The new SimCity...*sigh*

[Trekker4747]

Sad, but not surprising. Was anyone pleased with SC4?

Sim City 4 with the Rush Hour Expansion pack and the NAM add-on is a phenomenal game. The NAM gives you a LOT to tweak and alter in terms of how traffic and transportation is utilized. (Not to mention being able to impose "usage fees" on various transportation tiles for more income. I call them "personal property taxes" for the vehicles that use those tiles. )

I can *still* play that game, and do.

This recent release of Sim City stripped out everything that the franchise had built over its life and made it way too uninteresting and basic.

Give me the exact same game SC4:Rush Hour + NAM is with present-day graphics and 3D interface and you'd have something.

The Sim City (let's call it a reboot?) was junk.

 

[TheGodBen]

As a bit of good news for city-building fans, Cities Skylines is coming out soon and, from everything I've heard, it's quite good. It's from the same folks who made the Cities in Motion games.

I saw that on sale today for €20 and decided to risk it. I don't like pre-ordering games, but from the videos I've seen this really does look like it may be the city simulator I've been waiting a decade for. If the simulation ends up being broken then at least it was fairly cheap. And I'd prefer to waste my money on a game made by a small development studio in Finland than the soulless husk that once was Maxis.

I don't know if you saw the update at the bottom of the article: "A handful of Maxis Emeryville employees will be moving to EAHQ to continue developing SimCity." So not quite dead yet, but we'll see what they do with it.

I'm guessing those devs are being kept around to manage the game's online mode, for however long EA decides to keep the servers up. Maybe there'll be some more mobile SimCity games in the medium term. But it looks fairly certain now that there wont be another PC SimCity for a long time, if ever.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

As a bit of good news for city-building fans, Cities Skylines is coming out soon and, from everything I've heard, it's quite good. It's from the same folks who made the Cities in Motion games.

I saw that on sale today for €20 and decided to risk it. I don't like pre-ordering games, but from the videos I've seen this really does look like it may be the city simulator I've been waiting a decade for. If the simulation ends up being broken then at least it was fairly cheap. And I'd prefer to waste my money on a game made by a small development studio in Finland than the soulless husk that once was Maxis.

Apparently, some people who had a chance to play it wanted to see how badly they could break it. They removed the entire public transport network. The city fell into chaos: garbage piled up, buildings burned down, dead bodies everywhere.

Sounds awesome.

 

[SPCTRE]

I don't know if you saw the update at the bottom of the article: "A handful of Maxis Emeryville employees will be moving to EAHQ to continue developing SimCity." So not quite dead yet, but we'll see what they do with it.

I'm guessing those devs are being kept around to manage the game's online mode, for however long EA decides to keep the servers up. Maybe there'll be some more mobile SimCity games in the medium term. But it looks fairly certain now that there wont be another PC SimCity for a long time, if ever.

The actual Maxis is just as dead as Bullfrog and Westwood.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

Quite true. What's been calling itself Maxis for the past several years has almost no relation to Will Wright's original Maxis.

 

[eastman23]

As a bit of good news for city-building fans, Cities Skylines is coming out soon and, from everything I've heard, it's quite good. It's from the same folks who made the Cities in Motion games.

I saw that on sale today for €20 and decided to risk it. I don't like pre-ordering games, but from the videos I've seen this really does look like it may be the city simulator I've been waiting a decade for. If the simulation ends up being broken then at least it was fairly cheap. And I'd prefer to waste my money on a game made by a small development studio in Finland than the soulless husk that once was Maxis.

Apparently, some people who had a chance to play it wanted to see how badly they could break it. They removed the entire public transport network. The city fell into chaos: garbage piled up, buildings burned down, dead bodies everywhere.

Sounds awesome.

There's been several livestreams of people playing Cities Skylines over the past few days and the game looks pretty good. The buildings seem a little bland design wise, but other than that, I haven't found anything I dislike about it.

Maybe there'll be some more mobile SimCity games in the medium term. But it looks fairly certain now that there wont be another PC SimCity for a long time, if ever.

That's probably exactly what EA is looking for. More mobile stuff.

 

[FPAlpha]

Yeah well that happens when you design a game for maximum profit, take out everything that actually made the core of the game and slapped on some online component because people won't play games nowadays unless they can do it online (won't even mention the shitty launch and unfinished state of the game when it launched.. oops ).

Once a great franchise that's been run into the ground by greedy corporate thinking.

When i don't have enough on my platter gaming wise (fat chance) i will try some of these other city building games. While they are not usually polished like AA titles from big studios they are sometimes even better because they leave out all the bullshit and provide you with an actual enjoyable game.

 

[SPCTRE]

Yeah well that happens when you get bought by EA

FTFY

 

[Squiggy]

Sad, but not surprising. Was anyone pleased with SC4?

Sim City 4 with the Rush Hour Expansion pack and the NAM add-on is a phenomenal game. The NAM gives you a LOT to tweak and alter in terms of how traffic and transportation is utilized. (Not to mention being able to impose "usage fees" on various transportation tiles for more income. I call them "personal property taxes" for the vehicles that use those tiles. )

I can *still* play that game, and do.

This recent release of Sim City stripped out everything that the franchise had built over its life and made it way too uninteresting and basic.

Give me the exact same game SC4:Rush Hour + NAM is with present-day graphics and 3D interface and you'd have something.

The Sim City (let's call it a reboot?) was junk.

My bad. I meant nuSimCity. Not SC4, which still is a much better game than the current itineration.

That's probably exactly what EA is looking for. More mobile stuff.

Their current SimCity BuiltIt app is about as in depth as the new hot mess. That's fine for a phone, I'm not expecting to be blown away on an iPhone.

As a bit of good news for city-building fans, Cities Skylines is coming out soon and, from everything I've heard, it's quite good. It's from the same folks who made the Cities in Motion games.

I saw that on sale today for €20 and decided to risk it. I don't like pre-ordering games, but from the videos I've seen this really does look like it may be the city simulator I've been waiting a decade for. If the simulation ends up being broken then at least it was fairly cheap. And I'd prefer to waste my money on a game made by a small development studio in Finland than the soulless husk that once was Maxis.

Apparently, some people who had a chance to play it wanted to see how badly they could break it. They removed the entire public transport network. The city fell into chaos: garbage piled up, buildings burned down, dead bodies everywhere.

Sounds awesome.

It does. After getting burned by pre-ordering SimCity (and having the mac version delayed 6 months), I'm going to wait until after it launches.

If that trailer is anywhere close to the actual game, then Cities is the SimCity we've been looking for.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

I'll start a thread when it comes out.

 

[TheGodBen]

Apparently, some people who had a chance to play it wanted to see how badly they could break it. They removed the entire public transport network. The city fell into chaos: garbage piled up, buildings burned down, dead bodies everywhere.

Sounds awesome.

This video demonstrates how crazy things can get, starting at the 6h50m mark. The guy had a peak population of around 125,000 with over $3million in the bank, but over the course of an hour his population fell below 40,000 and he went bankrupt.

How? He built an incinerator slightly too close to a water pump. People started getting sick from the pollution, and he didn't have enough hospitals in his high-density zones to deal with all the patients. He also lacked decent public transit systems so he had some traffic problems that caused ambulances not to reach sick people in time. So citizens started dying in ever larger numbers, and the crematoriums weren't able to handle it. Dead bodies started amassing in buildings, which caused the spread of disease to get out of hand. It quickly became a pandemic, thousands died and thousands more left the city. The population stabilised for a time around 50,000, but the lack of tax revenue caused a huge deficit. He eventually raised taxes and cut services to deal with that, but that caused land value across the city to fall which led to more people leaving. Eventually he just ran out of money.

The game should have done a better job relaying the information about the polluted water supply to the player, as he mistakenly thought that people were getting sick from noise pollution. The behaviour of ambulances and hearses could also do with some improvement. But it was interesting to see how the different game mechanics interacted and caused the catastrophe. It was basically a series of poor planning decisions that were acceptable on their own, but when combined fed into a death spiral.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

Yikes.

Yeah, I hope they fix stuff like that. I don't mind having to fix problems, as long as I don't have to guess at what the problem is. The game should be good at communicating that. Even something as simple as "this incinerator is producing tremendous pollution that's getting sucked into your water supply," displayed through graphs/map shading.

 

[TheGodBen]

The in-game twitter thing did warn him that the water supply was contaminated about 10 minutes before the death spiral got out of hand, he just didn't see those messages. The problem is that all the tweets look the same at a glance, an innocuous tweet from a stoner praising the mayor for legalising cannabis looks much the same as one complaining that the drinking water is making people sick.

They should consider colour coding the messages like SimCity 4 did. A green message meant things were going well, blue messages provided advice, red messages indicated there was a problem, and flashing red messages indicated that something needed urgent attention. A simple system like that would go a long way towards making the game more accessible.