Mr. Flibble

Compare this to what was presented for Civitas and you see why for me at least that was a joke bordering on a scam from beginning to end. This looks fantastic, all the more so for being made by one person. Thanks for posting it.

I can think of no game I'd remotely consider paying $200 for out of the gate without being able to play a full-featured unlocked demo for a period of time. Even then that's a tall mountain to climb. I have other hobbies than gaming.

This is Mister "I won't greenlight a game that isn't fully multiplayer", right?

How many were pre-orders and how steep was the cliff of declining sales after the "launch"? Really what it did was sell 1.1 million copies of other titles that SimCity was given away with as a free bonus now that the compensation is underway. And there appears to be very little, at all, "hardcore" about the new SC. They couldn't have done much market research and data gathering or Lucy Bradshaw would never have said "well we could have, but we didn't" about offline play.

How that had any traction after the first week amazes me. Given those three screenshots, the total lack of any communications with the team and a video from the "beta" that was nothing but silly graphics appearing on top of a colored box, I cannot believe there are so many people so willing to toss money down a hole.

Los Angeles...that would take, what, about 200+ new SimCity sized tiles to represent at scale?

That's why Gamespot trotted out a 5.0 while sites like Polygon (who should learn now not to use pre-release code for reviews) only lowered theirs to 4.0 later once the true scale of the launch issues became apparent?

When you feel you have to title a blog entry "Straight answers...", it speaks volumes about how your community has lost trust in what you've said before, and, frankly just repeated again here without quite so much marketing spin. Oh, and this line, "In many ways, we built an MMO"...yeah. That's about the last thing many long-time fans and players, including myself, wanted. Will our disappointment be meaningfully addressed with more than a dismissive "eat your vegetables" wave of the hand?

Whether she expected it or not, she's got a rather intimidating wall of comments below it running about 97% negative. It wasn't really much of a defense of "always-on" that hasn't been said by them many times before. Oh look, we'll keep track of other cities for you, oh look you can load your cloud-saved cities on other machines, etc. (if they're not lost or corrupted). At least she admitted what they were striving for all along, SimCity the MMO.

I wonder what other "holes" will be quietly patched, such as the permanent offline bit and the ability to edit outside the prescribed borders. The designer is correct that there's no way to test endless permutations of some behaviors, but certainly dumb as a doornail shortest path road networks that have been in the game forever shouldn't fall into that category. They should have easily been able to see the problems there. He also brushes aside the notion that the sims should even have a permanent home and work location, well it seems to me that if they want to model how a city acts that's at least a place to start. An agent should at least return to the same location they leave from even if that location is randomized once per day. That would eliminate the silly looking video of Sim cars neatly (and wildly unrealistically) filing into driveways like putting books on an empty shelf. If they're going to take pains to show that much detail, they ought to model it as well.

I don't have it, and won't be purchasing it so take my opinion with that understood, but I never played SimCity ever at all with the wish in my head that it would be so much more fun with other people playing in the sandbox, too. SimCity once upon a time strived to be a simulation, not a mere game which is what it has become now. Every feature they remove is evidence of that. Sure there was minutiae that was unnecessary like needing to drag pipes around and whatnot, but instead of making the simulation more lifelike and open to exploration in 2013, they've made it far less so. The cities in the game have houses and roads and cars, but from what I've seen online in various places it's just a sugar-coated topping about as correlative to reality (to me) as a built out Monopoly board. Canned regions with even more canned starting locations is not at all going to provide me the same enjoyment as importing a DEM of my home area and recreating models of where I live (and totally different versions thereof). Do I think it's a hopeless mess? Absolutely not. I think the agent system and engine is an amazing accomplishment that they should be proud of and it appears capable, with some modification, of creating a level of fidelity that the old games could only approximate with the grid-based statistical methods. To accomplish that, though, it needs to have a true freeform sandbox mode unchained from its online cooperative stuff. Ideally they would both exist, then everyone will be happy. Otherwise, I agree fully with a comment I read before about this being as forever divisive to the SimCity community as the changes from Civ4 to Civ5 were for that franchise's fans.

So what you're basically saying is that the word "Sim" in the title is perhaps being generous, since it's not really simming how people behave in real life, nor can we make it pretty based on that. We have to make it pretty based on arbitrary rules that don't simulate behavior. It doesn't seem like a computational problem given the tiny city size, but it is perhaps a memory problem. It shouldn't be that hard for the sim to compute a path giving weight to road capacity one time from House001 where Sim001 resides to Job001 and reverse it at night. The only time it would need to recompute it is when the path from House001 to Job001 is altered by the player. Having to compute thousands of new paths with every day and night cycle as houses randomly fill up and vacate seems to be a lot more computationally demanding than computing them as need arises or change requires.

Aren't problems like these what the $19.99 "Streets and Rails" addon that you just know will be coming will allegedly remedy?

Path of Exile is proof that crowdsourced alternatives can turn out extremely well. At the same time, thus far Civitas is just some screenshots of wildly out of scale models next to a road and a concept video of terrain painting "done at 4 am". There's not even a website or list of these former developers so we can know what they've worked on in the past, and they have a planned release of November 2013. There'll have to be a lot, lot more revealed before I'd drop a dime.

Except that the forced online server experience is absolutely and irrevocably integrated into the game. You can't pick and choose what parts get the high marks and only factor them into a final score. If you want a joke review, the one at Polygon that's been revised downwards twice from their initial ridiculous glurge-fest played using pre-release code on totally quiet servers is the one for you. As for it being more complex in pure gameplay and simulation mechanics, well maybe in some areas in some ways. Traffic, though, is still apparently so primitive that traffic always takes the shortest route to a location even when it's not the optimal route, and everyone in the city must come and go from one arbitrary location. Did anyone really need to have the thoughts of every single solitary sim in the city modeled? The "cities" are not cities, in this game they are little petri dishes arranged on a lab table, they do not form an organic whole, a la SC4's regions. In short, the 'Sim' part of the game's title is somewhat misplaced. 'City Tycoon' would be a better name.

Subscription-based monthly fee gaming has over the last 6-8 years led to expectations about content depth, what will be available at release, and what will be added down the line. Yes it's "only" six dollars a month (if you decide to be completely faithful and not to go month to month), that means every six months you'll be buying the game again. And then again. It comes down to whether you think they can possibly cram enough in to make it worth essentially buying it twice more every year. I, for one, don't need to amortize out how many cents per hour or day some game is costing me per day to judge it worthy of my money. If it's fun and deep I'll pay for it. If it's truly special, I'll even buy the expansion packs that appeal to me. But the only games I would ever consider worth monthly fees for would have to be far deeper and more continually replayable than a city builder like CXL where you get five premade plots of land, a chat box, and a trade window. Maybe down the line they'll dazzle me with some amazingly open and customizable way to play but for now it's nowhere near enough for me.

In other words, Omnicorp is a government subsidized provider of resources. I wonder how much of a national debt they're running.

I have not bought the game, and for the near future won't, but the question CitiesXL will have to answer for me is whether the mere five cities you're allowed in Planet Offer will possibly be enough. I don't care if they release a GEM a month (which they won't), once you've really maxed out your five cities, what will be left to do? Play the totally gimped offline mode while you wait? I've worked on dozens of SC4 cities in numerous regions. I guess you just delete one and start over...

Modular expansions similar to The Sims games' were what I was hoping for from the beginning, and was what I assumed MC would be focused on with the GEMs. They allow people the control to focus on what they want to and leave out others. I would for example love a mass transportation GEM (since obviously single player will be without it now), and some others business or economic related ones. I don't know that I'd care about ski resorts or amusement parks, but hey that's what people who were into those things could buy. In spite of my grumblings about the game as it stands I have always wanted MC to succeed with Cities XL and it's why the game as released figuratively broke my heart after seeing the direction they focused on at the expense of so many pleadings from the larger community. They failed to meet a lot of our desires and therefore it's more difficult to find evangelists among us to sing its praises.

Same, and I use really old drivers because they're more stable on my machine, Forceware 169.32.

May the lords of SimCity have mercy on my soul, but I don't care if water pipes are removed from any future SimCity iterations or not. IMO, the model Maxis used for the power grid is so sensible that I wonder at times why water didn't go the same way. The only pipes needed would be to haul water a long distance across the map or between regions. The water buildings can be left as is, in fact I rather enjoy the water tanks in my little SimHamlets. But let's be realistic, that's the most interaction 98% of the gaming community has with water beyond their taps, a water tank they see when they drive somewhere. That's why people grumble about pipes, I believe. It's a layer of abstraction most of us have no real-life experience to relate it to. Same with power. Same with garbage. But woe, woe, woe unto heathens that simplify or eliminate transit options! This is again for the same reason. We interact daily with transit, going to work, watching car chases and whatnot. We interact with architecture in our cities, the trees, parks, libraries, landmark structures, etc. and it's fun to see these real-life things distilled into a form that we can rearrange any way we like and play with using tools that simulate that realism. Very few of us, however, experience clown schools, candy houses, Stalinist prisons, floating stoplights, mimes being hauled off by thuggish police, etc..that's why as a "SIM" City game, this newest iteration holds zero interest for me at all.

Storm drainage would be fun to model, and probably could be implemented with reasonable ease, actually. It would boil down more to calculating the runoff potential of each lot and its slope. As long as it could be programmed to only carry water totals from higher elevations to lower in the grid, it's doable. You just can't get bogged down in dividing the lots too finely as you rapidly reach diminishing returns in the final calculation. I spent some time doing grid modelling in GIS on streamflow runoff. It's fascinating.

I never said there were legions of them around...well, not here anyway, but that's the typical reply to any criticism over at TM. When you have a guy there calling for TM to be named "game developer of the year" for their stunning success with SC:S, I think one could fairly say they are as out of touch with reality as they probably think most of SimTrop's members are. I'm still intending to get it eventually, for the record, and I don't think it's the coaster of the year candidate some do. It's just too much $ for too little :-) right now.

"If you'd just play it more...." "Obviously you have barely played it at all..." "You're just regurgitating what a few negative reviewers playing betas already said..." The above lines are the stocks-in-trade from the pro-SC:S crowd as the only refutations they'll give to any point you make. You mentioned Sid Meier's Railroads in the first post as another unstable, graphically nice but gameplay crippled title, and that for me was the most intriguing point because I have felt the same about what Railroads did to the RRT franchise. It's frighteningly similar to what the majority of people are saying about this game. It looks nice, but it's buggy, unstable, and swings the pendulum from complex much too far to the side of infantile and simple. I've seen that general opinion on all sites with public comments (except TM's forums, which is hardly surprising). I won't be buying this until the first expansion pack at least. There's just not enough in it right now for me given its current price.

Originally posted by: calvinhsv This community is too absurdly critical and rude concerning this game. I would not expect there to be many mods for this game here. It is QUITE disappointing for me because I was really expecting this site in particular to try to make the best out of another product and was looking forward to interesting gameplay discussion and modding options.quote> It's hard to mod gameplay into a game that basically just sits there static, with no building or road network creation tools (which IMO are the core of the Simtrop mod magic), and no obvious way to do much of anything but change numbers and retexture. As it stands, however, your best bet is to go to the tilted mill forums where there are already new mods available. Theres also alot less negativity there. Avoid, however, the EA site since its populated by the same REPEATED posts of complaints (perhaps by the same people).quote> Or perhaps the negativity is more widespread than you want to acknowledge. The Tilted Mill forum is really the only place where people are just tickled pink by this game. Everywhere else is "Meh" or worse. The game looks great, but plays like the rush job it was. I have never seen a good game in the last 10 years go from first public showing to release in just four months. It has been a sad realization to me that this will not be the community for this game that, while not what everyone expected, is still not a bad game.quote> I'm sure Simtrop will have a few mods at some point, but it sounds like you expect the whole group here to just fire up the factory and churn out one after another for you. It'll be a while, probably another patch or two when the game is actually stable.