.
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