Maxis Will "Eventually" Increase SimCity's City Sizes

[Clive Howlitzer]

I'll stick with my Sim City 2000, thank you very much.

 

[Weaver]

This game looks fun, but everything I hear about it just makes it sound bloody horrible.
I would be really hesitant about just letting someone in my region, so I'd probably just claim all cities on it and build them myself, for two reasons:

1) I won't get dead cities
2) If I want to stop playing, then I can and don't have to feel like I'm letting some poor guy's town (and let's be real, they're towns) just kind of die off with no neighbours.

In that case the game has no reason to be online, for me anyways.

 

[Mirrorknight]

Hmm...yep. Think I'll just go pay $20 on Steam and get SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition, because apparently I'm antisocial and don't want my gameplay experience effected by other people when I don't want them to.

Plus, I want to make giant cities. I don't want to have to give 2 damns about how each little peon's day is going. I also want to wreck my city with disasters on a whim when I get bored.

I'm really frikking tired of these companies shoving social crap down my throat, and say I'm being an anti-social recluse when I complain. I play plenty of games online with friends. There are some I simply want to play by myself. SimCity is one of them.

 

[Griffolion]

"Don't worry guys! We made Sim City to work on your dad's PC, that's why the cities are so small! Of course, if you'd like the larger cities on your more powerful machine, that will be an extra £15, 2 months after release! Bargain! Don't be silly, of course it was a finished product at launch!"

- EA

 

[BoogieManFL]

So instead of leaving an option for those with PCs that can handle it, the best thing they can come up with is just to make it small and force it on everyone, and ignored the feedback of their testers? Really?

That makes no sense. To me that says lazy.

 

[OldNewNewOld]

snip

Sorry for asking, but how much do you get payed for this marketing?
Everything you wrote is either wrong or is better in SimCity 4.

 

[Maurice Harding]

so what we have is a £45 AAA facebook game.

oh and in befor the P3 relaunch with offline play.

R.I.P simcity.

 

[Dryk]

Seems like all of these problems are just arising from poor design decisions... there's no reason any of this stuff couldn't have been included as an option.

I've still pre-purchased this game, but I'm really concerned about actually NEEDING other players to get to the biggest buildings and "wonders". I seriously do not have any gamer-friends, and this guy says that you should only invite friends? Where do that leave us who don't have gamer-friends? And he also said that multiplayer is vital... so then I have to invite some random bloke to play for a while, who then might up and leave at any moment? Or what if I feel that this bored me after a day or two, what happens to that bloke's city?

The scariest thing to me about EA's current mentality is that they assume that you have friends that play the same games as you at the same time as you. For me that's never the case.

 

[Ed130 The Vanguard]

so what we have is a £45 AAA facebook game.

oh and in befor the P3 relaunch with offline play.

R.I.P simcity.

Ok, now that was a good one!

I doubt it would really happe... Oh who am I kidding? This is EA!

 

[ZZoMBiE13]

Wow. There is an olympic level of snark around here.

Almost every complaint I've seen in this thread is based on pure unfounded speculation and most of it is inaccurate.

I played in 2 of the 3 betas. If you don't want other people in your region, you have "private" options that will keep all the plots free of others. That's what I did in the last beta and I managed to build 3 decent cities in the 3 or 4 hours we had access to the game. One for industry, one for housing and commercial, and a third that I was grooming as a tourist trap with casinos.

As far as DLC and MTs, you have access to the full game for the base price. The Digital Deluxe version gives you 3 full tilesets to work with. And this isn't like SC4 where buildings repeat dozens of times over. In all of my plots there were basically no repeat buildings once things got going. If they want me to pay for them to make dozens of new skins for the game, I don't think that's unreasonable. It's not like you need the cosmetic choices if you don't want them. They're completely optional.

This is a good game, possibly a great game. I know it's fun to bash EA, but I just don't understand all the seething anger based on a few developer remarks.

 

[gmaverick019_v1legacy]

So they Diablo IIIed it.

But at least the plot will be better.

yup that was my thought

"This SimCity architecture is much more like the Sims. In the previous Sim Cities it was difficult to add any additional content. We built this SimCity to be 'composable', which is the best way to describe it. It puts us in a position to make more stuff for the game and to build more content. So we'll see what people want and ask for in particular and we'll make more content."

This game looks fun, but everything I hear about it just makes it sound bloody horrible.
I would be really hesitant about just letting someone in my region, so I'd probably just claim all cities on it and build them myself, for two reasons:

1) I won't get dead cities
2) If I want to stop playing, then I can and don't have to feel like I'm letting some poor guy's town (and let's be real, they're towns) just kind of die off with no neighbours.

In that case the game has no reason to be online, for me anyways.

also this.

just gonna stick to sim city 4, hopefully someday this game get's the diablo III effect where they consolize it and are going to patch in an offline mode.

 

[ThriKreen]

Its not chugging because it was hard to run.

Its chugging because you are asking a server from EA to run the program for you and send it over the internet. Have you ever WONDERED why the download size for simcity was so small and quick?

You aren't playing most of the game on your computer, practically you are just streaming it.

So what you're saying is you have no understanding of how a client/server system like this works, since it's not like that at all.

Not me, after the beta I had more of a hatred of it than anything else. I found it pandering. So stop generalizing.

Fine, you are, quite literally, the first one to not. Have a cookie. But considering you're making stuff up to justify your dislike of it, I'm not surprised at your attitude.

I've still pre-purchased this game, but I'm really concerned about actually NEEDING other players to get to the biggest buildings and "wonders". I seriously do not have any gamer-friends, and this guy says that you should only invite friends?

You can manage all the cities in your region by yourself if you wanted to, and can set up a private region to be invite only, and limit who can join. It can get tedious jumping from one city to another and maintaining it, but in some way it's no different than having one huge area in previous SimCity games, just less separation. It's up to you if you want to delegate the workload or tackle it solo.

Sorry for asking, but how much do you get payed for this marketing?
Everything you wrote is either wrong or is better in SimCity 4.

Nothing, I enjoyed playing the game and I don't like bad, inaccurate information that often gets spread around simply because it's an EA published game.

Like the guy above who is making stuff up so he can hate on it.

I don't know about better, some of the city management in SimCity 4 just got frustrating to me, laying out water pipes and power lines and such. It's a different game for sure, focusing more on a smaller scale parts of managing a city, less so the tedious nitty gritty stuff.

Don't get me wrong, there are some things I don't like either, like the fore mentioned lack of save slots. I too, wouldn't mind being able to save a city's state and test things out, and revert the changes without damaging my current city. Cuz you know, disasters and watching the civilians running and screaming and burning. Less likely to goof off now with the persistent game world. Like the nuclear radiation accident, which I have to deal with if I don't want to abandon my other cities in the region.

I also do wish areas could be a bit larger too, as sometimes it does feel cramped when I've got a super dense one and want to expand. I mean, there's that flat empty space right there beyond the city border, what do you mean I can't just claim it?

When connecting roads, I have to make intersections, but no way to make one way exits like you'd see on highways to improve traffic flow.

And overview of what services are going to and from what neighboring cities would be nice, instead of having to click on each individual police/ambulance/firetruck/garbage/etc. button to see the arrows. Basically a summary screen.

There's a post wall in the main menu region view to see news and post things to other mayors in your area, but it's not accessible without going out of the game mode afaik. I wish there was better chat options to coordinate, without having to switch out to the Origin overlay to chat to the other mayors.

Better context for what the Sims are protesting - Yes, I see you want better land values, but WHERE in the city? I've plopped parks everywhere, raising the value up a lot, but you say it's still low? The complain that there's not enough lower skill workers for the industrial areas? I guess when it's released there would be more information on how to better manage Sim needs and wants.

 

[ThriKreen]

yes, it is like that. The first thing I noticed when downloading the beta was how fucking small it was. It was then I realized that the announcement that the beta players told me beforehand it had a streaming-like architecture was true.

Me making up shit? you're the one playing marketeer right now, and refusing to point out where I am "making shit up.

It installed a launcher via Origin, then downloaded the rest from the SimCity launcher, like an MMO. I don't know where you get the small from, the game folder is sitting at 1.8gb which seems reasonable an install size for me.

I said it chugged sometimes, with a full city, due to my computer having to render the city and calculate the citizen actions and all that.

You're the one claiming it's all handled by the server farm then streamed to the client, which it isn't.

If you paid attention to any of the articles about it's networking set up, they said the game sends snapshots every 3 minutes (and maybe longer now that people have complained about momentary network loss). So most of the game calculation is on your end, then you upload your city's state to the server farm, where it would do additional gameplay calcs to send it to the other active cities in the region, and you get an update from their cities.

 

[Roxor]

Performance? Yeah, right. If they were concerned about the game running slow with large cities, they would have just used simpler models to reduce the rendering demands.

I think they're just trying to make you pay more.

 

[infinity_turtles]

It installed a launcher via Origin, then downloaded the rest from the SimCity launcher, like an MMO. I don't know where you get the small from, the game folder is sitting at 1.8gb which seems reasonable an install size for me.

Haven't played the game, but that seems small to me. Like ridiculously small. The only games I have on my computer that small are either small indie games, several of which are bigger then that, or games that are nearly a decade old. My Sim City 4 folder is larger then that.

 

[theultimateend]

To summarize: They've made a big F'ing mess of single player trying to make the games multiplayer work.

Multiplayer that nobody was asking for.

At least nobody I know or work for.

This is a good game, possibly a great game. I know it's fun to bash EA, but I just don't understand all the seething anger based on a few developer remarks.

I was in the betas to.

The fact that a historically single player game was nerfed repeatedly for multiplayer content that should have been secondary is aggravating.

They can also shut off your connection to the game at any time. I can still play Sim City 4 (and I do), I can guarantee you that I won't be able to say the same thing about this game in 5 years. That's a darn shame.

It's almost like the games had a strong singleplayer fan base were excited about a having a new game after a decade and didn't want a co-op focused multiplayer MMO.

Yet everywhere that I've read with people that had that same thought, after playing the beta they changed their minds and actually like the new features.

Not me, after the beta I had more of a hatred of it than anything else. I found it pandering.

So stop generalizing.

Yeah, I had two dozen people (well 19-20) in the beta with me.

None of us liked the emphasis.

That's not a huge sample size I admit but it is there.