10 Video Games You Shouldn't Have Played At Launch
2. SimCity (2013)
SimCity games are a special thing because they don’t always come around all that often.
Like the Master Chief Collection, 2013’s SimCity also suffered server issues on day one. What made it even worse though was that it affected the entire game. EA, in their infinite wisdom, had decided that the title needed to be online at all times to play. So, when the servers immediately fell apart, it pretty much made SimCity a block of deadweight on consumer’s hard drives.
For a studio who was intent on the “games as a service” format, it was not a positive sign.
Despite the problems, developers Maxis said that SimCity would stay online-only because it would take a serious amount of work to undo what was baked into the code. Mere hours later they were proven to be talking absolute tosh when fans effectively found the on/off switch that allowed players to play offline.
Eventually, 10 months later, Maxis updated the game with their own “offline only” mode.
Aside from all this drama, SimCity was unfortunately let down by crummy reviews. Whilst not a terrible game at all and absolutely worth playing for fans of the genre, it created a hole that Cities: Skylines came in and filled by being more focused on the game itself rather than a service.