Rest in Peace
Recently the monolithic source of all evil in the gaming world, Electronic Arts, decided to close the doors of one of the longest running and most influential game developers in the industry: Maxis. This comes as little surprise considering how their last few games have been received, and I thought I'd take some time to briefly go through my history with Maxis and why they were once the kings of PC sim games.
Where there's a Will, there's a Wright Way
Humble beginnings.
In 1987 Will Wright and Jeff Braun decided to port their well received Commadore 64 game "SimCity" over to the PC. SimCity was a strange specimen at the time, a game with no Win or Loose condition that just went on forever.
Wright and Braun created Maxis, after Braun's father suggested a "two syllable name with an X for good measure" and settled on the phrase "Six AM" backwards. Despite it's niche appeal SimCity sold very well and Maxis went on to create a slew of spinoffs including SimAnt, SimEarth, SimTower, and SimLife among others.
My experience with these early games is sparse at best, save one. I've played SimAnt and SimEarth before, but found them antiquated and poorly aged. SimTower, though, was an incredibly addictive and enthralling title that still holds up today. It's a great game, and fun as hell, and can be played for just moments, or for hours at a time.
Electronic Arts and the Sims
Unfortunately unavailable anywhere.
In 1997 Maxis was acquired by Electronic Arts, during the production of the third SimCity game, SimCity 3000. Their next title, and the first to be produced fully by EA was The Sims, a game that simply had no competition in the market place.
It's been said that the idea of The Sims is somewhat pointless, and the idea of a game simulating daily life doesn't make sense. This might be true, but the numbers don't lie, and The Sims quickly became, and has remained one of the most profitable franchises for a very long time.
Game changer, and genre-creator.
One Golden Year and the Sims 3
Almost perfect and untouched.
The 2003-2004 marks the absolute peak of Maxis' history. Between these two years we saw the release of what are, arguably, their best games SimCity 4 and The Sims 2. Thanks to these two Maxis became kings of the PC and a name that everyone, even many non-gamers, suddenly knew.
SimCity 4 has remained the high bar for city simulation games even 12 years later. The tools offered to the player are impressively expansive and the simulations are simple to learn and difficult to master. It's the best type of sequel, taking all of the best ideas from the older games and applying new ways to streamline them. It doesn't hurt that it pulled the SimCity franchise into 3D, rather then the antiquated isometric view of it's predecessors. It's a fantastically fun game, even today, and remains unsurpassed as one of the best city sims ever.
No more blocky faces and aging!
Meanwhile, The Sims 2 has often been regarded as the best of that series. There's no denying the leaps and bounds Sims 2 has over the original. A full 3D render, Sims that react to the world around them, contextual actions that change dynamically, a full town to explore complete with business, and so many updates to the AI it's impossible to fit them all here. The Sims 2 remains one of my favorite PC titles and a great, albeit dated, game.
Open world and polished to a sheen.
Eight expansion packs for the Sims 2 were released, and finally in 2009 The Sims 3 came out. It's change were less visual and AI, and more mechanical. Sims 3 completely overhauled the world and how the Sims themselves interacted with it. The biggest change though, was that the map was now seamless and open, meaning your Sim could dynamically walk to the park without ever experiencing a loading screen. This came at the cost of system performance and even now Sims 3 can be taxing on a system. Regardless, for fans of the series The Sims 3 offered a great deal of improvements over the prior titles and over the course of eleven expansion packs still remains a popular game.
Spore and the way down
First stumble, but not the last.
Let's talk about Spore, lord knows someone has to.
Let me pitch you an idea: create a creature from scratch, cobbling together it's DNA and watching as it grows from a single-cell organism to a functioning society, all the way to a space-faring galactic civilization. All the while the game is dynamically creating similar creatures that evolve with you.
That was the pitch for Spore, Will Wright's big game-changing follow-up to The Sims. What we got instead was a series of mini-games and demo's that finally lead up to an unsatisfying and mediocre space-sim game.
Spore might not be a bad game, it's completely playable and the addition of user-created content gave it a healthy fan-base while it was still active, but it suffered from what can best be described as the Peter Molyneux effect. The game is pitched in such a fantastical manner with so many promises that when the final product comes out lacking some of these features the game, regardless of how good it might be, becomes vilified. That's certainly the case with Spore, a poster child for broken promises in a game. This is likely where Maxis' downturn began, but certainly not it's zenith.
Double Whammy
Hole in the ground...
"I just pre-ordered SimCity [2013]"
"You just pre-ordered a game with always on DRM and micro-transactions from EA in 2013?"
"Yeah! I'm really looking forward to it!"
That's the conversation I had with my little brother shortly before SimCity 2013 was released.
"I regret everything I've ever done! I renounce Maxis, and I rebuke EA! I'll never love again!"
That was my little brother's reaction only a short time after SimCity 2013 was released.
SimCity 2013 (because naming a game the same thing as a game that already exists is stupid) was a disaster. There's no other word to describe it, nothing went right. It all started when it was announced that the game would feature always online DRM and wouldn't support mods. The idea was that this was a more "social" game then it's predecessors.
SimCity isn't a social experience. SimCity is a game played by PC gaming enthusiasts late into the night when they should be sleeping, not with a room full of friends at a LAN party or after a night of drinking.
Apparently learning nothing from the launch of Diablo 3, or any myriad of MMO games, the initial release of SimCity was unplayable, with wait times of over an hour to play, even if you were playing by yourself. Worse, the company later admitted that, despite initial reports, a single-player offline mode was very possible, and was even patched into the game later on.
Even worse is that, even when the game started working, players discovered that the internal systems just weren't that good. Maps were much smaller then SimCity 4, and it was often impossible to fit everything you needed to run a city into the city itself. The traffic AI was problematic, often behaving erratically or nonsensically, and the game was graphically unimpressive.
... nail in the coffin.
Following the disappointment that was SimCity 2013, the Sims 4 was almost doomed from the get-go. People didn't trust EA anymore, and voted them the worst company in the US twice in a row, beating out Bank of America and Monsanto. Add to that the exhaustive list of stripped features and the re-introduction of loading screens and it was clear that there was little hope for The Sims 4. Sure enough, upon release reaction was luke-warm at best. updates to the AI and an overhaul of Sim-to-Sim interaction couldn't help it. Maxis was limping, waiting the killing blow.
EA pulls an EA
Even their official images look imposing.
Maxis isn't the first developer to be killed by EA's involvement. Pandemic studios, creators of the Mercenaries series and the StarWars: Battlefront games were axed in 2009. Westwood, the creators of Command and Conquer, haven't released a game since 2003. Bullfrog, the studio founded by Peter Molyneux and creators of Theme Hospital and the Populous games closed in 2001. Origin software, who's name is now plastered on EA's second-rate digital store, created the Ultima series and shut down in 2004. The list is long and terrifying, and many have called EA tyrannically and pure evil because of this.
Maxis is just the latest victims of the modern gaming world. The constant nickel and diming of customers with DLC and expansion packs, along with disastrous business decisions and questionable ethics are telltale signs of a once great AAA company that's lost it's way. Knowing EA they'll likely stick Maxis on the back-burner, pulling them out to dance like a trained monkey in the vain hope that nostalgia still sells.
In the meantime, to you Maxis, I bid a goodnight. Perhaps this is a mercy blow, slitting the throat of the wounded buck and letting it pass into the golden pasture in the sky. I have hope for the former employees of Maxis, and hope that other developers might learn from this experience. Until then, Soodle Soodle!
image sources:
http://img1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20130514161620/logopedia/images/1/14/Maxis.svg
http://www.bestoldgames.net/img/ss/simcity/simcity-ss1.gif
http://moarpowah.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/SimCity-TRAVIS-1.png
http://cdn.hellogiggles.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/26/3266-the-sims-1-irgjf_1471495.jpg
http://eaassets-a.akamaihd.net/prod.simcity.com/sites/default/files/SimCity%204%20Box.png
http://popcultureblog.dallasnews.com/files/2014/07/the_sims2_089_1680.jpg
http://oyster.ignimgs.com/mediawiki/apis.ign.com/the-sims-3/thumb/6/6f/Sims3cover.jpg/480px-Sims3cover.jpg
https://d1s1q1nq49bywn.cloudfront.net/cached/7f7fa0c9239dcf62f49325dfe7eabf49/skin1/img/products/spore-mac/spore-mac-product.jpg
http://brothersofwar.org/community/uploads/monthly_12_2014/post-7-0-41882800-1418800378.jpg
http://blogs-images.forbes.com/jasonevangelho/files/2014/08/The-Sims-4-release-date.jpg
No comments:
Post a Comment