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These are reports, of course, and we’re not experts when it comes to AI. But what we’re seeing people say is rather than each Sim having a unique life, they’re instead operating on the same sort of systems that control the sewage and traffic. Which seems rude. It also explains why there appear to be lots of rather odd behaviours found in the game, with distribution of jobs, buses, and the like feeling a touch odd.

The claims go, rather than individual little Simmy lives, they instead operate as an homogeneous mass, distributing themselves like a collection of marbles rolling down a board covered in holes. As they reach a job, whichever job, ignoring their previous day’s job, they take it, until all the jobs are taken. It doesn’t matter if it’s a commercial or industrial job – they just roll until they fall into the next available slot. That sounds like a half-decent solution for a management game like SimCity, I suppose. But it’s not the one they boasted. But where it gets even weirder is when their work day is through. They don’t trundle off back to their well-loved home, as you might imagine a Sim would do. They, just as with work, move into the nearest available house. There’s no consistency to their lives, no permanence.

That’s certainly evident if you play the game. The names of residences has no bearing on the names of the Sims who’ll “live” there after work, and you absolutely cannot follow a Sim anywhere – once they’ve entered a building, whether residential, commercial or industrial, the game stops following them, and good luck finding them after.

It gets more peculiar. Because the game uses roads as the means of transport for everything, from cars to water to power to sewage, people are saying traffic jams on the road can actually block the passage of what comes from your Sims’ passages. And this whole filtration system seems to be affecting everything, from fire services to casinos. And import/export suffers from the same jams, with all having to pass through the main freeway entrance to your city. With the pathfinding issues many are saying spoils their game, this all becomes a bit of a mess

Blacklightning

Mar 14 2013, 02:35 AM

Blacklightning

Mar 17 2013, 02:42 AM

Amazon buyers are randomly having their game removed entirely from Origin due to Amazon issuing charge-backs. Amazon claims not to know what's going on, so naturally something seems fishy about all this.

EA censors their own customer support number on their forums to prevent people from phoning up with legitimate complaints, then deleted threads on the subject. Then had the gall not only to suggest that Simcity is an MMO, but even to say people liked the always-on DRM in their absence.

Finally, Rock Paper Shotgun delivers the tl;dr of motherfuckin' justice. Twice.