SimCity launched today, and the always online game is already experiencing some problems due to 30 minute queues on the server. The game was launched with the requirement to always be online to play because everyone’s cities can affect their neighboring cities.
While the concept of interacting with other people’s builds is cool in theory, the excitement over that feature can be quickly doused if players have to wait half an hour just to start playing.
As Geek.com points out, the game’s developer, EA, seems to have underestimated the popularity of the game and failed to allocate enough server space.
There is very little doubt that SimCity is an impressive game when you can actually get on and play. One blogger has actually used the simulated traffic in the game to fix his home town’s traffic problems in real life.
The beauty and realism are being overshadowed right now by the wait times people are seeing when they boot up their newly launched copies of the game.
Digital Spy points out that this is far from the first game that has had problems with allocating servers to online only games. Diablo 3 was another online only game launched last year that had similar problems right after launch.
Another problem that has arisen with the way EA has made the game is that, should you eventually shut down the game and want to play later, you are met with a conundrum.
The save data is dedicated to a specific server. Once you shut down, you can either wait for the server you were using to have an open spot or start over on a different server.
It stands to reason that, once the launch day has come and gone, the server problems won’t be creeping up any more.
You can check out a video demonstrating the server problems with SimCity below.