racketboy.com

There's going to be a new SimCity. What do you think of it so far?

I have to say I'm extremely wary. Extremely, extremely so. From being forced into online mode to the smell of socialized gameplay, there are so many negatives things I'm infering that the game would extremely surprise me if it were good.

First of all, we have the designer talking about how the game now has goals and objectives because gamers today don't want a sandbox:
http://www.vg247.com/2012/03/28/maxis-s ... -of-games/

And EA is quite pushing the idea of online leaderboards and rewards, which makes me think their heart is not in the right place:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3oFKhftK88

There has been a lot of talk about several resources and focus on special buildings like casinos, which will probably be the focus of the game. We know that there are going to be touristic cities, research cities and so on, and while I welcome the idea, I don't think the execution will be interesting after seeing the gameplay trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvpjZkAzXKQ

And then you have the confirmed lack of features like no terraforming and no regional networks, which just seem bad. And when the series was already ruined once, pardon me for not being optimisic

But there's one thing I like and thats the removal of pipe systems. It was always kind of pointless, gameplay-wise.

I'm okay with them removing pipes, but I'm a bit annoyed about the lack of powerlines.

Anyways, I'm very interested, but, I don't know that I'll approach it with the same mindset I'd approach SC4 with. While I'm okay with removing some of the redundancy, and the social aspects seem cool I don't like that I'm:

Forced to be online.
Almost forced to interact with other people to have a nice city
The removal of many sandbox features.

I have the feeling that a lot of this isn't on the part of Maxis, but, more the corporate at EA. I'll have to dig up the article somewhere, but, EA has basically said they wont publish any more games that don't have some sort of multiplayer component. That or Maxis has literally lost anybody and everybody that made them great and have finally gone all the way off the deep end.

General_Norris wrote:I have to say I'm extremely wary. Extremely, extremely so. From being forced into online mode to the smell of socialized gameplay, there are so many negatives things I'm infering that the game would extremely surprise me if it were good.

So you want socialized medicine but not socialized gameplay. You sound like a freeloader to me.

On topic, I haven't liked a SimCity since 2000. To me it felt like that game had the right amount of complexity and things to juggle without getting bogged down.

The game is going to be a joke.

All the amazing studios (from the "golden age" of PC gaming if you will) that EA absorbed have been destroyed and their intellectual property pissed on.

The "team" building this game has absolutely no understanding of what actual players that remember the series would want in a city building sim. I recommend they go back to SimCity 2000, spruce up the engine for modern day computers, tweak the economics and expand upon the options for city development/maintaining multiple connecting cities, etc. The core of the game is amazing, and with some freshening for how things have changed in the past decade it would continue to be so.

..but I guess that just doesn't sell games these days.

Since I have no real experience with SimCity besides 4. It looks pretty cool from this gameplay video.

Great. Another game with the exact same title as a previous game in the series.

Just wait. Microsoft is going to announce that their next console is called "Xbox".

I hope they don't turn this game into sim city social...

So this game has had a pretty controversial release.

Always-on DRM, no offline mode, and the game (from what I've read) is basically broken.

I hope they fix it and get rid of the DRM. I'd love to eventually play it.

i read that it requires you to join their servers (EA's steam like service) to "play" the game.....IF you can connect to the server that is..



$60 for this game....i'm sticking to the original.