CGAdam said:
Subject line says it all. It just feels like the 'always on DRM' is more like an MMO model. You can either build your city alone and ignore everyone else, as compared to grinding levels in your choice of MMO. Conversely, you can trade with other cities and players the same way you'd team up for a large scale quest.
Captcha: stony hearted. Huh.
The problem is that in its current state, they can't really bill it as an MMO
or a single-player game. An MMO's core mechanics are driven by player interactivity. In WoW, you can do things alone, but things are done much more efficiently and more successfully with others. And even if you only do quests you can complete by yourself, you will always end up socializing with somebody in some way or another. You participate in the game's economy to keep your cash flowing, or you join a guild and socialize through chat rather than doing raids together.
In SimCity, the only real interaction you get is inter-city trades. The extent of its multiplayer is throwing resources at each other. Think of it this way: An MMO is supposed to play like two kids sitting in a sandbox playing together. You can play on your own and ignore the other kid sitting next to you, but when you play
with the other kid the capacity for what you can do is increased exponentially. You not only exchange tools (buckets, spades and the like) but also ideas and strategies for accomplishing your goals. SimCity is set up like two kids in two separate sandboxes with separate toys with a wall between them, and one small door in the wall that they can use to exchange toys if they like. Yes, there is a certain capacity for interactivity, but to genuinely be a
massively multiplayer online game, it's going to need a lot more going on under the hood.
So it can't be an MMO, but because you are forced to be online the game forces you to feel like you aren't playing it right if you just ignore everybody else around you. You don't give a game a capacity to be played a certain way, and then set it up so that it is telling the player the whole time "You're doing it wrong, this isn't how I'm supposed to be played." If you don't want players to be playing your game a certain way, then don't give them the capacity to do so. That's sort of game mechanics 101 right there: In Mario you aren't supposed to go to the left when a level starts, so the game doesn't let you. In Portal, you aren't supposed to use the portal gun in the elevator, so the game doesn't let you. In Skyrim you aren't supposed to be able to hop onto a dragon and ride it like a giant bird, so the game doesn't let you. It would have been rather dumb if in any of those games you were
able to do those things, but it broke the level or impeded your progress. But that's exactly what SimCity's "single player" does--it allows you to play single player, but it doesn't fully invest in letting the player have total control in that style of play so they are denied offline play so the game can continue to remind them "You know, this is fun and all, but you
could play with other people, too..."
So to answer your question, yes. People still would have complained. Ignoring the launch day disaster and the vehement hatred of the always-online situation, it's just poorly designed and executed all around. No matter how you play it, it's broken at every turn. If it's not the stifling smallness of the game, it's the terrible traffic systems or the weird way that the endgame encourages you to make a highly specialized city rather than a balanced one.
