London-b

Is this real life?

You can't really say it started with SC4. They were in trouble in the late 90's and made a number of questionable decisions which lead to them being bailed out. Nothing really changed after that. SC4's longevity was a fluke, Spore was disappointing, no one has ever heard of Darkspore, and SC2013 was... The Sims was the only solid department but that's not going to last another decade the way they're going.

Most Europeans drive on the same side as Americans....

Did history taught you anything, people? Pre Orders should be in list of Bible Sins. Too many times when people pre order something and they find the game not meeting the expectaions or finishing comepletely broken... I know that Paradox is not EA and the price is sweet for someone but we need to be really cautious even with this game. You're absolutely right. I am really shocked people are still preordering after the whole Simcity fiasco (something I won't do again). Preorders for digital copies make no sense... I am very very excited for this game but I will not buy and download until the day or week it releases, based on more reviews. There may well be some things in CSL which suck and are yet to be reviled, but all the red flag stuff about SC2013 were known well before release, people just got it because Maxis and SimCity is a strong brand. And sometimes you just have to try things out for yourself.

To be fair, without procedural generation of buildings most cities will look more American than European.

Actually hardcore gamers do not play simulators, especially city simulators and builders. They make fun of people who do. The main genre which hardcore gamers play are first person shooters, with it's flagship gaming being Call of Duty. Simcity has always been seen as a casual/kiddy/nerdy game that hardcore gamers wouldn't touch if you paid them. So if you play Simcity (or any other simulator and/or city builder) you are either a casual gamer, kiddy gamer, or nerdy (maybe all 3). But you aren't a hardcore gamer/real gamer according to market research (yes market research is heavily used to determine what developers produce and to segment gamers). Maxis literally broke the bank trying to make a full 3D city simulator in the late 90s according to Will Wright interviews. This game was supposed to be Simcity 3000, but due to development hell and PC specs, Maxis was forced to develop Simcity 3000 as an isosymetric game to pull of psuedo 3D graphics. The full 3D city simulator was delayed and was shifted to be come Simcity 4, but EA now in control of Maxis and canned the project due to costs and sales projects. Maxis by this time had spent the better part of 8 years and countless millions making a full 3D city simulator. EA ordered Maxis to develop a traditional Simcity, which became Simcity 4. Simcity 4 and Rush Hour both sold so badly, Rush Hour selling only to 1/3rd of the Simcity 4 base, prompted Maxis to cancel all the expansion packs they were working on. Maxis also stopped development of all patches they were working on and let modders fix Simcity 4. EA and Maxis then employed market research to find out why majority of the people who bought Simcity 3000/3000U didn't even bother to buy Simcity 4. According to Will Wright in his last interview before he left Maxis stated majority of the responses stated Simcity 4 was too complicated for the majority of Simcity fans. He claimed that plans were in the works to reboot Simcity franchise into a much simplier game to meet majority of the Simcity fans who refused to purchase Simcity 4. Simcity 3000/3000U sold over 5M+ according to EA, Simcity 4 struggled to hit 1M in 2005 at the last sales update. EA has not updated numbers since then and will only mention Simcity 3000/3000U, because it is currently the best selling mainline title. As much as it pains me to say this, EA is best off making Maxis a Sims only studio and killing all other simulation based projects. There is very little money in making a simulator of any sort. @Robotica Bayonetta sold so bad with the orignal game, that Sega canned the sequel and the other games Platinum had in development. No publisher was willing to Bayonetta 2 or any other canned games until Nintendo came along. The question is did Bayonetta sell better or worse than Simcity 4? You need to stop peddling this rubbish. I remember you doing it ages ago. You weirdly mix unspecified "market research" judgments on gamers with other gamers judgments on gamers, with liberal use of the English language.

SC4 is an actual city builder game that does what it says on the tin. SC2013 is a farmvile-esque facbook game that took too many of those things Leo takes in the Wolf of Wall Street. It is a far far better facebook game than SC4 and the developers should be proud of that.

The original buggy Cities XL was more fun than this. I'm still not sure whether this was a serious release or a cruel social experiment.

They never said that. Maxis said "Many player's computers wouldn't handle larger tile sizes". There's a difference. In fact when you see notes from people who are modding the larger tile sizes even they comment your system may lag as city sizes expand. Simcity isn't a game that appeals to hard core, top of the line gaming machine players. It's played by average, middle of the road gamer's and while top machines could probably handle larger tile sizes, many Simcity players machines couldn't handle the load. So, Maxis would have to increase their minimum specs. If you see the current specs they are rather low compared to today's AAA titles and while it can be argued that a smaller player base would have made a happier player base then you'd see complaints like "why should I buy a better machine just to play a game like Simcity...". Maxis would swap 1 complaint for a different one. In the end, how big is big enough? Your defense of the tile size is laughable. It's not a matter of greedy gamers wanting more and more, it's a matter of getting nothing for nearly a decade and then getting unimaginably less. They shouldn't have designed such a limiting engine in the first place and in reality there was no need as the glassbox engine is basically an overly complicated stats generator itself. How big is enough? Well a simcity title that doesn't allow me to build anything geographically bigger than the 800 pipulation 4km/sq village I grew up in is a total abomination of a game!

I've not touched the game since the second third of March.

It's over

Well I've not played in over a month, and am not even tempted to start it up again, so what do you think? lol

The game won't get better. They will probably release bigger maps, but they will only be big by this games standards, they will still be too small to create anything realistic or with any character. Continuous tiles are the only way to save the game. Bring back what made SC4 so great.

Not played in 2 weeks. Don't miss it at all, played my beautiful regions on SC4 and was a breath of fresh air after the shackles of SC2013.

The population that's given is false, the population shown as workers, shoppers, and students is true, they are the number being simulated. After 500 population the game falsely adds population, then adds even more once you reach another threshold (I can't remember what it is). They do this as they can't simulate all the agents, so fudge the population so to make you think you have a large population and are not building a small town with empty skyscrapers.