Stop Lying to Consumers!

Whats the one thing that EVERYBODY absolutely hated when Sim City (the new one, not the one from 1989) came out?  Always online!  People hated that shit and some said it really ruined their experience.  For example Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation fame had his experience stepped on because he wasn't allowed to call his cities silly things like DogBollock.

But one thing I remember hearing around the time that people were complaining about this was that it's just not possible for Sim City to have an offline mode.  Apparently the game was SO advanced and there was so much shit going on in the game that it absolutely had to be online.  I think anyone with half a working brain knew that was a load of crap but that was their story and they stuck to it.

UNTIL TODAY!

On March 18th 2014, Maxis released a patch for SimCity that allowed the game to be played offline and it stores all your shit locally so you don't have to worry about server wipes of whatever crap was going on around release time.

People are understandably happy about this development, people love the Sim City games and rightly so, they are really good.  But just forget that you get to play your latest instalment of the series offline for a second, why are people not more angry about being lied to?  Why is this an acceptable practice for publishers and developers to just flat out lie to their consumers to get their money!?  Why aren't people marching into EA to punch whoever runs that absolutely shit stain of a video game company in the face?!! 

Now I'm picking on SimCity because it's the most recent example I can find but it's not the only one doing it.  Remember how awesome those Dark Souls 2 gameplay videos looked?

Yeah....not quite how we were told it was going to look, is it?

Not that this reflects on the quality of the game itself, and I'm still hoping that the PC version will look as good as those preview videos, but it's a little bit annoying to be told it's going to look good and then it comes out and it looks no better than anything else.

Like I said about SimCity, I'm only using these examples because they are fairly recent but this trend of just lying to people has been going on for a long LOOONG time and it's really sad and needs to stop.  How about instead of lying to consumers to get their money, how about you just make a quality product that people will want to pay for?! Fucking idiots.

I thought Patches were to make things better, not worse

Sim City is just the shit gift that keeps on giving, goddamn.

So, while I was browsing round the net on Thursday morning I came across an article about Sim City patch 2.0.  What does patch 2.0 do exactly? well it breaks your fucking game is what it does.  Go and give it a google search but this patch has caused all sorts of weird things like small making all your sims shit absolutely everywhere and causing trees to make car noises along with much more.

I'm hoping that as I write this post that it's been fixed because a patch breaking your game is bullshit.  A while ago I made a post about how people need to stop finished unfinished fucking games.  If you're going to put something on the shelf and charge £40+ for it, then at least make sure the fucking thing works was the general gist of that post.

Now I'm a reasonable guy, I'm not expecting the developer to iron out 100% of the problems, a couple of little bugs aren't too bad providing they don't break the game, but shit like this is just fucking everything up and ruining it for everyone.

What makes it worse is that these aren't release bugs, the game was PATCHED to do this.  The whole point of a fucking patch is to make bugs that you missed go away, yet when EA patched this mess of a game it went and broke it even harder, what the fuck.

EA isn't the only one guilty of this shit because Silent Hill HD did the same fucking thing.  But in that case the patches just did nothing rather than break it.  You couldn't really break that game any harder.

Fucking stop this shit, indie games made by 3 or 4 people have less bugs than these huge budget games with massive teams.  What sense does that fucking make? you'd think with all these people working on it, it'd be easier to spot something going wrong.  Just make sure your game fucking works before you start selling it in the first place.  Fuck your deadline, I'm sure fans would appreciate a delay for a product that works out the goddamn box, pricks.

Always On DRM is Arse

The new Sim City game came out recently and before I even start this post I want to have a little rage about the name.  This is what?  Sim City 5? so why the FUCK is it called Sim City?!  I hate when games do this and it's been a thing for far too long.  Even recently we've had Tomb Raider and Devil May Cry despite not being the first one.  Stop doing this shit, it's needlessly confusing.

Anyway, I felt bad for people who bought Diablo 3 at launch.  Not because I think the game isn't all that great, that's just my opinion but because that people weren't able to fucking play the damn thing because the servers were being overrun with people trying to log in.

So we have a case of history repeating itself, and now there are shit tons of people who can't play their new copy of Sim City because there are too many people trying to log in at the same time, and they are shoved into never ending queues.

What makes the whole thing really bad about both Diablo 3 and Sim City is that these are single player games, and people who paid top price for these games are being fucked over because EA are worried about a few pirates.

They really need to find another way to deal with piracy because at the end of the day, the pirates will still find a way to acquire the game for free and the only people that are being affected by this shit are the people who actually paid for the damn thing.

There is more to the Sim City story than just people not being able to log in, but the big point here is that always on DRM needs to fuck right off.  Find away to protect your games without hurting the paying customer or just don't fucking do it.