is complexity always evil?

[Discord 8]

This gives me great insight into why sim city, in many ways, are broken: http://www.polygon.com/2013/3/29/4161422/simcity-pedestrians-teleport

[morriswalters 16]

Fun is a relative metric.  The third time time lizard walked through, it became tedious, not fun.  The same for zombies.  He's an idiot.

[BudgieSimBoy 4]

"Moskowitz said that although SimCity was designed to be a deep simulation, Maxis found over and over that making the game less complex made it more fun"........Oh dear no wonder less complex is badly broken. not holding much hope of the game ever being fixed after reading this. Wow just Wow

[croxis 150]

One of the paradoxes in game design is that to increase the number of choices for the player to make you have to decrease the number of options. A good example of this is World of Warcraft's old talent tree system. Players had a lot of options for assigning points in their tree, but the end result was that there were only a couple of ways you should assign points, the other combos wernt worth the player's time. Currently the skill point tree has been replaced with six exclusive options.

 

Extra credits also has a really good 7 minute video on depth vs complexity.

[Freiluft 6]

For all the evil things people have said about SC5, I think the developers achieved a good balance of these two factors. For instance, why bother introducing glass into the recyclables, although glass could be used to manufacture televisions and computers? There are a variety of ways all SC titles gently limit choices: cost, negative effects, etc. There are enough choices to make one think the game isn't running itself, but not too many that trying to remember them all would be like trying to explain baseball to a foreigner.

[morriswalters 16]

It might help if it was discoverable.  It also might help if it were coherent.  CXL couldn't make this work.  If they had wanted multicity play it would have made more sense to peer the cities.  No matter what you do the sim can't be realtime. In WOW when you play with others, the play is one to one in realtime.  With this game what if I want to play and those playing with me don't.  If they were really connected it would be easy to game the system.  Setup a dummy city get it stable and exporting and walk away.  This was easy enough to do in CXL.  What makes a game Massively Multiplayer is multiple player playing at the same time.  And it wouldn't matter to me if it worked and did what I wanted to do with it.  I've had fun with it and I don't regret buying it, but when I put it away I doubt that it will ever come out again.

 

Some things should have been bulletproof out of the box.  Nukes are too sensitive to changes in education and transport is hosed.  Missing buses and so on, not traffic.

You can't grow trees in in city that has any dirty industry, they die and aren't persistent.  No decoration, nada.  If trees died like that in real life no city extant would have any.

They were over proud of the Glassbox Engine. It makes the cities feel real.  It would have made fine eye candy.  But they didn't have to use it on everything.  Buses could have had fixed routes.  Players love that, it gives the impression of doing something. 

Flash to the designers.  Plumbers first rule.  Crap flows downhill. The systems are not giant vacuums.

[AlexMBrennan 11]

A good example of this is World of Warcraft's old talent tree system. Players had a lot of options for assigning points in their tree, but the end result was that there were only a couple of ways you should assign points, the other combos wernt worth the player's time

The problem is badly balanced options and not having too many; sure, cutting half of them entirely will make it easier to balance the rest and probably result in a more balanced product but I wouldn't call it an ideal outcome.

In Simcity, the problem is that the player has *no choices* - you can't design efficient roads/supply chain/public transport because you have zero options.

Do you really think that bus convoys (simplified game by removing bus routes) made the game better?

If you remove too much complexity you get a screensaver...

[endorken 13]

I think it's all the result of an unholy combination of 1). designers/developers drinking the kool aid and 2). marketing/sales pressure now that gaming is all grown up and is a serious business.

 

I knew someone would post the penny arcade video. Yeah, elegant is good, depth != complexity, yada yada. When I heard Quigley and Katsarelis and the rest of them talking up Glass Box -- I thought -- damn -- that *is* an elegant model they've come up with. But does it make for a better game than the statistical model employed in all the previous titles in the franchise? Did they manage to cross that gap between the elegance of the original design doc and final product?

 

The rest, I think, is just the usual corporate pressure/ambition. If you just want to pay rent and salaries, sure, you can make a dynasty sim set in the late middle ages which expects the player to know (or look up) what Primogeniture is (Crusader Kings). But, if you're a publicly traded company, and your competitor makes a billion bucks every year on one franchise alone (CoD) and your sports games haven't been doing too well, then you better consider every reboot as a chance to attract that notoriously fickle creature -- the casual gamer. And the casual gamer doesn't fucking want to struggle with bus routes. And Maxis/EA know that. And they sold, what -- 1.3 mil units in two weeks? Half of it through Origin? Bringing people to *their* digital distribution platform instead of Valve's? Sounds like a pretty elegant solution to me.

 

*sigh*

 

[Shy Dude 149]

Initial prototypes featured super-modular buildings (which the SimCity team calls "toys") and a level of complexity that, in the end, proved to be not only unnecessary, but also un-fun.

I think that would've been brilliant, in fact, that's probably the biggest thing I want out of a city sim now. Seeing 50 exact clones of a building in a city makes your city bland and unrealistic, this will definitely add variety to skylines. It'll also solve the problem with wasted space as buildings can more easily grow wall to wall since they can be any size and [if lucky] they wont have to strictly be rectangles and would be able wedge between streets and zones (like the Flatiron Building). It'd be fun alone watching what will grow along an angled road.

 

I'd like to take pride in a cityscape with pretty unique buildings, dumb decision to scrap that idea. I could see the problem with more modern organically shaped buildings but it just seems like they took the lazy way out.

[ScottyDoesKnow 8]

The teleportation decision is the perfect example of how this game was programmed. That was EXACTLY the right place to change the simulation. They found a massive flaw in the simulation (sims going to the nearest building, if they had a destination in mind beforehand, they wouldn't walk and there wouldn't be a problem) and instead of fixing it they hacked a solution. I'm surprised they even brought this up, it's an embarrassment.

[Discord 8]

I have been dreaming of modular buildings since sc4. Think about it: a building that grows based on land value, avaliable land and possibly on other factors. There would be no need to flatten the land or to only use a grid layout for a beautiful and efficient city.

The first thing I saw in my first city where the hideous slope to the highway bridge just outside my borders. Gah! Ten years and that still exists?

What's so complex about a city that looks nice and alive?

[Srafty 7]

Complexity is only evil for a gamer who will spend no more than a month or 2 playing. as simcity "was" selling on the name of all previous simcity games it should have been more complex "more in depth", the whol point to a sequal is to Add and update an already grate game... simcity 2013 did neither, instead its more like a prequel, its dumbed down in almost every way and has many features missing. this is what i see to be the true problem behind the fail.. not the launch day\weeks connection issues, it feels as tho the company wants to keep people thinking about the failed launch instead of how they really missed the mark in creating a squeal.

[nashville nelson 51]

... the whol point to a sequal is to Add and update an already grate game... simcity 2013 did neither, instead its more like a prequel, ...

This is the reason why Maxis always called it a reboot

 

After reading the polygon news i lost my hope that this game will ever be good. SimCity is 'working as intended'!

 

[Ocean] We’re making SimCity, not some dopey casual game.  (08 March 2012)

It's sad