Mr Whippy

We? There's no "we" unless you've got multiple personalities..... SimCity is a city simulator populated with Sims, just like New York City is a city populated with real people, real people built New York City, why shouldn't a true city simulator feature a city built by the simulated residents? City planners responding to people's demand built NYC. Real city planners can do lots more than sc2013 appears to be offering, while also having less clear data about populace desires to act upon. Given sim city implies simulation, considering sc4 is almost a decade old its striking how much the sc2013 cities are further from simulated than ever. 2km2 size? Regions won't make up for that. My 15,000 pop local town would be 10 regions and its tallest buildings are 4 storey. Widest road 2 lane. It's nowhere near being a sim vs sc4. SC4 is still the king simcity. Generally to all per all the negativity etc, if we are so wrong and it'll all be ok why are Maxis staff on here not clarifying issues? Reassuring our every question? Nothing good to say and you best say nothing, ergo they must have nothing good to say to us? All Maxis guys have said on here is vanilla political/marketing responses, no specific reassurances. How can we expect people here who are here for their passion for all things sc2k 3k and 4 to not be upset that the game they are looking forward to I'd appearing as something entirely not for them. Might be a good game in its own right but... Dave

Nice review and good for Maxis showing you round. My 2p. Statistical approach was good in sc4. Real city planners only see their city as stats and percentages. Town planners in the UK can't fly around and watch the populace and see their desire lines to get stuff right. Giving sims realism is good but to over emphasise them is missing the point of city building strategy to me. Percentages ARE what matter when planning for thousands or millions and spending the same! That ambiguity and need to be analytical is a good thing. Great, 3d roads and triple deck overpasses. But in 2km squares? My village is 2km by 2km and has 2250 people. What city would fit in 2km x 2km and need such fancy road junctions? Realistic sims living more real lives, but the realism of the cities themselves seems to be second to the realism of the people. No matter how good the sims are if the city just looks fake with caricature appearance to squish it all into a small map it's not a "sim" city. It's a city with sim people in it. It's also an odd visual style for a simcity. Its fine in its own right but its not working for me for a simcity game. It's too caricature and obviously the sim for the city itself has gone out the window in scaling respects. It'll never feel realistic irrespective if the artistic style/rendering. For me the realism of the cityscape was a core draw of the game s2k onwards! Not to wish it badly, I quite like the look of the videos. Momentarily give it a different name so you judge it as a new product and not against what has gone before and suddenly I'm quite open to it in that context It's just not the next step in the SC series in my view so its impossible for them to make us happy with it as simcity fans. Unless of course LOTS changes to make the wrong things right :-) Dave

I like 2013 for its drive to make people more like people, it's no doubt gonna make that element very realistic. But then they appear to have flipped the overall city development around to be more passive and less actively authored or planned in detail. Part of me is just so happy with SC4 that I don't want to bother with a newer version if its just not more of the same :-) You watch the videos and it looks great, but read the details and it sounds very limited... Its a whole new type of game with the same old name. More about the people than the city kinda. If they are ill and skip work great, realism. But how you can limit zoning density and make it automatic based on transport infrastructure is just bonkers. Realism on one hand yet then completely unreal on the other, which undermines the whole benefit of the enhanced sims behaviours... BUT perhaps this engine will be used to provide a true sc4 successor... Who knows but we can keep our fingers crossed :-) Cheers Dave

Fleeting is the word. This type will leave as soon as they arrive. If online takes off, it will be a typical spike pattern, peak/bubble burst a week to a month after launch. After that is a series of short term milking before the fleeting ones lose interest or give up asking for service improvement. Then next version online cycle. If online falls flat, it will be blamed on the core fans - that we are too demanding and inflexible etc, offline patch/ private server migration may or may not materialize, and Maxis will ignore SimCity for another decade. Either way core fans have high chance of being screwed. SimCity being online is no win for the true fans, period. Maxis knows the risk of fleeting ones. Core fans are their backup plan "sales filler". That's fine. Just give us a backup offline plan, thank you. This is kinda why I'm only following the new simcity with slight interest and enjoying my expanding (1.5GB) plugin folder. Exactly. I played SC1/2k LOADS, and got a bit into 3K but not more than a few cities. I bought vanilla SC4 2nd hand in a Blockbuster video years ago and ran a tiny city and got bored with it and put it away. But recently I was working on an isometric style video project (ala Royksopp Remind Me video) and googling for images and the SC4 mod stuff I saw literally blew my mind. So I installed my copy, ahhh, no good. Bought SC4 Deluxe on Steam and I'm already downloading plugins just a few days later! The visual quality and technical depth of this game are quite stunning really. Coming to SC4 Deluxe + mods now is kinda like finding SimCity 5 for me! I'm mightily impressed basically, and if SC2013 turns out to be pants I really don't care. SC4 for £9.99 on Steam is a great game, the pinnacle of the genre... who could want for more? SC2013 is going to have to be sooooo so very good to surpass SC4. Given what I've read/seen so far it's nowhere near so SC2013 isn't even on my radar. Different game to SC's that have gone before so not even looking to it as a sequel in the series Dave

Argghhhh, delete the thread, let me go hang my head in shame. I was pressing the wrong keys Ah the joys of the Mac keyboard. Lovely to look at and type with, not so great to actually use these special keys haha! Sorry. Dave

Well, I thought perhaps the key mappings were not working, but I've just checked and it seems that rotate view left/right is bound to the pgup pgdown keys here. Ie, default SimCity 4 behaviour for pgup/pgdn is already reserved for SimCity!? Very confused now. I've bought SC4 via Steam so perhaps that makes a difference?! Thanks for any help/advice! Dave

I don't have the right drivers for the keyboard in Windows (never managed to find anything that works) So basically I don't have any way to rotate NAM pieces. I've tried the Mac/Windows on Mac shortcuts to (shift/ctrl/alt arrows) but no joy there. Also the shift-tab to reverse through the selection of pieces brings up the steam UI thingy as default which is pretty annoying. So, is there a config file where I can change the default NAM keys? I've searched high and low and can't find any reference to the word "key" in any documentation. Many thanks Dave

But SC1 is just called SimCity It makes sense to call it SimCity 5 so people reading these posts in 2050 are not confused which SC we mean Dave

A great analogy. SC2013 is still lego though, but it's digital. Just like SC1 >> 4 The real issue though is that SC5 is remotely stored digital lego. Turning off servers aside, I remember the game TDU1 was plagued with corrupted on-line saves which meant starting again in many cases. Not ideal with a game of this type. However they were sensible enough to have an offline mode too, so despite the game now approaching it's 3rd incarnation we can still enjoy TDU1 in offline mode until the end of time! Even the offline mode had 'stand in' AI players pretending to be humans, and you could essentially play as if you were online with these AI opponents. SC5 is very likely to be a game for a new demographic, a larger fleeting demographic. It'll probably be gone again in three years time replaced by the next latest fad but it'll make EA and Maxis some money. Nice in the current economic climate. Turning off the servers will make sense. For example, why provide a modding feature set later if they will turn off servers? My initial feeling is that Simcity 5 is just a game to fill a new market gap for now. Then they will close it down or whatever and at that time provide the moddable feature set and single player modes as an upgrade ala Rush Hour. That way they get money off the fleeting demographic, AND the dedicated simmers, then they get a second round of money off the dedicated simmers for basically the same exact thing with the modding features and sandbox stuff, and probably some new content maybe?! Sounds fine to me. I'll be waiting for the Deluxe version 6 months after release for about £10 hehe Dave

It also makes creating things like buildings and lots much easier & quicker. People always complained in older games about the appearance of clones all over their cities. With the game also allowing multiple add-on to buildings now, imagine having to create each building in realistic detail while trying to keep variety high. In SC4 they could fake detail since structures were rendered in 2D & people could only view buildings from a few different angles and zoom levels. But weren't the assets even going back to SC3000 heavily built using 3D models? Obviously they were then rendered out to sprites at various resolutions. There is no ease having the final assets in 3D unless they plan to have scripts generate random buildings (pretty easy these days) so you get much more variability. However that means that full control may be lost so a stylised look is used to mask the deviation from absolute realism. I like the look of SC 2013 but it's clearly not SC1/SC2000/SC3000 or SC4, it's a 'new' game again. Part of me thinks 3D is the wrong way to go for this kind of game. Civ2/3 were fantastic but Civ4 really lost something by going 3D. Part of me would like to have seen SC4 visual style but with the nice features of shadows casting through the cities, reflections on windows etc. Part of me wouldn't be concerned with 3D tilting too much. Rotating and zooming yes, but tilting seems to upset the isometric apple cart. Isometric looks cool as a style so it's a shame to see it go! Dave