How is SimCity doing? Should I buy?

[Brandon8181 0]

I've been playing Sim City since the original... I know this one had a horrible launch... Is there any major problems? Is it okay to buy now?

Are most of the problems gone?

[Ocram's Razr 964]

The majority of the old bugs are gone, the price has gone down, and new features have been added. The servers are better prepared for the amount of current players and only go down for occasional short periods for maintenance.

--Ocram

[eburress 267]

If you're interested in a very detailed simulation and don't mind the inability to realistically create anything larger than a town/very small city, then yes, consider buying the game.

[Xenocity 343]

The game works now.

It still has a few lesser issues and Universities still cannot get regional students.

The Expansion Pack adds a lot new futuristic stuff.

 

 

You can buy Simcity Plus (Game + Expansion Pack) on Origin for $60

If you don't like the new direction, then you can always buy Cities XL Platinum on sale for $10.19 on Steam thru January 2nd.

 

I suggest you go to Target by the end of tomorrow to take advantage of the 10% special sale and pick up an Origin Cash Card and/or Steam one while you can get them on sale.

[AkemiAzula 280]

If you're fine being confined to making cities that a snail could realistically consider commuting from one side to another in,

yes.

[Rufus Honker IV 100]

Neutral standpoint: Yes, game is fun enough.  Just don't expect much from multiplayer or large, sprawling cities.

[Prophet42 1,503]

I'm still going to hold off from buying until they get rid of the online requirement and I can save locally to my hard-drive.

[USA_Pride 49]

I played the "public beta" aka demo.

 

Until they change the city size and allow local saves, I won't buy.  The current city size is an unforgivable sin.

[StoNe220022 159]

Despite all my 'hoohar' and hate speak about the direction the game was going (with a giant bucket of 'told you so' about all the faults, poor game design, shaky simulation breaking the core of any city builder etc...) I ended up buying it when it was on sale and they were up to patch #6

 

With a decent income and a love for PC gaming it's hard not to turn down $45 (full price in Aus is $80) game that'll give me hours of enjoyment.

 

No matter how much I tried to suck it up and enjoy the game, traffic issues were in the later stages, services having everything burnt to the ground due to traffic, resources not getting to their destination, greatworks were bugged etc...don't get me wrong, this game was in a horrendous state; where you'd delete your cities out of frustration and that the game was playing me more than I it. It really was a painful experience. It felt that no matter how good a city designer you were, you'd fail unless you would play according to the broken game mechanics. I also refuse to pay $14 for theme parks and balloon sets, that's just fucked up, and I think that's their revenue model but then I knew it from the start...it was a no brainer to me that they'd follow the model of The Sims with DLC and expacs in which I don't agree with.

 

I'd say it was with the expac and patch #8 or 9 where it finally now feels playable.

 

As the game currently is, they seemed to have fixed a great deal of traffic (you can actually use intersections now) disasters are disabled (so you can focus on just building your towns/cities) and I think the specialization is actually a nice feature, increases the longevity of the game until you try them all.

 

A great deal of things still bother me, gaps between cities, small maps, gaps between buildings, fluctuations in revenue during building constructions/changes/burning, poor building density controls, buggy placement of buildings (on curved roads you get a lot of 'no room to upgrade' issues), horrible tools in game to measure out road distance (so hard to plan for High Dense buildings back to back at early stages of the game w/o just going ahead and dropping avenues), poor RCI tuning (you always need more employees to fulfill the jobs, but then you also need a lot more industry to be built to supply the commercial, and always need more commercial for all the unsatisfied shoppers.)  It's a permanent cycle of needing all three a great deal more, but as you add people to fulfill the jobs you increase the problem with Industry and Commercial etc... Also, you tend not to build trains transport because the rail line takes a huge chunk of your city building space, so primarily use it at the border to ship out/in goods for trading. The cross-city functionality also seems broken, residents won't all commute, freight won't get sent from one city to fulfill the next, so you really feel as though you must build each city as an independent silo, which sucks because I liked the SimCity 4 aspect of a joint region.  I also hate the 'no save' function, I like to have my city all nice in a safe place, save it...and then try something new prior to going from medium to high density for example.  It's easy to have a successful medium density city, but when it goes High, you really start to see new problems, and you can't roll back to an old save game.

 

The city size is possibly my biggest gripe.  I don't even like to pack the city in with all buildings sandwiched up next to each other, I like to spread out my industry and have a massive highway running to the residential, and some small shopping district off one of the highway exits.  I love to spread my city out, and then make choices on what I expand when, or if, I chose to join it all up.  I do hate the fact that all cities have to have this compact construction, so I can't run a long train line to join the housing estates up with the industrial parks etc...

 

Final thoughts...the game is enjoyable in small chunks, certainly doesn't feel as polished as a Blizzard, or Anno game, very clunky graphics and clipping (I hate clumsy buggy glitches that lazy developers can't fix, still to this day the fountain update on the Mayor Mansion clips in to the grass) etc...but over all, this just isn't a Simcity, so try to enjoy it for what it is.

[CaptCity 4,915]

Off topic comment(s) removed. Let's keep it on SimCity... Thanks.

[Rufus Honker IV 100]

While you're in the thread, CaptCity, we seem to get one of these "Has the game calmed down?  Can I buy now?" once a month.  Maybe we ought to consider a pinned topic.

[chocolate_city 93]

Personally ... You have to stretch your imagination and tell your self this IS NOT a continuation of the Sim City franchise.. and the only thing they share is a name... then maybe you might be able to enjoy it...I did'nt and was fortunate enough to find a buyer who gave me close to my money back...

[tnobles 38]

I've been playing Sim City since the original... I know this one had a horrible launch... Is there any major problems? Is it okay to buy now?

Are most of the problems gone?

After 10 patches, most problems are fixed. Check Gamersgate if you plan to buy. they have it on sale for $19.95. (half current price)

[jaredh 195]

At $19.95, its still $15 too high for what you get out of it....the game is still something I'd expect to download from iTunes rather than a dedicated big-budget PC game.

[Xenocity 343]

At $19.95, its still $15 too high for what you get out of it....the game is still something I'd expect to download from iTunes rather than a dedicated big-budget PC game.

People say this about most  games now including the big budget titles regardless of the system.

 

We can thank Steam sales for rapidly devaluing gaming as a whole along with Android store.

i mean why buy a game at full price when you can find it on sale on Steam for less than $15 at least 5 times a year.

 

Though i still beg to differ with your post, I've diffently gotten my money worth out of this game and its expansion pack.

 

I've actually clocked 188 hours in this game to date which is more than every game I've bought in 2013 combined (except for Animal Crossing: New Leaf, which I've currently clocked 200 hours on)

 

Edit: I should also note Simcity is one of very few games that allows you to install it both on Mac and Windows for no extra charge.

Most games still charge you a fee for to get the version that runs on another OS.

[Vette Man 0]

I've been sketchy about the game since watching preview videos.

 

I've always enjoyed playing the SimCity series and absolutely love SC4 with all the plugins I have downloaded.

 

The main threat for me to get the game would be how realistic it is compared to SC4, as for running a city and building a city.