KaiserElectric
Total Freakin Besties
- Joined
- Dec 2, 2007
- Messages
- 3,461
Don't count them out yet. Maxis is treating this game as the one that will put them back on the map, and judging by the what I've seen so far, I'm inclined to agree.
SimCity 5
- Thread starter KMRblue1027
- Start date
Don't count them out yet. Maxis is treating this game as the one that will put them back on the map, and judging by the what I've seen so far, I'm inclined to agree.
Chairman Meow
Class IV
I can't. I don't really play SC4 that often anymore, but whenever I have to be at the airport waiting for a flight, I always end up playing it. SC5 would be useless in that case, because at most airports there's no open wifi, and I'm not paying Boingo $10 just so I can start up SimCity 5...
There's a recent blog post about fires and how they spread.
http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/article/We-Didnt-start-the-fire-or-did-we.
http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/article/We-Didnt-start-the-fire-or-did-we.
Cheezy the Wiz
Socialist In A Hurry
A properly prepped "medium" sized SC4 city can house upwards of 475,000 residents.
Save_Ferris
Admiring Myself
Call me a noob if you must, but SC4 was too hard for me. I'm hoping we'll have a sandbox mode or more options.
I assume this is all land, with large neighboring regions of commerce, industries, and utilities to maximize the residential areas?
I usually have tons of water.
Having thought about it a bit more recently, and after seeing more of their blog posts, I'm starting to think more and more we're going to get a bit of a shock re how small the new "cities" will be (more than I previously posted about). My intuition (sorry I can't back it up more than that) says that moving away from a statistical simulation means complexity of the city and its systems increases at a faster rate with increasing population size than it did with the statistical "shortcuts" simulation. And with increasing complexity comes greater hardware requirements or lower limits on city size. If there's a demo you can bet it will limit the size of the city so that any problem like this won't be noticeable.
I anticipate there will be people in a year calling for a return to the more 'realistic' and 'better' gameplay provided by a statistical simulation instead of the planned fine-grained one. Bigger cities will be one of the main reasons.
I'm also a bit concerned about how great the UI designer (oops, I mean "User Experience Director") seems to think he is (reading from the latest blog post (1),(2)), and I'm half expecting to see a heavily streamlined game where numbers will be hidden as much as possible so as to reduce the chance of scaring off the easily-intimidated. I hope I'll be proven wrong of course.
I anticipate there will be people in a year calling for a return to the more 'realistic' and 'better' gameplay provided by a statistical simulation instead of the planned fine-grained one. Bigger cities will be one of the main reasons.
I'm also a bit concerned about how great the UI designer (oops, I mean "User Experience Director") seems to think he is (reading from the latest blog post (1),(2)), and I'm half expecting to see a heavily streamlined game where numbers will be hidden as much as possible so as to reduce the chance of scaring off the easily-intimidated. I hope I'll be proven wrong of course.
I'm also a bit concerned about how great the UI designer (oops, I mean "User Experience Director") seems to think he is (reading from the latest blog post (1),(2)), and I'm half expecting to see a heavily streamlined game where numbers will be hidden as much as possible so as to reduce the chance of scaring off the easily-intimidated. I hope I'll be proven wrong of course.
You have identified my greatest fear in modern gaming. All of the large game studios seem intent on dumbing down their game designs and focusing too heavily on the chrome.
Worst thing to happen to Maxis was being acquired by EA. Now they can't make the kind of niche game they used to have the freedom to pull off.
GrayingGamer
Prince
- Joined
- Feb 16, 2008
- Messages
- 565
It's just the way of businesses / corporations. The bad ones disappear, and the good ones grow.
If you like the niche stuff, there really hasn't been a better time in history to be a niche gamer. Steam and Kickstarter alone are providing huge outlets for small groups of people to make niche games and get them developed + sold.
Now, if what you really want is AAA production quality with niche gameplay, then you're just gonna have to learn to live without. The amount of capital needed to make a AAA game requires that it be mainstream. The really amazing companies might pull off a game that successfully appeals to the mainstream, while also having good niche / hardcore elements, but such games will certainly not be the norm.
If you like the niche stuff, there really hasn't been a better time in history to be a niche gamer. Steam and Kickstarter alone are providing huge outlets for small groups of people to make niche games and get them developed + sold.
Now, if what you really want is AAA production quality with niche gameplay, then you're just gonna have to learn to live without. The amount of capital needed to make a AAA game requires that it be mainstream. The really amazing companies might pull off a game that successfully appeals to the mainstream, while also having good niche / hardcore elements, but such games will certainly not be the norm.
J-man
Deity
SC4 had a rather steep learning curve but once you get the hang of it, it's not that hard.
The problem was not so much the concept of SC4 but imo 2 (avoidable) problems.
1. The original pathfinding mechanism and network capacity was really poor. (Fixed by the community btw).
2. Confusing information about which sims could work where.
Maniacal
the green Napoleon
Bad news everyone, you won't be able to save your city, play around/destroy it and then reload it because of the online requirement.
http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/sim-city-5/1224978p1.html
Screw everything about this.
Also you gotta love how the top and bottom quarterso f the screen are obscured by vast amounts of ugly and screenshot-ruining blur.
EDIT: And there is more on Destructoid (which pathetically tries to maintain it as a positive):
http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/sim-city-5/1224978p1.html
Screw everything about this.
Also you gotta love how the top and bottom quarterso f the screen are obscured by vast amounts of ugly and screenshot-ruining blur.
EDIT: And there is more on Destructoid (which pathetically tries to maintain it as a positive):
http://www.destructoid.com/e3-getting-around-the-new-simcity-228492.phtml#ext
Wow, how stupid can they get? Saving and loading whenever you want is a basic aspect of gaming.
Tecknojock
Keeping the world running
Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see one city per account mentioned/hinted at in the Destructoid article.
The not being able to save and the load is a big turn off though. Since you can play your city offline after connecting and loading it, I wonder if you could disconnect, ruin your city, and then delete the temp files, and then reconnect without causing problems to your city.
I love the tilt shift look honestly. If you look at the demo though, you can see that the tilt shift only happens when you zoom in.
The not being able to save and the load is a big turn off though. Since you can play your city offline after connecting and loading it, I wonder if you could disconnect, ruin your city, and then delete the temp files, and then reconnect without causing problems to your city.
I love the tilt shift look honestly. If you look at the demo though, you can see that the tilt shift only happens when you zoom in.
Maniacal
the green Napoleon
When I zoom in in a game it is because I want to see everything in better detail, not cover it in blur. Hopefully it can be turned off, but then again I'm not going to spend a single penny on SC5 anyway so the more it sucks the better.
EDIT: Apparently the devs have said on twitter you are not stuck with just one city. However, the rest of the online crap is still there and still good enough reason to avoid this like the plague.
EDIT: Apparently the devs have said on twitter you are not stuck with just one city. However, the rest of the online crap is still there and still good enough reason to avoid this like the plague.
Save_Ferris
Admiring Myself
I honestly don't know how well SC will work in multiplayer.
Tecknojock
Keeping the world running
It's only multiplayer in the sense that your city will affect other cities from what I gather. All the cities have various imports and exports (coal, citizens, power, water, pollution, ect...) and instead of those resources just being generated, they instead will come from other cities creating a sort of global economy.
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