RIDE TO HELL: RETRIBUTION

Ride to Hell: Retribution has received no small amount of criticism (to put it mildly), and yet it still doesn’t feel enough. Some games are simply offensively bad, and this is one such game. From crappy writing to repetitive gameplay, from terrible AI to a litany of bugs, ugly visuals to awkward controls, Ride to Hell: Retribution was a game that had critical problems in almost every single area.

Destiny

For many of us who never really got into MMOs but enjoyed first person shooters, there was Destiny. Launched in a disappointing state but possessing solid gun play and excellent mission design at the highest level (read: raids), the very nature of Destiny pushed us to obsess about it. When is Xur coming, what Exotics will he have, doing the Nightfalls and raids at reset time, a secret quest that’s been discovered – Destiny just scratched that itch to an insane degree.

In what is now a trend for EA, another classic, long time influential studio has been shuttered by them today. Maxis, the studio that was originally formed by WillW right (Wright left Maxis and EA a few years ago), and is behind such classics as SimCity, The Sims, and Spore, is officially being closed.

“Today we are consolidating Maxis IP development to our studios in Redwood Shores, Salt Lake City, Helsinki and Melbourne locations as we close our Emeryville location,” an EA representative said in a statement.

Personally, this announcement has left me feeling completely heartbroken- like so many others, I too grew up playing SimCity and The Sims. These were very important games to me, and to see their developer gutted like this… it’s depressing.

EA, of course, has a history of buying studios, and then shutting them down like this. Other past notable examples like this include Origin, Black Box, Mythic, Bullfrog, Westwood, and Pandemic.

In this case, however, EA has assured us that the Maxis label will ‘live on.’

Fat lot of good will that do.

It’s good for us that EA has gone back on its assertion of not having Steam-like sales on Origin because they would devalue its games and IP. It’s good because this year’s year end sale on Origin has sole truly great deals- and I mean great from any perspective.

If you head over to Origin right now, you can find some of EA’s biggest games of the last few years for obscenely cheap prices- Battlefield 3 is just 99¢, Titanfall is $10, last year’s SimCity is $10, Battlefield 4 is $15, and the just released (and awesome!) Dragon Age Inquisition gets a hefty discount as well, now being sold for just $40, or 33% down.

This isn’t even the end of it- you can check out more deals on the official sale page on Origin, and see if you find something you’ll like. Although, really, considering the sheer wealth of the games on offer, my bet is that there will definitely be something you end up buying.

Maxis, best known for its SimCity and The Sims games, is currently working on a brand new IP with emergent, unique gameplay, according to the job listings on their site. The job listings specifically call out LittleBigPlanet as a point of comparison for the new game.

The new IP will place a lot of emphasis on player created content- the job listings specifically mention, in addition to LittleBigPlanet, Project Spark and Minecraft as some titles that the applicant should have experience with.

Maxis is currently hard at work on The Sims 4, which releases later this year exclusively for the PC. Their last big project was SimCity, which was released last year to general criticism, thanks to its mandatory always online requirement, which throttled all gameplay during the game’s disastrous launch.

Stay tuned to GamingBolt for more coverage on this title. We’ll have more for you as it develops.

Finally, after over a year of its original release, SimCity is now playable offline. EA has announced that update 10 is finally here, and that it allows users and all future PC and Mac gamers to play SimCity offline.

All you need to do is download the update- for which, of course, you will need an internet connection-, put Origin in offline mode and then start up the game. And behold, you finally get to play the game that you wanted to play a year ago.

The offline mode will not include leaderboards, Citylog and region invites, but it will still include the Global Market with fixed prices. The offline mode will allow for a single player multi-city experience.

After SimCity’s original disastrous account and the amount of slack the game, Maxis and EA received for the direction they took, it’s a little surprising that it’s taken so long for the game to get an offline-only option. Better late then never, I guess.

SimCity launched more than a year ago, and its launch was an unmitigated disaster- what should have been a triumphant return of the classic and beloved series ended up as a reviled installment, as EA and Maxis’s bid to control players and piracy by demanding always online internet connections led to choked servers and compromised play experiences.

Maxis promised that an offline mode was in the works a while ago, and now it looks like it is almost here- speaking on their Twitter, they confirmed that the Offline Mode was in its final testing stages, meaning we should see it pretty soon now. Hopefully, EA will push it for both the PC and Mac versions on the same day.

With the connectivity issues resolved, SimCity becomes a decent, although not quite as great as the previous three, city simulation. Hopefully EA and Maxis take the issues learned by this game to heart and ensure the inevitable next SimCity launch goes smoothly.

The recent announcement of SimCity, Maxis’s much maligned, always-online city management simulator, going offline took several of us by surprise. This is especially so considering Maxis head Lucy Bradshaw insistence that it wasn’t possible without reworking a significant amount of the game.

That’s exactly what happened though, according to lead engineer Simon Fox in a new blog post. “Lucy Bradshaw once said that offline wouldn’t be possible ‘without a significant amount of engineering work’, and she was right,” said Fox. “By the time we’re finished we will have spent over 6 ½ months working to write and rewrite core parts of the game to get this to work. Even things that seem trivial, like the way that cities are saved and loaded, had to be completely reworked in order to make this feature function correctly.

“I wish it were as simple as flipping a switch and telling the game to communicate with a dummy client rather than our server, but it’s more than that. Entire calculations had to be rewritten in order to make the game function correctly.”

Since the original structure relied on servers routinely being pinged for important pieces of game data – the disruption of which caused the game to stop working completely – it was more of a matter of “rewriting the entire system, which previously existed in Java, and putting it into C++. We’ve had to knock out the internet pipe stuff. There’s lots of code that hits the servers looking for information. We’ve had to write a lot of code to produce that data locally, specifically for region information.

“Now, all of the regional simulation needs to be done locally. The algorithms governing trading between cities needed to be returned in order to make the behavior between cities more responsive for this type of play. This in itself required major optimizations in order to run the simulation locally. We have an obligation to make the game fun and functional on all specs of machines. We wouldn’t want someone who was enjoying the Multiplayer game to find the Single Player game crippled due to poor optimization.

“We had to remove parts of the game for it to function properly as well. This means removing lots of code integral to Multiplayer include code and UI supporting Trading, Social Features, Global Market, Leaderboards and Achievements. And, all without crippling the Multiplayer game.”

Now, why didn’t they just opt for the offline route to begin with? At least they’re taking steps to correct their errors now rather than never. What are your thoughts? Let us know below.

One of the many botched launches that EA made last year was Maxis’ long awaited next installment in the SimCity saga. The game, which required an always online connection, ran into server issues at launch, and people who weren’t even interested in the game’s social features but just wanted to get the quintessential SimCity singleplayer experience found that they were being booted from their own games, and losing progress. Sounds like a disaster, quite like another high profile EA launch from last year.

Anyway, now, in what must be the textbook case of too little, too late, EA and Maxis are rescinding on their ‘original vision’ for an always connected SimCity experience, and adding an Offline Mode to the game. The new update, Update 10, will allow players the option to play offline, although the online mode is still there for those interested in it and the benefits that it offers.

The addition of the offline mode also allows for modding opportunities for SimCity within the single player game as well. Considering how active the modding community was with SimCity 3000 and SimCity 4, this should be a welcome bit of news for all involved.

SimCity: Cities of Tomorrow is the first official expansion to EA and Maxis’s beleaguered SimCity released earlier this year, and it will allow players to exercise their city management skills in futuristic cities that look a lot like something out of The Jetsons. Or well, at least, that’s what the trailer seems to promise, as it shows off some almost idealistically naive technology that the game’s vision of the future will give players access to.

In any case, the game has had a lot of its issues since launch resolved, so for anyone looking to scratch their city sim and management itch, SimCity remains a pretty good recommendation now (and probably even more so now with what looks to be a very promising expansion pack). SimCity: Cities of Tomorrow will launch soon on Origin for Windows and Mac, so stay tuned to GamingBolt for further coverage of the title.