sigh I'll need to create an Origin account and always be online to play this, right? I miss the days when we could simply install a game. The only validation being a product key.
It's a shame, and it's inconvenient, frustrating, only hurts legitimate players and won't do a thing to stop piracy, but it does mean that a multi-billion dollar corporation greenlit a fantastically nerdy sandbox sim and gave it a triple-A budget. If that's what it takes to keep their board happy, so be it.
I would rather take the slight-to-moderate pain of EA/Origin DRM and have an honest-to-goodness SimCity 5 to play than not have one at all.
And come on, this really does look like it's going to be brilliant, doesn't it? The enthusiasm of those engine designers was obvious, and there's a lot of talk of how it's going to be even richer than previous versions (2K, 4 Rush Hour.)
http://kotaku.com/5915377/like-diablo-iii-sim-city-will-requ...
It's also not going to let you reload an earlier savegame - your city is in a persistent world, even if you want to play in a private region without other people.
I'm skipping this one; I'd rather feel I was missing out on a good game than become bitter trying to actually play it the way I want.
SimCity 4 was sometimes criticized for being too difficult and complicated, and what few city sims we've had since SC4 -- and that may include the new Sim City -- tried to appeal to a broader audience, but they have all done so at the cost of alienating the more "hard core" sim fans. They're all still playing a heavily modified SC4, but the game is showing its age.
It focuses on transit, but it's an excellent game and very open ended.
This also means it will be possible to hack your city and get it into the persistent world, so if your city affects nearby regions the game will be a mess.
When was that? A decade ago my games required me to put the CD in the drive to play. And two decades ago my games required me to find random words in the user manual to make sure I wasn't a pirate.
I hate the game needing me to stay online. And it's a stupid strategy to hurt legitimate users to try to stop pirates. But to be honest, that's much less bad than what came before it :P
I'm currently playing (or rather, trying to play) Assassin's Creed. It's a series I never got into, so I bought the first two on Steam. Guess what? The servers at Ubisoft have been turned off. This leads to multi-second pauses every 60 seconds, and after various game events - http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?p=33046... . At least the game still sort-of works, but if they "improve" the DRM any further, they'll be completely broken in the future.
I hate DRM as much as the next guy but installing from server accounts is amazing.
But with servers, there is no control. And it seems an obvious further development of DRM is to host some of the application code remotely, so that no simple workaround will be available to your children, should they want to see what games were like in your youth.
I miss that feeling of being able to completely disconnect from the Internet and just enjoy gaming on my local machine.
It's a shame, I would have loved a new single player city building sim but after seeing how badly Blizzard screwed Diablo III there's no way I'm trusting EA to manage this.