The creator of SimCity, Will Wright, created the original game but he wasn’t the one who developed the disaster known as SimCity 2013 or SimCity 5.
He said that the game itself is actually good and he even enjoys playing it a lot. He gave his opinion in an interview with GI.biz, and since he doesn’t work at Maxis (a subsidiary of EA) anymore, he can view the title as a normal player who wasn’t involved in the development of the game.
“I feel bad for the team,” said Will Wright, who left EA to run ‘Stupid Fun Club‘. “I could have predicted – I kind of did predict there’d be a big backlash about the DRM stuff. It’s a good game. I enjoy playing it a lot.”
“It was kind of like, ‘EA is the evil empire, there was a lot of ‘Let’s bash EA over it,'” he continued. “That was basically inexcusable, that you charge somebody $60 for a game and they can’t play it. I can understand the outrage. If I was a consumer buying the game and that happened to me, I’d feel the same.”
Maxis has created another patch to fix the traffic and transport issues, but it won’t fix all the problems. People who actually bothered to buy the game are pretty annoyed because the game cannot be played offline, even though it would actually work well if it did. Online playing enables the players to actually trade with each other, but they won’t be able to play it while they’re travelling, or when their internet’s down, or when EA’s servers are down. The launch was a mess because the game did’t work for almost a week, and to make it work EA had to tweak (and disable) a few features. You’d think EA would be prepared for the launch of a game like SimCity, especially since it can only be played online.