Sometimes you need to write about something, and the best place to write about it is a blog. This is one of those times.
The latest version of SimCity (simply titled "SimCity") came out recently to much rancor and vitriol. It's not unusual for games to receive bad reviews, even highly anticipated games. But SimCity is being torn apart for a problem not typically found in games.
If you don't know, SimCity is a city simulation game where you, the player, get to try your hand at building and managing a city. This may sound either tedious or overwhelming, but the game is constructed such that the player has just enough control for their actions and decisions to be meaningful without delving into the realms of micromanagement. For the past several iterations, the game has been single-player only. With the recent release, however, players are required to be online. From my perspective, the reasoning for this decision makes sense. Cities do not exist in a vacuum, so for this version, the player must be connected so that they can interact with other cities, both locally and globally. Hypothetically, the idea is solid.
Here's where the problem comes in.
SimCity launched last week, and the number of players trying to access the game is overwhelming. Literally. The servers they had in place were incapable of handling the load, leaving the publishers scrambling for a solution. Unfortunately, gamers are a fickle bunch, and have spent the past week defaming and attacking EA for the launch, even though EA has promised to continue working on the problems and has offered everyone who has purchased the game EA store credit towards another game. All of this has happened after EA had the peoples' money.
Despite this, the gamers continue to attack. "EA has ruined another franchise!" "Don't release a game if it's not ready for release!" "This belongs in a museum!" (OK, maybe not that last one.) But I think that all these people complaining are, to be honest, immature and stupid. Here's why:
a) Video games with online multiplayer do not exist in a vacuum. They can't. If World of Warcraft was still using the same code they used when they started, the game would be horribly outdated and unbalanced, and possibly flat-out horrible by today's standards. It's not that WoW shouldn't have been released as it was, or that it was a bad game when it was released. The fact of the matter is, in games with a large community of interacting players, there will need to be on-the-fly adjustments made to that game.
b) We no longer live in an era without patching. If you bought Final Fantasy VII when it came out and it had a game-breaking bug, there is no way it would have received the acclaim it now enjoys. If Final Fantasy XIII had a game-breaking bug, on the other hand, Square Enix could have easily released a patch to fix the game. With games getting more and more complex, this is a good thing. It's not that game developers are getting lazy (although in some cases that's probably happening), it's that they're dealing with more moving pieces to fit together. Having the ability to patch post-release is a blessing, not just a fail-safe, as long as the developers are careful in the initial release to fix as many bugs as possible.
Which is where I come by the title of the blog. Allow me to compare a movie to a play. In a movie, a group of artists collaborate to create a finite product which, in most cases, will remain in that finite form for eternity, or at least as long as copies of it survive. Directors who go back and change their works after release (I'm looking at you, Spielberg) are often denounced and reviled. Plays, on the other hand, are similarly collaborative, but change slightly night to night for each production and change drastically between stagings. It's not that a playwright changing dialogue after an opening night or an actor changing his action for a line in the middle of a run is a sign of a bad performance; rather, it's a sign of a playwright capable of sensing the audience's reaction to a line. While he was alive, Horton Foote, a Pulitzer Prize winning playwright, was a sharp critic of his earlier works and would rewrite lines for newer productions.
What does this have to do with SimCity? It's this: Video games have reached the point where patching is a simple (relatively speaking) process for players. Gamers no longer have to go to the game's site, or possibly a sketchy mirror site, to download the much-needed patch. In many cases, the game automatically checks upon starting up. While there are still several purists out there, clinging to unconnected games, most gamers have passively embraced this shift. Unless it interferes with their gameplay, that is. And that's where SimCity's problems lie. The gamer's launch-date gameplay experience didn't live up to expectations, which means the game deserves to be thrown under the bus. Which, to a certain extent, is true. But the sheer volume of vitriol being shown towards the game, even with massive steps being taken towards fixing the issues, is unacceptable and disgraceful. (It's bad, you guys. I highly recommend you not go look it up if you don't know what I'm talking about.)
So don't be so grumpy. Be patient enough to give the developers a week to fix the problem. After all, since we all know plays are better than movies anyways, I figure we should embrace the change, yeah?
-Josh
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