SC2013 is a deeper simulation with more layers, glassbox couldn't support millions of sims and maintain that fidelity. By the time some of the problems with glassbox hit home the game was already too far along to make meaningful changes. Yes there were bugs, yes some were quite bad, things like traffic were a real pain.
You have to remember that it was one guy working on the traffic simulation, one guy working on the engineering for that part of the simulation system, one graphics engineer working on engineering for the rendering of networks, and me making all of the artwork for it. All of us also had other areas of responsibilities, for example I also had to make all of the vehicles.
There wasn't a massive factory of hundreds of engineers and artists, it was a small team doing difficult work. EA couldn't just make the team bigger and fix everything, game development teams don't scale well like that. We certainly could have used some more engineers, and I fault EA for not giving us more headcount.
One guy had to fix traffic, and one guy eventually did with the help of others. After we shipped. We patched it and gave it out free. That was just one part of the entire game. That guy was laid off this week. That is why I am mad and saddened. He is also one of the smartest and most thoughtful people I've ever worked with, he will be ok.
It's easy to hate EA. It's easy to be mad that we didn't make the game many of you wanted. The reality is that the situation, as is the art of making simulations, was much more complicated than it outwardly appears.
Look at a map and try to find the route you take home from work or school. Now try and describe it very precisely with a series of mathematical functions. Now try to figure out how to optimize it for speed with several modes of transportation available to you, using math. Now try to explain why you decided to go home instead of the mall, using math.
The video game industry has a long proud history of cloning other peoples gameplay and designs. The more money they make the more they are mimicked and copied. Entire genres are nothing but iterative improvements and variations of such historic titles as Wolf 3D. Wolfenstein was a difficult game to make, Carmack is a genius. But once he solved the problems he was facing everyone else took those solutions and applied them forward.
In that same industry, 25 years after SimCity shipped, one of the most successful PC games of all times, only twice has someone outside of Maxis successfully attempted to approach these problems. The Sims is an even more extreme example of that.