SimCity – End Of The Trainwreck In Sight?

Read the review in full on http://techzwn.com/ 

If you’ve at all been keeping an eye on what’s been happening around the latest installment of the long-running online city builder series you might have noticed that its launch has been less than perfect. In fact it’s been all but an outright disaster and serving as possibly the single greatest argument as to why always-on DRM is an exceptionally bad idea.

Even prior to release there were multiple concerns surrounding the game with some reviews allowed access to the closed Beta noting that due to the low population they could not gauge the overall quality of the title. Praising many elements of its design and mechanics but specifically noting that because the servers were hardly being strained by their presence, issues such as lag, file corruption, disconnections and other aspects could hardly be accounted for. That their overall experience might not fully reflect that of the general public upon its release.

It turned out they were right to do this.

While Electronic Arts rightfully opted for a staggered launch to the title with access, only being permitted in certain areas before others to try and prevent a server crash from a sudden rush, it seemed to hardly help. Not long after its start we began to see repeats of many criticisms of Dialbo 3. Well, that’s not quite true. While Dialbo 3 was certainly problematic suffering from Always-on DRM it had a single obvious source – Error 37 along with one or two lesser referenced errors. The problems SimCity had with always being required to be online are numerous, ugly and came down to the publisher being completely unprepared to deal with the strain placed upon their servers.

Thankfully the end seems to be in sight, at least for some of its problems. More surprisingly however, EA has actually admitted it was at fault for many of the problems.