EA attempts to placate SimCity owners with free game

If you aren’t able to play SimCity, fret not. Electronic Arts is giving a free game to everyone who has activated SimCity on their Origin accounts while the developers work on getting the server issues fixed. People who have bought and activated the game on Origin will get an email on March 18 telling them how to redeem the free game. The company hasn’t mentioned which game we'll be getting, but it will be from EA’s lineup.

Many gamers have been facing issues with SimCity since its North American launch earlier this week. EA blamed "server instability" caused by too many players. The company has since been in damage-control mode and is scrambling to bring additional servers online.

Let's hope that the free game isn't Darkspore

SimCity is the latest game in the popular city-building franchise and is meant to be a reboot of the series. The game goes back to its roots, streamlining the gameplay while leaving behind some of the arbitrary complexities that the previous games had, like the difficulty in laying down underground things like subway systems and water systems.

A major new feature in SimCity is the game’s unique take on multiplayer. Multiplayer in itself is a new feature to the franchise. When you play a game, you have to first pick a region to build a city. Other players can join your region and take to building cities on the empty city slots. The game is balanced around co-operation between the different cities in a region.

The multiplayer component also ended up causing quite a stir, as the game requires you to be online all the time—even if you’re playing alone in a private region. While this originally resulted in angry retorts from gamers, the problem revealed its true form during the US launch of the game, when a staggering number of gamers were unable to even start the game. This is presumably because EA failed to predict the number of day-one players.

SimCity was released in India yesterday and you can grab it from EA’s digital distribution service Origin. The game is available in two flavours: a limited edition and a digital deluxe edition. The limited edition costs Rs 1,499, while the digital deluxe edition costs Rs 2,499.

The only difference between the two versions is that the digital deluxe edition includes all the day-one DLCs that EA has released for SimCity, which includes the British City Set, the French City Set, and the German City Set. These seem to be mostly aesthetic changes, and don’t have any radical impact on game balance.