YMMV / SimCity (2013)

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Are the monsters sadistic bastards or are they Well-Intentioned Extremists? It heads straight for your garbage dump, destroying any building in its path, but then eats all the refuse in the dump zone, thus removing a burden that can't be removed otherwise without generating pollution. Sometimes they end up doing more good than harm for you because there was nothing on their way, or if you get really lucky, they spawn right next to the dump!
  • OmegaCo can be either a greedy corporation who takes advantage of people who don't read the fine print, or, they can be an industrial leader to help the Academy pay for research, help pay for cleaner technologies, and even help foot the bill for expensive great works projects.
• Audience-Alienating Era: The 2013 game capped off a long audience-alienating era for the SimCity series. Many fans regard the fourth game, released in 2003, as the series' apex for both its addition of regions with many cities and its Hidden Depths gameplay-wise. However, it was followed up in 2007 by SimCity Societies, which many fans found to be painfully easy and extremely shallow. The 2013 game was billed as a return to form, but its launch was plagued by disastrous server issues that rendered it, with its focus on online connectivity and multiplayer, unplayable for weeks. Worse, even after the server issues were fixed, people who sat down to play it found it once more to be heavily simplified, with the small map sizes and lack of terrain features in particular greatly restricting the kinds of cities that could be built; not even the Cities of Tomorrow expansion was able to fully salvage the game. The failures of the 2013 game, in fact, led directly to Paradox Interactive giving the green light to Cities: Skylines, a Spiritual Successor to the older SimCity games that was overtly marketed to fans disappointed with the later installments.
• Audience-Alienating Premise: The always-online requirement for a single-player game turned off a lot of potential players. It ended up doing irreparable damage to the fanbase and led to EA abandoning the game.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Try to join public games in the game, and mostly you'll see the Titan Gorge region.
• Common Knowledge: The labeling of the persistent Internet connection requirement as DRM. While it's certainly arguable that Maxis/EA intended for it to stop piracy at least in part, the game actually was designed to be a heavily online multiplayer experience; a major mechanic of the game is the sharing of resources between other players across one another's cities, so the requirement for online connectivity is at least justifiable on a surface level. That said, where the confusion came in is that this was a long-awaited new installment to a historically single player series that ended up with a Misbegotten Multiplayer Mode at best in past attempts, and unfortunately even this game couldn't escape that reputation, and despite how much it was touted as a multiplayer experience, the game was still perfectly playable by yourself which still gave a lot of merit to those wondering why Internet connection was mandatory.
• Fan Nickname: This game is officially simply called SimCity. Fans tacked on the 2013 part to differentiate it from the original.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The Electronics specialization is by far the most profitable of the lot once it gets going. It is not uncommon to have cities appear to be running tens of thousands in deficit while making millions off computer and TV sales or even just processors and it makes the commercial and industrial zones obsolete. And unlike Mining or Drilling which rely on finite resources, Electronics can keep going indefinitely on relatively cheap imports or by using a recycling center.
  • The Academy in CoT can provide your city with some powerful new options provided you can pay the costs and keep the buildings staffed. Besides a wealth of new power options such as wave generators (which make water in your city much more useful), Wind and Solar power amplifiers, and power levels for MegaTowers, there's some great solutions to problems you can suffer. The ground scrubber quickly cleans up ground pollution accumulated around your city, the garbage atomizer literally obliterates any garbage issues with no drawbacks, and the Maglev trains can carry any type of sim around your city quickly without taking up any additional space.
  • OmegaCo is built around the idea of getting a cheaply built city running and taking advantage of the low tech and low wealth sims. If done correctly with enough stability to keep the OmegaCo factories producing Omega and drones, players can make a very large sum of money easily.
• Misblamed: If an interview with one of EA's spokerspersons is to be believed, the infamous always-online requirement was never an attempt at DRM but because Maxis genuinely wanted to take the franchise in a new, more MMO-like direction.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: Mention this game to any average gamer and chances are quite high that the first thing that comes to mind is its absolutely disastrous launch. The servers were so overloaded that getting into the game was nearly impossible, and since the game required a persistent Internet connection to the servers, the game was effectively unplayable for anyone who bought it on day one. To this day, it is frequently used as a textbook example of why always-online requirements to play a single player ^note Yes, the game was designed to be a multiplayer experience, but the game doesn't technically require it and it's an installment to a historically single player series that only tried multiplayer one other time with mixed results, so it's understandable when people consider this a single player game even if that's not what Maxis was trying for game are a bad idea. It didn't help either that the game would go on to be completely overshadowed by a competing game only a couple of years later, and thanks to the general middling reception the game got when it actually did work, the legacy it leaves behind is among one of the worst for a modern AAA title.
• Scrappy Mechanic: There are quite a few of these:
  • The agent system, which is supposed to handle resource distribution throughout your city. Unfortunately, thanks to Artificial Stupidity, none of your resources will actually get to where they'll be needed since the agents will get themselves stuck in traffic, drive around in loops, or just straight up ignore where they're supposed to go.
  • The significantly smaller map sizes means that it's nearly impossible to make your city self sufficient, so your only chance of getting your city to see the late game is to join a multiplayer region and hope your partners don't up and leave or suffer one of the game's many bugs and has their city deleted.
  • The online requirement in general. The bane of any SimCity fan who just wanted a sophisticated sandbox game to play in their free time or if they had no internet access. The requirement was so unpopular that, eventually, EA had to release a single-player mode.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • Some of the information revealed during the lead-up to its release was, to say the least, disconcerting to the fanbase. Some of the complaints included: always online and multiplayer-focused gameplay, pre-built regional transportation networks that predetermine neighbour connections for each city, "dead zones" around each city that make each one look and feel isolated, terraforming limited on a civil scale (i.e. no God Mode world-reshaping) and small map sizes compared to SimCity 4.
  • The "Always Online" really bit EA on the ass as the servers overloaded so badly after release that they were forced to make a patch that removed a number of key features. The complaints got so bad that Amazon temporarily stopped selling the game, which isn't something that happens every day. Later, EA became so desperate to decrease the pressure on the servers that they cut out several more features (including achievements and the fast forward mode) and actually asked sites to stop advertising the game.^note These issues were resolved - to the extent that there is rarely, if ever, an issue connecting to the game servers - and the general consensus of the game after these fixes is that once the game works properly, it's actually an enjoyable game, resulting in generally favorable reviews. In addition, EA/Maxis announced the addition of offline mode as a free patch to the game, not because of problems with online mode, but rather as an alternate form of gameplay. However, Gamespot's re-review of the game after all of this still scores the game a 5 due to bugs and other issues. Also by this point, many fans had already sworn off the game and weren't interested in giving it a second chance.

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