SimCity: Now The Dust Has Settled

[TimmyShire 0]

Hey guys,

 

I'll start by saying - yes, I am a games writer for a website. But I'm not here looking for cheap clicks, so I hope the mods will allow this!

 

My name is Adam Barnes and I'm a writer for NowGamer.com. I'm interested in putting together a feature on the latest SimCity to find out what the diehard fans think of the game now that the dust has settled. Obviously it was affected by the server issues and bugs, and that took over a lot of the headlines and did away with any positivity there could have been.

 

And since Simtropolis is well-known for being the diehard SimCity players' place to hang out, I thought I'd come here and see if anyone was interested in answering a handful of questions about the new SimCity. You don't have to like it or hate it, I'm just interested in opinions.

 

If you are, let me know. My email address is adam.barnes@imagine-publishing.co.uk - fire one across to say you're interested and I'll get back to you with some answers.

 

I think this will make for an interesting article, so I really hope the mods don't shut this down.

 

Cheers all.

[MandelSoft 2,775]

Well, let me explain the situation about this new game.

When the new SimCity, often referenced as SC2013, was announced back in March 2012, a large portion of the community were excited about the new game. After waiting ten years and numerous, Maxis finally decided to pick up the franchise and develop a new game. Many of us hoped for a new sequel to SimCity 4, a true successor that will to continue what SimCity 4 started. Better, more beautiful, more versatile, and even more challenging...

However, a few of us were skeptical, and most of the skeptical people, including myself, have witnessed the failure of CitiesXL (I don't fall for the Curvy Roads marketing trick again). CitiesXL was developed four years prior to SC2013. Many city builders had high hopes for this game, but in the last months of the development cycle, the developer Monte Cristo announced that quite a few of the original ideas (like an advanced road tool) were scratched and an online mode, the Planet Offer, would be available with all new content included... with a price tag of €7/month. In combination with little communication to the community (even shutting down their own forums!), this made quite some people upset and after the release this didn't get any better; the Planet Offer flopped in making enough revenue and Monte Cristo went bankrupt. The big complaint from the community was that they didn't listen to their customers. CitiesXL was then picked up by Focus Home Interactive to finish up the things Monte Cristo had planned, but not much has been developed since then and even most major bugs (like memory leaks) haven't been fixed to this day...

Now, back to SimCity 2013. Some people had hopes that Maxis would make a better game than Monte Cristo did. After all, it's Maxis we're talking about, the original developers of SimCity! Not some unknown company. However, skepticism still remained and unfortunately, it looks like the skeptics turned out to be true after all; this turned out to be a reboot, not a sequel. The more things they announced about the game, the more eyebrows where raised about this game...

• The Glass Box engine: a really advanced game engine for the new game, as we have heard. Now, during the development, there were not much comments on that at the start, but as more features got in our eyes odd limits, we began to wonder if those limits were the price of the Glass Box. After the release of the game, the engine itself showed huge problems by design, like people switching jobs and houses on a daily basis, dumb mass transit and city services (five fire engines trying to put out a fire on a small house while a huge building is ablaze with no fire engines), a borked traffic engine and numerous of other design bugs, of which some are inexcusable.
• Map size and region coherence: when they first announce the map size to be "as large as a medium sized SimCity 4 city" (or 2x2 km), there were two groups: one that was OK with it and one that was disappointed that they couldn't get larger maps, something that was already kind of a limitation in SimCity 4. Most people from the first group were OK with it as long as they could build coherent regions like in SimCity 4 (ergo: you can build cities side by side with connections you can manage yourself, so you can create the illusion of a larger metropolis). The region play in SimCity 4 is a key factor of the game and it kept me playing this game for seven years. If SimCity 2013 had that feature too, we would be much happier...

  However, then came the news how regions were set up: all cities were separate with set connections and each city has to specialize. For a large number of fans, this combination was a huge game breaker! This means you have a set city size of only 2x2km (4km²). To give you a figure of how small that is: Basel (CH) has 170,000 inhabitants and a surface area of 22.75km². If you would continue that figure you could only build a city of 30,000 inhabitants on that plot of land. But Maxis expects us to build cities ten times that figure. Furthermore, the footprint of all components seem to be increased, making the cities look even smaller. Besides with this restricted map size, you can't recreate existing cities in Real Life because the tiles are way to small for that (and it's not helped by the fact that you can only build on preset maps). The massiveness of SimCity 3000 and 4 is gone in this version...

• Art style: the first in-game screenshots showed us the tilt-shift style of the game, as well as the model work. People complained about the graphics to be "too cartoony" and colourfull. Now, the latter aspect has been dealt with with colour filters (a clever addition, by the way), but the first one is a deeper problem. Quite some models lack texture details making them look too clean. Little weathering and noise effects makes them look like cardboard to some people, and that breaks the deal for people hoping to create a realistic city.
• The Always Online issue: probably one of the most discussed issues about this game: you HAVE to be always online to play it. Saves are stored upon the cloud and you have interaction with the world all the time. Let me just sum up some of the consequences of this discussed on long and winding on other threads on this website:
  • People with no or a bat internet connection are screwed; they just can't play the game because it can't connect to the server. This will also exclude quite a part of the market. Also, this game is ideal to play in lost hours on the road or in the train, but having no internet connection there often, this excludes another potential portion of the market. And then there's the issue that even in Single Player mode you have to be online, which doesn't make sense since you use none of the online features.
  • Cloud controlled saves means no control over your saved files. What if you just want to experiment? What if you just want to use a disaster in your city and then want to roll back? What if you made a huge error and want to go back to where things go right? Or even raised a lot more: what if EA shuts it servers down? People will end up with lost work, and this happened quite a few times during the first week of the release.
  • The game is ONLY available by Origin, EA's own online platform. Steam users were not happy about this, because some people didn't trust this new platform and it was another program bloating on your PC.
  • And then there's modding. There are mixed messages about that: Maxis encourages everyone to mod the game while EA says they will ban you for cheating when doing so. This mixed message confused a lot of players. Is modding allowed or not? It could be a competitor to their own DLC addons. Furthermore, modding could potentially dis-balance the entire game online, making is way less fun for everyone. A solution to that is to allow modding in closed servers and single player games, but soe far, nothing has been said about it. Even worse: information about modding is still scarce and vague today...
  Why did EA come up with this Always Online DRM? To prevent piracy. Quite some people raised that this is not going to help anyway and instead they punish us all for what a select group of people do to this game (and DRM is not going to stop them anyway).
• The Price Tag: when the pre-orders gave up a price of $80, a lot of people found it expensive for this game. To compare: regular AAA titles cost only about $50-60 and SimCity 4 Deluxe costs only $5-15 nowadays. Because it's so expensive (and because the new game didn't turn out as we expected), a lot of people keeping their hands on their wallets and don't buy the game.
• The game seemed to be dumbed down. Instead of an advanced simulator for mature gamers, we have the feeling that this is a simplistic game for kids. Also, it looks like a lot more micromanagement is involved in this game than in SimCity 4, while this neglects macromanagement.

Now, to make things clear, with all these things summed up, in general, old fans are not too fond about the new game. Heck, I've heard stories about people picking up this game, got frustrated about it, look up what its predecessor was and what it can do, got pissed about what SC2013 can't do what SC4 can and play SC4 instead without touching SC2013 ever again. Biggest complain of the community? The developers didn't listen to them. This is Cities XL all over again...

I did play one of the closed Betas, but it did by far not convince me to buy the new game. The experience was as far as I can tell quickly boring and frustrating. I didn't want the game to fail, but in the current form it looks like a slowly moving train wreck and I've practically gave up hopes on this new game. Another game, Cities in Motion 2, seems to quite some people more like the new SimCity than the SimCity itself, even though the scope of that game is completely different. It looks like Maxis lost their grip on making a good city builder...

A lot of these points have been raised a thousand times, but this is for me the most civilized way I can put it.

Best,

Maarten (MandelSoft)

NAM Team and SimTropolis Staff Member

[laforcem 6]

Great post Maarten!

This resume the whole problem.

Sc2013 is more a game than a city simulator.

I envoy some part of it but in general, this game is boring and small maps make it hard to reproduce realistic cities.

I like the economy model but it is buggy and this is very frustrating.

Martin Laforce

A fan of Simcity since SC1

(SC3000 highway tunnel!)

[perafilozof 143]

Here is my personal view.

 

Before SimCity(2013) i would play SimCity4 every so often when ever I got the creative itch and would install SC4 to let it out. I would play for days and only play SC4 until I was spent, got annoyed by some game mechanic or would fail in some outlandish idea and simply wouldn't have the strenght to start over.

 

My biggest annoyance was the hidden math behind the game, because you could simply sense the places and moments by paying attention to some gameplay mechanic where the game was run by that math and not the logic by which your playing. In the end in order to translate your ideas into the game you would have to push them through the mold of that math which ran the game. You ended up playing against the game in a chess match where you had to know every move the game was able to make in order to win the match.

 

I personally don't like playing games where I have to understand their inner workings and then use that knowledge in order to outsmart the game to achieve my ideas. I want the game to be good enough to mask it's inner workings with fluid gameplay and game mechanic and allow me the freedom to unleash my creativity and ideas without worrying about can the game deliver.

 

In that respect, the most important to me in a game like a city builder, I think the SimCity of 2013 is better then SC4.

 

There are still things I don't like, things that need improving, things that require expanding upon, but what it comes down to, I no longer install SC4 when I feel my creative itch, I start SimCIty.

[paeng 2,527]

Well, so much has been already said on the "technical" issues, I don't feel like rehashing all of that - so here is just a little essay on how this whole affair and its marketing spin came across for me...

 

 

Real Cities Do Not Exist In A Bubble

When I heard that statement first - I didn't like it. Maybe because I didn't really understand it. Since then I had a lot of time to think and read about it.

Okay I thought - you had ten years to observe how NAM, RHW, SPAM, countless highest-quality BATs, glorious HD terrains and general intelligent modding by a highly motivated and dedicated community made this old dame vastly superior to its original, despite the ancient and sorta sub-standard tools available to us... Okay I thought - how nice if you pick it up from there and EXPAND on OUR vision and creativity, with a new (glassbox) engine, 3D (even if there is nothing wrong with the isometric view for this genre), smarter (not just more) simulation, fantastic new building- and texture sets - taking the proven and time-honored Simcity principles to new heigths and highs.


But then again - all this old-school stuff? Terraforming and civic engineering? Pah. Regionplay with connected mega-cities? Pah. Sophisticated multi-level transportation systems? Pah. Godmode to recreate realistic terrains like the Pacific Northwest or Tropical Islands or even Mars? Pah. An open system and an array of snazzy tools to continue creating city-styles, buildings, props, mods and fantasies? PAH! Just a bunch of outdated, primitive concepts.


We give you nicely down-scaled maps with clearly defined towns - so much easier to manage. We give you pre-configured traffic stubs - just continue them from the spots marked on the game-generated maps into your town. Once inside, you can weave roads and rail tracks at will, using the fabulous new 'Curvy Road' tool - all you need is to make sure to exit them at any of the predefined points again. It's easier than ever to construct a nice grid - kind of 'Connect-the-Dots'. Same with highways - you won't have to construct them at all, we took care of that. You'll see lots of clear space between your towns, which we use for these network-connections. Even rivers and lakes follow this principle - they are all generated with the map and so ensure a seamless fit from town to town. Where there are no connections to be made, we just filled in nice rolling hills and neutral landscapes that stretch up to the bounds of the next town.

We put some coal and oil and stuff below the ground, and we even tell you where they are located, the easier for you to exploit... you just need to choose WHAT you want to exploit. So now you can turn even the smallest town into a thriving global market place, trading all those treasures. Of course on a highly competitive level, with leader boards and all the works. Trust us, you'll have so much quality play time checking the prices on the world markets, buying stuff you need and selling stuff you don't need, or just shifting the goodies around!


Your game experience won't be hampered by the need to lay out stuff, e.g. those pesky water pipes. Matter of fact - we basically eliminated any 'below-the-ground' elements. After all - you cannot see them anyway. Instead we now give you thousands, nay, hundreds of thousands of little 'agents', zipping along your power-, water-, traffic- and all other grids... and they will not only tell you where water flows, they'll give you in-depth information (at your fingertips, so to speak) down to the last single Sim. You will finally know that Lucy's gone shopping - including what she buys, where she buys and why she's buying. You even find out what Lucy thinks about the color of the new car Kip just bought. Gosh, that's all so exciting!


These are just some basics - now let us tell you about the best part of our new game. We are taking your whole experience ONLINE! Yes! You'll be permanently connected to the pulse of the global markets, while global boundaries are being removed! It won't matter where (or when) you play, your friends in the USA, Europe, Asia or wherever will be always up-to-date with the progress of your town, they can even impact your town, for better or worse! If someone sends pollution or crime your way and you did not prepare for it - watch out! Your town may be losing heavily! What a challenge!

* Well, we made some rudimentary provisions for the unlikely case that you want to prevent or disallow this... But that would not be in the new spirit of this new game, so you would be cut off from so many of the exciting new challenges of our envisioned game strategies... that's why we did not put too much thought into this. We would not want you to keep up a permanent online connection just to "play" a pseudo single player mode. Gee, that would not be exciting at all!


We'll also take some heavy loads off you - no more need to clog up your hard drive with all these 'Saves' of mostly redundant old game states - global markets are moving much too fast for that. You'll just save YOUR current game into OUR cloud and never worry about it again - everything updates the moment you connect to our servers. Do not worry about down-times - they are unlikely, and we can keep things alive for all of 2 minutes... so the chances of losing any of your work are at an absolute minimum! And since the servers for a successful game stay online indefinitely, no worries in that direction either. All this online technology is sooo cool!


We have of course closely monitored your ideas and comments on the fan sites and community boards - and we are so grateful. We are well aware of your worries that upon release a few small things may be lacking - well, we are just starting (remember, this is a re-boot)! And by now you have given us so many new ideas of things to design and include in coming versions and upgrades, thank you for that! The vast majority of old and new Simcity fans all over the world agree that they will be more than happy to DownLoad (additional) Content. As a matter of fact - there does not even seem to be a true need to build overly complicated tools and put you through the hardships of creating such content on your own. We probably end up doing all this hard work for you and release it in small, easy-to-download packages that you can integrate at your own pace and without any headaches. Wait - just checking with our experts... yes! They agree, new content, be it single buildings or whole city sets, could be made available for what is basically just a token fee - so little by little, and for hardly any additional cost, you can build up a large collection of Sim items! Which, by the way, is a proven concept, so we are very excited about this aspect as well!


So - now that you have gained more inside knowledge about things to come, we do hope you share our excitement. All that's left now is to wait... and then see for yourself what we have done to good old Simcity.

 

 

 

* If you want or need a more concise list of my 'Likes' and 'Dislikes' - I can supply that, too...

 

 

Best regards,

Paeng

[baertooth 330]

I started with Simcity on Amiga like a month or two after release.  I have been a Simcity addict since then.  I have not bought SC2013 or did I play the beta, but I have followed this fairly closely and I think I have a good handle on the game.

 

Since the dust has settled I am really disappointed.  A lot of what was negatively predicted has happened.  From a broken game the fan base didn't ask for, to EA corporate greed and their desire to use online only DRM to cattle their customers, to renting games to destroy the used game market (you don't buy Simcity2013, you access it as a service).

 

There are tons of things to say about the game and the situation around the development of this game.  It's a long story that involves little details like Maxis' inability to release Simcity 4 and the team had to be retooled by EA to get Rush Hour out but I'm not sure you want to be that granular.  However this complexity problem that Maxis ran into back then, the perception that Simcity 4 is too complex due to poor sales (that wasn't the reason), and EA's desire to kill the used game market is what has really guided the development of Simcity2013.

 

And this is really the fundamental story here.  EA's desire to kill the used game market.  EA will no longer be selling games, but instead are selling passes to games as a software service.  This is to kill the right of first sale the consumer has to resell their physical copy of the game to recoup some of their loses by forcing each player of the game to buy a license from EA.

 

Aside from the dirty pool, the game looks shallow and for me I wouldn't probably play it very much in it's present state.  In affect they took ONE large city tile from Simcity 4 and broke it up into 16 tiles and spread it over a "region" (that's for the largest regions).  They simplified the game by taking out a lot of control over how you can manipulate your city such as regional control, terraforming, and density control and replaced them with DLC and...   I'm anticipating this...  wait for it...  I believe they are coming...   for a software service...    EA's new business model...     paid patches to get the game working...     welcome to the brave new world : )

[morriswalters 16]

A question you might want to ask is not where is the game at, but where can it go.  Maxis made a choice to utilize the Glassbox Engine for everything that moves on the map.  Apparently, at least from a casual glance, they decided to use some version of an algorithm called the drunkards walk or random walk for the agents.  This allows the designers to have services that get to every entity on the map without the designers having to know where they are.  If the map goes larger I'd be curious to know if the map could be serviced by this routine in the cycle time of the map, without requiring many more traffic causing entities.  Double the map size from 2k by 2k to 4k by 4k and you increase the area by 4 times, that is from 4k²  to 16k² . The way they operate the elementary school entity in the game is a good example the problem with this.  Buses run 9 hours of game time and students get the full benefit of an education if they get there before the schools close.  The number of buses is the controlling factor for the number of "students" that can get and education given that time frame.  Even given multiple "schools" the buses all cover the entire map.  So can they make it scale given this behavior?  If buses go out can they get back to the "school" in the time allotted.  The same would be true for every service vehicle if my observations are correct.

 

The Glassbox engine is one of the bright spots of the game.  It makes the maps feel alive, with a sense that "people" are going places and doing things.  Cites XL was criticized for looking dead. But that random behavior requires a lot of thinking when you play and it it not always obvious what to fix when something doesn't work.  Commercial entities in the game are an example of this.  The behavior is obscured by the parks you have to use to increase the "property value" since they behave as commercial development. It can be hard to tell why some things fail and others work.  "Workers" are another example of this.  You may get a prompt that a "business" is closed due to a lack of "workers", but no explanation of what wealth class may be lacking or if the problem is related to that at all.

 

I have strong opinions on region play.    If you play a game like WOW, the thing that can bring the most value for your dollar is the one to one play available.  Raiding parties are synced, every player there in real time,  And when you play alone there are other things to do.  The world itself is persistent and active 24/7 365.  SimCity 2013 need not apply for this.  The game takes hours to play and the worlds are not persistent when you aren't in them.  This leads to EA and Maxis acting as brokers.  They have to supply the appearance of that persistence.  If there is a one to one exchange for a given set of cities in a region I have yet to find it.  I can't send workers between cities of my own in a private region.  So EA/Maxis provides an analog.  An average of what could be.  And the same is true of every exchange between cities.  Perhaps one of the larger complaints has been the lack of "cheetah" speed.  And this defines the problem with region play for the dedicated city player, the clock.  For what it's worth, that is my opinion of some aspects of the game.

[macvirt 361]

I would not say the dust has settled. To be honest, if there was any dust it was limited to community media first, mainstream media second, but more importantly to a relatively limited set of user types connected to the franchise. EA has made clear in its communications that it is business as usual, and that the road taken will be followed. To be honest, for them the correct decisions.

 

SC2013 is a textbook case of adapting a niche product (with an established but niche audience) to a broader audience for commercial purposes. Yes, EA did leave a lot of gaps in that process of adaptation, and yes they did create several issues for themselves which could have easily been prevented. But this remains something that mostly affects that already existing franchise audience. Not the audiences of EA's targeted volume market.

 

In many ways it is a very similar situation to that of the Civilization V release by Firaxis / 2KGames, at the time. Existing fanbase, used to provide foundation elements for marketing, product turns out to be tailored for a different market anyway, core users are frustrated, casual gaming users are happy. Company engages release of a lower development cost product, makes tons more with content based DLC, makes even more with feature based DLC so widen the experience of the main target and make good use of the previous core users who reach for the wallet because they want to believe. Meanwhile the studio takes flak, publisher practices standard "big lie" marketing and is happy because business is as usual.

 

SC2013 is a franchise reboot. What did people expect. Be honest. Sure, server issues could have been prevented, but the default practice is to create the conditions to allow such issues to arise. It generates buzz, which is very easy to turn in to positive marketing instrumentation, while also cutting out those who are not the real target customer thus preventing them from inserting negative messaging in to the volume market community trending which marketing aims to create.

 

Folks, it's business. 

[T Wrecks 10,210]

What did people expect? A bloody successor to their favourite game, sheesh. What else? That's what they have been expecting for ten years, and they have also been expressing that. Basically, all wishes and gripes the hardcore community ever had have been all over the place. No company would have had to do less market research to get it right than Maxis for a successor of SimCity 4.

 

What happened was first that EA had Tilted Mill develop SimCity:Societies. They came here, said they were going for the SimCity crowd and that our input was oh-so-valued. Well, input came... but it was all brushed off with "Oh yeah, that's nice, but unfortunately not going to happen". What happened instead was that it turned out that the game was nearly finished, and that it had nothing at all to do with what people here are interested in. Plopping buildings down instead of growing them, the infamous candy cane streetlights...

 

Next came the CitiesXL trainwreck. The announcement from MonteCristo "We're going for the SimCity crowd" still rings in my ears... rest of the story see Maarten's excellent post above.

 

Third time's the charm, eh? Well, not so much in our case. The most important points have already been covered, so I'll restrict myself to adding that the way you get treated when you happen to belong to the core SimCity fans feels like being punched in the face over and over again. Hollow phrases that come down to "oh yeah, you are so valuable to us (and with 'valuable' we mean your money!), so we'll ignore you and treat you like little children". Add to this that with each new miserably failed attempt at making something that deserves being called a successor to SC4, a large number of newcomers invades the forums and basically tells those guys who have been running all this how they are just a bunch of notorious complainers who don't know jack, and not a few of them seem like they're out on an evangelization mission. Well, you've had several of your oh-so-great games now, when will be our turn for a change?

 

Basically, if you want to know how opinions towards SC2013 are distributed, go by post count and date of registration. Onward from 2 years membership and ~800 posts, your chance of a "how about no, the game is a major disappointment" approaches 95%.

 

This audience has matured with the SimCity series, and so have computer gamers in general. It's not a secret that SImCity is enjoyed by people from 13 to well above 60 years! Gamers are no longer only unpopular and socially inept youths, they are normal grown-up people and would certainly appreciate not being underestimated instrumentalised for cutthroat business models and presented with dumbed-downed and simplified games all the time. Check out some of the CJs (City Journals) on SimCity fan sites - that's what people think about complexity and realism! That's what people think about room for creativity. SC2013 feels all dumbed down and fenced in in contrast, not to mention the 'forced online' disaster and the ugly business model behind.

 

Finally, we have often heard the phrase "We at EA feel like we have worked ourselves into a niche with SimCity". It was often cited to highlight why it was allegedly so important to head in a totally different direction. Sounds logical? Jeez, a city builder like SimCity is a niche. Just like a soccer game. Have you ever heard EA complaining about how the 'felt like they worked themselves into a niche" after Fifa 200, Fifa 2001, Fifa 2002, Fifa 2003, Fifa 2004, Fifa 2005, Fifa 2006, Fifa 07, Fifa 08, Fifa 09, Fifa 10, Fifa 11, Fifa 12, and Fifa 13? Wouldn't it be about time to make a reboot and turn it into a single-player-oriented, always-offline game with a healthy distance between both halves of the soccer pitch?

 

Well, it looks like SC4 could also be christened SC4ever because it appears it'll be the one those who liked SC from Classic to 4 will play forever, lacking a worthy successor.

[StoNe220022 159]

I've been a fan of SC since the original - that must be showing my age :/

 

I have not bought this game as I thought the faults and shortcomings were transparent to the degree you could easily make up your mind prior to the release.  I'm not happy about the fact that all of the flaws of this game became predictably true; it would have been nice to have another game to play.

 

But for me the faults, flaws, shortcomings were these:

 

Always Online - I don't mind being connected to the internet on my home PC, but I do travel a lot and often spend my nights in hotel rooms in foreign countries; it's amazing the pleasure I receive sitting up on a 17 hour flight across the pacific using my laptop and playing games.  This is also why my World of Warcraft account gets locked for months on end; not because I get bored with the game, but my lifestyle doesn't have any synergy with online gaming.  That's my reason for not liking online; however this game seems to have taken it to a whole new level being:

• inability to restore a city after a disaster or poor choice
• out of sync RCI supply / demand
• no reliability on sharing resources, services, money

 

Immediate gratification prioritised over product longevity - The new Maxis/EA games seem to focus on a new different level of detail; having spent time on making sure sims have a thought (e.g. "I want another ice cream" "I just came from Joe's Diner" children are skipping in the streets etc...) this to me I refer to as short term thrills; once you have seen it or experienced it the feeling goes away and all of the effort in investing time in to producing it is gone, at least until the next user comes along.  To me some books and movies provide this...fantastic to read or watch, but you wouldn't own them in your dvd collection as chances are you'd never re-watch them.  So why did the developers put time in to producing things like this? Why would I buy a game that would excite me and make me smile for one week (because everything is new) only to be left with so much other unfinished content and no drive to load up the game again?

 

For me a good computer game is something I'd load up and play; I still reload the Sierra Quest for Glory games and play my char from 1-5. Dungeon Keeper I still play, Theme Hospital has also received some modder's love as has Transport Tycoon in which I still play both.  The Anno games are another one that I love to reload and keep playing.

 

Curvy Roads at the cost of Good roads - It's kind of strange, there is such a push to get curvy roads in to city builders but there is no push to do them correctly.

• Buildings are still rectangular
• City Design becomes clunky and less efficient
• Road joins are rendered unnatural
• Curve comes with wasted space in-between the bend and the straight angles
• Clipping with grass/ground textures / more potential unresolved bugs

So it is a little disappointing when developers do away with the many many many road types so that we just get this one bendy road, it is far too much that was sacrificed to get these new road types in.

 

Realism was prioritised to make the game less real - It's such a mixed argument, you will often hear players sometimes argue a fault with "It's like that because the developers went for more realism" but then when arguing another fault you'll hear the opposite argument "It's a game, it's not supposed to be realistic which is why the developers did it like that"

 

I am referring to the Glassbox simulation aspect, and the 'living in bubbles' comment, traffic behavior etc... as to me a city is not supposed to be simulated, it's supposed to be statistical.  As soon as you simulate a garbage truck, you've destroyed the concept of a vast city and have made a decision to focus on the smaller community; which was not the understanding of the SimCity franchise.

 

City Tile Size - No matter how creative individuals are, if you give them a concreted predetermined limited canvas, they will design and build for efficiency.  City maps are functioning more like 'levels that need to be conquered' as opposed to a giant blank canvas.  Ironically, due to the way traffic works, city specialisation, road real estate, pollution / industry, utilities water/power flow...you no longer experiment with your build but instead find the most practical and efficient way of doing things, and will stick to that model for every city.

 

Players may find their cities starting to look and feel the same using only the specialisation to differentiate, once they would have found the best way to 'conquer that level'

 

City size prevents sprawl and flexibility in ones design, forcing the designer in to a mold.

[paeng 2,527]

looks like SC4 could also be christened SC4ever

 

 

 

;-)

[TimmyShire 0]

Wow. Thanks guys! There's already so many responses! I knew you guys were the ones to speak to!

 

There isn't really much I can add, so I'll just wait for a little while before collating them into the article. It seems a lot of you don't like it so much.

[perafilozof 143]

It's not that people don't like this game so much, It's that they don't like what this game is compared to what it could have been. It's the fact that we know just how much better this game could have been that is the real tender spot in our hearts.

[morriswalters 16]

The game is what it is.  Everybody is an expert at playing the game they owned and each had their way of looking at what made it fun.    And a  game written by a all those people would have made no one happy.  Someones favorite feature would have been left out, or someones most hated feature put in.

[NovaBlazer 10]

What I find the single most frustrating issue about this game still is the inconsistency in which "Region" processes occur.

 

Sometimes, my trains show up to take away items from the depot, other times not.

Sometimes, my garbage services from other cities work, other times not.

Sometimes, my sewer will go to another city like it is supposed to, other times not.

Sometimes, electricity will be provided from one city to another... other times not.

And on and on the list goes.

 

Even playing in a "private" region by myself still have these issues.

 

Everything inside the town seems to work pretty well.

But it is regional play that can not be relied upon at all.

[perafilozof 143]

Well I think that those problems are all just server side problems atm, not that they are game bugs that require fixing, but that they are simply the overloaded server problems. And it's also possible some of those things don't work because they were changed or turned off by Maxis to stabilize the servers.

[Xenocity 343]

I personally like Simcity 2013.

 

I don't mind the fact there are spaces between cities, since most of the world and my state are built like that (except for the few cities that border Detroit).

 

Seriously if you drive through most of the world it goes like this: metropolis---> rural ---> city---> rural/town ---> city ---> rural ---> metropolis!

 

Urban sprawl is literally an American invention that only exists in certain parts of the U.S. (mainly on the East Coast and CA).

 

Also I find this game more challenging and engaging because you actually have to make the best use of all your land.

I also enjoy the challenges of adapting my city to the environment

 

Anyways Simcity 2013 still needs the following fixes:

• Region connection issues (Utiitiies are not following properly)
• Crime (Why is my city complaining about too much crime when my 40 police cars are only arresting 4 criminals per day?)
• Freight issue (Why is my industry complaining about shipping times?)
• Education issues
• Tourist issues
• Traffice issues

I believe once those issues are worked out, it will be a good game.

I am still hoping they give us a future building set like in Simcity 2000 at one point in time.

[cirugo 1,889]

I couldn't say it any better than Maarten.

[catty-cb 4,412]

Ten years the people on the various simcity forums have been posting on what they wanted a new simcity game to do, we told Monte Cristo  what we the players wanted in a city builder and they didn't listen and six months after the Cities XL release they were bankrupt, EA/Maxis also got the same advice from players and based on what they released they have ignored everything anyone has said to them.

 

Most of us were realistic enough to know that some of what we wanted wasn't possible or practicable in a new game, but we all had the expectation that we would have at the very least everything that was in the old game, its a sad situation when Cities in Motion 2 is closest to what you wanted in a City Builder game that the new SimCity 2013.

 

-catty

[khac2956 0]

Urban sprawl is literally an American invention that only exists in certain parts of the U.S. (mainly on the East Coast and CA).

 

Umm, you have never been to London then.

 

Or Tokyo

 

Or Mexico City

 

Or Delhi

 

Or Mumbai

 

Or Birmingham

 

Or Manila

 

Or Karachi

 

Or Jakarta

 

Or Ciaro

 

Or Istanbul

 

But i suppose you are right... apart from all those other places, urban sprawl only exists in certain parts of the U.S.

[Cubanoy31 0]

Here are my thoughts on this game,

First I should say I have not bought this game, though was thinking about it. Once all the bugs are removed and the price drops a bit I'll look into playing this game, but I think that the game still suffers from what I understand as broken IA (traffic programs, fire, police, and the glass box where people are suppose to go back to their homes not just the closest ones) no really penalty for bad neighbors, and I hear that cities are still going missing.

I think 60 is still a lot of money even for the best of the best games. I have bought with the exception of the first SimCity every other one. (In the case of 3000 twice and play it just about every day on my iphone)

As much as I love SimCity I just don’t go along with their vision (always online DRM) and the amount of issues are still outstanding. I get just about 20-30 extra bones a month for gaming at this time I would much rather not spend it on SimCity at the current price.

When the game drops down to 20 I will rethink this line of thought by then the bugs and AI should be fixed if not then I will be ok with letting the sun set on my run with SimCity.

[lordax 3]

I've never played another SimCity; few months ago a friend introduced me Anno 2070 and I love it; then told me about the new SimCity and how it's much better than Anno (she loves SC4), I pre ordered the limited edition and all, I bought the hype. 

I've been playing games since the 80's so I know my way around learning how to play a game, is not that difficult these days with the auto save, bullet time or flashback button so I quickly learnt how to play SC. Without reading anything about the game I started to find it annoyingly bugged or just bad coded or good idea, bad execution. When you are on the menu screen you are told that the game is "best played with friends"; however, so far playing with my friend caused more pain than fun; having both cities with high education and no criminals had no point since we send each other dozens of criminals every hour; having every sim working didn't matter, we send each other tons of unemployed sims anyway, clogging our main entrance; plop buses? it doesn't matter if you have enough in your town, we sent each other dozens of them even tho we had about just 6. 

Then there are a lot of little things inside your city that makes it fail if you don't follow strict rules like just T intersections or this or that; they sold me a game that said "your city", I don't feel it's my city since I can't build it the way I want since each sim will just get literally vomited by buildings to the closest bucket and upon filling that one will go to the next making essential that you build certain way so you don't have mindless sims just sitting in their cars doing nothing to advance while there's an empty way next to them.

My friend quit a couple of weeks ago, she's very pissed and disappointed, she expected a real sim game; I confess I expected more of a challenge, there's none, you have literally no much to do: lay the initial roads, zone it, wait for people to move in, plop this or that and wait for people to expand, build the money maker (electronics is the less problematic and most productive) and just leave it there, as a very expensive animated wallpaper because after a couple of hours, that's what the game becomes, nothing to do, nothing to expect but to see the money number grow up. Luckily for me I have 2 computers, one used for communicating with my family and my "main" computer where I play my games, I installed SC on "chat" PC and it's there running, like a very expensive wallpaper.

[mike119 0]

Yesterday was the first day since the game came out that I did not play it. StoNe220022 put it perfectly above:

 

"City Tile Size - No matter how creative individuals are, if you give them a concreted predetermined limited canvas, they will design and build for efficiency.  City maps are functioning more like 'levels that need to be conquered' as opposed to a giant blank canvas.  Ironically, due to the way traffic works, city specialisation, road real estate, pollution / industry, utilities water/power flow...you no longer experiment with your build but instead find the most practical and efficient way of doing things, and will stick to that model for every city.

 

Players may find their cities starting to look and feel the same using only the specialisation to differentiate, once they would have found the best way to 'conquer that level'"

 

I realized yesterday that I figured out a decent way to keep traffic down and that every single city I was building started looking the same. It's so stupid how crippling traffic can be. There's traffic in every city but they don't all fail. Maybe it's because not everyone leaves the house at exactly 7AM every day. And what helps traffic? No 4-way intersections and a small limit on traffic lights, if any at all. Oh, and don't put commercial buildings on the main street, put them on side streets since everyone leaves the building at exactly the same time and they'll block the road. Want to relieve traffic by providing buses? They mostly just follow each other. Make sure you don't add too many stops because each of those buses will stop at every single bus stop. 

[Xenocity 343]

Urban sprawl is literally an American invention that only exists in certain parts of the U.S. (mainly on the East Coast and CA).

 

Umm, you have never been to London then.

 

Or Tokyo

 

Or Mexico City

 

Or Delhi

 

Or Mumbai

 

Or Birmingham

 

Or Manila

 

Or Karachi

 

Or Jakarta

 

Or Ciaro

 

Or Istanbul

 

But i suppose you are right... apart from all those other places, urban sprawl only exists in certain parts of the U.S.

Those are Metropolises.

As in they are cities which focus on high density development along side their high population density.

 

Urban sprawl or suburban sprawl is a multifaceted concept centered around the expansion of auto-oriented, low-density development. Topics range from the outward spreading of a city and its suburbs to its logical limits, to low-density and auto-dependent development on rural land, examination of impact of high segregation between residential and commercial uses, and analysis of various design features to determine which may encourage car dependency.^[1]

 

Here in the many parts of the U.S. after World War II, the U.S. Government financed the building of the suburbs as a fast and cheap way to allievate the housing shortage instead of building high density buildings in the cities (which is quite expensive and time consuming)

 

So in many parts of the U.S. it goes like this:

• Chicago (2.7M city proper) - 9.2M metro (consists of 20 interconnected suburbs and Chicago that span 3 states without any rural breaks)
• Los Angeles (~3.7M city proper) - ~12M metro (consist of 7 interconnected suburbs and L.A. without any rural breaks)
• Washington D.C. (~600k city proper) - ~5.7M metro (consist of 4 interconnected suburbs and D.C.)
• Detroit (~700k city proper) - 4.2M metro (consisting of 6 counties interconnected with rural areas only being on the mainly in the northern portions of the northern counties.)

It is like driving through one big city for hours on end with very few sky scrappers and low population density (yes there are very few people per sq. mile in most metro areas)

[MandelSoft 2,775]

Still, you can't fit in even nearly dutch compact(!) cities in a SimCity 2013 tile decently. Take my home city for example, Zoetermeer. 120,000 inhabitants. Each black square represents 1x1 km, so each red square is a SC2013 tile:

And this is considered to be a compact city, were you can easily take a bike to get to the other side! We dutch already build quite dense because we simply have little land to build on.

So, what can you recreate on such a small canvas? Well, this, a mere city of 20,000 inhabitants of little significance just outside Amsterdam:

And even that doesn't fit in the city tile completely! In the Netherlands, this is just not even enough to be a city to our standards, just one of the numerous larger towns...

The huge urban sprawl might be a metropolis only feature. But normal city expansions, heck, even just a random old historic city is just too much asked from SimCity 2013...

No wonder why people satirically call this game SimTown....

Best,

Maarten

[TimmyShire 0]

Hey all!

 

It was later than I would've liked to get this put together, but someone asked me to plop the link in here once it's live.

 

http://www.nowgamer.com/features/1907182/simcity_what_the_diehard_fans_think.html

 

I didn't get the room to feature everyone's comments, so apologies if I missed you out. It was still massively appreciated, though, so I hope you enjoy the article all the same.

 

Thanks guys. Let me know what you think.

[AshPikachu 54]

 

Urban sprawl is literally an American invention that only exists in certain parts of the U.S. (mainly on the East Coast and CA).

 

Umm, you have never been to London then.

 

Or Tokyo

 

Or Mexico City

 

Or Delhi

 

Or Mumbai

 

Or Birmingham

 

Or Manila

 

Or Karachi

 

Or Jakarta

 

Or Ciaro

 

Or Istanbul

 

But i suppose you are right... apart from all those other places, urban sprawl only exists in certain parts of the U.S.

 

Seattle and Tacoma in Washington State has urban sprawl.

[redrummage 9]

Good article Timmy, you really wrote the opinions of the forum.

[ChrilleT 2]

Read about the game before it came out and there was alot that i did not like. One thing was "the always online" since i sometimes play SC4 where I had no connection to internet.

 

Did not buy it at first and when i read about the server issues and all the bugs I was happy that I waited. Did follow when they put all the updates out and eventually did buy the game since I thought most of the things would be fixed. Never had an issue with the servers but when playing the bugs and issues was just to much so stopped playing and have not been playing for a couple of weeks now hoping that a few more updates would make the game more playable.

 

Things that really made this game hard to play for me.

 

*Region play where you help other citys out with power, garbage, water etc. Had one city with serveral garbage trucks but was only allowed to send 1 to my neighbour city that needed alot more than one. Seems the game looks at how many cites are in your region (even if they have no population/buildings) and split so you have to distribute the garbage trucks evenly. So if you have 6 citys and 6 garbage trucks its impossible to send 2 or more garbage trucks to one city.

 

*All the fire trucks going to the same place even if there is more fires in the city.

 

*Can´t go back to a save if you screw up. I was looking where to place the university and mistakenly plopped it when serching for a good place. It not only got placed where I did not want it to be placed, it destroyed some other buildings that was there before that I did not want to destroy. Since I did not have that much money at the moment and since it was an expensive building I started a new city. Wished I could just go back to a save...

 

*Can´t play the game everywhere I want like I did with SC4.

 

*Citys to small to make many realistic bigger citys. I Also feel that when you going to place building you have to think about what in the city to destroy to make place for that building. Youre just going out of room to easily. However i hope they fixed the bugs and issues with the game before they expand the city tiles.

 

*The road entering the city tile is almost always having trouble with to much traffic and I can´t build any other roads in or out of the city to distribute the traffic.

 

*Make disasters optional. Yes I know you could play in another mode but I don´t find it fun to start with so much money and everything unlocked so don´t want to play that way.

 

I hope to be able to enjoy the game soon and will wait a few weeks more hoping on more updates before giving it a try again.

[Rufus Honker IV 100]

Online play still makes no sense.  Playing with other people, you forget they're there.  Yes, you can offer and buy services from each other, but it's hardly social.

 

What they should have done is released the game for offline, and then added an online DLC.