SimCity: The City Simulator

[Niyeaux]

The Giant Bomb quicklook definitely makes this game look like totally not my jam. The tiny city size and the inability to save and reload are complete dealbreakers.

[Gormongous]

Yeah, what's with how small the cities look in reviews? Watching Chris and Jake play, while it didn't seem like there was tons of space, there was enough, but every screenshot I've seen of the final game seems to show the same twelve-by-twelve-block mini-borough.

[toblix]

I bet they're just playing it safe with regard to server load. They'll probably have their hands full in the coming days making sure everything is not down all the time, and limiting city size is likely an simple way of easing the load. They've been very vocal about increasing the max size later, so that's probably going to happen once they've bought all new servers since they're going to fucking melt when I get my hands on the game.

[Colourful Stuff]

Creative director Ocean Quigley claims, "We’ll eventually get around to expanding the city size, but I can’t make any promises as to when.” Maybe between promises for larger cities and server problems it would be advisable to not buy SimCity for a while.

[toblix]

I haven't really played that many massively multiplayer games, especially not a launch, but after having burned myself on it always ending in a «We thought we were prepared, but we weren't at all» scenario, my expectations of actually getting to play on launch days have been set to zero. So I'm not going to be all angry when I get weird error messages and dropouts; instead I'll laugh derisively at EA and Maxis and maybe play some Ni No Kuni, which, by the way, seems terrible so far.

[Frenetic Pony]

Creative director Ocean Quigley claims, "We’ll eventually get around to expanding the city size, but I can’t make any promises as to when.” Maybe between promises for larger cities and server problems it would be advisable to not buy SimCity for a while.

I guess I'll wait to see when, and even if, they actually do so; not too mention to WHAT size. It'd take maybe, 4x the size to get me interested. Still not huge, and still missing things like highways, but I could still enjoy it.

 

Still, by that time I might as well wait to see if it goes on sale as well.

 

Edit- Also, if Ni No Kuni doesn't grab you in the beginning, I'm not sure what to say. The story was a big draw, but I stopped playing after the JRPG trappings of stretching out the game to twice as long as it should be, the tutorial to ten times as long, and still sticking with stupid menus for attacks when it's been more than a decade since western RPG's got rid of them for the better.

[Colourful Stuff]

... but it isn't really massively multiplayer is it? From what I've read (which is very little) the multiplayer is confined to the region map. The online requirement is a drm and cloud save thing.

On the game itself and that QL, I found Jeff's compulsion to optimise very frustrating. It does seem to have been designed as a set of expressive tools. Curved roads are less efficient, but cities aren't efficient. I am the person who deliberately inbreeds my court in Crusader Kings 2 to make a dynasty of dwarfs, maybe optimisation is what most people want.

[Gormongous]

I agree, but it sounds like you have to optimize aggressively to unlock all the buildings and features, since the final city hall addition unlocks at 290,000 and the Ars Technica article reported difficulty pushing past 200,000. The tools can be as robust and expressive as you please, but if the canvas is lacking...

[Colourful Stuff]

... or your canvas is at the end of a long queue. This canvas metaphor is being STRETCHED a little too thin, don't you think?

[Badfinger]

Giant Bomb: https://www.giantbomb.com/videos/quick-look-simcity/2300-7103/

 

Glad I hesitated in pre-ordering, it just sounds, too small. Like, you can quickly max out a city and then you just have to go do a new one, nor do the "region online" things sound interesting.

 

If a city was, like, 9 times bigger it might sound good. But if I want small scale simulation, then I'm probably sticking with Rollercoaster Tycoon.

The thing people are finding out, generally, is that it is REALLY easy to fill a city space. As in, instead of trying to increase density if you just pop down new roads and new zones for what has demand, it will be filled.

 

And then they find out that's a virtually unsustainable way to grow the city and go through tremendous pains to expand up instead of out.

 

I'm excited to find out if it truly has the depth I'm expecting from region play and how cities in the region coexist. That is because I've never been about filling a space with skyscrapers anyway.

[Salacious Snake]

I've only played for a few minutes so far, but I really like farting around in my little crapburg. 

 

Also, I'm extremely happy that you can still use profane city names... I was afraid the "always online" stuff would mean a profanity filter. Maybe it does filter things in public games, but privately they didn't stop me from founding the city of Shitville in the county of Buttholevania.

 

If anyone wants to be my Origin pal, my name is Wikipedia_Brown.

 

I'm pleasantly surprised by how well it runs on my laptop with an Intel 4000 thingy. It may get bad as the city becomes denser, but the game actually looks neat with the settings way down low. The buildings almost look untextured, but in an eye-pleasing way. 

 

I'm installing it on my beefy desktop as we speak, so that will probably be revelatory after slumming it on the portable.

 

 

image relevant to portable computing: 

 

[Thrik]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=H9VClRhU404

[Badfinger]

IS EVERYONE SIMULATING CITIES? ARE YOU LOVING IT?

 

I am quite excited to get home to my copy of the game this evening and just SIMULATE.

[Dewar]

I bet they're just playing it safe with regard to server load. They'll probably have their hands full in the coming days making sure everything is not down all the time, and limiting city size is likely an simple way of easing the load. They've been very vocal about increasing the max size later, so that's probably going to happen once they've bought all new servers since they're going to fucking melt when I get my hands on the game.

 

At some level I take the $20 Amazon credit I got for pre-ordering this as sort of an inconvienence fee. I expect the servers will be up and down and things will be tweaked a lot in the first few weeks, but I can always go and try to finish up Tropico for my city building needs while I wait.

[Salacious Snake]

I spoke too soon about profanity. Everything is a string of asterisks now.

 

That pisses me off.

[Badfinger]

I take no credit for finding these, I have stolen this post from another forum.

 

http://imgur.com/a/gUFqn

 

They are incredible, and you should print them on your Virtual Mayor Wall immediately.

[feelthedarkness]

I haven't been following too closely, but since city size is initially limited by their server capacity/load what is the value of that for me? Is it just DRM/Anti-piracy stuff? I usually don't care about that stuff, but this seems a bit onerous. 

[Lechimp]

Should someone create a region so we can have up to 16 people from here playing in the same city? That would be cool.

 

Feel free to add me on Origin: MechaTofuPirate

[BigJKO]

I thought it wasn't so much server load, but that it's a client performance issue and they want to ensure everyone, low-end and high-end, are on the same level city-size-wise. But that's still only an issue when the game wants players to play with other players. I wish there was just an unlimited single-player only option,

[Yahto]

I've been unable to even get to the server selection screen. Ugh.  And as far as 16 player regions ago, apparently you can only directly interact with three adjacent cities.  But I guess you can chat and contribute to great works, so that makes the game multiplayer and necessitates always-online drm? If anyone manages to make a region without having all progress wiped after taking a break, sign me up!

[TheLastBaron]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=H9VClRhU404

Oh god, Francis is still around?

[TychoCelchuuu]

I spoke too soon about profanity. Everything is a string of asterisks now.

 

That pisses me off.

Holy shit. That's sort of like, the last straw in terms of me not wanting to buy this. EA is going to tell me what I can name my own city? Fuck that noise.

[Sno]

In the GiantBomb quicklook, Jeff touches on one of the things that made me really dislike Sim City 4, where to get the most out of a city, you had to surround it with other cities. You were forced into spreading your attention out across a number of cities that you don't really care about instead of focusing on the one you do.

It seems like the absolutely tiny city limits in the new game just exacerbate that issue to extremes.

[Jayel]

limited space -> specialization -> cooperation -> fun?

 

I haven't bought the game yet... Still on the fence. It almost feels like it was originally designed to be a facebook game. As if one day a Maxis designer was rummaging through EA social games division dumpster and discovered a design doc and said "hey... this could work!" Obviously they couldn't turn their beloved flagship franchise into SimCityVille so a few things had to change: "Real money transaction, that's gotta go. Waiting forever for things to get done? Well we can't let the players get bored and quit, so let them fast-forward. But then the city gets filled too quickly and the player has nothing to do. Let them build multiple cities."

 

I mean if I'm going to create multiple cities, of course I'll create them in the same region and specialize differently so they benefit each other (for variety's sake if nothing else) negating the need for other human players. But isn't that at odds with its primary design goals? Might as well be a single-player game at that point.

 

Worse, if I play the game the way it's intended to be played and take a smaller role in a region, then I may again run out of things to do, get bored, and create cities in other regions. So not only will my attention be spread across multiple cities, but multiple regions! Who plays SimCity like that? Has anyone played 2 worlds simultaneously in a management game?

 

I would've been a lot happier with a traditional SimCity game. At least then I know I'd like it. This looks too different and I don't like things that are different.

 

rant over

who am I kidding. I will end up getting it. I'll just wait until some of the issues are ironed out.

[Gormongous]

Looks like Tom Chick is putting off his review for at least a week, pending a patch. The not-a-review he's posted in its place claims that most of the inter-region mechanics are broken on some level, making the game unplayable in its current form: http://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2013/03/05/why-this-is-not-a-one-star-review-of-simcity/

 

I've come a long way from the high of Polygon's glowing review. This has become the wait-and-see title of 2013 already. Hope that doesn't end up biting EA and Maxis in the ass.