According to Gibeau, SimCity should have been a complete disaster. ”In retrospect, our biggest takeaway is that we are lucky that SimCity has an enormous number of loyal fans,” he noted, ”That first week after launch was really rough - an experience nobody wants to live through again.”
Faith in RenderWare was also somewhat misplaced. ”The idea was that RenderWare would power all of our games in the last transition,” Gibeau admitted, “The problem was that it wasn’t ready for prime time. It hadn’t shipped any games. The tools, the pipelines, the tech just weren’t mature or complete. Then I took that learning because in my role as the head of the studios, I had to make sure we understood how we were going to manage the technology…We blew the last transition because we relied on RenderWare. It didn’t work. It set us back for multiple years. I was not going to repeat that mistake.”
The Sims 4 will be an offline experience, and in the next console cycle, EA will be favoring the Frostbite 3.0 and Ignite engines.
