SimCity 5

Reminds me of the city I am living in. Ok well not that extreme :lol: But does have enough winding roads where it feels more like a roller coaster than a road.

I wonder what the fatality rate for that city is during winter :D
 
hobbsyoyo said:
OK so I'm not reading through 40 pages, but is SimCity broken?
Click to expand...

From what I know it's not broken, but it definitely has some serious issues.

Anyhow, here's what I typed up to my friend a few days ago, if you're interested in what these "issues" exactly are (please forgive the inside jokes/manner of speech):

As for the new SimCity, after doing considerable research into the matter, I have decided that despite the capitalistic advertising, SimCity is NOT worth its ludicrous price tag. There are several things working against it:

1. It is no longer the single-player game we love. Even EA admitted, eventually, that they aimed to create an MMO from the beginning (though probably for DRM purposes). Certainly, there’s pleasure to be found in flooding Amol’s cities with crime and garbage, but that is only temporary pleasure: the true pleasure in SimCity is being your own dictator.

2. The game is restricted to pre-made, extremely small “cities”. How can one exercise freedom in building a “city” that’s a quarter the size of Rockville?

3. The game is too easy. I have heard reports that it’s possible to build cities of hundreds of thousands in a mere couple of hours. Not a problem, perhaps, but it makes the game lose some of its rewarding nature. I have seen reports of players who built perfect cities consisting of only residential areas and no power, garbage collection, water systems, education, health, and other services - a libertarian paradise, essentially (look it up online, I’m not joking).

4. Speaking of “large” cities, apparently some of the statistics in the game are fudged by the game engine.

5. The game was falsely advertised for its ability to simulate the “lives” of individuals in the city. This is, as many have found out, false. Instead of having the same house and going to the same job like in SimCity 4, the new SimCity’s individuals are actually basically randomly generated people with unique “names” that go from their “house” to the nearest available job and they go back to the nearest available “home” before repeating the process (i.e. they don’t even remember where their home and job is, they have a different one each day).

6. There will almost certainly be so-called microtransactions. If you don’t know what this is, this is basically where they sell you small, downloadable content. I don’t mean normal DLCs or expansion packs that might add in interesting new features or stuff, but stuff like “Pay $3 for the Shell Gas Station! But wait, buy within 24 hours and you’ll get the $5 Best Buy Commercial buildings collection for half off!” There’s technically nothing wrong with this, except...

7. You can’t mod the game. EA said they were thinking of allowing modding eventually, but that probably won’t be for a very long time. Which means your only source of new, additional material will be the microtransactions above.

8. You have to always be online while playing the game, and you have to use EA’s Origin service to do so. This isn’t a problem until 1) you want to play where there isn’t a good internet connection (airplane, Scotland, the Himalayas, during a thunderstorm when the electricity’s out, etc.); 2) once EA cuts the servers (probably when they want to sell you the next SimCity), you can’t play SimCity ever again unlike with SimCity 4.

9. Lastly, you *can* actually play SimCity offline. Players who’ve hacked into the game’s code found out the forced online was something that could be easily removed, except EA wants you to stay online forever because EA is evil.

Anyhow, I won’t say more as I don’t want to bash my most favorite game series of all time, glory to it, divinity of the empire. However, this fellow here has summarized many disappointed SimCity fans’ feelings much better, and why SimCity 4 is still a better single-player experience (as [our mutual friend] himself said):

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/7053-SimCity
Click to expand...
 
Was broken, is broken, will be broken.
 
Shoulda been a Ford dealership DLC, given the game's inspiration from the Pinto.
 
NBAfan said:
It's not broken anymore, but it's a terrible citybuilding game.
Click to expand...

Maniacal said:
Considering that it sells itself as a city building game and it falls so far short of that I think it qualifies as broken, or close enough as to make no difference.
Click to expand...

So as far as it not being a good citybuilding game, what are the specific problems?

I'm just curious is all.
 
hobbsyoyo said:
So as far as it not being a good citybuilding game, what are the specific problems?

I'm just curious is all.
Click to expand...

See my post again: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=12349618&postcount=785

:p

Specifically the issues in terms of citybuilding is that city sizes are too small, it's too easy (which technically isn't a problem, but it does make gameplay rather unrewarding and too simplistic), and the simulation isn't really simulating much (a lot of the game's statistics are fudged, for instance, and "individuals" don't act like "individuals", they're just mindless drones).
 
@hobbsyoyo
IMO the biggest issue with the game that is inexcusable is that people are frequently losing the progress on their cities due to "server issues". Buying into this game means handing over all the power to control your play experience over to EA, and they're doing a piss poor job of it so far.

I know I'm a bit of a control freak when it comes to how I use my PC, but I can understand if others are less offended by the lack of control they get with games like this.
 
How's this for an alternative to SimCity?

http://www.synekism.com/

Free download available of an alpha build.

About
Synekism is an attempt at a modern city simulator rooted in procedurally generated content. The project was started in 2010 to address some frustrations with the city simulation video game genre. It is actively developed on and currently in a purely alpha-experimental stage. Updates on the project are posted on the first of every month. Note that work on this project is more or less done by one person so progress will be slow, but steady.

The game is a sandbox where control is not explicit but indirect. The player can designate residential, commercial, industrial, and government zones and watch them grow, instead of explicitly plopping each building manually. The game tends to lean towards macro-management.

The key features of Synekism include grid less 3D environments and procedurally generated buildings. The lack of a grid results in total freedom when zoning and building roads allowing for more realistic looking cities. Procedurally generated buildings allows for more visual variability. Instead of querying a finite list of static models, a building is generated uniquely upon creation using local as well as city-wide conditions.
Click to expand...

Interesting is that you can load an image overlay, like this:
Spoiler :
83FEA5731A02FBD2110B0D6FC7B90A93DC1FA957
though I still haven't been able to load an image other than the default one

A youtube demo:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82as4BAN-Ho
 
Interesting.

It's obviously rough and very barebones, but it has a decent base game from what I tested.
 
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