Honestly I think Maxis deserves a ton of blame as well. They operate semi-autonomously for how long and they routinely churned out terrible games. On reddit, I see far more people blame EA than I do Maxis. And while I'm all for EA getting a ton of bad press, I think it's bs that nobody points a finger at Maxis because they're just as guilty, imo. Nostalgia for 90s and early 00s Maxis is blinding people from the reality that Maxis turned into a shit dev
Yes, but there is a pattern of EA ruining previously good development houses. It's like expression, "The common element of all your failed relationships is you."
I think it's a result in AAA development in general being in a slump.
If anything, I'd say Ubisoft (outside of one or two lone bright spots like Rayman) has been worse than EA the last few years, with the rotten cherry of Uplay on top.
Have a look at Activision/Blizzard. They built essentially the same thing (Origin/Uplay) but being very customer friendly about it and have had crazy success with Battle.net.
You've never played their recent games then. Battle.net 2.0 is routinely called 0.2 and considered a step back in every single way, aside from FB integration I guess. It didn't even have chat channels until recently or clan support. Promises made for starcraft 2 5 years ago have yet to be delivered on. Diablo 3 was a terrible cash grab and mostly abandoned by players.
After Activision purchased blizzard it has not been the same company.
You're conflating the battle.net platform that they have built, which is the launcher, the updater, etc. with concerns that people had over matchmaking and chat support.
Uplay is a horrendous piece of junk that feels like a horrendous piece of junk that's horrible DRM. Nobody talks about chat channels and clan support in Uplay, because the only function Uplay has is to sell you games and stop you from pirating games.
Battle.net serves the same purpose, but it serves it much more gracefully. Apart from some complaints about no offline only mode for Diablo and Starcraft, it's been a pretty quiet system. Even with the new launcher it's pretty respectful to players.
I think it's pretty telling that you talk about specific functions like clan support and how Diablo 3 was a cash grab. It means you're talking about gameplay features, and not about the Battle.net platform at all.
The fact is, Battle.net is pretty quiet from a DRM perspective. You don't feel violated by installing the launcher like I did when I loaded Uplay. It feels like a tool for interoperability across Blizzard instead of an attempt to outsteam steam while screwing you over trying to lock down your games.
Battle.net's launcher got me playing hearthstone, it got me playing HOTS, it let me reconnect with people that I forgot I had on my friends list from when I played WoW. It was a useful tool. This is regardless of how long it took them to get clan support in SC2 or global chat channels or matchmaking concerns or whatever else your pet issue might be. Whatever the case, I didn't feel cheated just by installing it. Whether the games are good or not are different question.
Blizzard has a huge fan base and have had much success with recent games like Hearthstone and the build up to Heroes of the Storm is also looking very promising. SC2 has stagnated and Diablo had missteps but they've made bold steps in trying to fix those problems. I don't think Activision's stewardship of Blizzard and EA are even in the same league. Blizzard has maintained a very unique and powerful brand with almost Nintendo level IP. There are a lot of characters from Blizzard games that are well known.
Also Blizzard's' international presence is very large.
This is the classic symptom of changing oneself to fit the mainstream once one hits the mainstream. Whether it's EA's fault of Maxis's fault is just fruitless finger pointing (it's EA's, these guys are literally the cancer that's killing the video game industry), but the real mistake is updating your game to fit "mainstream standards" of connectivity, social, high quality 3d graphics, etc. Some management official or engineer probably sold these ideas as completely required innovations if Simcity wanted to stay competitive with things like facebook or MMOs (i.e. other time-consumers), and everyone just jumped on board.
And it's that very idea of "we need to stay competitive" that really killed Simcity. Here in capitalist societies, we're sold on the idea competition is great, but it's not, it assumes the fact the rules stay the same and focuses attention on what our "enemies" are doing. We become obsessed with not doing what we do best, but with doing what we think will beat the others. In Simcity's case, it was adopting online connectivity and social interaction despite the fact Simcity is inherently a creative game and not a social one (in fact, unless you're a trash-tier mayor, you've spent time researching city layouts, reading through strategies, and possibly even simulating various algorithms and geometries in matlab or whatnot... whereas in a social game, you'd be spending your time name-calling the other players). Strategies and ideas that emerge from competition focus on trying to capture customers from an adversary, and completely ignores the fact people are complicated, don't like change, and that a company can capture them by just being incrementally "better" in some engineering metric.
Today, it's too late for simcity, but to a new rising city game like skylines, I hope they ignore what "the competition" are doing and just focus on making their fun city building game more fun (e.g. instead of worrying about online, social, or the 2018 version of online-social which will probably be 3d holograms or something, spend time introducing new mechanics like strategic resources, "work from home" algorithms, flying cars, racism / gentrification, etc.)
I think Simcity came around in the same era where everything EA did was online, for no reason. It's like the execs said 'online social games are killing us, we need all of our games to be online and social' and wouldn't sign off on a project without those two check boxes.
Need for Speed: Rivals was similar. It was a neat concept, but it revolved entirely around online play that was generally just completely terrible. You get dumped in a map with 1-7 other people, and then you drive around aimlessly hoping that you eventually run into them, which you don't. In the meantime, you're listening to every idiot with a Playstation Camera screaming at their moms for another PB&J, or some jackass swearing the entire time because he thinks he's alone in his room, because there's no way to turn off voice chat in the game whatsoever.
Congratulations, your game is both online (but you can't really tell) and social (but it's actually antisocial).
Simcity is the same way. What if you could play online against other people? I mean… with other people. You could build neighbouring towns. Except you're actually building neighbourhoods because realistically sized cities would take too much server resources. And then you can interact with other cities! By buying or selling resources like garbage pickup, recycling, and power.
Except that the servers didn't work, so online only meant offline always. And the social idea was cool, until some jackass dropped into your region and built a zone that was entirely coal power plants and industrial zones, and polluted the whole region. Or built a city with nothing but power plants, provided power to everyone else in the region, then one day bulldozed everything, pulling the rug out from under everyone else and sending their cities into chaos.
I really hope that Cities: Skylines is successful. It already seems like a far more interesting game than any previous Simcity was, and it has a lot more potential as well. I love the idea of being able to ease congestion by 'work from home' incentives, and it would be cool if they (or modders) could implement that.
The racism / gentrification thing might actually be extremely interesting for its effect on land-value. Like, each sim-citizen would be assigned arbitrary a race; to not conflict with real world race, we can call it race alpha, beta, eta, and omega. On a regional (or global) level, each race would have an affinity value for the other races that is periodically calculated based upon the aggregate contribution to city land value from that race...
Or, in colloquial terms, I like you if you like me or if you bring up the land value of my house. And the land value of my house is equal to however they used to calculate land value, and how much I like the race of my neighbors.
It would be amazing (and probably instructive) to see how much gentrification, segregation, and whatnot evolves out of this. Would we see all the races converge to harmony as race becomes a non-factor in calculating land value (because the affinities converge to 1 number)? Or will we see cycles of alpha race at times increasing land value, and at times decreasing it? Or will we see high rates of crime due to increasing population in sectors of eta race? Or will we see long-term oppression where omega race always increases land-value and beta race always decreases land value?
I think you definitely hit the spot on what killed SimCity, but a 3D holographic city builder would probably be one of the best things ever. Combined with the street level view you can get in City: Skylines it'd actually be really really cool to see.
Most of the people from 'Maxis' left Maxis a long time ago. The current 'Maxis' is just the brand that EA is slapping on stuff from that studio, but it bears almost no relation whatsoever to the Maxis that we all grew up loving.
What it seemed like happened was the Maxis developed a great (or at least good) game, and EA came in and stuck their own requirements in where they didn't belong, which then caused all the issues.
And honestly their strong suit was never the software itself so much as the awesome ideas that came from the Will Wright, Jeff Braun, and their team. For instance, The Sims. Not a great game technically, not much innovation there are far as game play. In fact it's quite generic. But the idea of creating an AI-driven character that has it's own emotions, it's own life? That's legendary stuff. But they've always seemed to try to appeal to the masses, watering down their games to the point that they become boring over the years. Their games went from interesting complex simulations to disney-like worlds where everything is nicely polished, but not very intriguing.
And this doesn't even factor in all the mistakes that EA has made.
Speaking of that, is there an indie competitor to the Sims out there? My biggest gripe with that series is the $30 game + $6000000 of expansions model, which could be pretty easily replaced with community-made mods to build on a simpler base game.
