SC2013 Review - first impressions

[Deed_Poll 32]

Hi all,

I've had about 24hrs of play time with the new simcity and thought I'd share my experiences as a fan of the series since the snes days if anybody's interested.

My expectations were mitigated to such a large extent over the release period that i found myself pleasantly surprised the first time I played the game. My man concern, other than the unforgivable DRM, was the city tile size. When I first started playing, I was excited and in good spirits. I thought, maybe this small tile size will encorage me to build picturesque small towns and take the gameplay in a different direction. I like the choice of filters, but wish the day night cycle could be stopped, or seasons reintroduced.

The road tool is also cleverly executed, and exactly as I imagined an improved system incorporating curved roads should work when playing simcity 4. However, as density increased I realised there are several problems with the way buildings grow, which for me is the core of the game.

Firstly, having 3 discrete building density levels results in an ugly lack of realism when an area is a mixture of low and medium density, or medium and high density. I don't understand why they could not have adopted a system of gradually growable buildings that add a few storeys at a time (like on the STEX) until the next density level is achieved; i.e. that density should be an output, not an input.

Similarly with wealth level: this should also be continuous and should be an output. Income level should be displayed in simoleons and the department of finance should let you move the tax bands as well as changing the rates within those bands. If the game is going to insist on treating sims as individual entities it seems stupid to lump them all together into one of three groups.

For heaven's sake, let me look at GRAPHS not just pretty data views. When I started my first city, I made a colossal error when I had a power shortage at night time using solar power. I added more and more panels, but the problem did not go away - I assumed the day / night cycle was visual like in the old game. I ended up building a wind farm to deal with the problem, and come the next day had a power surplus of 400%. On any previous sim city game, it would be impossible to run a profit making city with such wastage. It would have been a simple matter of reading a graph to see the power demand curve in relation to power capacity - not in this game, where it only shows you a surplus / deficit.

I'd taken out all the bonds I could afford to build them and decided that it would be more wasteful to demolish the surplus panels. So I let the game run, fully expecting to be punished for my error. And that never happened.

The game is fundamentally too easy. It is never remotely challenging. You just do what it asks you to do and you get a city.

Sim city should be hard. It should leave you racking your brain, analysing graphs. It should force you to strategise, to carefully diagnose a problem and work out a solution. This is the core gameplay of sim city. And sim city 2013 utterly fails to deliver in this area.

The core gameplay of SC2013 is reasoning blocks for greater efficiency. This was like a therapeutic chore in the old games - like washing the dishes. It could be enjoyable and you might come back to an area vindicated that the changes you made worked out for the better. Likewise it might keep you guessing as to what was the best option. A lot of time was spent doing this, but it was not the core gameplay mechanism.

The combination of this 'efficiency drive' dynamic with the small tile size is what cripples the new game. You want to use The curved roads but space is at such a premium you cannot justify it.

We all remember the thrill you'd get in SC4 making some large infrastructure decision. Would you build a highway ringroad around the city centre preserving your high wealth commercial district? Or would you run the highway straight through the centre and crack a few eggs for the sake of the omelette? Would you instead build a rail network, or metro system to ease congestion in the centre?

There's none of that in this game. You build avenues and upgrade them to streetcar avenues. All the highways are placed for you. City density will grow to massive levels EVEN ON THE OUTSKIRTS. It's ridiculous. The fundamental point of the last game was that a city has to grow outwards to grow upwards. You learned to appreciate the role of low density, low wealth areas in your city and these made your business district, your high wealth housing on the river, your cultural centre all the more special. Everything had a role to play.

Why is the mayor running the casinos in a town? Or controlling the mining wealth? Or getting income from the exhibition centre? The specialisms make no sense. the fun of sim city is in macromanagement, not micromanagement. I want to see an option to decriminalise gambling, and for this to allow casinos to grow on commercial zones. Likewise for mining and industrial. The demand level graph seems broken in my game, too. I decided to build a tourism / gambling city and have had zero commercial demand from the beginning - yet you build $$$ plazas and the skyscrapers shoot up.

My region is a sea of green with 5 monolithic perfectly square dense cities dotted across it. If I were to look online at the same region, no doubt others would look the same given enough gameplay. And for what? Why couldn't regions border each other and allow me to make my own transport and infrastructure decisions? And half way realistic looking cities.

And the biggest thing of all, what is with the sandbox engine? Even if it wasn't for all the glaring bugs and errors in the AI that this causes, it will never scale well. It's like if they made a game called sim casino, and their selling point was that every hand of blackjack and every spin of the roulette wheel was individually calculated! Super realism when you're running 2 tables! But you can only have up to ten. A probabilistic model is just better. They had it right the first time around. This game has been designed for little girls who want to follow the sims on street level. The core sim city fan base has not just been ignored it has been insulted and cast aside.

The breakthrough for this game would be algorithmically generated parametric buildings that respond to the lot size, shape, local density, wealth, building style etc. I hope that if this game is ever released to the mods, that this could be made possible. Until then it is an insulting glimpse into what a good game maxis could have given us.

Mega rant over!