mcallisterw

Put it this way, if they had just called the game 'SimNeighbourhood' and marketed it as a spin-off rather than a successor to SimCity where you build a neighbourhood rather than a city, and focusing on completing challenges and sharing with other users rather than on management and complexity there would be no problem here. Some people would think it sounds fantastic and buy it and be very happy with it (server issues notwithstanding), it seems most of us (me included) would simply have ignored it like we ignored societies and continue to wait for the next SimCity... and perhaps some people who loved SimCity but fancied a different kind of game would have found they enjoyed it. I think the problem here is many people feeling disappointed that they had been waiting for a successor to SC4, it finally arrived, it was at a hugely inflated price but we'd been so excited with the anticipation we bought it anyway, only to find that (in our view) it wasn't SimCity at all.

It presents a different challenge, which some will relish, but so would buying a completely different game. I think there are still a lot of people, who while appreciating some of the improvements, feel like they've ended up with 'SimNeighbourhood' instead of 'SimCity'. I for one love a bit of complexity, it's not just because expanding your city to meet a new challenge is easier than redesigning it to make the best of limited space, it's because at the end of the day I like to have a big sprawling metropolis that I can spend hours just exploring with the pause button pressed, building little backstories to the different neighbourhoods and thinking to myself 'I built that'... I miss that.