Jokurr

I’m not sure if I entirely understand your argument. The OP seems to be very much against DLC and how over time, the price for a game when all DLC is included can be $200 or more. Am I wrong in concluding that the argument is then, to avoid DLC by paying the same price, or even a slightly lower price to get all of that content upfront, all at once? If so, then no I do not agree. The idea behind DLC is that the user can pick and choose whichever content he/she wants and can avoid the ones that do not appear interesting. Your idea means that the user gets everything for one large lump sum, even the content they may not be particularly interested in. With that being the case, I would rather be able to choose which DLC I wanted. Plus, as previously brought up, at the time of release it is hard to know what issues people might have with the game, or what content they want added in the future. If DLC is released in a staggered manner, that gives time for the developers to read customer complaints and suggestions, and then release content based on what people want added to the game. Your model does not allow that. As far as DRM goes I do not support the idea of paying more to get rid of it. DRM should not exist in its current form in the first place, and offering to pay more to get rid of it is the equivalent of throwing in the towel and letting game companies rape our wallet. We should absolutely not have to pay more to get a DRM-free game.

For those of you who are claiming this as “the best news in years” could you please explain to me what exactly it is that John Riccitiello himself did, that EA would not have otherwise done if someone else was at the helm? From what I could tell he was probably one of the better CEOs that the company had, he actually played video games in his spare time unlike many of his predecessors, and as such was more in tune with what the average customer’s wants were. Unfortunately for him, EA is too much of a giant corporate morass that is too big for any one man, even the CEO, to fundamentally change. My prediction is that little will change once a new CEO is appointed.

When they increase city tile size, remove the dead space between cities in a region, fix the pathing problems the AI has, then I might buy it. And that isn’t even half the stuff I would ultimately like to see, just what is mandatory for me.

Even if any of SimCity games are not a completely realistic simulation of the real world, they at least were believable. The unrealistic aspects of SC4 were cleverly disguised or abstracted in a way that would cause the player to not think about it. The idea that a city of 200k people can be sustained by parks and basic utilities alone, with no input from other cities in the region, is totally insane and completely unbelievable. How can you defend this?

I wish I could say I was surprised.

I’ll admit that I’ve been critical of SC 2013 for a long time for multiple reasons such as tile size, lack of terraforming, lack of contiguous regions, etc. but I always thought that the glassbox engine looked awesome. After seeing this thread and the others like it with all sorts of AI nightmares, I can say I’m honestly stunned. I thought that they would have at least done better than this. I already questioned if glassbox was really worth it after learning that glassbox was the reason for small city tiles, but now it’s incredibly obvious to me that it is not worth it if this is the type of simulation that it comes up with. My goodness.

After playing the beta this weekend, the game was more or less what I expected it to be with no real surprises. There was enough to do that I was entertained and kept busy for the one hour I had to play and even left me wanting more, but I also recognized that after as little as another hour I would probably become bored. The most fun I had was simply watching the simulation of the game once my city was for the most part up and running, I enjoyed watching various sims commute back and forth throughout the town. Within the one hour I played I managed to fill about ¾ of the map, and I figured that in less than another hour I would have filled it completely. In fact I could have easily filled it within one hour if I did not spend as much time just watching the simulation. So like pretty much everyone else, I agree that the map size is probably the biggest limitation in the game and a real deal breaker. I would probably be able to live with the map size if I had control over region connections, but since the only connection I had was a single highway exit, my city felt very isolated. I enjoyed the implementation of curvy roads and I felt that the tools the game provides made it very easy to create roads in any shape you want. However, I found placing zones on those roads to be very clunky, and it was hard to judge how to space your roads to eliminate wasted space between buildings. The way zones are placed felt like a large departure from the previous games, where it was easy to “paint” large zones in one easy click and drag of the mouse. In this game I had to “line” each road individually with the zone of my choice and it did not feel as intuitive as the previous system. When I first heard that zone density was a function of road size I was disappointed, and I was disappointed when I was finally able to try it for myself. It takes a large amount of the player’s freedom to build their city their own way, and it’s unrealistic. My first apartment was 26 stories high and would be considered high density, yet it was on a narrow two lane road. The apartment I live on how is directly on a six-lane busy avenue, but is surrounded by low density, single story stores and shops in a largely suburban neighborhood. SimCity 2013 would not allow me to accurately portray either of the neighbourhoods I’ve lived in. I built bus stops throughout my city and I spent a long time watching a bus zoom around the city picking up and dropping off various sims. Granted it drove from bus station to bus station in a haphazard and unrealistic way, but I still enjoyed watching it. It’s disappointing that I won’t be able to do the same with subway systems, but since the map is so small it’s not like I would have been able to build much a system anyway. I enjoyed adding plopable subsections to buildings, and I felt it was an interesting and fun way to add to and improve the buildings in your city, and at the same time allow for a lot of unique ways to develop such buildings. In fact, I would say this was one of the best additions that was not previously in any of the Sim City titles. This has nothing to do with the game itself, but I was also disappointed in the way which EA conducted this “beta.” A beta which lasts three days and only allows players to play for an hour at a time is not a beta, I resent EA using that term. It’s a marketing demo and little more than that. I was also irritated at how EA gave away thousands of keys via facebook and other such giveaways, but very few of the people who signed up for beta months ago received a key through that avenue. The only reason I got a key was because I was lucky enough to be the first to respond to someone who was giving away a spare, if it were not for that, signing up for beta months ago, like it was for many others, would have been in vain. In closing I won’t be buying this game. It is simply far too restrictive to player’s individual creativity and I feel I would become bored of the game very quickly. The few features I thought this game did better than SC4 are not enough to outweigh the lack of features and creativity that SC4 encouraged.

They give them away at 5:30GMT/1:30PST (correct me if im wrong) at 5:29/1:29 keep refreshing the page until they are released. Thats how I got one. Also if I get picked by EA i'm going to release it.. I want to see the reply's haha! 5:30 GMT is 9:30 PST.

My guess is that EA thinks that most people who signed up for beta way back when will probably buy the game regardless if they get into the beta or not (though myself, and I'm sure plenty others like me won't). By giving away keys en masse just before the beta starts they create a lot of hype and get a lot of people interested who otherwise wouldn't have been. Afterall, this "beta" is nothing more than a marketing demo. The fact that it's only on for a weekend and resets after an hour of play prooves that.

Did anyone who signed up for beta back in the fall get in? I heard we are supposed to know by Friday but I believe some emails will be sent out before then. So far I haven't gpt anything.

Crusader Kings II isn't exactly a turn based game but I agree it is awesome. And you are aware that Paradox is publishing CIM2, right? They are not actually developing the game.

Looks like CiM2 will be implementing region play in a way that makes my mouth water: http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?655125-Cities-in-Motion-2-–-Planning-the-levels-–-Developer-diary-3 From the developer diary:

So are you saying Simcity 2013 is not targeting "casuals"? I am saying that everyone in this thread seems to have their own (different) opinion on what those terms mean, rendering them pointless. Nothing more.

The terms "casual" and "hardcore" gamers have been so widely misused and obfuscated in this one thread that they've become meaningless. Yeesh.

You mention Minecraft as a game casual gamers enjoy. If there is any game that is popular with casuals that EA/Maxis should be looking to for ideas, it is Minecraft. It is a simple game to learn, and building a simple house or something is quite easy and casuals can do it in a small amount of time. However, the game does not stop there. Your imagination is the limit, and I've seen people come up with incredibly complex creations that boggle my mind, for example I've seen people build 16 bit computers in the game, that is amazing. Minecraft's popularity and critical accaim is due to it being a game that is easy to learn but yet allow palyers to make incredibly complex creations. It looks like SC2013 has the first part of that formula to sucess (easy to learn) but is lacking in the complexity department. Tiny maps is a part of this as it severely hinders the player's imagination, but a lot of other missing features contribute as well. A lot of people say that SC4 was too complex for the casual gamer and that might be true, but I think making those complex elements easy to learn or not necessary for a simple city is what EA/Maxis should've done instead of cutting them out of the game.

I see no reason to not leave that up to the player. If you don't want a curvy suspension bridge, don't build one.

Oh really? ...and you have seen water used within the city construction are? Please link pictures. We haven't seen pictures (that I know of) but we have been given a text confirmation. Link: http://www.clickonline.com/games/preview--simcity/14308/ There is a also a discussion about what kind of bridges we will get going on in the Transit and Roading Networks thread.

While vanilla SC4 plays nothing like a heavily modded version complete with Rush Hour, calling it a "horrible game" is not very fair. Back when it first came out there was nothing even close to it, the vanilla game was a huge step forward compared to SC3k. Yes it had bugs, yes it was missing a lot of features we've come to love, but the difference between SC4 vanilla and SC3000 was huge. I can't really think of any major way the game was a step backwards from SC3k, though I can think of plenty between SC2013 and SC4.

Realism is not a good reason for not including terraforming, it's definitely not the real reason. The real reason, as previously mentioned is because it simply doesn't work in a multiplayer environment. Players would create rivers that lead into mountains, and other such discontiguous terrain.

I suppose that means that beta will be more about catching bugs than a review of the game mechanics then.

I wish it was all a joke.

I've never been a fan of the disasters, and never intentionally unleashed one upon my Sims, but I do know that in real life, disasters will strike randomly. I welcome this challenge, and while I haven't played with disasters turned on, I can and will adapt. If you want to pull the realism card, no city has been attacked by UFOs or giant robots in real life last time I checked.

Ray Nagin couldn't turn off disasters for his city, why should we be able to? It's putting everyone on an even footing Because it's annoying and frustrating to meticulously fine tune a neighbourhood only to have it ripped apart by a random disaster you didn't see coming.

Indeed, this is the bottleneck. Which is why I propose having different map sizes. If your computer is old, play on a small map. However if you have newer, multicore processor, let us use a bigger map so we can take advantage of that additional power and build the city we really want.

Graphical rendering is not the bottleneck, it's processing power. Being "full 3D" has nothing to do with it.