SimCity 5

[AlpsStranger]

Exactly. People like Blizzard ( though that is much muted lately. ) People barely tolerate EA because it ensnared developers they liked.

 

[PieceOfMind]

It appears EA's CEO, John Riccitiello, has resigned

His blogpost: http://www.ea.com/news/from-john
Press release: http://investor.ea.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=749234

 

[RD-BH]

^^^ Too little, too late ... the damage is done.

I'll feel better when I see a publisher that cares about its products.

 

[codepoet]

^^^ Too little, too late ... the damage is done.

I'll feel better when I see a publisher that cares about its products.

Two things odded me out regarding SimCity5 (and I never bought, thankfully, due to reading these two things):
1. Always online requirement for a game I consider a single-player only.
2. The small map size descriptions. Even the largest maps in SimCity4 I felt were too small (and didn't like the whole build a city next door to feed into your main city tactic)

As feedback for these two things rolled in, they seemed defiant and steadfast. Shame.

 

[RD-BH]

Two things odded me out regarding SimCity5 (and I never bought, thankfully, due to reading these two things):
1. Always online requirement for a game I consider a single-player only.
2. The small map size descriptions. Even the largest maps in SimCity4 I felt were too small (and didn't like the whole build a city next door to feed into your main city tactic)

As feedback for these two things rolled in, they seemed defiant and steadfast. Shame.

"Tho' I've belted you and flayed you,
By the livin' Gawd that made you,
You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din!"

If only I had listened ...

 

[peter grimes]

A really interesting little discussion on some of SimCity's failings in a lesser-traveled sub:
http://www.reddit.com/r/engineering/comments/1ajxg4/how_to_fix_simcity/

I'm not going to quote any bits, since it's worth reading the whole thing. But I'm posting it here because it may not get noticed if you're just scanning /r/simcity

 

[J-man]

In my oil city I now have five refineries maxed out in converting crude oil in to fuel. I'm buying crude oil on the market for 4.5k and selling fuel for 21k. I'm not even pumping it out of the ground, I'm saving that for when the prices of oil go up.

 

[PieceOfMind]

A really interesting little discussion on some of SimCity's failings in a lesser-traveled sub:
http://www.reddit.com/r/engineering/comments/1ajxg4/how_to_fix_simcity/

I'm not going to quote any bits, since it's worth reading the whole thing. But I'm posting it here because it may not get noticed if you're just scanning /r/simcity

Good thread.
This is IMO the best post I've read:

ZorbaTHut (editing in some spaces between paragraphs)

Spoiler :

I would love to hear the rest of your thought. Never had thought about the thought process of making a game.

A few suggestions beforehand, then: subscribe to /r/gamedev and /r/ludology. If you've played Portal and/or Portal 2, go through them with developer commentary turned on. And read postmortems on Gamasutra.
Be warned - once you look behind the curtain, it's really tough to unlook behind the curtain. It's like learning how sausage is made. Sausage will never be the same again.
So. SimCity.
The thing about original SimCity, as well as SC2 and SC3 and SC4, is that they were big aggregate simulations. They dealt with averages, not individual people. SC4 kinda faked it by adding individual people, but those people didn't control the simulation, they were generated by the simulation.

The resource model in these games was also very simple. Fundamentally there were maybe six kinds of "thing" overall. Water and electricity, in SC4, both acted the same - you built a network, then it either worked or it didn't. Garbage was even simpler, it just accumulated at your garbage dumps. You have Residential, Commercial, and Industrial, and aside from slight differences in zoning density and slight differences in their effect on (and preference for) air pollution, they were also essentially the same. There was traffic, but traffic was always a very vague mechanic. The hardcore players installed hardcore traffic mods that made it nearly unplayable for casual players, the casual players never really understood traffic. Traffic was just that thing that happened and made your city suck. And finally there was money, which, effectively, was the only important resource in the game, and which kind of spontaneously generated itself with residential, commercial, and industrial.

The trend in game development lately - and I think this is a good trend - is to move away from the boring makework and micromanagement, and make sure that the player's decisions are generally more important. Even SC4 was moving in this direction - compare SC4's automatic street-spanning power connections with SC1, where you had to build hundreds of little one-tile power connectors. So, when people complain about how SC5 builds the water network automatically and SC4 didn't do that and therefore SC4 is a better game, remember that people made the same complaint about SC4's power network compared to SC3.

I suspect SC5 had a few major goals, and I'll go over them one at a time. (Note: this is all conjecture! I'm not a Maxis or EA employee. I could be totally wrong.)
First, SC5 wanted to encourage variety in cities and variety in development techniques. You wouldn't have "the city" like you did in every previous game. You'd have neighborhoods with different properties. Here's the industrial center, we'll keep the pollution away from everyone else. Here's the casino city. Here's Garbage Central. You could sort of do this in the previous games by just splitting up the city into multiple parts, but realistically your city would just end up merging with itself when it got big enough and you'd be right back to The City. SC4 tried this, but SC4's approach just resulted in going right back to The City, with a few awkwardly-named suburbs. Not ideal.

Unfortunately this ends up tying into one of the fundamental paradoxes of game development. Namely, in order to get players to make more varied decisions, you ironically have to restrict their choices. Think about it this way: if you let players build anything everywhere, they'll come up with an Optimum City Design and build it everywhere. But if you force players to specialize - if you say "hey, you can build the megacasino central or an industrial ultracomplex, but not both" - then players will naturally start building diverse specialized cities.

As an example of this going bad, look at Path of Exile, whose big claim was that you could control every aspect of your character via the gigantic passive tree. End inevitable result: there's maybe a dozen builds that people actually use, and 2/3 of those suck. Meanwhile the developers have a balance nightmare ahead of them while a tiny tiny number of players have fun minmaxing and finding the completely broken spec.
As an example of this going right, look at World of Warcraft, which has effectively well over thirty distinct classes to play. You choose a class, you choose a spec, each one of those feels different . . . and they accomplished it by making your spec a series of exclusive choices.

Second, SC5 wanted a more interesting economic model. In SC4 and before, your industry is kind of a theoretical standin. You'd never notice if your coal mine vanished and was replaced with a copper mine, or a factory, or a sweatshop. But obviously that's ridiculous in terms of economy. If all our coal mines were replaced with copper mines in reality, we'd be ed! We wouldn't have any coal! So they decided they wanted actual resources. That meant resources in each individual city that you could use (tying nicely into "variety in cities" - no, your cities can't all be coal mining towns, they don't all have coal!), a lot more resources for the player to be concerned about, and generally a more personalized city, where you say "this is my coal mining town" instead of "this is the town where the random number generator placed a lot of coal mines, oh, I guess they're factories now, never mind".

The problem with resources is that once you have resources, you kinda want to track them. It's easy to wave your hands and say "money teleports everywhere" because realistically it does, money is all electronic now anyway. It's harder to justify a hundred tons of coal teleporting from a coal plant to somewhere else. So they wanted to have resources shipped around explicitly, so you could say "oh man this is the last batch of coal I need for my big project, I'm gonna watch it travel."
And once you've done that, why not turn everything into a simulation?
That is, I think SC5's third major goal. They already needed coal to travel, so why not tie people into the same sim? SimCity has always been about people! So people got tied into the same sim, and power got tied into the same sim (why not, they've already got the sim working), so did water and sewage, and everything became part of the general GlassBox economic model. They wanted everything to be modeled sensibly so you could watch people walking around the city.

The problem they ran into is that this is just too much stuff.

There's a similar citybuilding series, focused entirely on resources, that I think is sort of what SC5 was trying to move towards. It's called the Anno series. (It was far more popular in Europe than in the US - if you're a US gamer, you may not have heard of it. Anno 2070 is available on Steam and highly recommended.) Anno has a very complicated resource model, with literally dozens of resources trucking around your islands. And the game, importantly, is divided into islands. Instead of SC5's artificial region layout, Anno simply splits the game into islands, each with a limited number of resources available. Want to build Bionic Suits? Great! You'll need Exoskeletons and Biopolymers. For Biopolymers, you'll need Corn and Algae. You can't produce those on the same island, so you're already going to need to ship around, and we're not even going to talk about building exoskeletons.

But Anno abstracts a lot of things away. Population in Anno doesn't work - it just consumes goods and produces money. You can have perfectly functional zero-population islands that work as resource produces (and, in fact, you probably will!) Electricity is an island-wide constant. Pollution is an island-wide constant. Anno is singlemindedly focused on resource production and resource management.
And even then, it starts slowing down. There's maybe a thousand things moving at any given moment, at most, and even that turns into a performance issue. Economy modeling is surprisingly difficult.

So, when SC5 decided to turn absolutely everything into an economic simulation, they had to cut two corners, just to make the game run at all. First, they needed to limit the number of "things" that were modeled. Second, they had to make sure the "thing" modeling was very simple. And given that people were already complaining about a lack of subways (as if game quality is based on the number of individual things you can build, and not on how well those things interact - come on guys, subways? is that really critical?) they certainly wouldn't dare removing water, power, or garbage.
A small number of "things" led to the fudged population number, because they flat-out can't simulate 100,000 agents running around, but players demanded cities with really big numbers. Simple thing modeling led to the broken pathfinding system - the bus trains, and the Intersections of Doom, and the horrible traffic problems for no obvious reason.

And that's the big breaking point. They wanted to make Anno, but their fanbase demanded SimCity 4.1. They tried to compromise and ended up with the worst of both - the vague and confusing economy model of SimCity with the complexity of Anno, without the ability to control that complexity using Anno's powerful toolkit.
To be honest, I think they were doomed from the beginning. I don't know of any way to make a game with the mass-market appeal required by a AAA title that would still satisfy the SimCity 4 fans.

 

[warpus]

I don't know of any way to make a game with the mass-market appeal required by a AAA title that would still satisfy the SimCity 4 fans.

Oh, I don't think it would be that big of a challenge! Give us SimCity 4.1 with curvy roads, updated graphics, and a couple other features, and we'd be happy. Very happy.

 

[cybrxkhan]

Oh, I don't think it would be that big of a challenge! Give us SimCity 4.1 with curvy roads, updated graphics, and a couple other features, and we'd be happy. Very happy.

That's a very dangerous phrase there. "Couple other features" might = Whole new game, for some.

 

[warpus]

Yeah, but I mean things like, more realistic highways (the elevated nonsense in 4 kinda sucked), more realistic need of ___ modelling (the way XL does it is nice).. nothing that departs tooo much from what they had in sc4. SC4 was pretty good

 

[cybrxkhan]

Yeah, but I mean things like, more realistic highways (the elevated nonsense in 4 kinda sucked), more realistic need of ___ modelling (the way XL does it is nice).. nothing that departs tooo much from what they had in sc4. SC4 was pretty good

Yeah, SC4 was pretty good. I heard that they couldn't really do much after Rush Hour because they didn't know what to do and what direction to go in, since there wasn't much to improve short of making a new game. SimCity's a weird game with that considered, definitely. Though I only played it a bit, I think Cities XL was going in the right direction - it has its own flaws and issues, but it was going in the right direction nevertheless.

 

[spider1]

This is not a good successor to SimCity 4. Tiny little cities, to much eye candy, and a total dependance on other cities isn't what I want from a SimCity game. I guess I'll stick to SimCity 4.

 

[Sonereal]

I actually think that if it wasn't for always online and if agent behavior was actually decent, the game would be good as a standalone title outside the SimCity series.

 

[Thorgalaeg]

When SC4 was launched i thought cities were too small compared to SC3, so imagine how i feel about SC5. Anyway even if i was a newcomer to the series i would think there is something inherently wrong about cities the size of a neighborhood with skyscrapers, mass transit system or industries.

I see this trend of doing things smaller in all sort of games, like RPGs, flight simulators... One would thing that with all the power of current machines it would be the other way, but nope...

 

[Rub'Rum]

Am I the only one who's not a fan of the whole region concept? I've been playing SC4 recently and something annoys me about the whole region thing. It's like the game sort of wants me to manage a city at a level higher than the one I really think of when I play SimCity. SC5 seems to do it much worse too.

 

[cybrxkhan]

Am I the only one who's not a fan of the whole region concept? I've been playing SC4 recently and something annoys me about the whole region thing. It's like the game sort of wants me to manage a city at a level higher than the one I really think of when I play SimCity. SC5 seems to do it much worse too.

The difference with SimCity 4 is that you can still more or less play a single city if you feel like it (and there are user-made regions that consist of very few cities), and that you have much more flexibility when it comes to how you want your region to be - if you want a region at all. It appears the new SimCity, you have to have tiny cities in predetermined locations in a region where their interactions are more or less relatively predictable.

 

[fret]

cybrxkhan hits the nail on the head there with the use of the word 'flexibility'.

SC4 certainly offers that, great big buckets of it.

Ive been having fun with SC5 over the past few days, but that is all it is, a bit of fun. There is just no challenge in it. I don't think it is going to have much staying power.

 

[civvver]

I haven't played 5 and I only have about 60 hours on 4 so I'm not a big sim city vet, but the regions to me are a very cool concept. In 4 they demand is shared across regions so what I do is build support cities for my large, clean, wealthy city in the middle of the map. Basically if you build a really dirty lower class city it will raise demand caps for clean jobs in your nice clean city. Connecting the cities with high speed transit can raise demand for commercial. I don't know all the inns and outs but it's really hard to develop a rich high tech city without a few low tech dirty ones around it. It's a cool concept to me. Looks like 5 may have taken it a bit too far with resources but we'll see. I'm not planning on buying it til it's on sale for $30 or less though.

 

[warpus]

When I first saw regions in sc4 I got excited about the possibility of sharing a region with a couple friends and working on a region together - each one of us working on a different city.

Well.. They seemed to have taken my dreams and made them into a nightmare