SimCity developers say 2013 launch was ‘heartbreaking’
I have a soft spot for SimCity (2013). It was beautiful and pleasant, even if it was badly damaged in its construction.
Merry RPS Fanzine PC Gamer recently spoke to a portion of its design team about these compromises, their reasons, and the ensuing series-killing backlash.
If you don’t remember, SimCity had a Horrible launch. It requires an “always online” internet connection even if you’re playing alone, and players will be kicked out of the game if the Internet or the SimCity servers go down. SimCity’s servers were down a lot, especially with millions trying to log in in the first few days and weeks after release. Lead designer Stone Libranda calls the launch “heartbreaking.”
At the time, EA’s Lucy Bradshaw said the online connectivity was an “innovative game design decision,” though it appeared to be about banning piracy and pushing users into EA’s new digital storefront, Origin.
“SimCity has been one of the areas that has been hacked the most [series] All the time and so there was a prompt to find: “How can we make it intolerable,” Librenda told PC Gamer. One way to do this is to keep a lot of data on the server so there is really nothing to hack, and if you hack your own copy you still need to check the servers.”
“Origin is the storefront on consumer devices, so the motivation was to take SimCity online and use it to push Origin,” says Ocean Quigley, creative director of SimCity. “Maybe it would have worked, had the infrastructure been in place.”
Liebrand also says that “at the time, every game had multiplayer components,” and that he had a “personal goal” to be able to play SimCity with his two sons. No PC gamer has spoken saying that the “always online” requirement is there in order to offload some simulations to EA’s servers for performance reasons, which was the other justification given by EA at the time.
Aside from these trade-offs and launch issues, there is some discussion in the article about the reasons why SimCity is still exciting to me – mainly the simulations and the design philosophy that I grew out of. “I had a sign above my desk that said, ‘Cities are people, not buildings,'” says Libranda. “It was an urban planning quote. You don’t want to think of a city as a collection of buildings and streets. You want to think of them as people moving through these systems, from one place to another.”
Shortly after the release of SimCity, both Libranda and Quigley Maxis departed, and EA shut down the studio soon after. Quigley and another SimCity developer started a studio called Jellygrade, which never released anything. Today, Quigley is a creative director at Meta working on VR, and Levanda is a designer at Riot Games.
Social media addict. Zombie fanatic. Travel fanatic. Music geek. Bacon expert.