Guild Wars 2 is a game that was designed from the beginning to be a cooperative, online experience, though. SimCity is an iteration on a previously offline design, with no marketing or design data shared with those looking to buy the game to indicate that it's an entirely different game (to justify online-only) than the previous SimCity games. There's also a big difference between a game where all of the computation takes place on the gameservers and a game where you simply replicate your state up to the server. I think that we're at a point in technology where the public, at least core gamers, understand the difference and can make judgment about this themselves without relying on marketing material or other-party commentary.
Edit: For example, there is similar drama* regarding Diablo 2 to Diablo 3 and StarCraft to StarCraft 2 given the former games had offline+LAN support and the latter require a persistent online connection. Guild Wars required a persistent online connection, so Guild Wars 2 requiring the same thing was practically a given.
I'll agree that EA did a terrible job of explaining to people why the new game was different than the old ones (i.e. why it might require always-online). I think the key point comes from this (taken from the OP):
> Players who want to reach the peak of each specialization can count on surrounding cities to provide services or resources, even workers. As other players build, your city can draw on their resources.
What some people may not realize is that the cities in this new game are pitifully small (probably so that a computer can handle trying to update 20k sims at a time), so in order to actually do anything of significance, you usually have to draw from surrounding cities for materials, people, etc. This is the part of the game that requires online-only, because unless you want to be simulating all of the cities in your region (which I'm assuming you don't, but I don't really know whether the computation costs would be that high), you need some sort of server to handle that for you.
People claim that they came out with an "offline patch" that allows you to play offline, and while that is true, you then miss out on all the city-sharing features, and thus your cities end up crappy, because it is impossible to manage all the resources within a single city.
I'm not saying that what EA/Maxis is doing is necessary, but people seem to be missing that this is the main reason that the cities are always online, not just for the city saving features or anything.
Also, I do know about the StarCraft to StarCraft 2 drama, and from what I can tell, people don't really care any more, and people have gotten over the fact that they need internet to play their game. Sure, sometimes the internet drops in the middle of a tournament, and people get riled up about it again, but it seems to have died down very much since the launch.
> What some people may not realize is that the cities in this new game are pitifully small (probably so that a computer can handle trying to update 20k sims at a time), so in order to actually do anything of significance, you usually have to draw from surrounding cities for materials, people, etc. This is the part of the game that requires online-only, because unless you want to be simulating all of the cities in your region (which I'm assuming you don't, but I don't really know whether the computation costs would be that high), you need some sort of server to handle that for you.
I don't think anyone is debating this. What people are upset about is that Maxis seems to be making the argument that introducing such a mechanic was done for the "vision" of the game. Perhaps they are genuine. But if they are, it leads one to question what exactly their vision was focused on.
>But if they are, it leads one to question what exactly their vision was focused on.
I think it's pretty clear that their vision is focused on the "social" aspects, and with that comes the idea of having all of your friends build a single small city in your region, and you all interact with each other and stuff. I've seen some examples of this happening, it looks pretty fun. I'm sure people would like the option to build single huge cities, but Sim City 3 still works just fine for that.
> I don't think anyone is debating this.
Have you been reading the same news that I have? I hear a lot of people complaining that the servers are basically doing nothing but saving cities to the cloud, so everything should be able to be run client side, and either don't realize or refuse to acknowledge that the servers might be doing other things/useful. I dunno. Maybe things will clear up in the next week or so, when server issues will hopefully get better, and we can stop having front page posts about a company who doesn't know how to scale an online game.
dye44 on twitch.tv has a map of 1.1 Million sims on a res only map. It seems likely he can go much higher then that.
He also has a map that has a 'taxi-splosion' one taxi spawns hundreds of taxi's until all the streets are deadlocked with taxi's. He has to log off and back on for the map to work again.
Lastly are the insane, inane, and wacky workarounds he does to have a playable game. EA got too ambitious and couldn't manage all the WTF's they have made with the new engine.
Edit: For example, there is similar drama* regarding Diablo 2 to Diablo 3 and StarCraft to StarCraft 2 given the former games had offline+LAN support and the latter require a persistent online connection. Guild Wars required a persistent online connection, so Guild Wars 2 requiring the same thing was practically a given.
[*] I can elaborate on this, if you'd like.