SimCity2013 to escape the 'town' vibe

[StoNe220022 159]

I'm glad the demo was showcased over the weekend as it gave us a great deal of insight into the game and I think we should all be grateful that Maxis/EA took such a risky move to open it up to the masses and make themselves vulnerable to backlash.

What I liked about it as it got me thinking a lot about the 'feel' of the game; the whole town / SimsVille feel and it made me think why I feel this game missed the mark and from a design perspective - thinking about if the game design really matches the goal they set out to do, and I think it makes sense to me now...

From the cancelled Simsville 2001 game...

So what are the core differences between a village, town, city and so forth? I was born and grew up in a small town which I would say had a population of about 75,000 people or so...currently today (about 33 years later) this 'town' is referred to as a city, and has a population of 100,000+ people...and I gotta tell you, the increase in population gives it a different feel. I now live somewhere completely elsewhere within a population of 4+ million.

But when I was growing up, you knew about the kids living around the corner, and when someone died, someone got married, or someone would know your father's father and so forth blah....today...it has a much more anonymous feel to it when I go back there.

This got me thinking about what SimCity2013 was doing...it focused on the sims to create a realistic simulator of what people do and where people work...and guess what...when you scale this in to a larger city, as the city gets bigger and bigger.....sorry to say but no one cares about the kid that got ran over by a car three suburbs over. Actually sadly, when someone dies in a city with a large population, sometimes it doesn't even make the news.

So how come, SimCity2013 doesn't scale just the same with its engine as the town evolves? When SimCity2013 uses x number of agents in its engine to simulate the population of a town; as the town becomes a city should an agent within the game engine represent a much larger portion of people?

I say all of this because to me, the game has a constant town feel to it...and I'm sure when you replace townhouses with skyscrapers it will still feel 'towney'...so why not allow for larger maps / more population by letting the glassbox spunk agents scale down as the city grows up? Hence allowing for constant growth? Sim that lived at address...blah now becomes, Sims that live in apartment building blah...

Thoughts?

[l_rubbo 34]

Nice post. And interesting idea about scaling agents. Another alternative is to simply adjoin cities, as per SC4, instead of the 'dead zones' in between.

I wouldn't complain so much about the size if they did this as eventually you would get a 'greater city of..', a combination of satellite cities and suburbs. Much more realistic. Isn't this a simulator after all?

[Xenocity 343]

Town vibe depends on where you live.

I mean I have a city two towns over from me that has a population of 889 people and spans .5 square miles.

In Michigan you can become a city by filing the proper paper work and by voter approval.

We have many of these tiny cities in Michigan.

[Cob92 360]

Well according to Maxis, SimCity only simulates 100,000 individual agents, so as a city grows huge it would be necessary that not every single Sim be represented simultaneously by an individual agent.

[StoNe220022 159]

Yeah but I guess what I'm trying to say is that...as a city gets bigger and bigger...the people become more like, well...statistics :/

John and Betty worrying about a pot hole in the road on the way to work becomes more about getting people in the south eastern suburbs along the 408 Interstate.

Priorities change as a city becomes more dense; yet this didn't seem to be represented in the game as the town grew.

Also I don't mean this to turn into a regional design floor or small city tile debate we all know it's shyte small