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EA wants to avoid online issues with SimCity

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SimCity

Diablo III, a predominantly single player game launched this year – with a perpetual online requirement – so you’d always have to be connected to the internet to play. It’s had more than its fair share of issues – leading many to be a little wary of games with similar requirements. One such game is the new SimCity reboot – but EA’s doing it all it can to prevent similar launch issues.

Speaking to Videogamer – who justly prodded on the matter –  Maxis overlord Lucy Bradshaw had this to say

“I think that’s why we have to be really, really good about the service that we provide. Electronic Arts is investing quite a bit in making sure we’re locked and loaded”

“If you’ve seen some of our recent launches they’ve been really quite flawless. Battlefield had huge amounts of players and stayed extremely stable, and think SWTOR was one of the most absolutely stable MMO launches. We understand that, when we go down this path, one of the things we have to do is provide really great service. Not only in the steps that a player takes to get into the game, but also in the game services themselves.”

Like Diablo III, SimCity will have a persistent economy – hence the online requirement . Bradshaw insists that they’re trying to come up with a  “nice, graceful” way to deal with connection loss, so that it doesn;t affect players’ games too much.

“I don’t want people to have to tolerate bad connection or downtime. The asynchronous multiplayer aspect to what we’re doing allows us to be very graceful in how we address any kind of hitches,” Bradshaw reiterated. “We also take very seriously games as a service. And I do think, yup, as with any technology there’s going to be moments of ‘here we go’ and we’ve seen it with hordes coming in and systems that are overloaded and what not. But we ultimately have come up with more and more graceful ways to deal with that. And I think the opportunities it affords in terms of gameplay are so significant, that if we’re not going to push in that space and stay on these little self-contained islands that we’re not going to explore new gameplay.”

Last Updated: July 14, 2012

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