SimCity 2013: A Lesson In How Not To Launch A Game

SimCity is one of the most iconic, beloved computer games ever. Its formula instantly appealed to so many. The genre became known as the 'god game'; the player was given ultimate control over their own virtual city.  It was ridiculously fun and like any classic it swallowed hours of time for all the right reasons.

In 2012, Maxis announced it was back. Taking advantage of modern multicore hardware and vast RAM, it would use a new simulation engine they called Glassbox. This would allow the game to not just simulate the final effects of the player's actions, but actually simulate the mechanisms themselves. Cars wouldn't be graphical assets that appeared and disappeared to indicate traffic, they would be actual models with a starting point and destination, even a purpose for each journey. The traffic would be the collective end result of thousands of these cars modelled together. This priciple extended to all aspects of the game.

The game would have multiplayer, an obvious addition that players had long desired. It was all very exciting.

The Game

The game was launched in March 2013. The Mac version that was promised was pushed back five months to August. It was to be the first of many frustrations with this new SimCity.

The goals of the new SimCity and its Glassbox engine were to increase the game's sophistication, make the game feel more directly a result of the player's actions and to generally increase the realism of the simulation. At least, that's what I assumed.

The game did get some things very right. The grapihics were pitch-perfect with realism and cartoon fun in balance. Modular buildings were an interesting and fun advent in principle. Seeing power and water bubble along roads in real if abstracted units felt satisfying. Being able to play alongside friends offered a lot of promise.

Manhattan with SimCity 2013 plot size overlaid. Credit to Reddit user Yuzername. A fellow user asked 'what game is that?' 'Real life' came the reply!

So what went wrong?

This gets its own heading for a reason: a lot went wrong. I want to say that I am not an impatient player. I loved SimCity and was willing to be very long-suffering whilst Maxis and EA got through the bugs. I'd helped beta test the game and I saw the potential of Glassbox. I so wanted this to be a great game.

Glassbox became the end not the means. The idea of Glassbox was to add sophistication. Instead, the engineers at Maxis seemed so proud of what they had created that they lost sight of its purpose. Its demands on system resources meant that the plot sizes for cities were comically small (see also). Gone were the days of building a metropolis of your very own. The knock on effects were absurdities.

To make up for the tiny plot sizes, it seems a scaling constant was added to bulk up population sizes, making for cities with population densities that made Manhatten look like Montana. A 4km square plot needed more than one gargantuan police station, fire depot and hospital. Roads capable of carrying tens of thousands of cars would block up under the strain of inexplicably large numbers of people making their way across a tiny city. You could see Glassbox at work, but it wasn't working.

The multiplayer aspect was a disaster. I had many friends that bought SimCity at launch. We set up regions and for the first time in years all got VOIP on the go to settle in for a Big Bang Theory-style session of municipal meglomania. It just never delivered. What I did in my city would take minutes, sometimes even hours to show up for a friend in the neighbouring city. In-game chat was truly pathetic, offering the option of a completely non-functional regional message chat or the modal Origin chat (by modal, I mean you literally had to minimize the game to say something to your friend!). EA either need to invest in Origin properly and make it a Steam for EA games, or scrap it. Right now, it's abysmal.

SimCity was replete with bugs, big and small. In addition to the above there were problems with building wonders, sending gifts, commuting between cities and the list just goes on and on. There were other gripes too, like the problems caused by buildings requiring the road they were adjacent to to remain forever lest they be demolished. UI quirks like demolishing an entire building instead of just a module of that building until you learned you had to go into the modular editor to demolish those. It just bred frustration at every turn.

The game was no longer about building a metropolis of your own. It lost the 'god game' thrill and became more about building economic assets like coal mines, refineries and trade ports than about making a cool city. In fact, it was nearly impossible to build a successful city without the use of some sort of heavy primary industry.

I haven't even mentioned that it required a continuous internet connection to servers that were just not up to the job. To take people's money and require an internet connection and then fail to provide adequate server capacity in 2013 is inexcusable.

Ultimately, it just wasn't fun.

Seriously, what the hell? Thunderbirds on speed.

The Future?

In all honesty, I don't know if we'll be getting the SimCity we want for a very long time. Content such as Cities of Tomorrow is a slap in the face when fundamentals of the core game are so desperately in need of improvement. In SimCities of days gone by, things like arcologies were fun cherries on top of the core game. Evolving them into these absurd cities I see coming from CoT content makes me weep for what SimCity could have been, and what it once was.

It was always clear that EA/Maxis' assurances that offline mode wasn't feasible weren't honest. The game was hacked very early on to show regional play without plots was possible at least in priciple. In 2014, sure enough, offline play is here. Their assurances that it was technically difficult were disingenuous. They just didn't want offline play.

The city plots issue was addressed in a blog post by Maxis in October 2013. The reason given was perfomance. Bigger cities just wouldn't run well on the majority of players' computers. Two things immediately sprang to mind:

• This seemed extremely short-sighted. So what if most players couldn't play the larger terrain maps in 2013, some could! Seeing that larger maps were in the game but just not within the capabilities of their current machine would have placated most people and the most vocal group – the high-end PC owners – would have been the minority that could have played them.
• What was the benefit of Glassbox when it was constraining the game in the most fundamental way imaginable? To repeat, Glassbox had become the end – the game bending to fit to its needs – not the means for delivering a better game. The very mechanism that made this game more advanced had crippled it in doing so.

Playing SimCity I have often wondered if the Maxis team are as frustrated as I am. I ask myself if they want the game to be what it is or if their hands are tied by EA and its Big Blue of Gaming culture. Surely they loved SimCity for the same reasons I did back in the day. It was a simple game in its inception and there really were only so many reasons to love it. There had to be overlap at least between what they wanted and what I, my brothers, my friends and so many others online seemed to want from the game.

This SimCity debacle has done inordinate damage to the repuation of a much-loved developer and franchise. If I worked for Maxis I'd be livid at what has happened. I hope the next installment of SimCity is wonderful. I hope it goes back to being a single-player game first and foremost, with multiplayer elements around that. I hope Maxis gets control of its baby back and makes the game we were all so looking forward to. I hope.

…but I digress.

Playstation 4, Xbox One and the Computational Funnel

This quarter saw the release of the Xbox One and Playstation 4 gaming consoles. To those of us that have been around a while it all seems so familiar. Newer, faster, better, brasher and the moniker 'next-gen' bandied about with glee by marketing departments.

Like others who've seen this cycle many times before, I find myself wondering if this will be the last of its kind. Since 2005 when the Xbox 360 was launched we've seen a seismic event occur with the introduction of the iPhone in 2007 and perhaps more importantly, the introduction of the App Store in 2008. Google has since followed suit and the mobile app has become the zeitgeist.

I remember seeing that announcement with the introduction of the more affordable – read, affordable – iPhone 3G and instantly realising what it meant. Suddenly, we'd see indie developers get a shot at reaching large audiences without the need for a publisher. I was thinking back to the one-man efforts of yesteryear like Frontier: Elite and SimCity. I was extremely excited. For once, I was right!

So we have a launch of a new wave of consoles set against the backdrop of a rapidly emerging mobile computing market. That alone is enough to make things interesting, but I think there's a bigger, more holistic context in which to put this. To illustrate, I'm going to liken it to a funnel.

I just read on the The Loop a throwaway remark made by Jim Dalrymple that this generational leap in performance for the gaming consoles wasn't as dramatic as previous ones. I disagree with that, but I see what he means. I'd slightly rephrase his sentiments as 'this leap isn't as impactful as previous leaps.' I'd also add the word 'yet.'

The computational power of this crop of consoles is many, many times greater than that of the 2005/6 consoles they replace. It has to be said, it's astonishing what is achieved with these machines given they are eight years old! Who still runs a PC or Mac that old, yet alone gets to run the latest gaming titles in full HD? The power leap is as enormous as ever, but it isn't producing the same 'wow, we couldn't do that before' effect.

Why is this? I think it's because we are emerging from a computing power funnel. How deep into the funnel we are is a big question. We might be sat pondering the same thing after another wave of consoles in another eight years, or we might be able to see that we have emerged. Let me explain.

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The Computational Funnel

So does this mean that the possibilities are endless? I don't think so. What it means is that we are approaching a point where computing power will be so great that it is no longer the bottleneck on what can be done with computers. At the same time, for all our impressive technology, it seems that time is teaching us that our computer technology is actually quite nascent in the grand scheme of things.

This leads me to two questions for the gaming industry and the hardware makers.

Hollywood Production Values

Over the last decade we've seen the advent of the game with Hollywood-level production values. Grand Theft Auto, Mass Effect, Assassin's Creed, Forza Motorsport et cetera are huge production efforts whose credits roll longer than most summer blockbusters.

More CPU/GPU speed and RAM theoretically allow more to be done by the user's computer or console but that doesn't mean that the full potential of that hardware is easily reached by the developers of its software. I think this is the effect we are seeing now.

Textures can get more beautiful, that's just a matter of rendering 3D models and artwork at a higher resolution. More instances of each element can be put on screen at once. What can't be stepped up with just a slider in a dialogue box is AI intelligence, fun factor, story. Those things need hard work done by talented humans.

That creates an interesting question to ponder; what can be produced procedurally by a computer unaided by a human? You might choose to model a car for a Forza title, for example. You might decide to stop trying to make a car's handling feel right and simply program every detail of the engine, chassis and bodywork of a car into highly accurate modelling software and let that software tell you what the handling for such a car would be like. The car gets more realistic – and more fun through being more visceral to drive – without the human developer needing to do more and more work for the gains. Once that master software is written, the human just needs to do the measuring of the real-world car components…once. As computers get more powerful, that computer model can be re-rendered using previously-taken measurements but at with a higher degree of accuracy. Don't repeat yourself.

What requires more work from a human being in order to improve? What limits the scope of a game by the manageable size of the team needed to produce it? This is the first question for gaming.

Product Cyles

The second question for gaming revolves around the distribution method of the hardware.

As we approach the mouth of our funnel, hardware power is becoming easier to package and mobile devices are showing us this in a dramatic way.

The 64-bit Apple A7 SOAC is approaching the power of a 2008 MacBook Pro. Think about that for a moment. The Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 were from 2005 and 6 and look what they can do. What will the A8 be capable of? The A9? It is not just faesible, but probable, that we will have a hand-held device in millions of pockets around the world that will be capable of running Xbox 360/PS4 titles within eighteen months.

Now factor in two existing facts. The Apple TV box that retails at £99 has an Apple A5 SOAC in it. It is also capable of facilitating AirPlay from any recent iOS device. What happens if Apple update that box in the summer with a year-old-at-the-time A7 chip? Suddenly, you're a controller away from a console with the power of a 2008 MacBook Pro. Second fact: Apple added controller support with iOS7. That console would have native support for third party controllers. Next year, it could have an A8, the year after an A9 and so on. Could Microsoft or Sony match that rate of power increase?

Apple could find itself a major player in the gaming hardware world within a year with almost no effort. If that isn't a concern for Microsoft and Sony then they are in for a big shock.

What About Non-Gaming Software?

Where I think we'll see the plateau is in non-gaming software. How much added value can endlessly more powerful hardware bring to a news reporting app or a word processor? We can add quicker streaming to an ESPN app but at some point it gets as fast as we could want. Non-gaming software is designed to fulfil a purpose and once that purpose is fulfilled it becomes a matter of doing it with more finesses, more intuitiveness. Those things are not endlessly aided by computational power. Designers need to put the hard graft in to make those things better. They also need taste and an understanding of their non-technophile fellow human beings.

…but I digress.

Smart Quotes and Apostrophes

I'm going to level with you now; this is going to be a geeky post but you might learn something pretty surprising about typing. I know I did.

One of my favourite typefaces is Adobe Song (Adobe Minion but a little lighter and looser, designed for simplified Chinese).  There'll be those that say I probably shouldn't use it for latin text but I just like how it looks. I often set Apple Pages to this typeface when I want to just type. I set song lyrics and poems in this typeface regularly. A problem I've had with using Adobe Song has long been an inexplicable space after apostrophes.

Adobe Song and the apostrophe mystery

Needless to say this drove me crazy. I tried the obvious: highlighting the space to see if it could be manually deleted, playing with tracking and kerning, you name it. Nothing seemed to sort this out. 

I ran a web search for this problem and the plot thickened. I discovered plenty of people complaining about something similar, but they were using Microsoft Word, not Apple's Pages. I opened Photoshop and tried to type with Adobe Song there and discovered that there too I got this irritating space. Three different applications across different operating systems and the same problem. That told me this probably wasn't a bug but something I didn't know about typefaces that was tripping me up.

Quotation Mark Ignorance

To cut a long story short, I discovered that almost all of us type the wrong (for want of a better word, as I'll explain) character when we are typing apostrophes and quotation marks. As so many of us are typography laymen, Microsoft and Apple have a setting in their word processors for enabling ‘smart quotes’ that automatically corrects for our ignorance. This setting is enabled by default and most of us will never even notice.

Pages' smart quotes

What does this setting do?  It automatically substitutes the ' character for a nice curly ’. You see, they are not the same character.

An imaginary headline set in Times New Roman. Note that using the correct keyboard key for an apostrophe here is rendered as a symmetrical typewriter apostrophe when smart quotes is disabled.

Back when typewriters were the word processor of choice, it simply wasn't practical to have a key for all these different yet similar punctuation marks. It became acceptable to use ‘dumb quotes’ when using a typewriter. The apostrophe, single quotation mark and prime symbol were all entered using the same key and a symmetrical ' was invented for simplicity's sake. You'll still often see this character online, where text has been entered using programs without a ‘smart quotes’ feature (including for apostrophes in the body of this article, typed online. Safari has a ‘smart quotes’ feature but it doesn't seem to affect this web app).

When computers took the place of typewriters people's habits were set hard and so for the sake of typography the ‘smart quotes’ feature was widely adopted by software companies. Usually, this feature works fine and substitutes in curly quotation marks when we use the key left over from typewriter days and we hardly notice – so much so that when it goes wrong as it did for me using my Adobe Song, I was at a loss to know what had happened!

What was happening was that I was entering apostrophes and Apple Pages was substituting the apostrophes with a quotation mark, as is its wont. When the quotation mark went in, so did the added space that should follow a quotation mark. Of course, I wanted an apostrophe, which does not mandate a space.

Apostrophes, Quotation Marks and Primes

So what should we be typing in for quotation marks if we don't want to rely on smart quotes?  Well, there are three main characters that you're likely to be typing in using the same character on your keyboard: apostrophes, quotation marks and primes.

For an apostrophe, you're almost certainly already using the correct character. On my Mac's keyboard it's the key to the right of the colon/semi-colon key. The issue with apostrophes is that using the correct character on your keyboard for an apostrophe will likely give you a typewriter apostrophe rather than a nice curly one, as I said earlier. This is why smart quotes generally substitutes this apostrophe with a closing curly single quote.

For a quotation mark, you should be typing option-] to for open marks and option-shift-] for closing ones.

The symbols keyboard in iOS 7 is labelled with a closing double quotation mark/speech mark but the default symbol you actually get is a double prime.

A prime is the mark used to signify feet and minutes, amongst other things. To enter this character, you will probably have to use your Mac's Special Characters window accessed from the edit menu in most apps. ‘Smart quotes’ won't do this for you so it's good to know you shouldn't use the apostrophe key for this at all ideally.

If you are using an iOS device then you can get these symbols by pressing and holding the characters on the virtual keyboard. Bizarrely, the typewriter double quotation mark key is labelled with curly double quotation marks/speech marks. iOS supports primes but I cannot see any way to enter them using the keyboard.

What About Speech Marks/Double Quotes?

Typewriter quotes and opening and closing speech marks/double quotes in Times New Roman

The same story, I'm afraid, but with some confusing US nomenclature thrown in for good measure. You see, I've said ‘quotation mark’ throughout this article referring to the single quotation mark. I'm British, and in Britain this is what a quotation mark is. The double quotation mark is a ‘speech mark.’ I'm sure not all Brits will agree, but those same Brits probably say ‘alternate’ instead of ‘alternative’!

Regardless, the symbol you get if you press shift-' is an old typewriter double quotation mark. Again, it'll often get automatically converted to a nice pretty curly double quotation mark if you have smart quotes on, but if you want to know the shortcut for entering this manually it's option-[ for opening marks and option-shift-[ for closing.

Does It Matter?

If you have smart quotes on – and you likely do – then it probably doesn't matter as your word processor will handle this for you most of the time. Unfortunately, the smart quotes feature isn't perfect and if you love your type as much as I do then you want to know your beautiful curly quotes from your typewriter throwbacks. Great type is about the details. It's also just nice to know what you're doing and not have to rely on your computer to correct you. Of course, the likelihood is that nobody will notice if you just use dumb quotes, but I'd like to think my audience would be made up of the type of people that would care!

…but I digress.