Maxis Developer Takes SimCity Review Lumps Gracefully

[mfeff]

Just leave this little guy right here....

The instant I saw SC5 'regions' I thought they were basically SC4 cities divided into smaller playable areas. Seems like that is confirmed by how that video shows you can modify the game so simply and just play like the borders aren't even there.

I think it's a shame that server connectivity dominated the media surrounding this game because it falls flat in so many other areas. The city size in particular, it's so small and with not being able to control road placement outside the area it seems to me that the game could fairly easily be 'solved' in a small region. Doesn't leave much room for creativity.

The city size is a good bit smaller in release than it was in the demo/beta build. Though it is quite arbitrary at that. The server issues are tied to the game run speed. For example, the highest speed "cheetah" is still disabled as it causes the region area to update too many times. The online component is "for all practical purposes" a DRM. The region network information is a little bit of smoke and mirrors. The save games are stored on remote servers, but that has had a lot of problems... corrupted saves, cities saved with bugs that are not addressed effectively destroying all the region inhabitants saves.

As an example in a single player locked game, simply connecting a city to a highway with nothing "built" and certainly no other founded areas in the region, cars will come into your "roadway" and drive around, and leave. There is some sharing in the region mode but it isn't updated that often and in some cases, depending on how far one pushes the "build" is akin to grieving other players.

Pure industry build for example will generate criminals and homeless; but criminals do not commit crimes against industrial buildings (at the time of writing this), adding the criminal building will give a x3-x5 effect and as such the criminals will "export" themselves into the region, causing huge crime waves.

There are also some residential only builds which can get upwards to around 600-900k populations which will absolutely cripple anyone's cities on that network when all those sims update into the network looking for work. Its is actually kind of funny.

Part of the reason the cities where reduced in size and much of the buildings where locked to specialization is simply due to the "bb agent" nature of the sim tracking (or lack there-of). There is a post above this one that details it.

As pretty as it is, there is A LOT of lazy under the hood... which is what causes most of the issues. Not really sure how much "game" is actually in the box.