mcallisterw

What's been going on here... Still a lot of mud-slinging (with pictures of mud-slinging to boot) going on. Happily the thread's more on a productive course though. I'm with GenX in that I really do want to like the game... personally I have no beef with the graphics which have been described as bland or cartoony or somesuch. But I like to create and I feel I don't get enough of that in this game. I know being able to rename things and drop labels doesn't add anything to the gameplay, but I miss it, and part of my disappointment at the lack of things like terraforming and control over access points into your city isn't just about gameplay but also about customisability... The main reason I got bored is I'd toyed with all the plots of land on offer I didn't find one I really liked. There's lots of stuff I really like about the game, but not enough to overcome what I don't like and actually make the game enjoyable to play. When I said that this was just the reality of a new game for a new demographic I wasn't really enthused about that, I would much rather play the games of the styles I know and love. I don't know whether it's just me being older and grumpy and intolerant of what the kids do these days, or whether I actually have a point when I talk of lost utopianism and games being all about collecting and sharing... maybe collecting and sharing is the new challenge... the new games won't be about solving puzzles that are logical and mathematical at hard (if pleasingly chaotic), but will be about managing social relationships, making friends with someone who can gift you that really cool building you want (yes I know Sim City doesn't work like that... yet) But yeah, gameplay too. Terraforming is all part of the joy of making a city that is all yours... it's not as much fun if everyone's building on the same land. And maybe people wouldn't feel the desire to terraform as much if you had the whole Earth to choose where to build your city, but you don't you have a few measly options. If I want my city to be at the mouth of a river that flows into a bay with a couple other rivers, with cliffs running through the city centre... why shouldn't I be able to? I could in SC4, and now suddenly I can't. As I said earlier, I was probably wrong to assume that 'SimCity' in the title of a game meant something. I should have treated the game as if it were a newcomer.

The first couple of Sim Cities paid very little attention to realism, who ever saw an actual completed arcology? I know there has been one under construction in the Arizona desert for decades now; and I believe on the original, if you so chose, you could build your city on the moon. At the same time there is realism of another level, in the way that the city grew organically. I would say that over the course of the whole series there has been a shift from that kind of scientific realism, with it's inbuilt utopianism towards a more social/domestic realism, where small details and individual Sims are much more important... I don't think EA sat down and said 'this is what we want to do', I think it's what happens when they sat down and said 'people like the Sims, and they like FarmVille, what can we learn from that?'

Personally I've hardly played SimCity 2013, I played it for a week after I bought it, then got bored with it... I will probably reinstall SC4 though, I loved that game. I think the problem is mainly the fact that in the 6 or 7 years (can't remember off hand) since SC4 came out, a lot in the gaming world has changed... and with many of the people who were originally responsible for Sim City no longer being at Maxis, EA have I think, built the game from the ground up, and tried to appeal to 'new' gamers who wouldn't have even thought about games before the more twee types of games you get on Facebook came out. Ultimately it's a new game for a new demographic of gamers Personally I've said before that gaming now is less about challenge, practice and perfect, and more about create (within set limitations, don't want to present people with too many choices), solve simple but varied puzzles and share what you've done. Unfortunately our problem (or at least my problem) Is we put too much stock in the fact that the game was called Sim City, we assumed things about the game that were never actually said. I bought the game after looking at the website and getting excited that a new Sim City was coming out. I read a lot of stuff about the game on the website, and it looked fantastic, all this stuff about city specialisation, modular buildings and yes (hangs head) curvy roads. It never said that you would build huge metropolises, create your own regions, build highways, play with different modes of transport or name everything in your city what you want. I just assumed that the name 'SimCity' implied all those things... I was wrong. Can we draw a line under this please... You've got me confused with who you want me to be, not who I actually am. You keep pulling quotes out of my original post but chopping off the bit at the beginning of the post when I said things like 'not this' or 'this is what some other people say'. As I said, I never said terraforming was unrealistic, I said that some people use 'it's more realistic' when defending the fact you can no longer terraform.

No different people mean different things, some people mean the things you said, some people mean the things I said, I was never trying to say 'all people mean this',,, but you are.

I know no-one has ever said there should be a committee etc. that was my example of 'you say you want realism, well this is an extreme example of realism'. But I have encountered people who weigh in on discussions about the way region play works and the other limitations of the game, defending the limitations by saying that it is more in line with how real cities work. Yes there are also people who are criticising SC2013 in relation to SC4 using realism as an argument too, but those weren't the people I meant. In truth I don't think whether or not something is realistic should be an argument at all, not as far as the city-building process is concerned anyway (like I said I personally like to create cities that look realistic, but sometimes in SC4 the process of creating this city meant doing some things which were 'unrealistic', my point is that i don't care about those things) I think I speak a different language to everyone else. No doubt the next person will read this post and instead of what I've written they'll see 'I think terraforming is a government conspiracy' and will post a response to that instead.

*Sigh* I've had enough of being snarky now and hoping that the penny drops with you guys so I'm just gonna have to spell it out now. @Bravogreenone, yeah having looked through the posts I had noticed that you were the only one not calling me retarded. Actually I've decided what probably happened is that no-one actually read the original post. Most people probably just read GenXisT's post and inferred what was going on from that. My original post starts 'We hear this a lot, usually people arguing that the things others have picked out as faults with the new SimCity are more realistic.' I.e. I was saying that when we complain about the lack of terraforming, city size etc. other people use the claim of realism to say why they think it's better. This is what we call a straw man, a hypothetical opponent created to argue against, in my case the whole terraforming shebacle was one of the things the straw man has said (that's the straw man, not me, the straw man). It's not even an important part of my post, the point was that realism shouldn't be an measure of quality of SimCity, it's already unrealistic in that you don't have to delegate decisions to a committee, but nobody would want a SimCity where you had to do that. I think GenXisT has skim-read the post and gotten the straw man confused with me. Unfortunately it's kicked off this retard-o-fest which is a shame, because it means when I try and point of your errors it makes it look like I'm some kind of troll, and I'm not, I didn't start the thread with any intention of causing all of this. And while we're on the subject of terraforming, when the straw man said in real life you can't terraform, I know I don't agree with the straw man (that's the whole point of having a straw man), but I did have in mind someone thinking it was unrealistic that you can build mountains and such, not someone thinking it was unrealistic to reclaim land from the sea or prepare land with earth-moving equipment. For the record I do want terraforming to be available in the game, my point is that I don't care whether or not people can build mountains in real life. I'm a town-planner by trade, I used to work on an earth-works site and have managed some of the machinery GenXisT puts in his/her post (not the last one though, that is insane), so I know fine well what can be achieved.

I suggest you all read my original post again (you may have to read it a few times, I understand limited intellects such as yourself won't get it on the first go). It does make me chuckle though at how much effort you guys put in to attacking a straw man (if you don't know what a straw man is, Google it, it'll only be a tiny bit of extra Googling for one day). No you didn't read my last paragraph correctly. P.S. Having now taken time to read through I'm gonna excuse BravoGreenOne of this comment, however GenXisT gets s double helping of stoopid for actually employing irony in his/her response... it's a riddle wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a quote box.

I have as it happens... used to live in Grand Rapids. Also, you could visit most of the major cities in the Netherlands without ever seeing any countryside, or drive between places like Liverpool and Manchester, or along the Ruhr valley in Germany

The money is there, but not the will to spend it. Particularly in the U.S., suburban taxpayers will balk at sinking money into mass transit, but will happily approve multibillion dollar freeways in the exurbs so that new subdivisions can be built. In Houston, the west side Republicans have relentlessly tried to cripple the Houston MTA because, in the minds of the suburbanites and exurbanites, mass transit is just a charity program for poor inner-city minorities. The pervasiveness of the car culture here is insane, so much so that people who don't or can't drive are treated as invalids, and owning a car (and the detached house to park it in) is considered THE gate to adulthood. As a result, our light rail system is years behind schedule, and anything more advanced than a streetcar ends up staying on the drawing board for eternity. It could be that the money is more spread out that it was before, cities that have built trams here have had to look for private investment and funding from various regional, central and European government bodies. All this consensus-building takes time and there is the possibility that while you're concentrating on getting funding from Y, X will withdraw their funding because it is taking too long. When I was in Liverpool (whose tram system plans are still on the drawing board due to this exact situation), there was a little public opposition to the trams, people saying it was a waste of money (the sort of people whose arguments, if followed to their logical conclusion would result in 100% of the national budget being used to pay nurses, nothing against nurses but every piece of public spending is weighed against the number of nurses you could have hired for that money, people saying 'I think it's criminal that the council are spending money on this new bypass, that could have paid for 20 nurses'). Edinburgh's tram system has become nationally known for the fact it has taken them (so far I think) almost 10 years to build a single line through the city centre. I think it's the same sort of thing going on there.

We hear this a lot, usually people arguing that the things others have picked out as faults with the new SimCity are more realistic. In reality cities are built within specified boundaries and if as mayor you don't like the fact there is only one road in from a highway which falls outside your city, you just have to work with that limitation... In real life you can't terraform the land before you build, and so on. All I will say is, I like my cities to look like real cities (key word being 'look'), but if realism were the main way on which SimCity should be judged then in real life one person can't decide everything about the city. Real mayors don't decide which land to allocate for housing, where to put schools and roads etc. If SimCity were designed this way then your job as mayor would be to chair meetings to decide what to do about an issue, listen to proposals that were put forward by other councillors, council officers or members of the public; vote along with the other councillors on which proposal to accept and then hire a consultant to do the actual designing. And the best bit is you don't even get to pick which consultant! You do get a casting vote though if the votes are tied, and perhaps being mayor gives you more influence over other councillors. Good idea for SimCity 6?

Flicking through the forum I've seen a lot of people, who like the new city sizes and region layouts, saying they think it is realistic because in the real world cities don't all merge into each other, there is countryside between etc. etc. Well besides the fact that in most urbanised parts of the world cities do merge together, that's not the real issue I have. Personally I just don't like the fact that all you can hope to design is a city centre in the size of the tile, and then there will be no inner-city, no suburbs... it will just go skyscraper, skyscraper, skyscraper, virgin meadow.

It's happening in a lot of places, over here, Sheffield, Manchester, Nottingham and Edinburgh have reintroduced trams recently. Often running on streets in the city centre, but then switching to dedicated lines in the suburbs. However this was largely a noughties phenomenon, Liverpool were in the advanced stages of planning a new tram system but with public cuts that has hit the skids (excuse the pun). As Cobhris says, in a lot of European cities the trams have always been running. Blackpool is the only city in the UK that still has its original tram system, or the only major city at least. I have an old map of Liverpool on my wall, and if you look at that you can see tram-lines literally everywhere, I doubt we'll see a return of tram systems like that. It may be that monorails and subways can handle more passengers than trams, but trams, and their cousins, guided-busways, have the advantage of dropping you right on the street as opposed to some feet above or below it; also monorails and subway systems are astonishingly expensive and nowhere in the Western world I think has that kind of money anymore. As for the idealism, I think that is probably down to SimCity no longer being Will Wright's personal project and the corporatisation that EA have brought to the table. The originals reflected his personality, whereas currently there is no personality to reflect. Big companies like EA would probably prefer to steer clear of idealism, lest it offend any of their sponsors and investors.

I certainly don't think that those of use who want a more involved and complex game are some tiny niche, we make up a sizable (if no longer the majority) number of the gaming community. The same goes for 'hardcore' gamers the world over. Well not even hardcore, I certainly don't consider myself a hardcore gamer, I will play a game for, at most an hour at a time, but I would still prefer something more challenging and with more scope for creative solutions to problems. Even though we no longer form a majority of the market for games, we are less fickle, the danger the companies like EA make in abandoning the 'persevere and innovate' model of gaming preferred by this market in order to chase the larger social gaming market who want to 'collect and share' is that the people they are going hell-for-leather to court are people who might not be customers for very long. All it would take is for someone to design a game from the ground up to appeal to the social market, something like a beefed up downloadable version of a Facebook game, like CafeWorld with more options for customising your cafe and sharing it, and better graphics but still intertwined with Facebook, and EA's imagined market for the DLC they are planning to release will be gone.

Sure there are games that are so esoteric in what you have to do to succeed at a particular task that you give up, but the whole point of a game is that there is some legitimate challenge. I'm not saying SimCity2013 poses no challenge whatsoever but I was a little worried by the suggestion that the reason for removing something from the game was that it was possible to get it wrong.

The following quote: from this article http://www.polygon.com/2013/3/29/4161422/simcity-pedestrians-teleport I don't want to obsess over the details of it, as though I really want to be able to micromanage my power station. It's the reason they gave as to why they simplified this that bothers me. It seems to suggest that the possibility of being able to do something incorrectly is seen as a negative feature of a game.