Unsurprisingly EA is already rolling out the first wave of
DLC for SimCity, which isn’t a problem in itself. However they seem to have
prioritised it over fixing critical bugs. To my dismay, I only discovered them
after many hours of play within the same game region, and after writing my own
review.
The first bug I encountered was caused by trying to build a
regional wonder with the help of a friend. After he paid the hefty price of one
million Simolians to begin construction on an Arcology, we both noticed strange
occurrences in our cities. Random warning messages from our advisors would pop
up, stating buildings weren’t open due to a lack of workers. Incredible traffic
jams would form at the freeway junction and buildings were being abandoned at
an alarming rate. After some investigation, it turned out that almost my entire
population was going to work on the Arcology every day. Something that shouldn’t
occur until the required amounts of construction materials had been delivered
to the site.
Despite this completely crippling my cities economy and
forcing me to abandon my gambling specialisation, I decided to carry on. I was
curious to see what would actually be achieved if we finished building the
Arcology. At this point you may sensibly be thinking, “why not cancel building
it, if it causes so many problems?” Well that was plan A until we realised the
game won’t let you.
Several hours of careful city management later, I bumped
into a rather typical nuisance of playing SimCity. My game had failed to synch
with EA’s servers again. Great, another twenty minutes of play lost I thought
as I clicked the ‘roll back’ button again. Then as I tried to re-enter the
game, it never got past the loading screen telling me to try again later. After
leaving the game for an entire day, I was still running into the same loading
error. A quick search turned up a massive thread on EA’s tech support forum, as
thousands of players who had encountered the same bug were having to manually
ask EA’s tech support to recover their save files. No proof was needed to show
that games which only allow cloud saves are a bad idea, but now we have it.
Having run into this bug, I know it’s not worth my time playing another minute
of SimCity.
As for the DLC itself, players can now build Nissan Leaf
Charging Stations as extra mode of transport. This lets your Sims zip around in
non-polluting electric cars. Obviously it’s a little piece of advertising for
Nissan, and to make up for that the DLC is free.
“Plopping
down the Nissan Leaf Charging Station will add happiness to nearby buildings.
Adding the Charging Station will not take power, water or workers away from
your city. Zoom in to the streets of cities and players will start seeing a
percentage of their Sims from all wealth classes driving the electric vehicles.
The Charging Station produces no garbage or sewage as well making it pollution
free.”
While I’m not entirely opposed to large companies being
able to put adverts into games, it would be nice if the added content was
actually balanced. Much like the special editions of the game that included the
British, French or German theming, it just makes an already easy game even
easier. Of course it is optional DLC, but considering the bad PR EA and Maxis have
already attracted for the game; you’d expect them to get their priorities sorted.
