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Simtropolis Returns! 05/26/2026
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Hey everyone! First, I would like to thank everyone for their interest in our post-event impressions, and for their patience while we worked to get everything together. Second, I want to thank the people at Maxis for their awesome hospitality and for putting this event together. It was a blast to get to talk with the developers, especially since everyone was so excited to have us there for the day. Finally, this is my first time doing a write up like this, so I'm just going to go for it and see where it takes us. However, before we jump head first into the write up, let's take a moment to discuss the format of the event. Our day was split between play testing the latest version of the game, interviews, and opportunities for general chit-chat. That said, I'm going to jump between talking about play testing, interviews, and the like. The first impression upon starting up the game is that Maxis has been busy since the time that the beta was launched. Stuff has been tweaked as a result of feedback from the beta, and the game actually plays differently as a result (I think the end result is better balanced). Just to throw out a single example, road costs have been tweaked, which means that strategies that worked in the beta will now drive you bankrupt in a hurry. For those who think that the new SimCity has no difficulty levels, the taxes act as your primary difficulty levels. (This may not seem like much, but at the same time, the difficulty levels in SC4 really just altered the amount of cash you started with.) As we all know, one of the big new features of the game is city specializations. Some die hard SimCity fans are likely to regard this move as heresy, but I don't see it that way. If you want to play the new SimCity using the classic RCI model, you are totally free to do so, and you will find that the game responds in much the same way that you would expect it to. However, for those of us who might be bored of the classic RCI model, or want to try something new and different, city specialization is a great way to mix up the franchise. Some people will say that the "formula for success" with the city specializations is somewhat flat, but that is a superficial analysis as it takes some degree of skill and planning to capture the benefits of city specializaton while mitigating the negatives that go along with that specialization. There has been concern that the specializations are tilted to favor the resource-based specialization, which would logically mean that the city spaces rich in coal, oil, and ore would be the first to be claimed. However, this concern misses the unique challenge the resource-based specializations face: resource scarcity. These resources are finite, and it's only a matter of time before you have to address your sustainability problems. (During the beta, I built a city based on oil and drove it for everything it was worth. However, the oil fields couldn't sustain that forever, and they started to fail to meet the demands of my refineries. I had to start importing oil to sustain the refinery output, which took a big chunk out of my profits.) If you decide that you want to re-specialize the city, you face potentially even bigger challenges. For the Community Day event, I landed with a city laden with ore, so I specialized in ore production. However, I got tired of the ground pollution hurting my residential development, so I decided to "turn the city around." Except that it didn't turn around. It was like watching the decline of the American Rust Belt as my city slid into a financial death spiral. I had built a city with millions that was the third most economically powerful city in the region, and it all fell apart because I failed to plan far enough forward to ensure a successful transition away from an ore-based city economy. So if you're thinking that pumping oil is a cheap way to amassing millions, just remember that you're going to burn through millions trying to carry your city through the post oil boom days. So at this point, let's take an intermission from the play testing and talk about one of the group interviews that we did. We had the opportunity to do a small group interview with the design team concerning Glassbox and the depth of the simulation. We got to see under the hood and see the game through the eyes of one of the developer debug tools that is used to tune the simulation. With the drag of a slider, the dev shut down a coal plant and with another drag of the coal supply slider, the plant started up again. (Meanwhile, the coal supply animation responded to reflect the state of the coal supply.) Then with a few more clicks, we got to see the pollution simulation while Ocean Quigley explained how the simulation rules wrote air pollution to the map. A couple of clicks later, and we could watch one of the sims driving around the city and what his most pressing interests were. At 6AM, the little sims started getting up for work and we could see traffic picking up while watching how the sims were altering their most pressing needs in response to the events they were encountering. While I admit that I'm not a modder, I feel like if we can get even a fraction of this kind of capability in modding the game, we will eclipse anything SC4 was capable of supporting. Let's jump back to the play testing and talk about something that we all care about: region play. However, before we do that, let's talk about me for a second. I am a lone wolf gamer. My big interests are campaigns (like Halo or any other FPS game) and PvE (like Guild Wars 2 or World of Warcraft). I don't generally enjoy PvP or cooperative play with people I don't know well. That said, let's jump back to SimCity. It took me a few minutes to warm up to the vibe of the room and the people in it, but once that happened, it was magic. I decided that my city was going to be one of the trash dumps of the region, where the mayor didn't care about you and your troubles, and thus, Double Shift was born. And the place lived up to it's name. Double Shift dominated the crime leader board, and I was immensely proud with I became aware that my criminals were setting up franchises in neighboring cities. Fire services weren't set up until half the city was engulfed in flames, and with no health services at all, my sims lived hard and died young. Soon enough, my sims began clamoring for assistance from their neighbors, and Tosca Cliffs came to their aid with police and health services. But Tosca Cliffs had troubles too; trash was overflowing with no method for managing it. Except that Double Shift had just completed expanding its waste management services. A deal was struck and soon the residents of Double Shift began breathing the pollution of Tosca Cliffs's trash. While all of the above is important, it misses another important part of SimCity's region play: the social interaction. Admittedly, the bunch of us were in the same room and this enables conversation to flow in ways that isn't normally possible over the internet, but I'm fairly confident that none of us have had a string of random conversations like this in SC4: -"Oil is where it's at, man. Already making $750,000 a month." -"I want to build a green city. Who's going to take my sewage?" -"We don't want your *bleep*. No one's going to take your *bleep*." -"But I want to build a green city!" -"Send it to Double Shift. I hear he's building a trash dump of a city. He doesn't care." -"Sure, send it over. The ground in that part of the city is already dead anyway." -"JOIN MY CAPITALIST EMPIRE AND TOGETHER WE SHALL RULE THIS REGION!!! MWAHAHAHAH!!" Random amusing stuff like this is possible with the new SimCity. If you want to experience it, you can. If this doesn't interest you, you're under no pressure to engage in this stuff. Now do you want to voice chat with some random dude you don't know who is playing in your region? Probably not. Does it have the potential to be a lot of fun among friends, family, and whatnot? I think so. Another area that deserves mention is the visual filter capabilities. For some individuals, the default visual style is awesome, and for others, not so much. Filters offer an easy way to find a visual style more suited to your tastes. However, filters have so much more potential than that. As cheesy as it sounds, filters offer a new way to experience your city. A single filter change can fundamentally alter how a street feels. I didn't think to ask about this question during the event, but I hope that we get the ability to add in new filters to the game. If we do, I suspect we will the experience the growth of some truly wild and unique City Journals. If you're wanting to tell a story about your city, filters just offer too much potential to ignore them. Before we wrap this thing up, let's head back to the group interviews one more time to hopefully shed some light on what the devs were hoping to achieve with the new SimCity. One thing that was made very clear was that, in designing the new SimCity, the developers were hoping to capture the elements from the previous SimCity titles that made them so much fun to play. However, as even Will Wright admitted, the series was getting too complicated, so they felt that it was necessary to find a way to give the player the core essentials of the SimCity series without burdening the player with micromanagement and extraneous details. Additionally, Maxis is well aware of past efforts to reboot the SimCity series, and the dev team has made the effort to learn from those mistakes. You may think of it as "getting back to basics," or "the prodigal son returns home," or any other number of things, but the dev team has tried to keep the core fundamentals of the SimCity series in place while re-imagining how those core essentials can come together in a game. If you had asked me a while back if I would buy the new SimCity game, the answer would have been a definite no. As far as I was concerned, it was basically another Societies or Cities XL clone and I wasn't interested. I got the opportunity to participate in the beta, so I decided to try it out, and it had a very definite "this is a reboot" feel. It didn't feel like it warranted the title "SimCity 5," but as a reboot of the series, it was decent. However, after playing the version we did for the community event, it is evident that this isn't a reboot where the producer throws out all the old material simply because he didn't like it. This is Maxis positioning the SimCity series for a future it could have never achieved under the previous design paradigm. It may look like Maxis is taking steps backwards with the technology, but that is incorrect. Rather, Maxis is basing the series on a new technological underpinning that will be capable of carrying our favorite franchise into the future. We are witnessing a new stage in SimCity's evolution, and while SC4 hands the new game enormous shoes to fill, I feel it is up to the task. Bottom Line: I intend to buy the game.
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