MapleNormandy

Have to agree with OP here... I've always had an outlook of cautious optimism for the new SimCity but after playing the beta there are just some fundamental flaws in its design that make me think they were going for a SimTown feel rather than a SimCity feel. Glassbox is pretty amazing, which is probably the only thing I enjoyed outright about the beta. Extendable buildings were also pretty fun, but since they made the buildings irregularly shaped they tended to leave lots of open grass around them. The curved roads are fun, but the total lack of space and boring maps (though I hope that changes by release...) make the curved roads pretty useless. My verdict: "Maybe the sequel will be SimCity again". Or alternatively, "Maybe when Maxis gets creative control back, it will be SimCity again".

I don't think it is unreasonable to judge a game based on what you know so far, and really? Hellspawn? Simply put each time we hear more of the game it sounds less and less like what a majority (I imagine) of the simtropolis community want. You also mention evolving, sure thats a valid argument if the game was actually evolving but from what we know, it isn't. They're taking control and freedom away from the player. So if anything it is devolving. The game is evolving in the sense that it uses glassbox, but really thats about it. Simcity 4 was about total control, you did everything yourself, the new Simcity is sounding more and more like a glorified town simulator and if thats the game you want, fine. However you can be sure that for alot of people that isn't what they want so they have every right to complain about it. The issue is that many members of the community are jumping to conclusions and contributing to the negativity surrounding SC5 by posting useless comments like "I'm canceling my preorder" or "looks like SC5 will be a disaster". These are pretty unconstructive comments by themselves, encourage other people to post unconstructive comments rather than actually discuss or think about the design choices behind and possible alternatives to announced features. ----- I'm a little confused where "large open spaces between cities" were confirmed. I haven't been following the twitter accounts of any of the Maxis devs (but tbh twitter isn't exactly the most reliable/accurate feed for news), but from what I read all that's been confirmed is that you cannot control transit networks "in the region". Now this is a little vague as to whether or not there will be special "regional" routes which cannot be changed at all by the player, but from a literal interpretation of Maxis's clarification, as long as these routes are inside city boundaries they can be changed at will. As for upgrading these routes, I think that it will probably use the same system as shown in the trailer with multiple cities cooperating to build an airport. When the game detects that a route needs to be upgraded, it will probably notify the affected cities with a 'mission' kind of thing. I think it is still unclear whether or not entirely new routes can be constructed. This does not necessarily imply large open spaces between city regions. While I imagine there will be some open space between cities, we haven't been given any information about how this open space works or how it will be laid out. Heck, square region tiles haven't even been confirmed. We've been given info on the size of these tiles, but I haven't read or seen anything that explicitly confirms square tiled regions. Considering we now have curvy roads, it might not be too optimistic to hope for non-square region tiles... As to complaints about the lack of realistic city sprawl and W2W buildings, I would like to point out that SC4 had neither of these in the initial release or in RH. It's pretty easy to get skyscrapers to build next to open grass in SC4, and there are maybe 2-3 vanilla W2W buildings, which all pop up only in medium density housing. SC5 building density is apparently based on traffic, so at least it addresses the issue of unrealistic sprawl a little by preventing skyscrapers from popping up to empty space without some preexisting development nearby to support it. W2W buildings are just a question of modding content - which SC5 is confirmed to have. Rumors about SC5 not having modding at launch seem to stem from Maxis dancing around the question - it appears they might not have made an internal decision yet about this. I am a little concerned about whether or not it would be possible to build suburbs in SC5, but there hasn't been any official word on this. SimCity as a series has never really focused on suburbs, so I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't make concessions to allow people to build sprawling suburbs.

SC2k and SC3k highways didn't even have ploppable interchanges. You simply dragged two intersecting highways over each other (there were no separate elevated/ground highways back then) and they automatically formed a cloverleaf in the 2x2 intersection. They also ended abruptly; but at least in SC4 we got highway-avenue transitions. I'm remember that in SC2k and SC3k in order to get those nice transitions a lot of extra work had to be done.

I would like to point out that a simple UI does not necessarily lack in power for a power user. For example, take the Windows 7 taskbar/start menu search bar combo. Pin a couple of applications to the taskbar and right-click them to bring up a rich set of relevant features, or simply reduce the number of keystrokes necessary to access commonly used programs. Use the start menu search bar to bring up just about everything else you would want from your computer without moving your hands from the keyboard - extremely efficient, no visual or manual searching required. With desktop icons disabled, a calendar organizer program like Outlook with pop-up reminders, and maybe a weather gadget, the desktop environment is extremely sleek and minimalistic, but all relevant features can be accessed with a couple of keystrokes.

The SCWire is the new news feed from your advisors (I remember them briefly mentioning it a while ago), and I think the last button on the bottom bar might be rewards, though I could be wrong.

Maxis has stated that they have created "one-to-one" representations of the underlying agents in Glassbox with graphical features whenever possible. So 15k car agents will actually be 15k cars throughout your city.

Heh, I think that this article might be a direct reply to some of the concerns in this thread: http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/article/The-New-SimCity-Through-a-Tilt-Shift-Lens I think the main points that are relevant are: -Many of SC's graphical "misrepresentations" (e.g. misscaled factories, giant houses tiny skyscrapers) are intentional -Some of these are done to give SC a more uniform overall look and feel (i.e. "The real-life scale differences between a skyscraper, and a shotgun shack are so huge that you couldn't easily see them both in the same scene.") -Prefer stylization rather to pure realism (i.e. "If you look at real buildings, a lot of them are boring. [...] in an industrial area you see huge expanses of warehouse roof and big stretches of blank wall.") -They describe their buildings as "caricatures" of the real thing (i.e. "... what's important about the building has been highlighted and what's irrelevant has been suppressed." -The textures are starting looking better (see the grass bordering the road on the screenshot at bottom of page) -Maxis loves tilt-shift My personal opinions: -Maxis seems to have put a lot of thought into their decision to scale back from the more "gritty" and "realistic" (term being used lightly here...) graphics of SC4 -They seem to be placing a lot of value on aesthetics in SC2013, but on "model" aesthetics rather than the "photorealistic" aesthetics that we are used to from SC4. Given the community's tendency to prefer modeling real-world buildings and places detail-for-detail, this is probably what's causing a lot of the aesthetic tension. -Take one glance at a SC4 city with Maxis-only BATs and it is clear that SC2013 is a graphical improvement over vanilla SC4.

I'd just like to chime in that when I first picked up SC2k when I was 10 years old, the (arguably) cartoonish graphics and some of the more silly content (ever stop to ready the newspapers or set one of the sillier disasters loose upon your city?) really helped to draw me into the game. Even though now I avidly play SC4, I don't feel that my 10 year old self would have ever connected with SC4 the way I connected with SC2k. I'm sure the textures will improve by the time of release, but I do not think that the cartoonish look and feel will or should go away. Children and people new to the series alike shouldn't need to be introduced to the series at SC3k before moving on to the next games in the series - hence the "reimagining" of the SimCity franchise. The earlier SimCities were a lot about accessibility - making something as remote as urban planning accessible to young children and teens, and I know that the series has grown with many of you, steadily increasing in complexity as you have grown older and more able to deal with this complexity. I cannot imagine having the patience to learn not just how to play but how to make interesting and beautiful cities in SC4 as a 13 or 14 year old, but during those years I easily lost hours of my time to SC3k (note that at this time I did not own a computer powerful enough to play SC4...) I am really hoping that this "reimagining" of the series will it back to its more accessible roots while keeping the core of the game, balancing the dual needs to build functional and aesthetically pleasing cities, intact. With glassbox Maxis has shown that they are committed to keeping the simulation aspect deep and complex by getting rid of the "magic" numbers that SC4 had and replacing them by with the actions of simulated people, a concept much more easily grasped and understood by all audiences. Hearing the gameplay interview and that a "sports city" needed to be designed with the ability to shuttle as many people in and out of the city as possible put my hopes up for SC2013 - when was the last time the SC4 simulation did something as interesting as that? (That being said, I really hope the "ability to build 5-7 different types of city" was marketing talk and not an actual indicator of the possible variety in the game...) So anyways, point is, I don't see the cartoonish graphics as sounding the death toll for the SimCity franchise. I see it as what Maxis sees it as: a reimagining of the franchise that will bring it back to its roots without losing the core gameplay. There will always be mods (hopefully?) for people who want more realism in their cities, and as the artists at Maxis continue working on their art the game and more detail is added to the textures the buildings will look less clean and cartoony, but the core gameplay is going nowhere. SimCity has always been about engaging adults and children alike in a game far more interesting than shooting aliens on a screen or what have you. And plus, tilt-shift photography can look really cool.

I think that "unlocking difficulty" approach is actually a really good way to approach simplifying SimCity. They used to do something like that; in sc2k you would only unlock power plants, arcologies, and certain other buildings as rewards for growing your city to a certain size or staying with it for a while (anybody remember the year system where you couldn't use things until they were "invented"?) I think that was a great way to hide complexity and choices until you were ready - and if you were an experienced player, you could always just cheat to unlock all the buildings, or otherwise set yourself up to quickly grow your city and unlock all the buildings. I guess you can combine this sort of approach with the unlock approach in SimCity 4 - the unlocks are totally optional, you can reject them just as easily as you can accept them. Say your advisor tells you that you need to build for flood control - you can reject it (thereby turning off floods for good), or you can accept the challenge (thereby turning on floods). Maybe there are some benefits to building for flood control; say your safety rating goes up. If the game were to take a modular approach, hiding interface elements until needed, I think that would go a long way in making SimCity accessible for not only new players, but core players as well, who are interested in one thing, but not another.