"Every time they would unblock one pinch point, then they would just discover the next one," says Librande. Work was necessarily slow-moving and frustratingly laborious. EA had sent additional technicians to the studio to bolster the servers it had woefully overestimated, but it didn't have the infrastructure to respond at speed. While fans were angry, feelings inside Maxis weren't much rosier.
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"We're hoping you won't stay mad and that we'll be friends again when SimCity is running at 100 percent," adding that EA would be offering disgruntled players their pick of a free game as compensation. "We feel bad about what happened," general manager Lucy Bradshaw said in something of mea culpa (opens in new tab) shortly after launch. Initially high review scores were drastically downgraded, and Maxis spent the next week scrambling to expand server capacity. Unable to play the game, players didn't hold back in their criticism, and neither did the press. "Everything was snappy and tight, and that gave the EA brass a false sense of security about how much infrastructure they would need… Setting aside whether it was a bad idea to make it online-only in the first place from a gameplay and aesthetic perspective, the really inexcusable part was, even given all those decisions, the server infrastructure was a factor of 10 off what it needed to be in order to give people a satisfying experience."Įverything was snappy and tight, and that gave the EA brass a false sense of security about how much infrastructure they would need. "In the development process, we brought in beta testers, and the infrastructure was fine for a small group," says Quigley. The game's servers buckled under the tidal wave of players trying to connect, and there was no subsidence on the horizon.
Swathes were unable to get into the game at all, left endlessly hanging in the launch menu, let alone experience the fresh multiplayer city building they were promised. Players were met with frequent crashes, extreme latency, exceedingly long load times, disconnections, and delayed downloads. The problem, simple as it seemed, was significant: there wasn't enough server space to go round. If that connection dropped, they'd be booted from the game. When SimCity launched on March 6, it required players to maintain an active online connection to the game's servers. That, unfortunately, turned out to be the problem. By early 2013, it had been over a decade since SimCity 4 launched, and droves of fans eagerly pre-ordered what promised to be an ambitious revitalization of the series. Nestled between Dead Space 3 and FIFA 14, SimCity was placed in prime position to fill a slump in EA's calendar. Multiplayer soon became one of the game's headlining features, as well as a main selling point in the marketing leading up to its launch. All of that emergent storytelling that comes out of people working together or not working together are stories about real cities, too." "I wanted to be able to set up, with my friends, a little region and work together or sometimes compete with each other make a whole bunch of crime and export it into their city to mess it up. "My personal goal, because I have two sons, was I wanted to be able to play with my family," says Librande. The thought of having players team up to construct cities in neighbouring regions, and interact with one another by trading resources, sharing services, or polluting the common environment, seemed like a natural step towards further realism. But he recalls the team at Maxis was largely on board with the idea. "It was definitely like we needed to do it because at that time every game had multiplayer components, or was expected to have multiplayer," says Librande. Although it did make one request: SimCity should step outside the single-player bubble and embrace the fad of the moment-multiplayer.
Stone Librande, lead designerĪs the project ramped up and more developers joined, EA largely took a back seat. It was definitely like we needed to do it because at that time every game had multiplayer components, or was expected to have multiplayer.
You want to think of it as humans moving through these systems, from place to place." You don't want to think of a city as a collection of buildings and streets. "I had a sign above my desk that said 'Cities are people, not buildings,'" says Librande. Unlike past games in the series, this SimCity would model the behaviour of individual people, cars and businesses to more organically and realistically replicate city life. "We wanted to make it more dynamic," says Quigley, who hoped the new engine would more responsively visualize the interactions of the city's inhabitants.
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