Beta 2 Screen Shots

[Towel 76]

City size turned out not to be an issue for me ... I had to play on cheeta speed to fill out the city in the hour, and basically rush everything without thinking about it! 

 

Once you do hit the maximum city size, the game gets interesting. I agree with those who say that the game doesn't start until you have filled the map!

 

My main road into town ...

 

[Towel 76]

MOAR SCREENS!!!

 

You can make things look dead sexy!

[EG0611 57]

What is the difference between BETA 1 and BETA 2 ???

[DazzaDazza 29]

Grate town, the game look good but shame about running out of room so quickly

[AnyNameWillDo 6]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Dazzb84 0]

I will ad mine later today, my best city has had 50k+ residents so far.

[McGilligan 8]

Civil engineering at its best:

 

 I like the way traffic backs up:

[Howitzer Zak 17]

Here is my city

Uploaded with ImageShack.us

[ZiZiL 7]

Here is my last try:

 

[BurroDiablo 222]

For those complaining about city size, you gotta realize this game isn't about filling the map up.  The game STARTS when you fill the map up, unlike SC4 where when you filled it up it was over.  Every one of those shots, it felt like I was just getting into it when the Beta ended.  There is so much more to do even after the map is full, especially when the rest of the content is unlocked.

 

All of which would be a much longer and much more satisfying process if the city tile was bigger. Honestly, even after playing for an hour and not filling the tile up I feel like I'd quickly start to run out of things to do if I played for another hour or so. And SC4 by no means ended when the city tile was filled up, by then you had a fairly large city with a plethora of problems to fix, and the problems would be much larger, much more deeply ingrained into you city planning and much more challenging to correct that it is currently in SC13. 

[soldyne 111]

I think it is interesting to note that most of the large population screen shots also have negative budgets and low treasury's, while the lower population shots show high treasury's and positive budgets.  sure you were able to get 150K sims in 1 hour, but, if you had 2 hours would they all have stayed?

[ZiZiL 7]

I think it is interesting to note that most of the large population screen shots also have negative budgets and low treasury's, while the lower population shots show high treasury's and positive budgets.  sure you were able to get 150K sims in 1 hour, but, if you had 2 hours would they all have stayed?

 

Well, when we played beta, we really did not plan anything right. I mean you have one hour, you just rush everything. I think with the regular release, this will be a lot more fun since you can plan a lot more.

 

Other than that;

 

Being in customer service / experience business in technology field, I know for fact that you cannot make everyone happy with your product. Most of the time this is not the goal of the company either. In the end, every single company in the world (except non-profits), do things to maximize its shareholders' value. No company in the world will try to make a game to satisfy all users and loose a lot of money in return. 

 

With this release, it seems EA accepted the fact that they might have to push some hard-core simulator fans away, but they will gain a lot of new users who does not like hard-core simulators. It seems what they have tried to do is finding a balance between simulator and fun. Let's face it, hard-core simulators can be fun to many simulation fans, but it is boring for many users out there. That is the trade off they decided to make and it seems so far it was the right decision. It is all about tapping into the right market. Realistically, hard-core simulator fan market is a lot smaller than regular users out there. This is pretty much what EA is after. From a business perspective, that makes total sense.

 

Looking into social media, and tweet levels yesterday, it seems that EA will do a record sales with this game. That is my observation at least.

 

Disclaimer: This is mainly my observation and my opinions. I have no connection to EA therefore I have no idea what was their strategy with this release.

[Kythlyn 80]

Took these screenshots as I was attempting to build a residential area on the incline of a hill... as you can see, something went horribly wrong. Poor Smellytown! Hope they fix this before release.

[simcity4deluxe 95]

I think it is interesting to note that most of the large population screen shots also have negative budgets and low treasury's, while the lower population shots show high treasury's and positive budgets.  sure you were able to get 150K sims in 1 hour, but, if you had 2 hours would they all have stayed?

Well, when you get more high wealth than low wealth you make more profits, I spend 8,000 simoleons per hour in parks and yet I make a lot more in return, once you start adding parks, you'll lose a lot, but only because a lot of re construction is going on, after the construction you'll be making as much as all the low wealth you had, but you'll only have 1/4 the population compared to a low wealth city, but if you don't add parks in the beginning than it's hard to make a profit, I've had a city with with over 20,000 in expenses and only a population of 16,000 I believe and I still made a profit, but might also be because they lowered their taxes.

[mapboy 106]

Here's some shots from my cities.

 

[Zukunftstraume 220]

People complaining about the "cartoonish-ness" of the game need to realize that there are plenty of color filters in this game, and one of them in particular, the "Juicy" or the Normal filters are the primary culprits behind those over-the-top colorful shots. However, there are plenty of color filters that actually make the game look incredibly beautiful, and the darker or saddening feeling from those shots really make this game very diverse (in that regard only though).

 

Just remember what SimCity 3000 looked like:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Quite a shame that's one of the few great perks of the game.

[Howitzer Zak 17]

I think it is interesting to note that most of the large population screen shots also have negative budgets and low treasury's, while the lower population shots show high treasury's and positive budgets.  sure you were able to get 150K sims in 1 hour, but, if you had 2 hours would they all have stayed?

 

The only reason I had a -309 budget at the end was because I reduced all my tax levels to 1%, trying to push as many sims into the city as I could.  At 7% tax rate I was making a crazy amount of money and had nothing to spend it on.

[Towel 76]

What is the difference between BETA 1 and BETA 2 ???

 

You could play 2 cities in the same region in the second beta. I also noticed other small changes, the water table for instance is now random whereas in beta 1 it was the same each time, and the wind also changes direction now. 

Thank you all for the screen shots. You have all done great with your cities. However, personally, I think the game looks terrible. Very small maps and the graphics are incredibly cartoonish. I can't believe all of the positive feedback, but to each his own.

 

Thanks for reaffirming my thoughts to ignore this disgrace of a "SimCity".

 

Aside from SimCity 4 (which IMHO had horrible bland graphics) I can't think of any SimCity (or Maxis game for that matter) that didn't have some kind of cartoonish graphics.

 

Having said that, when playing in-game, the graphics feel very model like. As if you're looking at something someone has crafted by hand, those screenshots lose a little bit of that effect.

[Cob92 360]

I think it is interesting to note that most of the large population screen shots also have negative budgets and low treasury's, while the lower population shots show high treasury's and positive budgets.  sure you were able to get 150K sims in 1 hour, but, if you had 2 hours would they all have stayed?

 

People played the beta as what I like to call "SimCity-Time Attack". Knowing that the game would be over at the end of the hour, we just tried to build as big as possible as quickly as possible, with no regard to long term consequence. We used cheap tactics like taking out all the bonds and never paying them back, lowering taxes to zero to inflate demand, and running unsustainably huge deficits to get the city built faster.

[Towel 76]

For those complaining about city size, you gotta realize this game isn't about filling the map up.  The game STARTS when you fill the map up, unlike SC4 where when you filled it up it was over.  Every one of those shots, it felt like I was just getting into it when the Beta ended.  There is so much more to do even after the map is full, especially when the rest of the content is unlocked.

 

All of which would be a much longer and much more satisfying process if the city tile was bigger. Honestly, even after playing for an hour and not filling the tile up I feel like I'd quickly start to run out of things to do if I played for another hour or so. And SC4 by no means ended when the city tile was filled up, by then you had a fairly large city with a plethora of problems to fix, and the problems would be much larger, much more deeply ingrained into you city planning and much more challenging to correct that it is currently in SC13. 

 

Couldn't disagree more... If you played the 16 region city (which can build all 4 grand works) you'd have to spend significant hours to just start all 16 cities, let alone build them up and have them running efficiently. Given also the more dynamic nature of the game, problems would appear to be more interesting ...

 

That Industrial city, with all the pollution down wind ... Well the wind changed - hah!

That oil city making a motza on the global market ... Well oil just went south and your city is now in the red!

 

Just to name a few ... 

[MINIggy03 227]

And now for some non "SimCity-Time Attack" pics 

 

 

Also, a tornado managed to randomly pop up, was pretty cool.  It didn't last very long, went away before taking out the soccer field, along with the players that were completely oblivious to it, haha.  

[Zukunftstraume 220]

^ I hope the weather of the moment the tornado struck actually matched that of what the weather of a real-life tornado would be like...

 

Other than that, those first two pics look like a small town in a gloomy northwest.

 

Does SC2013 even have weather? Like fog, rain, thunderstorms, hurricanes, drizzle, winds, sandstorms, overcast, partially cloudy, snow, or blizzards? Okay, maybe not the extreme ones w/o it being a disaster of it's own... But, I can't recall even seeing rain in the game, hopefully I'm wrong.

 

EDIT: Well, this seems to have answered my question:

 

 

You
could play 2 cities in the same region in the second beta. I also
noticed other small changes, the water table for instance is now random
whereas in beta 1 it was the same each time, and the wind also changes
direction now. 

[Ma8thew 77]

^ I hope the weather of the moment the tornado struck actually matched that of what the weather of a real-life tornado would be like...

 

Other than that, those first two pics look like a small town in a gloomy northwest.

 

Does SC2013 even have weather? Like fog, rain, thunderstorms, hurricanes, drizzle, winds, sandstorms, overcast, partially cloudy, snow, or blizzards? Okay, maybe not the extreme ones w/o it being a disaster of it's own... But, I can't recall even seeing rain in the game, hopefully I'm wrong.

 

EDIT: Well, this seems to have answered my question:

 

 

You

could play 2 cities in the same region in the second beta. I also

noticed other small changes, the water table for instance is now random

whereas in beta 1 it was the same each time, and the wind also changes

direction now. 

 

Ocean Quigley said rain and haze. I don't think that it's connected to tornados though. They seem to come out of the blue.

[Howitzer Zak 17]

And now for some non "SimCity-Time Attack" pics 

 

Also, a tornado managed to randomly pop up, was pretty cool.  It didn't last very long, went away before taking out the soccer field, along with the players that were completely oblivious to it, haha.  

 

I also played a few games on slow speed, just enjoying the simulation (I think people need to get out of the SC4 mindset).  Did you have any issues creating industry on dirt roads?  I created a small town with about 10 houses (trailers).  The only industry that would build was what looked like moonshine stils lol, which was pretty funny (no one could work there though).  I also created only a few commercial zones.  They built a refrigerator store on the corner and a fortune teller beside it (damn hillbillies).  There was an issue with such a small town, the utility costs were so high, power, water and sewage had me at -500/hr.  This kinda let up when I got a factory going on a small road though.

 

I'm tempted to upload the video to youtube, but it is probably painfully boring to watch for most people.  There were some funny moments with one guy wandering down the dirt road into the woods looking for a good time, and some sims wondering if they were just in some computer simulation.  Most of the video is just me enjoying the game, checking out the different stats etc..

 

Edit:  Just realized you're the one I gave the beta key to, glad you had fun!

[CUatTHEFINISH 3]

Honestly, playing the game with the right filters makes it feel less cartoony. "Warmer" is quite possibly my most favorite thus far, Sepia makes for good pictures as well.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Although, some filters are just for "artsyness." I had one screenshot retweeted by @simcity with a lame joke attached, that picture now resides on their twitter feed as the most recent one.

 

https://twitter.com/HowIChrgeLazer/status/303031499844907008

 

<I was about to type a long lengthy feedback of how I felt here, but, I'll keep this reply to just screenshots I tweeted>

[Captain_Juice 7]

Everyone's cities are huge! After seeing this I really have much to learn! How did everyone's city grow so fast? 
Here is a video of my weak city getting hit with a quake.

http://youtu.be/3BplXgNkDmc
 

[AngelikMayhem 2]

Civil engineering at its best:

 

Is there some kind of bridge tool that I'm not aware of?  I fought constantly trying to get the road tool to go out into the bay, but it wouldn't.  What's the trick?  In stark comparison, here was my effort:

 

 

[markofyeg 0]

I for one can't wait for custom decals so we can customize those building signs! On another note, I found beta 2 to be a marked improvement from the first particularly zoning, having became comfortable with the first beta I also explored the landscaping and park features more. Adding trees, as oceanquigley always presses upon people, really makes the city come alive.

[AngelikMayhem 2]

Oh, I forgot my screenshots:

 

Beta #2, My second game...

Beta #2, My fifth game...

Beta #2, My ninth game...

 

[Catchin22 299]

Glassbox isn't causing the restraint, I'd bet my life on that. It's the fact they want to SELL you, the sucker customers DLC to increase map size. I have no doubt a lot of that revolves around server bw/ resource usage caused by the always on DRM.