What? There's actually someone DEFENDING this hilarious piece of horrid design? What? How...what? That blows my mind. It's such a disastrous disregard for customer freedom it's hilarious. That I have to be constantly connected to a server that could potentially go down at any time and take my savegames with it...to play a single player game...boggles my mind. It's such a stupid design desicion that I cannot fathom that there is ANY regard for the customer in that design. It's purely to create an "online service" that can be milked with DLC further down the line. Also DRM.
*steps down from soap box*
Go to the simcity forums on gamefaqs. There's nothing but two warring factions. The first is the people who can get into the game or love EA to death or are paid to love EA who write about how amazing the game is. The second group are the people who have actually tried to play the game and can't and want their money back and generally sort of go overboard about hating EA. There is also one person with a sensible opinion of "Man I wish this wasn't happening so that people could play an otherwise good game" who is me.
Also, totally wasn't defending THQ, but I got the THQ complete pack and I actually have loved most of the games. There are problems, but nothing nearly as offensive as triple-A nonsense I see sometimes. Also, those other really good publishers aren't more or less dead and gone. THQ is.
And Zespri, it is in the consumer's hands as to whether this is the future of gaming. If people get the common sense to not reward terrible business practice and heartless DRM policy, then game developers, publishers, stockholders, and so forth will lose more money to that than to piracy. In an ideal world, it'll all stop. Personally, I really am hoping that all of the non-MMOs with always online policies fail. It's not because the game is bad, or I hate the developers, or anything. I want the people who authorized/forced this nonsense to be punished for it. Hard. I want this gone from the industry immediately. I do not want to be forced to play multiplayer, I do not want social capabilities in my games, I do not want strangers to be able to jump in and help at random, and I do not want to play always online games on my reliably slow internet connection, and I will boycott, write letters, sign petitions, protest, I will do anything possible to make this not become the norm. Anybody else who has a problem should do that as well, and maybe we'll eventually make an impact that counts.
And yeah, I know that petitions and letters are always ignored, but I don't care. This is ridiculous and I'll get every kind of mad that I want to get. As a consumer, you do have one entitlement: To a product that works when you get it, after you paid for it.
(I probably wouldn't in all honesty actually protest in real life. I have more important passions to pursue. But, all of that post is symbolic of how much this whole 'movement' is something I really do hate to the fullest.)
