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Losonti Tokash wrote:Your constant comparison of ME3 to COD or Halo also leads me to conclude you have either never played any of these games or you have suffered some sort of traumatic brain injury where you can only communicate in meaningless buzzphrases taught to you by gaming journalism.

Losonti Tokash wrote:ME1 was published by Microsoft, not EA.

And yeah, 2 and 3 are the best games Bioware has made because they're actual games and are fun to play. The first one is largely a clunky pile of hot garbage that is an absolute slog. And that's still better than their earlier games of "clumsily modeled D&D fan fiction."

But what's really funny is you always complain about how derivative games are because you want them to be just like these other games.

Your constant comparison of ME3 to COD or Halo also leads me to conclude you have either never played any of these games or you have suffered some sort of traumatic brain injury where you can only communicate in meaningless buzzphrases taught to you by gaming journalism.

Oh, and obviously my throw away line about video game Hitler was 100% serious and I was directly stating people actually believed that, rather than mocking your hysterical outrage about video games.

Lagmonster wrote:So is there a good, fun, modern-looking SimCity-type game out there, that is actually finished, and doesn't employ dated or ugly graphics, and requires a reasonably complex amount of strategic thinking and balancing to build a functioning city?

Jan 14, 2014
Simon Fox, Lead Engineer, Single Player Mode

Hi, I’m Simon Fox, lead engineer on the Single Player Mode for SimCity, and I’m here to tell you more about how we engineered Offline gameplay for SimCity.

When the game released, our fans were calling for Offline. I rallied the team to start making that happen as soon as practical after launch.

REENGINEERING A CREATIVE VISION

The original creative vision for SimCity was to make a game where every action had an effect on other cities in your region. As such, we engineered the game to meet this vision, setting up the player’s PC (client) to communicate all of its information to the servers. That means that our entire architecture was written to support this, from the way that the simulation works to the way that you communicate across a region of cities. So yes, while someone was able to remove the “time check” shortly after launch, they were unable to perform key actions like communicating with other cities that they had created locally, or with the rest of their region(s), or even saving the current state of their cities.

My team did, however, see a path forward towards Offline, one that would maintain the integrity of the simulation. Lucy once said that Offline wouldn’t be possible “without a significant amount of engineering work”, and she’s right. By the time we’re finished we will have spent over 6 ½ months working to write and rewrite core parts of the game to get this to work. Even things that seem trivial, like the way that cities are saved and loaded, had to be completely reworked in order to make this feature function correctly.

REWRITING KEY PIECES

I wish it were as simple as flipping a switch and telling the game to communicate with a dummy client rather than our server, but it’s more than that. Entire calculations had to be rewritten in order to make the game function correctly.

SimCity was written to rely on the servers. The game routinely pings the servers for critical pieces of data (region status, workers, trading etc.) and it relies on that information to keep the simulation moving. This meant rewriting the entire system, which previously existed in Java, and putting it into C++. We’ve had to knock out the internet pipe stuff. There’s lots of code that hits the servers looking for information. We’ve had to write a lot of code to produce that data locally, specifically for region information.

Our game routes pieces of data from one city to another as data flows through the regions. All of that code exists on the server, and now we’ve brought all of that down into the client. The client processes the region box, which is what all of the cities pushes their data into. We’ve brought that down into the client as well.

And now, all of the regional simulation needs to be done locally. The algorithms governing trading between cities needed to be retuned in order to make the behavior between cities more responsive for this type of play. This in itself required major optimizations in order to run the simulation locally. We have an obligation to make the game fun and functional on all specs of machines. We wouldn’t want someone who was enjoying the Multiplayer game to find the Single Player game crippled due to poor optimization.

And it’s not just adding, we had to remove parts of the game for it to function properly as well. This means removing lots of code integral to Multiplayer include code and UI supporting Trading, Social Features, Global Market, Leaderboards and Achievements. And, all without crippling the Multiplayer game.

So where are we at right now? We’ve been working on this since August and now, we’ve hit Alpha and are in the final stages of testing before we release it as part of Update 10 in the future. On behalf of the engineering team, thank you for your patience on this one. We know you want Offline play in SimCity and we are really happy that we are finally getting ready to deliver it to you.

Zaune wrote:

Lagmonster wrote:So is there a good, fun, modern-looking SimCity-type game out there, that is actually finished, and doesn't employ dated or ugly graphics, and requires a reasonably complex amount of strategic thinking and balancing to build a functioning city?

You're going to mock me if I suggest Dwarf Fortress, aren't you? Though it does tick every item off that list except graphics, and even then there are a number of graphical tilesets.

Purple wrote:

Zaune wrote:

Lagmonster wrote:So is there a good, fun, modern-looking SimCity-type game out there, that is actually finished, and doesn't employ dated or ugly graphics, and requires a reasonably complex amount of strategic thinking and balancing to build a functioning city?

You're going to mock me if I suggest Dwarf Fortress, aren't you? Though it does tick every item off that list except graphics, and even then there are a number of graphical tilesets.

He might, I won't. Fellow dwarf, I greet you.

Lagmonster wrote:I won't either, but I've not played it before. I know it's a popular game, but I never approached it because it was described less as 'lo-res SimCity-style metropolis builder' and more 'unwinnable quagmire of spiraling and inevitable doom'.

Purple wrote:

Zaune wrote:

Lagmonster wrote:So is there a good, fun, modern-looking SimCity-type game out there, that is actually finished, and doesn't employ dated or ugly graphics, and requires a reasonably complex amount of strategic thinking and balancing to build a functioning city?

You're going to mock me if I suggest Dwarf Fortress, aren't you? Though it does tick every item off that list except graphics, and even then there are a number of graphical tilesets.

He might, I won't.

Fellow dwarf, I greet you.

Vendetta wrote:Or if you want a not shit agent based building sim, Tropico 4

EA wrote:Creative vision

TheFeniX wrote:ME2 was a boring corridor shooter (uh oh, I'm using "review buzzwords!") from what I could be bothered to play. But that isn't even all that important in an RPG. What was important was that the storyline felt like a sidequest or DLC. I skipped ME3 because I realized it wasn't going to get any better as a series.

Civil War Man wrote:So you are saying that you know with 100% certainty that ME2 and ME3 are objectively bad games and worse than Bioware's earlier work despite having played none of ME3 and an unspecified amount of ME2. Sounds legit.

They are not perfect games by any stretch of the imagination, but I'd rank 3 as the strongest of the series if only because it actually makes Shepard feel human.

TheFeniX wrote:You'll obviously be happy to show where I said "objectively bad" or even "bad." And piss off with the "you didn't 100% the game and think it's boring? Pfft" because that's the whole fucking point of why it was boring. It couldn't keep me engaged. That is a fault with the game, not me.

Everything about the development of ME3 had me feel the same way: this isn't a game for me. It's targeted toward a different audience.

Hahahahaha. Oh wait, you're serious, allow me to laugh even harder! The game they "published" was ME1. The games they had a direct hand in developing were 2 and 3 and ME2 was a step back from ME1 and ME3 couldn't decide if it wanted to be Halo or CoD more. ME3 wasn't terrible. But it was a pretty big fucking joke. "Tali has 3 fingers, let's totally ignore her character model and just crop some fingers off this chick." I could bag on ME3 all day for it's lazy production value, laughable premise, and shitty color-coded ending, among with numerous other failures it culminated in. Instead I'll just say: it's EA and BW has been gutted like a fish.

If you honestly think ME2+ were BWs best games you either haven't played anything they made pre-2006 or so, or just don't like RPGs.

Civil War Man wrote:Shepard has just experienced one of the worst and most humiliating defeats in their entire life. Joker chooses that moment to crack a poorly-thought out joke about it, causing even a Paragon Shepard to go ballistic.

Yup there is, it's called sim city 4
In all seriousness , no not really . Simulation games have been dieing out.
Civilization 5 is the most recent big simulation game I can think of

Civil War Man wrote:Not finishing ME2 is no big deal, seeing as how the list of games I haven't finished is a mile long, but you yourself admitted that you haven't even touched ME3. So that "If you think game X is better than game Y then you don't like RPGs" comment is based predominantly on secondhand information and your impressions from third party sources rather than any actual experiences with the game itself.

Though I do find the Tali example funny. Out of all of the flaws of ME3, you choose to single out them half-assing an easter egg that is only seen if the player follows a very specific story path (Tali survives through the end of the Quarian storyline and is romanced in ME2 and ME3).