EA and Maxis can’t do anything right lately, according to many fans of The Sims. The recent removal of several features of the game from The Sims 4 – including that ever so important transitionary period, the toddler stage – has angered them. Understandably so when their main complaint is that they’ll sell it to them later, a practice that the publisher has shown devious willingness to do countless times. If that wasn’t enough, new information has come to light that suggests The Sims 4 was originally developed with the same DRM as Sim City had. Yep, the one that wouldn’t let you play the game without an internet connection. Why is this such a big deal, intrepid reader? When Sim City launched, the servers couldn’t withstand the assault they found themselves under and went kaput, turning the £40-or-so product that many customers had just bought into a digital doorstop.
A LinkedIn profile of Gil Colgate, a Senior Engineer at Electronic Arts, lists the following (emphasis ours):
Sims 4 Got to work on clustered servers, chat systems, scaling and performance, and other internet style stuff when it was an internet based game. Also became python internals guru.
It’s not a huge leap of the imagination to reach the conclusion that “internet based game” means “it won’t let you play the game without an internet connection” from the very same companies that already implemented it once.
This is contrary to what EA said back in July of 2013, when Frank Gibeau told VentureBeat that “The Sims 4 would be built as a single-player, offline experience.” You can’t really get that with an “internet based game.”; so it would seem that EA really did learn something from the Sim City backlash.
Credit to @DansGaming on Twitter for finding the LinkedIn.
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This is old information and not contradictory. It was being developed as an always-on game initially, but then they scrapped that and switched to developing it as a single-player title.
Welp I just canceled my preorder. Wish more people would, it might send a clear message to EA