From SimCity to SimCity: The history of city-building games | Hacker News Reader

From SimCity to SimCity: The history of city-building games

arstechnica.com

73 pointsdoppp39 comments

If you like city building games and have not tried Cities: Skylines yet, you definitely should! It does all the basics right, is truthful to the genre but has a modern feel to it. Not too complex but rich and versatile. In particular, the traffic simulation is very impressive! And it's one of those games my wife enjoys playing so we can have some quality time together.

Only negative thing I have to say about it: once my city starts getting bigger, it gets a bit sluggish on my old crappy PC. It is one of the two games that is forcing my hand to buy a new gaming PC.

Cities: Skylines is what Simcity (2013) was supposed to be.

Spot on!

I wonder if the developers had set their mind on building a city builder game before SimCity's non-success or did they realize the market gap and go for it reactively.

They already had a pretty decent city and traffic simulation engine in their earlier Cities in Motion games (which I didn't like nearly as much, perhaps because I was really bad at it). So it's feasible (but still awe-inspiring) if they put Skylines together in that timeframe.

cities in motion was very interesting but the scope was a little too small and forced. there were some interesting mods tho.

so far my preference goes to sim city 4 deluxe + rush hours. that has a very good traffic simulation and does a good job of simulating cities, has a lively modding community and it's quite cheap.

haven't tested yet skylines, waiting for a sale.

At a gameplay level, I'd generally agree. But there are some things that the SimCity series got right that Skylines could have done a lot better with:

certain gameplay aspects graphics music user interface

SimCity (2013), despite some failings in gameplay, still gets a lot of things right.

Now why some people might not care about the things I enumerated above, I do. I've been playing SimCity since the original classic was first released. For me personally, the peak of SimCity was SimCity 2000 or possibly SimCity 4 Rush Hour in gameplay terms, but graphically, SimCity 2013 was the most desirable.

While Skylines certainly has that core gameplay feel to a certain extent that Simcity (2013) was missing, it's clearly not yet the best the developers are capable of. I think the next iteration they release will be the one that many have been waiting for.

I played C:S for a while at release, but quickly got to the point where everything but the traffic simulation aspect just felt really thin, gameplay-wise. Didn't really measure up to SC4 to me. Have patches/expansions/mods deepened the experience much since release?

There's a few traffic related mods (traffic++ or something like that) that open up lots of new possibilities (but requires a beefy computer). A few updates also introduced new features with some versatility. And a new extension pack added tourism and some other stuff.

It's probably worth giving a new shot, I guess.

I loved C:S up until the point when my first city had all of the available building types. After that, it got very thin. Rinse / repeat. Do the same thing you did here, but again over there.

It's a fun game but I just didn't feel as involved as the SimCity series (prior to the latest, which was a disaster).

Agreed, it's not as deep as SC4. Colossal Order has a lot of plans for DLC, and in the meantime there are mods and assets all over the Steam Workshop. It's enough to tide me over until they reveal their next expansion. :)

Did you try playing in "Hard mode"?

I feel like C:S seems shallow to people because the first and only real challenge in the game is traffic. Most of the elements that are challenging in Sim City actually do exist in C:S, but the game is tuned such that you have enough money to buy your way out of any problem.

Sim City games force you to make many difficult decisions because your funds are so limited. I hope that in the future the C:S developers make note of this, and they take the time to tune their games to replicate that challenge.

I feel the same about the game. And the expansion unfortunately doesn't add anything interesting gameplay-wise.

I had to return that game because it was totally unplayable on a 2009 iMac with Radeon 5850. That should be plenty of computer but there's this obnoxious cloud simulation over the top of everything that pegs the GPU. Pretty sad.

> I had to return that game because it was totally unplayable on a 2009 iMac with Radeon 5850. That should be plenty of computer

Skylines came out only this year. 6 years is a long time in the gaming world. I wouldn't expect to play many games from this year on any computer from 2009.

Lots of games run fine on this computer including games that came out this year or recently, including Kerbal Space Program, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, XCOM: Enemy Unknown and XCOM: Enemy Within, and Papers Please. Cities: Skylines is the only one that was a slideshow, which is weird because city sims don't need graphics. I'd be perfectly happy with Transport Tycoon-level graphics from 20 years ago.

> Papers Please

That could potentially run on a Pentium 4 with integrated graphics, not exactly the best comparison. Great game, but not sure why you felt you needed to include it in that list.

Quite a few of those games are not overly demanding either and mostly forgiving of older graphics cards. If you can run things like Arma 3, Witcher 2 or 3, I'd be more curious.

Cities Skylines is a simulation, it's going to eat up a lot of CPU and a lesser extent, GPU.

I can run The Witcher 3 with quite playable performance. Pertinent system specs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10372389

If Bohemia Interactive wrote ARMA 3, I wouldn't take its requirements for a beefy machine as indication of anything other than the... interesting design choices those guys make when designing and implementing their games.

I'm playing Cities: Skylines just fine on a ~2009 computer (Core i5 750, Radeon HD 5850), on Windows. So the difference is in the software.

That's interesting. I'll admit I haven't tried it under Windows. Maybe it works fine under that OS.

> I wouldn't expect to play many games from this year on any computer from 2009.

I run many, many, many recently released (and not-yet-released) big-name 3D games on 5 [0] and 6 [1] year old hardware.

Console-first development has done terrible things to video game design, but it has let cheap bastards like myself get enormous mileage out of our gaming rigs.

(BTW: Cities runs juuuuuuuuust fine on my "ancient" PC. :) )

[0] Radeon HD 6950

[1] AMD Phenom II X4 955

Did you swap the video card? The 2009 iMac didn't come with a Radeon 5850.

Indeed. After 5 years the original GPU developed some kind of intermittent flaw so I swapped it out with the board (and cooler) from a mid-2010 iMac. It's an easy swap. Mac OS X identifies it as a Radeon 5750 but Windows calls it a 5850. Either way, I believe it's very similar in performance to the original 4850 that was the top spec in the late-2009 iMac.

Yea, I totally agree. My Commodore 64 didn't even know what to do with the game. Pretty sad indeed. I don't understand why developers choose to go after markets of majority, rather than developing in accordance to what my machine is. I mean, it has 64,000 bytes in RAM, and although I don't have a firm grasp on even simple computing requirements, 64,000 of anything is a lot and should be able to play the most modern games.

You'd do well to peruse a few of the replies to the person you replied to. Your brief screed is rather off the mark.

Good grief.

Checking the game's subreddit totally sold it to me https://www.reddit.com/r/CitiesSkylines/top/ it's amazing how advanced the game is. Basically, it doesn't impose any limits. Just like in Democracy3 you can build and test your politic ideas, here you can do the same with urban planning, etc. Patiently waited (if you add a game to steam wishlist, you get an email when it goes on sale, great marketing idea, win-win for all parties involved) for a sale and grabbed it the last weekend :)

It also has really good modding support, which is fun.

Any discussion about city builders without discussing Cities:Skylines is crucially out-of-date. The game set a new, extremely high standard for the genre. Each denizen has a family, a career and travels around the city as an autonomous entity fulfilling his day to day errands. The consequences, especially on traffic, is a fascinating thing to comprehend.

Where the latest Simcity was a low quality sham, Cities:Skylines was a wonderfully put together game that anyone interest in the genre needs to play.

Reminds me of Endless Legend vs Civilization Beyond Earth. When the main series of a genre stagnates, its great to see smaller studios do it different and better.

> Any discussion about city builders without discussing Cities:Skylines is crucially out-of-date

Cities:Skylines is discussed in the article though. There's a few paragraphs on it right at the end of the piece.

> The game set a new, extremely high standard for the genre. Each denizen has a family, a career and travels around the city as an autonomous entity fulfilling his day to day errands. The consequences, especially on traffic, is a fascinating thing to comprehend.

I'm surprised it wasn't done like this before - it's kind of the most obvious and "right" approach to model it. Why is that? Computational reasons?

Computational, and also how much does it add to the 'fun' in the gameplay? City builders aren't about modeling how real cities work, they're about providing a fun gameplay experience. Which is fine, but orthogonal to the question of whether modeling agents in the way mentioned is the 'best' way to model a urban system (to which the answer is a solid 'maybe sometimes', but that's a different discussion...)

It's my personal opinion, but I find optimizing games for fun directly makes them very shallow. In case of a sim game, I'd much prefer it to be hard due to an accurate simulation, than simplified to improve enjoyment. The former can actually teach you something, and you can also apply real-world knowledge to improve your chances.

But then again, I'm a weird player who likes things like Dwarf Fortress and considers Kerbal Space Program to be the best space game ever made.

I think it's largely a business decision.

You need to find a balance between really heard and appealing to more niche audience (resulting in a relatively high game price). Some games like KSP went fairly mainstream, but they did a ton of work to be appealing to a wider audience, not only space enthusiasts.

At the other end of the spectrum, you have easy games which appeal to larger, more casual audiences but like you've said are a bit shallow.

In this regard, C:S hits a good balance.

I've been hearing nothing but praise about C:S (and I've seen some fun videos of abusing dams and hydroelectric plants to create tsunami waves); I'm definitely going to buy it.

Of course, 'fun' means whatever stimulates your target audience most and longest. Which is orthogonal to my point that games are or should be about mimicking reality (because let's face it, otherwise nobody would have ever made it through the first room in Doom).

The problem of today's games is that the target audience is "everyone who can pay", which naturally leads to very shallow experience, designed for the lowest common denominator.

> Each denizen has a family, a career and travels around the city as an autonomous entity fulfilling his day to day errands. The consequences, especially on traffic, is a fascinating thing to comprehend.

I thought this, too, initially.

Thing is, each denizen moves... either once a month or once every couple of months. This has profound consequences for traffic. Sadly, it means that traffic problems that you thought you had licked come roaring back later in the year because -as it turns out- you didn't solve the problem! The traffic causing the problem just disappeared for an extended period of time.

When you combine this with the absolutely essential traffic deletion mechanic, [0] the woefully inadequate freight and train pathing, [2] and non-existent train path control tools, the more I got into the game the less pleased I was with it.

Don't get me wrong, I've seen a lot of SimCity 2013. Cities is far, far, far better than that game. I also fire up Cities from time to time and enjoy wasting a few hours on a small-to-medium-sized city. It's just... given the pedigree of the author, I expected a far better traffic simulator than what they delivered. [3]

[0] There's a mod out there to disable traffic deletion [1]. I used it in a city that had several cargo train stations. The cargo train stations could not absorb returning delivery trucks fast enough to prevent months-long gridlock. It was a disaster.

[1] Traffic deletion is the thing that erases cars, trucks, semis, and trains from the game if they've taken too long to get to their destination.

[2] It's trivial to deadlock trains. The author of the traffic deletion disable mod mentioned that he would never turn off deletion for trains because of how essential that feature was.

[3] Hell, I was completely unprepared for the train wreck (ha!) that was and remains the train navigation system.

A-Train should be in there. It inspired SimCity 2000's isometric view and was also a great game to boot with a strong economic system (ledger, stocks, taxes, capital gains, etc).

I don't know if it's only nostalgia, but I feel strongly about old programs attempt at conveying conveying / display complex things through limitations of the era.

http://www.mobygames.com/images/shots/l/87549-a-train-constr...

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