When I showed up at the store on March 7th religiously and told the shopkeeper that I had a reservation for Simcity, I knew there was a good chance I wouldnât be able to play that first day. A simple search on Twitter for hastag #simcity resulted in hundreds of complaints from players in other countries who had already purchased the game and couldnât play because EAâs servers were down.
Simcity requires a permanent Internet connection to play, or rather, for Electronic Artsâ DRM to work and not expel you from the game for being a pirate. This system was also used by Blizzard in its Diablo III and the results were similar: a few days without being able to play the game.
During the first few days, the servers on each continent went from 2 to 8 to better distribute users, but to make the task easier, EA also decided to layer the game: disable fast speed, leaderboards, achievements, etc. As of today, 3 weeks after its launch, only achievements work.
If that were the only thing that didnât work, it could be a bit overlooked, but in addition, the game comes with more than a dozen bugs that ruin your game: traffic jams that prevent your trade trucks from reaching the factories, problems when establishing the cityâs income/expenses (you can go from earning 100,000 to suddenly losing 500,000 without any explanation), errors when accounting for materials sent to a common construction site in the region (great work), traffic that remains stopped and immobilizes the police and firefighters and causes the city to burn in flames. My favorite is when it tells you that errors have been detected in your city and it is left in limbo: you canât access it anymore.
I have played it for 64 hours and the game has a lot of potential, but it is inevitable to have the feeling that it is a very untested product, that has been launched in a hurry. Although it is possible that they will fix it in the future, at this time I cannot recommend it; It is exasperating to lose a game that you have been playing for hours due to a mistake.
At least I will be able to play Simcity 4, which Electronic Arts has given me as compensation, if someone has a 4:3 monitor, let me know that the game is not compatible with 16:9âŠ