EA
As LucasArts closes its doors, the next stage in Disney's Star Wars video game plan has been revealed. EA has announced today an exclusive deal to publish all future Star Wars games for at least the next few years.
Here we are, once again reporting on more problems with EA and Maxis's SimCity. In a perfect world, these issues would have been taken care of well before the game's launch. In any logical world, they would have at least been worked out shortly after the game's disastrous first day.
It almost seems like a bad joke by now, but the SimCity fiasco is somehow still ongoing. Yesterday, the first major patch to the game since launch, Update 2.0, was released with Maxis hoping it would clear up many of the ongoing issues.
SimCity's servers will be going offline later tonight in anticipation of the update 2.0 patch. The game will be unavailable for about two hours at around 9 PM GMT later today, April 22.
A massive SimCity patch is set to drop on Monday, and Maxis is hoping that it will clear up many of the issues still plaguing the game. A post on the SimCity forums states that it will include "a number of top-requested bug fixes and improvements."
Recently, I delved into the causes and concerns raised by SimCity's always-on debacle. However, the controversial mechanic was by no means introduced by that game. Always-online systems might be a relatively new development in the industry, but even in its short time, it's already made waves.
There are few words in game development as controversial as "always on." If you're not familiar with the term, it refers to "always online DRM," also known as "persistent online authentication." Simply put, it is the requirement that the game always maintain a connection to the company's servers in order to function. These sorts of games will not run without an active Internet connection that allows a constant stream of data to be sent back and forth between the game client and the remote servers.
As the SimCity debacle finally inches towards a close, EA has revealed the list of free titles it will be offering to owners of the game as an apology for the appalling lack of functionality over the past two weeks.
EA has officially confirmed that it will be revealing Battlefield 4 at this month's Game Developer Conference in San Francisco.
Game developer American McGee is currently asking fans, are you interested in seeing a third game in the Alice series? And if so, would you potentially back the game's development on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter?
Despite the major headache that has been SimCity's major connectivity issues, early reviews of the game have been fairly positive overall, although almost all of them cited the always-on features as the biggest negative.
Somehow, the grand fiasco that is the latest SimCity is stretching into a fourth day. A new online petition is now demanding that the "always on" DRM that came included with the game be removed.
SimCity is off to a very rough start. Despite a constant stream of assurances that Origin could handle the "always online" features at launch, players are reporting continued outages as the game is released in more countries worldwide.
Last week, an EA statement regarding microtransactions had many gamers up in arms. The quote, grabbed from the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media, and Telecom Conference, seemed to imply that the company was intent on implementing microtransactions into all of its future games.
While Crysis may have started out as a PC game, it's now undoubtedly a multiplatform franchise. In fact, Crysis 3 was actually well on track to be released on the Wii U, strangely enough.
