Is SimCity that bad?

[monsterjamp 42]

I was wondering if I should get the new SimCity.

- I don't care about online only.

- I'm over the city size limit.

- I don't care about server issues (it'll be resolved eventually)

- I don't care about teraforming (I found it a little too time consuming SimCity 4)

Is there anything else wrong with it? I actually have the game in my hands but I was wondering if I should install it or get a refund.

I'm asking this because of the low ratings on Amazon (It's the same as SimCity Societes!).

 

 

Update: This topic seemed to get more responses than I expected.

I think I'll install the game (Probably one of the last games I'll ever buy from EA). Really the only thing holding me back was the small city sizes, but I think I can deal with it (Eventually).

 

Update 2: I really enjoyed the game (Took me forever to get to play though) Although I still feel the city sizes are too small. One thing that I didn't like was that it seems impossible for me to get a airport (And a lot of other things) because of the small city sizes. I really don't think I can fit much stuff in one city (Unless I make a city and transfer loads of money over there). The city sizes restrict me in more than one way. Everything else is great though (Except the servers).

[SirChick 184]

The main issues is city size and crashes if you're over them then nothing is holding you back.

 

There some quirks i'd like changed, like upgrading roads is a bit tedious but they can probably change that with patches etc.

[Cockatoo 2,257]

Haven't touched the game myself yet, but if you can overlook those four issues (those are from what I understand the biggest contributing factors in terms of negative reviews) then you shouldn't have a problem with the game.

 

Personally, the size constraints are the biggest concern for me, and it probably will prevent a purchase at this stage - until it's sorted that is. But if this doesn't bother you right now then you should, in theory, enjoy the game.

 

It's up to you.

[crashx 18]

If you can overlook city size and always online I highly recommend it. I do hope both of these things are fixed, the only reason I am not playing now is because the servers went off and have had problems getting back in...but it's a great game IMO and much better when you are playing with others.

[Haljackey 17,354]

To be completely honest I'm enjoying it...

 

But you have to treat it as a completely different game. If you compare it to SC4, your mind will spin out of control, as mine did early in the beta tests. I kind of like the dramatic contrast between the two.

[croxis 150]

I have found that, despite the small tile, I am spending a lot of time iterating over my small two city test region.

 

The only issue I personally have is getting serious traffic jams from the single highway entry point and some LOD issues with ground covering up roads.

 

And not being able to take over cities of people who had the full delux edition.

[Micah 16]

Well guys, he's already mentioned what he's overlooking sooooo...

 

I would actually wait at least a week. Maxis is going to be busy working with their servers so game crashes should not be surprising AT ALL. They will definitely release a patch shortly because, even during a beta period, there is still a lot of data that Maxis is going to be collecting including bug reports... again, since the games are actually running on servers now. 

[crashx 18]

Well guys, he's already mentioned what he's overlooking sooooo...

 

I would actually wait at least a week. Maxis is going to be busy working with their servers so game crashes should not be surprising AT ALL. They will definitely release a patch shortly because, even during a beta period, there is still a lot of data that Maxis is going to be collecting including bug reports... again, since the games are actually running on servers now. 

 

I think they already updated something. Had the servers drop on me earlier and saw that the game was updating.

 

[highencast 11]

Simcity 4 is more expansive in every way.

[ThePilotGuy 10]

I love the game. I think it's 100% better than SimCity 4 minus the map size and region play (No direct city --> city connections/green space between cities).

 

Online play is great in my opinion. It effects your city a little but not enough that it no longer feels like it's your creation.

 

Also, I haven't had any server trouble. At all. The bugs I've experienced have all been graphical except for calculating water usage incorrectly.

 

I think that if you overlook those things, you'll love the game.

[Xenocity 343]

Simcity 4 is more expansive in every way.

And yet it still can't simulate traffic right...

[Zelgadis 638]

I wouldn't say it's "that bad" at all.

 

What we have is a vanilla. Try going back and playing the original SC4 without Deluxe or downloads and you'll get a good idea of what we have now.

 

The current SC2013 is what we have, but that's surely not what we're going to end up with later.

[crashx 18]

I love the game. I think it's 100% better than SimCity 4 minus the map size and region play (No direct city --> city connections/green space between cities).

 

Online play is great in my opinion. It effects your city a little but not enough that it no longer feels like it's your creation.

 

Also, I haven't had any server trouble. At all. The bugs I've experienced have all been graphical except for calculating water usage incorrectly.

 

I think that if you overlook those things, you'll love the game.

 

I feel the same way. Love the engine at work here, if only they can increase the map size I'd be ecstatic with it.

 

I've already got over the always online thing, I'll just accept this as a MMO game pretty much. It's launch reminds me of one.

[Xenocity 343]

Also everyone needs to remember how negative people were in 2003 when Simcity 4 launched.

This launch is more positive!

[nhgriffith 179]

Given the amount of server issues, it's way to early to fairly judge SimCity. It's hard to sort out what's legitimately wrong and what's simple first day server overload.

[niqht 24]

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/03/simcity-impressions-we-waited-ten-years-for-this/

[PushIt23 1]

I'm enjoying this game and frustrated all at the same time.

 

After a certain point, you start to realize the tile size is really damn small. Looking for space in your city with none to be found.

Online only wouldn't be such a pain, if i wasn't getting numerous crashes and constantly losing my progress.

My other issue with online issues are the servers and the syncing between them. I haven't been able to use any of the U.S. servers, cause theyve all been busy. I've been stuck on one of the European servers. I noticed that at one point when i attempted to switch to another server, the game had no record of my progress/my cities and proceeded to put me through a tutorial (as if it was a fresh install).

 

Multiplayer has such potential to be great, but for the player who would like  play alone (for a while/forever) a completely offline mode would truly be so much better.

 

Certain bug/issues I've noticed are also a pain.

1. Gifting Money from City A to City B... The money got lost in transfer.

2. Trying to export your sewage to another city doesn't seem to work for me.

3. Creating a sandbox mode region.... and then sandbox mode isn't enabled.

and other annoying little gameplay bugs.

 

I want so badly to love this game, but .... It's gonna take some time (and hopefully some custom content)

[bixel 1,224]

2nd day playing it - got the Deluxe Digital edition. If you are unsure about plopping down 59.99 - 79.99 for it - then maybe wait several months for them to update or perhaps change their policies (DRM) and maybe tweak gameplay style...

 

I have to say I may not play it tomorrow - I am really into World of Tanks right now (its free). That being said.. I will list the reasons why i may not play tomorrow or the next day.. ill get back to it (sc5) probably in a week

 

* I feel after my 2nd city... that other than changing the arrangement of the buildings, the new city looks like the old city. You have such LITTLE space, you cannot be very creative... you end up filling it whether you want to or not.

 

* You cannot place parks where you want to place them. THEY attach only to roads... this makes it very difficult to "garden" your city.. it is so restrictive you will probably end up plopping parks randomly just to get the land vaules to rise but not for any real aesthetic purpose

 

* there is no agriculture industry - no farms

 

* if you want to create a rural city - you can do that in about 2 minutes, make 2 roads, zone some res and 1-4 commercial and you are done... the map is THAT small. If you want a school, highschool, fire/police, town hall in your "rural city' you have to get money by zoning more residential - and here is the kicker... once you do that - 70% is full,,, rural city is already gone.. quit - make a new city...

 

* everything is online.. there is no do-over so if I waited 10minutes to save 88,000 to plop my expensive University and you realize you plopped it a little too close to the sewage center... well I can't reload my map - its permanent.

 

good stuff

 

* it looks amazing

* i feel with some tweaking it can be an excellent game

* some of the biggest issues can be solved with their online policy

* customer reviews may force them to change/update...

* it has some awesome concepts and the modular buildings are amaizng

[AkemiAzula 280]

Negatives:

Limited tiles, lack of contiguous tiles

Lack of terraforming/regional infrastructure control

Forced online (nowt wrong with cloud saving or server based games mind you)

No agriculture

No subways

Parks not able to be placed/zoned (I'd like Cities XL's system and the classic plopping systems combined)

Positives

GlassBox, proper simulation instead of statistical

Graphics... Although that is highly debatable. I prefer sc4's style but full 3d is a pretty huge leap for simkind

Multiplayer (as an option)

Curvy roads (although small tile size naturally somewhat defeats this one)

Conclusion

I will play this game, enjoy playing this game, and wish it was better in the same way I played 4. Hopefully in a similar way to 4 there wil be improvements in future at some point. My advice is to play this game if you like the genre, but not to enslave yourself to EA or not consider any alternatives (BoomTown) that may arise in future

[halicem 16]

I've so far played 14 hours, made 2 cities. It's a bit of a shock really. Where simcity 4 was like chess, this is more like football. Everything's going on all at the same time. It takes getting used to. Heck I know I'm running out of power even before the icon starts flashing amber.

Is it an sc4 replacement? No. If I want a laid back atmosphere, I'd play sc4. Sc2013 is almost frantic at times... There were moments went it felt like everything's gonna give but just gotta hold on. And that's how I ended up playing 14 hours over the last 48 without taking a day off.

My biggest gripe with it is the ever diminishing water table. I've relocated pumps half a dozen times and the map is practically light blue all over.... What the heck do they expect us to do when the water table runs dry on all the cities in the region? Don't see a bottled water storage lot in my trade depot...

[YukiEiriKun 29]

Wait, what?

The resources run out?
And you can't create your own regions?
And you have limited amount of regions?

Epic!

 

***** EDIT *****
Or is it possible to delete old cities/regions and ... re-start them?

[Herdervriend 46]

There is a speech for this.

 

You never know, untill you try it.

 

So just buy the game...There is a 14 day RETURN stuff right? (At least if you buy the game offline)

[Hellken 1,658]

Also everyone needs to remember how negative people were in 2003 when Simcity 4 launched.

This launch is more positive!

 

 

Sorry, that's false. I remember 2003 very well and I remember the transition from SC 3000 Unlimited to SC4. Hell, I played vanilla SC4 last year. 

 

I even have copies of gaming magazines from back then. SC4 was rated by most as a step up in many ways from the well - presented but terribly glitched SC 3000/Unlimited. It did not get many perfect scores but it was far from negative and nowhere near the server crisis EA is having right now. The general consensus at the time of release was that: "Only patches could save SC4 from all the bugs".  Otherwise most were somewhat okay with it and many praised the region and God mode idea. Compare it to this launch with hundreds of users across the internet demanding a refund or unable to unlock or play the game due to EA's poor servers. The standard deviation in scores for SC (2013) (as of the time I write this) is quite big.

 

Not many people found SC4 vanilla perfect or super positive but reception was at least acceptable. It was not praised immensely but it wasn't criticized to death either. It had a number of flaws initially but the flaws were not as crippling as SC (2013)'s.   

 

A more positive launch? Really? At least at launch, SC4 was a headache to install but playable by most people who got a copy. 

 

...and of course, people could save and load normally without all their progress deleted because... um... the servers failed to sync. 

[Nique 291]

Yes it is 'that' bad. People even bring back the game to the stores. This game prototype is unfinished and overhyped (marketed). 

Check the user score on Metacritics it is killing Simcity: 

http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/simcity

[snowhawk04 22]

Maybe you are looking for something like this: 

 

The traffic simulation is terrible.  Watching an intersection, vehicles do not change lanes to move through traffic and will just wait it out.  Other vehicles will make one U-Turn just to make another U-Turn and will just loop.  I'm pretty sure its already been stated before but where is the priority for emergency vehicles?  Did I miss a city ordinance feature where you could enforce ride-sharing   Would have also loved to see half intersections, one-way roads, subways, intracity highways, multiple city entrance points (traffic balancing), walking trails/bike paths (with a park system that utilized them), and walkways that went over high density avenues.  

 

Space between ingame objects can be an issue, both visually and functionally.  The visual issues can really be seen in cities that features curvy roads.  You'll end up with square lots on these curved roads that leave V-shaped open areas of non-utilized land that's too small for trees but big enough to be noticeable   In square grid setups the gaps are still there.  Functionally, I've found a few instances where you have a park and a city service (such as a school or bus depot) next to each other.  Sometimes the game will not allow you to expand that service along the border between the park and the service even though the space for the expansion is already reserved on the service lot (i.e. school buses).

 

Upgrading roads is about the same amount of fun as laying pipe in sc4.  Requires way too much effort to upgrade a strip of low-density avenue into high-density streetcar avenue.  The road upgrade system also sucks when going from road to avenue, especially when you have services touching the road.  Upgrading between different bridge types is expensive, especially when the upgrade doesn't look right and you are forced to downgrade.  Would have love to have seen options for NA/EU road styles, culdesacs, unbalanced roads (2+1 roads), different types of road material (plain asphalt instead of dirt, colored brick roads), roads with turn lanes, and turn-only lanes.

 

Depth of ploppables is shallow.  The game really ships 1 school (of each level), 1 bus depot, 1 police station, 1 fire station, 1 clinic with 1 regional version of each.  Where are the options?  How about a bus depot without the parking garage or an underground parking garage.  Or Grand central stations, museums, alot more parks/plazas, military installations, private schools, churches, cemeteries, seaports, marinas, docks, golf courses, boardwalks/beaches, toxic waste dumps, state/federal prisons.  More tree types and colors would have been great.  You can reboot a series and include ALL of these ploppables from the previous games.  Add something new like multipurpose RC zoning. You want to hope modding tools will be released sooner than later but I honestly believe EA is going to nickel and dime the hell out of the userbase.

 

The 3D system they implemented was a distraction and sometimes just uninformative.  Scaling-wise, blades of grass and trash cans were almost as tall as one story buildings while some of the signage were way too tall (~3 stories tall), completely dwarfing the sims that were walking around.  All of the power structures are way too small and the effect they have on happiness is too forgiving.  When the nuclear plant has a meltdown, I didn't see a giant explosion with smoke everywhere, instead I got a message that said "oh hey, we have no power, you should probably check why" with my power plant in the off animation.

 

The implementation of Glassbox doesn't feel like it was worth the sacrifice of features and specification limitations.  I was under the impression that actual simulation was being done remotely but playing the actual game with other players, Glassbox's online component seems nothing more than a transaction handler.  The online component is there strictly to tell other active cities to add or subtract resources (water, power, garbage, sewage, simoleans, and sims) and to update the inactive "frozen" saved cities resources.  As far as the local simulation goes, the agent system is better than the 10 year old SC4 automata, but I would have rather seen a scalable agent system that represents a percentage of the population (which is determined by the system playing the game) rather than an artificial limit that all systems abide by.

 

There game doesn't feel challenging.  Every road will be an avenue and will be upgraded immediately to streetcar avenue when available.  All pollution is easily ignored by creating all polluting zoning along edges down-wind, since the wind doesn't vary enough to matter.  All services will be plopped along local roads and linked to low volume collector/arterial areas of my transit network (since the simulation doesn't prioritize emergency vehicles).  Those services will always be immediately max upgraded.  Money wasn't an issue as I let it run on full speed for a few minutes when I had high amounts of hourly income.  I just stayed patient and pooled money so I could recover from disasters very easily and expand when I wanted to.  My cash reserves have been amazing in all of my games so far as I use early game bonds, mid game DLC missions (free $25k in simoleons per city for a $20 USD DLC, pay to win at its finest), and late game concerts at the convention center.  Just alot of sitting back and watching my money go up and not trying to outbuild my bank.

 

There was a positive though in my experience during today's session.  I had no audio issues and I enjoyed the music.  Never did I feel like turning it off and loading up pandora.

 

The game wasn't purchased for me but instead was for my nephew.  Since I'll be helping him learn how to play PC games, I was learning the UI and focusing on the nuances of the game so if he had any questions, I could talk him through it.  Would I purchase this game for a 7 year old, sure.  He'll probably be amazed with it for the 2 or 3 weeks he'll play it before he wants to do something else.  But for myself, I'm sticking with SC4.  Both games are different, but I enjoy the city building aspect more when it comes to this genre and I really really enjoy terraforming and the various options available via the STEX and SC4D.  Goodbye all my SC2013 cities, may you rest in rollback limbo forever (or until it gets deleted by my nephew).

[Mr_Maison 2,426]

Yes it is 'that' bad. People even bring back the game to the stores. This game prototype is unfinished and overhyped (marketed). 

Check the user score on Metacritics it is killing Simcity: 

http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/simcity

 

This is not only embarrassing for Maxis/EA but also a serious blow to the credibility of game review companies. What an extremely drastic difference in opinion between so called pro reviewers and consumers. What's shocking me the most is that this train wreck is worse than the CitiesXL fiasco.....and this is MAXIS we done signed petitions for because "only they would make a proper new city builder"......just wow.

[Nique 291]

And really i don't think it is maxis only. It is the EA influence. The hot EA air in the neck of Maxis (deadlines, money, pushed DRM). For this project, they made the ultimate mix of wrong decisions. I stated it earlier in another topic: Very bad Project Management. 

[Pouria 8]

Well, here is my take on the game having only played the beta so far.

 

The tiles are too small and that is a huge issue for me. I'm used to playing on the large tiles in simcity 4 and would have actually liked to try even larger tiles.

 

Curvy roads are a good addition but because of tile size issue, you really don't want to use them.

 

It seems to me that traffic is exaggerated in the game (by a factor of 10x or more!). I can't understand why in a town with 5k population, I should see so many cars on the streets causing a pretty bad traffic. Actually I don't understand why sims use cars at all!

 

Always-on DRM is a great concern for me especially after seeing the launch issues. I can neither trust my own connection nor EA's servers.

 

I don't understand why they're talking so much about specialization as a new feature. I used to specialize my cities in simcity 4 too! It's no excuse for making city tiles smaller.

 

I like the new bus transit simulation but where is the subway? oh, I forgot subway makes no sense when your city is so tiny

 

I seem to have a much easier time making a profit in this game than I did with simcity 4. Is it just for beta?

 

Other than that, game actually looks to be fun... But I don't think the fun would last for more than a few hours because you can fill up your cities so fast!

 

I want to play the game, but I think it's not worth $80 (Australia's price). I think I would wait and see how much its price would drop in the next 6 months. EA may shut down the servers few years after launch but this is really not the kind of game I would play years after its launch anyway. I might have some fun with it for a weeks or months, but in the end I will go back to simcity 4 unless this game gets major improvements.

[Sunfighter 186]

Simcity 4 is more expansive in every way.

And yet it still can't simulate traffic right...

 

Neither can this game if you actually watch it.

[snowhawk04 22]

Well, here is my take on the game havinI like the new bus transit simulation but where is the subway? oh, I forgot subway makes no sense when your city is so tiny

 

http://goo.gl/maps/D4Rr2

 

Draw a 2km x 2km square on any part of NYC's peninsula and you'll have 7+ metro stations.  The reason Maxis didn't implement them is because the graphic engine they are using doesn't accommodate underground structures (probably the real reason you dont have pipes or fiber)