Sim City: An Interview with Stone Librande

[mayor_w 0]

Designer blog of Stone Librande on the game - I remember this was the guy who narrated the gameplay video that got me hella excited.

 

Sim City: An Interview with Stone Librande

 

Edit: Updated with the original topic source

[Cykik Visage 0]

One of my favorite lines, which speaks great lengths to how pathetically tiny the actual map sizes are.

 

"For example, if we made the airport runways actual size, they would cover up the entire city. Those are the kinds of things where we just had to make a compromise and hope that it looked good."

 

 

There was another one in there about how typically mall and venue parking is bigger then the builds lots, so we have to pretend everyone parks underground to compensate...... I have a better idea, stop slacking and cutting corners in your simulator and make the cities scale better then they did in SimCity 1995?

[r00n83 12]

First of all, when we started the project, and there were just a few people on the team, we all agreed that we didn’t want this game to be called SimCity 5. We just wanted to call it SimCity, because if we had a 5 on the box, everybody would think it had to be SimCity 4 with more stuff thrown in. That had the potential to be quite alienating, because SimCity 4 was already too complicated for a lot of people. That was the feedback we had gotten.

 

I wonder whom they got the feedback from? This certainly is not the opinion of the majority of Simtropolis members the biggest Simcity players community.

 

The early design actually did call for agriculture and food systems, but, as part of the natural process of creating a video game, or any situation where you have deadlines and budgets that you have to meet, we had to make the decision that it was going to be one of the things that the Sims take care of on their own, and that the Mayor—that is, the player—has nothing to do with it.

I watched some amazing food system documentaries, though, so it was really kind of sad to not include any of that in the game.

 

FU EA for ruining this game.

[Rufus Honker IV 100]

Instead, what I did was that I came up with two extreme cases—around the office we call them “Berkeley” and “Pittsburgh,” or “Green City” and “Dirty City.”

 

God, we're never going to live this down.  Pittsburgh hasn't been "dirty" since the 1970's.  We're an educational and medical center now - have been for years.

 

On to the city aspect, this graphic illustrates a beef I have with the game:

 

OH to have a small city hall!  The original city hall given to you in the game is ENORMOUS.  Want to make a tiny relaxed town?  You have to have a giant, two-story city hall, sorry!

[SockoJr53 51]

I kind of agree Rufus, I don't like that every city must become this big fat skyscraper covered mess. I would love to make small farming communities, stick with only the small civil service buildings, and just sit back and farm. SC4 allowed this, I feel like this game forces you to start spamming skyscrapers at 15,000 people.

I could also see them turning that farm/food economic cycle into a DLC. Farms to be placed in areas with a good water table, and then food processing plants to turn them into food to be sold too market.

[NCGAIO 562]

.............., because SimCity 4 was already too complicated for a lot of people. That was the feedback we had gotten.

 

I wonder whom they got the feedback from? This certainly is not the opinion of the majority of Simtropolis members the biggest Simcity players community.

Although many of us fans of simulators do not find so complicated, it is undeniable that for the general public seeking simpler just fun with games SimCity 4 was a bit difficult to use and with a long learning curve.

Although it received positive reviews at launch coming to have 84/100 metacritic in the aspect of difficulty was also mentioned besides the delay performance of the machine by the inefficient use of memory for the executable.

 

SimCity 4 was praised for being the second game in the SimCity series to primarily use a 3D engine to render its graphics, the first being SimCity 64 for the ill-fated Nintendo 64DD. It received widespread acclaim, won several awards, and was one of the top ten selling PC games of 2003. It was however criticised for the difficulty of gameplay and computer performance.

The proprio W.Wright acknowledged that the simulator was too complex to be treated as a game and have thought simcity should follow another path.

 

Will Wright has previously stated in an interview on May 16, 2003, that there would probably be more expansion packs after Rush Hour,[32] but none have ever been released. In another interview on May 22, 2004, Wright stated that Maxis was attempting to work out a "new direction" for SimCity after new versions had become "steadily more complex".

And so we have Simcity 2013 which is a nice little game but never actually will be a real simulator.

 

source:wiki/Simcity4

[macscfan 117]

It goes back to the whole argument of city simulator versus city building game.

 

I would like to think that with EA's resources, they could have accommodated both playstyles, just let you pick the level of complexity.  

 

Some of the Railroad Tycoons did a good job on this, letting you decide whether you were going to go all out on simulating the running of a railroad from laying tracking to fending off hostile takeovers or upset boards of directors, or taking over other companies, or limiting you to basically laying track and deploying trains.