Rogueleader89

well that's incredibly disappointing.

Someone obviously went to a region, took out the highest bonds possible, then abandoned immediately. There's not much more trolling than actively trying to raise crime level and pollution levels (like I do...). I don't dare to touch my neighbour's city. But is it true that all players in the same map have more than necessary privilege to modify other's city like shutting down police station to crank the crime rate skyhigh? You cant edit other people's cities. Didn't I just read from somewhere that you can actually place parks to someone else's city.. And wipe out entire residental areas like that? You can, but the changes don't save so you are only wasting your time and doing no damage.

Not a chance this game will kill off simcity, if any game would have done that it would have been societies. There appear to be flaws to the game definitely, but the core gameplay looks good, server issues will eventually be fixed, and the impact of most of those flaws will be greatly diminished outside of the old simcity community (which will either like the game for other reasons or retreat back to simcity 4 while new players migrating from games like the sims play this one). Is this game going to be a massive success that the city-building community points to for years to come? Probably not, but simcity certainly won't die because of one highly debated entry into it. At worst I'd say, if the game is not a success, we might have a large wait until the next one (then again you don't generally code a whole new engine for use with just one game either, so I'm sure glassbox will show up again somewhere in the near future).

Nice review, lines up a lot with my thoughts on the beta (I only pre-ordered after playing beta, my copy is suppose to arrive Monday) so I'm glad to hear the final release plays well. I do have to disagree with you about your DRM stance though, while the multiplayer may be great and add a lot to it, the DRM is unrelated to that; it does nothing but hurt the game and in the long run won't stop piracy for very long while scaring away many potential consumers (a large number of people I know are avoiding this game solely because of the always on DRM even though they would almost certainly play it online with other people most of the time), pushing people towards the multiplayer aspect could be accomplished in much better ways. Also thanks for taking the time to compile that image of your city's layout. Looking forward to testing out numerous layouts once I get the game myself (I recall some articles from beta about curved roads being optimal for some things like population), nice to have a few successful starting points to reference.