Sometimes I think it's not worthwhile to keep up with the ins and outs of the gaming industry. There's almost too much information, and not all of it good. And it's starting to effect how much I enjoy some titles.
A couple of recent examples: Aliens: Colonial Marines (ACM) and SimCity (SC). We'll start with ACM.
Some of you may have heard about the issues surrounding this title. Most of it has to do with a lot of drama in the development of the game. The developer went on and on about how much they loved the franchise, and how they were finally going to give the fans the "true" Aliens game that they've wanted all these years. What really happened is that they couldn't give two shits about the game, and instead farmed it out to various lower-tier third-party developers to actually make the game, and put out a game that was very different than what they promised us. So much so that people have openly accused them of lying, outright false advertisement, largely based on a "live" demo shown at E3 last year, nearly all of which did not appear in the final game.
That said, the game actually isn't bad. It's just not as good as it could have been, as it should have been. The graphics are a little "meh" most of the time (but other times downright stunning, like the exteriors of LV-426). The AI is a little bit on the stupid side. Okay, maybe more than a "little". But, really, it plays fairly well (on PC, at any rate, although it could be that my system is merely muscling it's way through), and it's not downright buggy or crashing or anything.
But I wonder how I would feel about the game if I hadn't seen those early reviews? If I didn't already know going into it that it wasn't going to be as great as I thought it was?
Which brings me to SimCity. Oh, dear.
What started out as a promising game turned into a nightmare for many, as the game was plagued with server issues at launch. Plenty of paying customers were unable to play the game that they purchased for a week or more. Thankfully, those issues have been largely resolved, but now new issues are coming to light.
That always-online requirement? EA/Maxis said it was due to heavy server-side calculations that were occurring, that most of the detailed simulations you were seeing were actually being done on their end, to offload the extreme stress from your lowly little PCs. This was, apparently, the cause of some of the server issues they were having at launch.
Turns out that was a load of bollocks. The game is, in fact, run entirely offline, and if not for their artificial 20-minute timeout, the game will run just fine indefinitely without a network connection at all. It's actually coded into the game to force itself to quit if it can't talk to the Maxis servers for twenty minutes. If you change that one line of code, the game will run forever, and perfectly fine, for any length of time.
So it turns out that the only reason the servers were there was to facilitate inter-city regional interactions between players (which makes sense for multiplayer) and to save your game, since the only copy of your city is in the cloud. Isn't it? No, actually, that's stored on your PC, too, and just uploaded to their servers at regular intervals and when you quit. And while the servers are necessary for multiplayer, if you choose to run an entire region all on your onesies, the inter-city processing is so minimal (as shown by users tracking exactly what information was sent back and forth between the servers whenever they ran multiple cities), that it could easily be run on your PC as well.
The city size limit? Artificial. It's bound only by their invisible walls, not by any limitation in processing or graphical power. Users have already broken out of those walls and affected the region around them.
One reason for all this, one that I happen to agree with, is the idea that the game was originally intended to be a browser-based game, likely integrated into Facebook or some such. Those limitations make a lot more sense when you look at it that way. But then they decided to make it a full standalone game released at $60, without removing any of those browser-based limitations. And now they're catching a ton of flak for it.
The problem is that I know all these things. I've been keeping up with the news, reading the forums and the news sites. And, frankly, it's starting to ruin the game for me. Now, when I play it, I can't help but see those invisible walls, and the ludicrously stupid traffic AI routines, and forced limitations (like game speed) because their servers can't handle the load. If I hadn't read any of that, I would probably be enjoying the game a lot more than I am.
With something like this, that you look forward to, and you initially enjoy before hearing other people complain... is it better to remain ignorant of the flaws, if you yourself don't notice them? Sometimes... maybe it is.
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