SimCity 5

[Smellincoffee]

From Forbes:

“We’re building a simulation that really captures the world that we live in today,” says Bradshaw. “We’re talking about a Simcity where the resources are finite. Where you’re going to be struggling with some of the same decisions that people are struggling with today.”

Online and social elements are going to become a bigger part of the franchise: if you put a lot of polluting power plants near your borders, your friends might start to get some smoke rolling into their suburbs. You might even start to contribute to global CO2 levels.

I guess my days of plunking down a coal station on the corner of the map so 75% of the pollution disappears are over.

 

[Antilogic]

The $150 game can't be far behind.

The $200 game was already tried, and with disastrous results.



Everything I've seen looks good so far. I wish I didn't have to wait for another year and change, but I'd rather them develop it while I don't have the playing time.

 

[MaxaTheGreat]

Simcity 5?

But I really hope it can rival that of past Simcity games. After Spore and Societes and all...

I will also need a new computer.

 

[Maniacal]

Societies was a different developer.

 

[Patroklos]

I eagerly anticipate the bolded section. The one of the things I particularly hated about SC4 was the zone in which Fire, Police or Hospitals operated in. With the new glassbox engine it appears I can finally enjoy a real world simulation of emergency response. I hope instead of 2 firetrucks responding to a big blaze I can order 5 or more from different stations to the same large blaze.

What are you talking about? In SC4 the only thing the area effect did was PREVENT fires. When a fire actually broke out you had to send the trucks to the fire individually. You even say the trucks spraying water onto th buildings!

Hell, even in SC2000 you had to manually dispatch firetrucks, though all you saw was a sign post telling you which station was responding.

In any case this is going to be the same failure that CitiesXL was. Piggish cartoon 3D graphics that fail to capture the realism of SC4.

 

[croxis]

Tilt shift != cartoon.

This is a cartoon:

The technical term in computer graphics is cell shading. Borderlands is a recentish game that made use of it.

This is Tilt shift:

The objective of this is a toy or model (depending how old you are) appearance.

Realistic art direction is bad. The muted colors increase the difficulty for the player to differentiate different visual elements. Realistic art direction also causes the game to show its age much quicker than a stylized art direction. Part of the reason Sim City 4, World of Warcraft, and the CG from Babylon 5 held up for years is because of a non-realistic art direction.

Here is SimCity 4:

And a google map shot of Portland's downtown.

 

[NBAfan]

Plus there hasn't even been any game footage yet, all Maxis has shown right now is the engine. At least hold back judgement until you see actual game pictures.

 

[J-man]

Sounds very exciting! I'm a huge sim city fan!

I cheered when I read this:

Now consider that Maxis is striving to simulate tens of thousands of agents at a time, and that resources such as power, water, coal, and oil are also treated as individual units, as well as every house, business, and factory, and you can start to get an idea of the incredible number of emergent possibilities GlassBox introduces.

It seems to me that it requires a pretty hefty computer, but pretty much every sim city game needed a strong computer (for its time).

I'm a little worried though that they're going to make this game to much dumbed down, because the don't want to attract just the hardcore sim city players (like sim city 4).

Edit: EA held an AMA (ask me anything) on the interwebs, some guy compiled all the answers:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Z4e9-pWJrX-O5qTCvq_I_gEo5loAcNwudAt9gmwL2HE/edit?pli=1

 

[croxis]

Their reddit interview indicate they want something different. What they don't want is a vertical learning curve like SC4 had where you almost had to be a vet of the series to be able to play it. They are probably going to remove some elements, which isn't a bad thing. I always found the water pipe system in SC4 to be annoying and wish it was done like power, or I only had to worry about the wells and the main lines, like how power was done. They are also taking out most charts and graphs as it will be directly visualized in the city. They said they are making this a serious game but the barrier to entry has to be lower.

 

[J-man]

Their reddit interview indicate they want something different. What they don't want is a vertical learning curve like SC4 had where you almost had to be a vet of the series to be able to play it. They are probably going to remove some elements, which isn't a bad thing. I always found the water pipe system in SC4 to be annoying and wish it was done like power, or I only had to worry about the wells and the main lines, like how power was done. They are also taking out most charts and graphs as it will be directly visualized in the city. They said they are making this a serious game but the barrier to entry has to be lower.

Sim city 4 had steep learning curve but IMO this was caused by a large part a few mistakes or errors:

- The original path finding mechanism was poor, sims didn't took the quickest way to work. (this could be partially fixed by community created mod, the NAM)

- The speeds at which the sims were driving and the capacity of the roads were unbalanced. The sims were driving really slow and the roads clogged very quickly. (Again this can be fixed with the NAM)

- When you have an large office building which reports to have e.g. 900 $$$ jobs you think 900 $$$ sims can work there? Wrong! perhaps only 90 to 135 $$$ sims can work there. This caused a lot of confusion because you might be wondering why all these $$$ sims are leaving the city. (It took the SC4 community quite a look time before figuring out this was the case)

These facts can make SC4 very hard to play for anyone who isn't aware of them.

 

[croxis]

I would also add that it is very easy to screw up the early game. Losing can be fun, and that is part of the way on learning how the game works. A lot of the simulation is obscured so a town can fail and the player, with little experience, would not understand why.

 

[J-man]

I would also add that it is very easy to screw up the early game. Losing can be fun, and that is part of the way on learning how the game works. A lot of the simulation is obscured so a town can fail and the player, with little experience, would not understand why.

Yeah, I agree with that.
I also hope that you don't have to adjust to sliders on the every individual school, college, library, hospital, etc. anymore, it's so tedious!

 

[Save_Ferris]

SimCity4 made it difficult to generate a profit, especially early on.

 

[Maniacal]

From the interviews so far I think they are going to do well with the art direction, which I liked in Sim City 2k, 3k and 4k (although I didn't play that) with it getting better each time.

 

[J-man]

From the interviews so far I think they are going to do well with the art direction, which I liked in Sim City 2k, 3k and 4k (although I didn't play that) with it getting better each time.

I hope the music is as good as it was in SC3K, it had the best tracks of the serie, no contest.

Btw, at the end of the trailer you can see something that resembles a launch arco from sim city 2000. It also actually takes off. I wonder if we see the arcologies return.

 

[Quintillus]

The price does seem slightly high. British/French/German cities would be cool, though. Too bad we can't just pick one of those plus American (? - the default?) in the starting price - I might go with French as the "standard". But either way, I'm not going to buy the game a whole year in advance.

I guess my days of plunking down a coal station on the corner of the map so 75% of the pollution disappears are over.

Same here! No better place to put 'em.

A lot of the SimGames have had somewhat steep learning curves. I think the one that I've played with the highest learning curve is SimIsle. Only in the past few play-throughs did I start making profits, and even then they were usually fairly meagre, and I never did get heavy industries developed - it was either tourism or raw materials (most commonly logging) that brought in the dough. A small isle famous for its cars would be totally cool, but never happened for me.

 

[civ_king]

Y'know, buying an entire city set seems quite legit as a DLC item, I'd pay $10 for a really well done city set.

 

[J-man]

Y'know, buying an entire city set seems quite legit as a DLC item, I'd pay $10 for a really well done city set.

Ssshhtt, don't bring EA to any idea's!

I expect a LOT of DLC, that's just the way it works nowadays.

 

[Antilogic]

Aside: I hate DLC, it seems like a poor excuse to milk a few extra bucks out of fans.

 

[croxis]

Usually DLCs have their own separate budget, much like an expansion and, according to devs who been in the industry for a while, is *usually* stuff that wasn't going to be in the vanilla game anyway. It also means that additional content can come out sooner than waiting 6months to a year for a traditional expansion pack.