"data collected from camera never leaves the local console"
That's a lie, because any machine can be hacked, even by Microsoft employees (and certainly NSA these days, they'd love facial data for free via government order). As long as you save the data, the data is saved, and can leave the XBox platform, and as such, it's unsecure. Hacking occurs every day. Nope, no thanks. Sony, you'd better pay attention to this and not repeat MS's mistake(s).
Too late, EA. You screwed this game. I'll wait for the single-player offline Simcity 5, if it ever occurs. When you go back to the previous Simcity games and follow that formula, then you might get my money. Not until. I want my huge regions that I had in SimCity 4 Deluxe / Rush Hour, and I want it 100% offline. Until that happens, screw you and your investors, you won't get my money. Quit killing my favorite games, morons.
@Scorpion1813 @VarietyMage Actually, after 30+ years of gaming and doing programming myself for years, I know quite a bit about development and the development cycle. I also know that quite a few single-player games have been scragged thanks to MMO development (which kills the need to put out new single-player games, thanks to constant money coming in).
As for Rockstar being "way better than that", only time will tell. Blizzard got rid of the D2 team, and shot themselves in the head (ostensibly because they didn't want to go the route Blizzard execs laid out for them - cloud gaming, leading to MMO). DNF got caught up in the changing technology conundrum, when they should have stuck with the current tech, put out the game, and got money rolling in for the sequel. It doesn't have to be perfect, it just needs to ship with few bugs. EA decided that they wanted to force everybody to play with each other (MMO), and as such, denied the core fans the single-player masterpiece that SimCity once was.
@greatryoman Hopefully they'll patch the game to allow you to use your IPod or other downloaded tracks in-game (your own independent station). I looked at the track list, and I was not impressed at all.
With GTA Online running, they'll milk that for money for probably 5 years, then release GTA 6...maybe. Hopefully GTA 6 won't be another Diablo 3 / Duke Nukem Forever debacle (5+ years of programming, only to turn out crapware). It seems like whenever a company starts running an MMO (Blizzard, Bioware, EA, etc), the single-player games (Diablo, KOTOR, SimCity, etc) get dumped on. Crossing fingers...
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