SimCity 5

Been playing 4 for a while, and while I love it for how challenging it is I still have some issues I hope aren't in 5, mostly to do with traffic.

I hope they make the traffic pathfinding and general traffic issues better. If there was one thing that bothered me about 4 it was how if commercial plots were what ought to have been an acceptable distance away your Sims would still write them off as being too far away or too inaccessible and thus would be unable to work. Boroughs actually having a connection to one another was often right out unless you did it exactly right, as was commuting to a specifically designated commercial area from a specifically designated residential area.

What bugged me about it especially was that there were ostensibly all sorts of ways you could alleviate the traffic problem and get your Sims to places easy, except then you would place them and the Sims would never use them. It's why I hated highways, monorails, pretty much anything but the trains and buses (which would get used, and even then not as often as you'd think) - you would pay a crapload of money and make room for a lot of space for these transportation systems only to see them never used no matter how conveniently you constructed them.

I call it "roller coaster tycoon syndrome," where Sims are debilitated by things that common sense would dictate are not actually all that bad, thus forcing the player to play quite specifically in order to appease them (named after how in the first Roller Coaster Tycoon guests would write off coasters as being "ultra extreme" if they had more than one or two drops in them, no matter how steep or long).

And of course the pathfinding was broken in general anyway - there's that loop where a Sim will enter a neighbor town and not really be able to leave, thus sucking your Sims out of town and making your commerical unable to grow. Also, similar to that was the issue where the pathfinding would decide to take the Sim through another city in order to get to their job in your city - because they would path to the edge of the map instead or something, thinking it shorter. As a result, they would never get to work and, again, your city would never grow. I only found out about this when I searched online for answers to why even though I tried to do everything I needed to my city wouldn't advance.

That led to a whole plethora of other problems, of course. Since you couldn't actually control where commercial plots were, you could often end up with the problem where you might want to alleviate the issue of jobs being too far away by, say, putting down commercial plots next to your residential instead of creating a "downtown" area, but you wouldn't actually see growth there and instead you would get offices in other places.

At least Sim City Societies did something right: sometimes, when the city wants an apartment, or a project, or an office building to be built somewhere it gets built there, and you don't have to go through a plethora of objectives to make them a possibility.

So yeah. Fix traffic, please. Also, I hope they allow more direct control over zoning and construction management.

edited 21st May '12 8:57:05 PM by KnownUnknown

For once out of a friggin hundred times, let this game not be spec-intensive

"Spec-intensive?"

Hardware-intensive.

Meaning, I think, that it shouldn't need two gigs of dedicated video memory, eight gigs of RAM, and a water-cooled overclocked i7 to run on normal settings.

And I agree with the traffic and path-finding thing. From what little we've seen, it seems to work okay, but that's with a small town. Things tend to go to complete crap after awhile, say, after fifty-thousand population or so.

edited 22nd May '12 3:11:03 PM by pvtnum11

Maxis has been dialing down the system requirements for the previous The Sims games in order to reach a wider audience, so I'll assume that they're following the same strategy again.

After the colossal fuckup with Diablo III, I'm avoiding this game. The Sim City Social sounds better.

^ Are they made by the same people or something?

Always on DRM. Not doing it again. Fuck them.

Just found out about this game. DRM is one of the reasons I haven't gotten a Maxis game since Sims 2, and while the "always-online" requirement may not be strictly speaking for DRM reasons, that may be because they're trying to expand on what they did with Spore, turning Sim City into an MMO or at least Cityville writ large. The description of resource play I read originally gave me the sense that it was a way of kiddifying the game, suggesting they hadn't completely learned the lesson of Societies, though I guess I am familiar with similar things from "historical" city sims like Caesar III (and later Civilization installments).

Then I saw the videos and got the sense that they really did learn their lesson from Societies, and the game certainly seems to be a logical evolution of the path set out by SC 4 and prior games. But if the "global market" turns out to be a core feature of the game - and the fact those coal plants have to get their coal from somewhere suggests it might be - then I'm out. It doesn't help that, while the new engine may provide the elements for fixing SC 4's infamously buggered pathfinding, the description of how job sites find workers sounds not entirely dissimilar to Caesar III, a game with even worse pathfinding than SC 4. (I'd almost like to see some of the people who worked on SC 4 and maybe this game break off from Maxis, join with some of the better SC 4 modders, and release their own city-building game.)

By the way, someone mentioned upthread linking Sims games into Sim City and importing Sims 1 sims into SC 4 or the SC 2 K spinoffs. I wanted to mention that you had the ability to use SC 4 to create Sims 2 maps, though only the terrain and road layout.

It's impossible, but I agree with you.

Fuck always-online DRM.

So, I sat through the 17 minute presentation of Sim City and went from "Fuck the DRM. Not getting it" to "Fuck YES. I'm getting it."

Yeah, fuck DRM, but I want the game anyways, so, temptations wins

SimCity Social is a kind of game where you need 5 suckers who are playing this game alongside you, and are your friends in order to progress anywhere. I'm having a bit of fun with it, but the greed for Diamonds scare me

Thats depressing.

It's the irritating truth behind a lot of Facebook/Social games. A lot of them are really fun games held back by the fact that you're required to have friends who also want to play it do to anything beyond the first few levels.

I mean, you can play them, but they move at a snails pace and most of the content is denied you.

So this looks fun. Only headache is that it uses Origin, and I'm less than impressed about how that works.

I wish EA Games and Valve got along like they used to...

My problem with EA's handling of both Sim City and The Sims is how they just send mixed messages.

Like, frankly, both this and The Sims 3 have lots of awesome things in them, but at the same time, so much bad management with pricing, glitches, etc. And they don't seem to understand that they have tons of potential customers who a) don't have the kind of internet capabilities to have constant on-line play and b) prefer to play by themselves independently anyway.

But at the same time, DAMN this looks so awesome at the same time. See what I'm getting at?

...so how long before the first Something Awful or 4chan "trollcession"?

A New York minute, I guess.

They make it sound interesting but it's probably going to fail miserably. Maybe if we could simulate war, I'd be inclined to buy it.

...I don't think combat is an option in Sim City...

So, I want this game to have great music. Not just great music, but really great music.

Like, the kind we got in Sim City 3000. They still have Jerry Martin, right? Even if they've been having him dial back the jazz in The Sims?

Also, anyone else think we should have a general Sim Series thread?

edited 11th Oct '12 11:24:48 AM by KnownUnknown

Sim City 4 has some pretty cool music, I think.