Great job scoring the FemShep interview. She sounded like a good sport the entire time and sounded really enthused in engaging with "fans" as well.

Bobby im with you on the SimCity debate. I don't believe that the whole online aspect is a disguise for DRM. I give Maxis credit for trying to change the franchise in a way thats indeed inovative. Rather than releasing a SimCity5 with updated graphics from 4 they chose to make it into a real Simulation game (in many ways like an MMO).

Which is why I don't plan on getting SimCity. Which is too bad because i've loved the SimCity franchise for a long time. I give them credit for wanting to change the franchise, but i still don't like several aspects that they changed.

No matter what the case is, I still believe that the damage is done, and it's too late, despite EA's atempts to pacify the angry horde. I know that if I was having the kind of problems people were having, I certainly would run far away and never look back. I wonder how many people who have bought the game share my view point, and have abandoned ship, never to return. The sad thing about all this though, is EA will not learn from this mistake. They have already made a killing on the game one way or the other, and they won't be afraid to try this kind of thing again in the future. They'll just tell themselves that they won't let this happen again. Then noone will be surprised when it does, and the cycle will continue. Nothing will change, and people will forget, sadly. EA deserves to be raked over the coals for this, but they won't. Devs need to be taught a lesson that always online is just a bad idea.

Oops.. Turns out according to a Maxis insider you don't need the servers after all. This pretty much supports the EA suits demanding always on conspiracy. They could have done all the cool innovative multiplayer stuff without requiring it for DRM purposes.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/03/12/simcity-server-not-necessary/

I've gotten two additional emails with this article, and they sadly were not very nice about it. I'd save my thoughts for Sunday, but I feel I should put them here, and then repeat them on Sunday.

The main "revelation" in that article is actually nothing new. I've even said on the air that Maxis described the Glassbox engine's simulation as affecting the REGION and the GLOBAL areas. They never specifically said it DIDN'T do anything in your currently active city, but they also never said it did. If you read past RPS's spin and editorial, you'll see that the insider (whom I believe is actually an insider as well) says that it still does simulation on a larger aspect. This is another case of Maxis trying to explain it in the past, and people just sticking their fingers in their ears and going "LALALALA CAN'T HEAR YOU I HATE DRM"

The fundamental flaw is in the design - much like Sony's fundamental flaw being the Cell Processor biting them in the ass for 10 years - you can't play this game as a single city. What I get out of the insider's comments (and from the tests from Kotaku and Notch) is that you can play your single city without connecting to their servers just fine, but the PROBLEM is with the design - you CAN'T reliably play this game with just a single city. You NEED the Region system so you can control multiple cities, even if it's by yourself. And that system offloads portions to the cloud, just like the insider said.

The last thing he said was "It wouldn't take that much...to give you a limited single-player game." I am a software developer myself, and I have said "It wouldn't take that much to do this big fundamental change to our system" before, and have been proven wrong by unforseen difficulties every single time. Just because I, as a grunt working on a larger project, THINK it is trivial and simple to implement, doesn't mean it IS, and it's the job of my project manager to reign me in and put more realistic estimates on the effort needed.

Besides, I wouldn't want to play this game with just one city. It would get frustrating extremely quick.

I don't think there is a problem providing this online mode. It sounds like, from how you described it on the show, that it's awesome and really innovative. I just feel they could have added a limited offline option as well to mess around and experiment with things separate from the online main mode of the game. That's where the LALALA DRM crown gets their ammo. It's all online or nothing. Creating separate modes might have helped assuage both sides. The online mode would have clearly been the superior gameplay option, but at least players could always have an offline mode forever without hacking or whatnot and something to play with when servers or local internet aren't cooperating.

Yeah, I tend to believe this article as well. I mean how complicated could these calculations really be that they just HAD to put them on another server. Sounds like hacked versions of this playing single player offline just fine will be rampant soon.
All that being said, I could care less that it's always online. I just think it's funny that some people think there is no way a big company like EA would want to try to sneakily add DRM under the guise of design.

Whoa. If I didn't play FemShep already, after hearing Hale's voice, I think I'd HAVE to!!! Holy sexy voiceovers, Batman!

It was a great show, Nice job on the Jennifer Hale interview. :)