The SimCity Snafu, Why I'm proud of Maxis

Since the release of SimCity, there's been a constant struggle for stability that EA and Maxis hasn't quite managed to fix. Maxis is trying their hardest, as seen by the numerous updates and additional servers they've brought online since the game launch, but they also know they aren't quite up to snuff yet, and are still working hard to make their customers happy. They've even offered a free EA game to anyone that's registered their copy of SimCity at this point. So why are gamers still so mad?

Well, let's take a look at the traditional SimCity editions. When you look back, you see games in which cities had to be pretty well self-sufficient. Cities which, without your careful planning and attention, would be horribly ill-conceived blobs of zones with not enough fire, police, and hospital coverage, and if you weren't bussing around the ill in your hard-to-drive ambulance, you sometimes weren't able to make ends meet in the grander scheme of things. Running a city in SimCity 4 wasn't easy, and that was kind of the point.

The fun thing about the city was seeing how far you could get before you failed. That's really what the game is about, if you look at it objectively. It's a strategy game where you have to figure out how to get your city to work. If you somehow manage to get the city to run on its own, making more money than you were spending, it became a rewarding screen saver to look at... at least, until the aliens descended from the heavens and blasted your city with their giant laser, destroying half of your buildings, and your world wonder, and setting another quarter of your city on fire. And then you'd rebuild.

But you know, Maxis is one of those companies that, much like Valve, are constantly striving for better and more interesting gameplay. In this instance of SimCity, they found that through the power of the internet. This is the primary thing that people are complaining about, but if you look at the game and how it has progressed since it's first release, taking it to the internet is the most obvious next step. What Maxis is trying to do here is make the game a little bit more like running a real city, and the only way to do that is with a real working economy, and the only way to achieve that fairly is online.

While yes, you can set up your own region, leave it private, and run all of the cities in the region by itself, that's not really the point. The reason the game is online only isn't because of some silly DRM scheme implemented by EA, and no number of angry anti-DRM gamers are going to convince me of that. And while yes, I can see how having the game online only does help protect against game piracy, the point of the system isn't that. The point is that you are supposed to be playing this game WITH OTHER PEOPLE. If it weren't so hard to manage a world economy with the number of players Maxis was expecting to get with their new title, I'd even say that we wouldn't be limited to regions, but instead all placing cities on one really big world map.

To me, the vision Maxis was going for in creating SimCity is a smaller-scale attempt at creating a global community of cities. I'd even posit to say that the next Maxis title might be more akin to an MMO, with cities being created as cities in states that interact with each other in countries that then interact with the rest of the world. SimCity: Planets?

What I'm really trying to say here is that I believe the gamers crying out for the ability to play offline, single-player only, no internet connection required, are completely missing the point. SimCity 4 was pretty close to the best single-player SimCity experience I could hope for, and I'm ready to step into the realm of online, multi-player, region based gameplay, and I think that the gamer population as a whole should take a step back and look at the bigger picture. Maxis has been a company I've respected for what they do, and for that, I trust that they are following their vision. If that means that SimCity is going to remain online only, so be it, I'm going to continue to play and enjoy crafting regions with other players, and I'm going to love it.