Selphy

That's the case with many franchises. The thing is individual gamers feel like they're always the people companies should market to but the fact of the matter is that the market is a changing organism. 10 years from now I can guarantee you that games will be significantly different from today because companies will be marketing to newer generations of gamers. Fans of the original Castlevania haven't had a true Castlevania game for ages. It switched to Metroidvania-style games and then 3D action with the console releases. Metroid went from a 2D platformer to a FPS then to whatever Other M was. Mario similarly from 2D platformer to 3D platformer. Only recently have they went back to side-scrolling with New Super Mario Bros. The thing about being a gamer is that you have to learn that you'll be the targeted market at one point in your life but eventually that will change. You have to learn to roll with the changes otherwise you'll always be angry about new games. There are plenty of games that I wish didn't change or evolve to accommodate new generations of players but I gave a lot of them a chance. Sure I wasted plenty of money but I also found games that enjoyed immensely. And yes, they were all $60. But before you go on saying that I'm rich or whatever, I worked tons of part-time jobs to make money to support my hobby. The point I'm trying to make is that things change, sometimes drastically, but that doesn't immediately means it will be bad. The best information we have now is a 20 minute demo. It's hard to gauge how much fun you'll have after playing for a year based on the first 20 minutes. There were so many things not included nor were you able to build a fully functioning city along with regional play to see how cities bounce off each other.

I'm not the biggest fan of the Global Market. I'll use it to the extent that I need to keep my cities running but I don't like playing the markets. I'm glad that it's not entirely forced on you. Whenever I use it I'll just assume that I'm trading with a computer or something.

Are you referring to SC4? or SC2013? SC2013 has static 2x2 km tile size and there are 16 tiles per region.

I know the good work you are doing, but some points that we consider to be negative in the game has diminished our enthusiasm for the game SimCity (2013). You may have noticed that some features and absence of others aren't pleasing the huge community of SimCity fans. I wish Maxis kindly give a response on those points mentioned in this and other forums that are displeasing to most fans of this wonderful game. I hope you understand that we aren't a small group and we admire all the effort you have done by making this game. I'm sure they know and their PR probably won't let them acknowledge the discontent. What would they say? "Yeah, we wanted to terraforming in but upper management decided it would be too difficult for new players to grasp." "We would have liked more options in terms of traffic too but it was decided that we can only work with these options." Etc. etc. They have to believe that the product they are pushing out is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Otherwise it would seem as if the team's wishes and their management's wishes were different or that they know the product their pushing out isn't perfect but that's still the direction they're headed in. You'd think "Oh, so they know that we don't like these changes but they're still doing it anyways. See they, don't care about our wishes." or "They don't even want to make it this way but that's what they're doing so it's probably going to be second-rate." They have to truly believe their game is the best even if they don't believe it because if the developers don't think it's the best then why would we, as consumers, want to buy a product that the creators don't even feel is their best. The best you can hope for is a post-release statement where they say something along the lines of: "We wanted to do more with the game but budget and time restraints prevented us from doing so. We're going to take what we learned making this game and apply it all to the sequel/expansion to make sure we can deliver an even more entertaining/true SimCity experience for our fans."

This one. Sanae > Sakuya, just barely though.

Are you kidding me? There is plenty more for them to elaborate on. Right now, the knowledge we have is just the framework. I for one would like for them to let us know more about city specializations. As of right now, they keep saying coal, casino(tourist), and oil. I would like to know what other specializations exist and some images to showcase the aesthetic change between each specialization. We know you can add modules to stuff but all we know is adding more smoke stacks, cranes for coal plants, extra panels for solar, and a new garage for police and fire. What about things like the Mayor's house? City Hall? Schools? Hospitals? Parks? What degree does each addition affect the original building? Showcase more of the transportation options. I want to know about railroads, elevated transportation and subway. What are the other Great Works we can work towards? Or tell us about some of the rewards that we can get? They showed in the video some type of reward system where you get new building options or something for completing some kind of challenge. Are these one-time use rewards? Do they only show up once? Etc? Don't get me wrong, I'm pretty excited for the game but their marketing is piss poor. From the day the game was announce to now, they've barely unveiled much. They keep telling us things we knew about months ago over and over again. We know the framework pretty through and through. At this point I think we deserve some finer details. I'm not asking them to spoil everything but most games unveil more than they have 6 months prior to launch. RPGs would showcase the battle system, various characters, the world, skill system. Racing games would show us various vehicles, different tracks and probably the customization if any. Action games would show us different scenarios, villains, probably a run-through of the first area, various guns/weapons and cool action sequences. I'm going to buy this game and I'm positive about it but even I think they need to showcase more detailed information. And like I said, they don't have to spoil it all at once or everything for that matter. Just start releasing tidbits to get people excited. Or interested for that matter.

Another interview and nothing new was learned.

They are not going to fix the maps. Get that out of your head right now. Small maps are what you will be playing with. As I read through all these posts something occured to me that I had not considered. do you (anyone) think EA may be intending to SELL larger map option and terraforming? Pay a fee and get the unlock key... ? I imagine they would probably release expansions down the line as popularity died down to spur the community. Within these expansions I can see them including larger city tiles. Think like: SimCity: Downtown. "Expand your borders with this new expansion and give your city the much needed downtown to let your Sims relax and enjoy city life!"

While I applaud your thinking of ideas, I abhor your actual ideas and think those would be terrible additions to the game given the suggestion of how you would implement them. If we had a choice about buying land or having locked 2x2 km tiles, I'd stick with the locked size. Allowing players to buy land and sell it would inevitably lead to much griefing in non-locked games. As you said, people would be scrambling to buy as much land as they can possible because more land means more money. Some people would be left with little to no land for expansion other than playing absurd amounts of money to other players. This is what most players fear, people having direct influence on your cities. If my development was stifled because some jerk bought all the land around my city and refused to sell it, I would be livid. As of right now, there is little influence between cities. I'd like to keep it that way.

A lot of games are going this direction. To my knowledge, Diablo, Starcraft, SimCity, Mass Effect, Assassin's Creed, probably Borderlands 2, Bioshock, Dead Space 3 to name a few. I guess it doesn't matter to me since my connection is usually spot-on or I have other things to do when internet rarely goes down but I suppose you have reasons for not liking this model.

I think the main point of the "have you played it yourself" argument is that playing something and reading about it is very different. For one thing, he may enjoy the engine more and all the tiny details so he may have glossed over items that you might have more interesting like certain building aspects or city management or Mayor mode terraforming. Next, why do you think it will get boring quickly just because he likes the engine? It just adds a new layer to the city building. New things to appreciate and new things to worry about. Because at the core, you still build a city. Why does the fact that data layers being done in CitiesXL already make it bad for this game? I never played the game so I'm asking, where the data layers a good addition? If so, why shouldn't SimCity incorporate it? If it was bad, why can't SimCity build on it and fix it? Over the shoulder shooters became big after RE4 released. That doesn't mean other games can't build off it without being bad? Your last point about getting bored because of small city size is a good argument for you but not everyone wants to build huge cities. Maybe other plays appreciate building smaller towns? My point is, some people can enjoy it. Lastly, just because it's a gameplay article doesn't mean you can truly experience the game by simply reading it. Have you ever liked a game that got unfavorable reviews? Or do you dislike a game that extremely favorable reviews? My point is, you can read as much as you want but actually playing a game ultimately determines your enjoyment of the game. Example. Everyone loves Demons Souls and Dark Souls and the games got very favorable reviews. I can't get into the game at all. But on paper, all the features of the game are features that I enjoy in other RPGs. I thoroughly enjoyed Magna Carta 2 but that game got many unfavorable reviews. What I'm trying to illustrate here is that you can form an opinion and gather information based on other people's experiences but sitting down and playing the game ultimately cements your feeling towards the game. The same goes for movies, books, TV shows, etc.

I beg to differ. I can see how you might think that way and you are more than welcomed to feel that way but I think the fact that they can simulate every Sim at every instance and exactly what they do is amazing. The evolution from what SC4 did to what SC does is astonishing. It's as much of an evolution as the graphics jumps. From text-based adventures to single dot pixels to 2D sprites to 3D models, developers are always trying to push the boundaries and make things more visual. Make every detail matter from the swaying of grass to clouds in the sky. I feel that they're trying to humanize the city. In SC4, I created cities but I never cared about the people in the city. If there was a fire, I put it out. If they wanted more houses, I zoned more residential. But since each Sim is accounted for, I think they're trying to make you keep in mind that each Sim matters and as a mayor you should care about your population. Not to the level of choosing furniture and finding a job but a few steps above that. And yeah, TBH, if I was a developer, I'd always try to find makes to improve my work. This is in regards to your comment about them not being happy about what they did in SC4.

I fail to see how you're forced to compete on the global market/world. If all you want to do is play co-op with your friends and do friendly competition, you can still do that. As far as I know, they aren't withholding unlockables only for the people highest on the leaderboards. If you so choose, you can look at where your city/region places. If you don't want to look, I assume you can just not click the button that takes you to the ranking so you still have the choice to not care.

In regards to people talking about the global economy, I want to put my speculation here and see what you guys think about it. I hope/believe the way the Global Market works is that each city is connected to this Global Market, not simply just a region. The reason for constant online is because their servers are constantly tracking the amount of moved through our factories and sold in our markets within our cities. From this they can track the amount of resources that are moving in the world and put that information into whatever formula they have to spit out a price based on supply and demand. With all that in mind, I believe that we'll be connecting to the server to buy resources. Just like in SC2K and SC3K, you connected to imaginary neighbors to strike up deals. In SC you will strike up a deal with the server for X amount of resources for Y price for Z amounts of days/months/years. The only trading between two people I see is trading within a region to either your friend/random or to yourself if you control all cities.

I imagine the store is probably DLC stuff which we knew was coming and/or an option to just buy resources with real money instead of Simoleons if your city is too poor or you just want to speed up development/whatever.

I'm gonna say that this should be closed. Most posts aren't even about the original post anymore but rather, again, what makes a SimCity game a SimCity game. No offense to OP but this seems like a needless "Oh look how bad SC even more! Boo! I hate it so!" topic when it could have easily been put in the which surprisingly is also by the same poster. Right now you're comparing maps from what we physically can access in a game (SC4) to maps which we only have screenshots of (SC). And I'm not saying that Maxis has time to fix the game or that they will make it better. That argument is almost worthless because more than likely the game is in beta phase or pretty much hammered out. What we can say however is that the information we have is very little. Unless Maxis releases an image or video that says "Hey, this is the maximum sized city with each tile filled up and the max number of things we can jam in there" we won't truly know how the two compare till the game releases.

Why I'm not against making forum topics, why is this poll allowed? How much different is it from "Are you excited/disappointed for SC2012?"

Really? where? I've been following this extremely closely and just about every forum or blog or article that I've seen is getting negative reactions about the same things I'm seeing here. I agree with MINIggy03. Just because you frequent some blogs and forums, that doesn't mean that no one is buying the game. The number of people on the forums and blogs hardly make a dent in the HUGE pool of consumers that exist outside these places. There are probably hundreds of thousands of people who don't browse forums as much as we do but would still buy the game when it released. Think about the whole Mass Effect 3 debacle and then consider that the game sold over 2 million copies not including digital sales. How many of that pool of millions of people do you think went on the web and complained? We, as gamers, frequent these sites because we are interested. But that isn't to say there aren't people outside of these boards, blogs, and forums that aren't interested, that won't window shop, that won't buy because of word of mouth, that won't impulsively buy. Yes, on these forums, it sounds bad for SC. The vast majority of people aren't happy with the way things are proceeding. But consider the number of posters who are actually here posting their displeasure. I wouldn't be surprised if it was just about 50 people. My point is, your scope of unhappy fans is just a couple forums and blogs and that doesn't encompass the larger majority of people, who we don't interact with or even see post about the game, who would buy it.

I might suggest that you read my post toward the top of the page. The word "Involving" in that sentece also doesn't exclude factors like the Global Leaderboard and the Global Economy. How does a global leaderboard affect your personal enjoyment of the game? And as of right now, we have no idea how the global economy will work. It could work like in SC2000 where you bought resources from a "neighbor" except this time you buy it from the "market" which is the server. The only difference is the price is influenced by the amount of resources each region contributes. Or it can be the stupidest dumbest thing in the world. But in the end we don't know what it is yet. It's up to Maxis to explain to us why we should accept the emphasis on multiplayer which is being forced onto what has in the past always been a single-player game. So far they have failed. They have also repeatedly stated that even if you choose to have your own region, you are still tied to the global economy, leaderboards, whatever and must be online to do it. People don't WANT to be forced to play this way. I asked how a leaderboard, which you don't even have to look at if you do choose, negatively affects enjoyment of the game. Specifically a leaderboard. Not the idea of being online or anything because we're forced online anyways. But when people say that online sucks, they always tack on "leaderboards." A global economy (by the way we still don't know how it functions) I understand because you feel like you're tied to something but why pick on a leaderboard?

I might suggest that you read my post toward the top of the page. The word "Involving" in that sentece also doesn't exclude factors like the Global Leaderboard and the Global Economy. How does a global leaderboard affect your personal enjoyment of the game? And as of right now, we have no idea how the global economy will work. It could work like in SC2000 where you bought resources from a "neighbor" except this time you buy it from the "market" which is the server. The only difference is the price is influenced by the amount of resources each region contributes. Or it can be the stupidest dumbest thing in the world. But in the end we don't know what it is yet.

Kojima and their FOX Engine is another. MINIggy03 mentioned a couple of the other big ones.

We all know that there will be city specialization. And I'm well aware that some people aren't happy with it because it forces you to make cities that only exist purely for functionality. However it does exist and I rather they don't halfass the attempt. So far they've revealed a coal based city (Special building = Coal Refinery) and tourism based city (Special building = Sports stadium. What do you suppose the other specializations might be? The max city tiles in a region is 16 so I imagine they will have to have a decent amount of choices so as to prevent having multiple cities with the same specialization. At the time same time, I can't imagine there would be 16 or more. Also I think this could solve the issue about city sprawl. By that, maybe a city specialization might be city sprawl. So far all we've seen is concept art and a couple screenshots. Perhaps those cities have yet to develop enough to have a specialization chosen. I would like these specializations: Farming (I always thought the SPAM farms were cool but I could never get it to work correctly or look nice. I hope food isn't a resource but the idea of developing a rural farming city would be cool. I'm not sure what special building can reflect this specialization) Hi-tech sector (I think something like Silicon Valley would be awesome. Or if all the buildings had sort of a futuristic look to them that would reflect the "hi-tech-ness" of the city that would be cool. I think the special building that reflects this specialization should be something like this:http://scophy.com/20...-ipod-in-dubai/ Or any other building in Dubai) City Sprawl (I really like the whole Manhattan-style cities. It looks cool and really gives a vibe of a living city with so many people shuffling around. I don't think suburbs can really match this feeling so I hope that you can specialize a city to be sprawl. I don't know what special building can reflect sprawl) Big business/Skyscrapers (Even though it sounds bad, I hope that this is the only specialization that allows for the construction of skyscrapers. It feels weird when they pop up in areas that don't seem like they'd have a skyscraper. And if this skyscraper specialization exists, if there doesn't exist a sprawl specialization, I hope the residential buildings in this specialization reflect city sprawl. I think the special building that reflects this could be something like Twin Towers or Empire State Building, something tall that reflects the strength and stability of businesses or a stock center.) Suburbs (It seems like this is the specialization that you in the screenshots released right now and I'm okay with it. I think the special building can be something like a strip mall or open-air marketplace.) Water treatment (I seem to recall them saying that you can specialize a city that will deliver water to all the other cities. Probably a water filtering plant can reflect this specialization.) Artsy (I don't know exactly how this specialization would work but I think it would be cool if your city looks avant-garde or very post-modern for picking this specialization. A special building could be a national museum or something) College City (I remember them saying that you can make a college town. I hope it is reflected by having lots of dorm buildings and whatnot. Obviously the special building should be a university or something) What do you guys think? Can you think of more specializations they can add? EDIT: I added a poll because I think it would be cool to see if people are in favor or not of specializations. You see a lot bashing the online and multiplayer aspects, the regional layouts, and so on but I don't see people particularly miffed about city specializations.

Has anyone considered that Maxis didn't want to go that direction? I understand that SC4 has been alive for so long and we've grown accustomed to things and have ideas of our own but in the end SimCity is their property and IP. It would be awesome to have them cater to our desires but they also have their own plans for their project.

Funny you should mention comics because I've moved to digital. Boxes and boxes are stacking up and I'm running out of space. Also I find myself rereading issues more often on my tablet than I do grabbing older issues.

Bottom? Do you mean the top in the background? The bottom looks likes like some sort of business corporate city. Background top city looks more futuristic because of the dome and what looks like a rocket.