SimCity launched a decade ago, and it was so disastrous it killed the series
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I've read TFA, and honestly they also failed to mention maybe the worse issue of SimCity 2013: how limited it was compared to the previous instalments. The playable area was tiny, so you quickly felt constrained by the border of your playable area. The fact that you could build multiple cities in the same region alleviated it a bit, but it really felt limiting compared to it's predecessors.
Another point, which I feel is a good representation of an 'EA'-fied game: I was a bit miffed to discover that you couldn't create a subway system, you were limited to roads (I don't even remember if you could create a bus system). A few months in, I see that there was a 'Subway' content pack, which got my hopes up... until I realized it was to add 'Subway' sandwich shop in your city.
Same, they had a cross-promotion with Nissan, so your Sims would feel happy when they recharged their electric car, and the charging station has the effect of a park in your neighborhood.
Add to that the server issues, the fact that they said it was because so much computation was offloaded to their servers (which was quickly disproved, and felt bogus to being with), and the whole affair had a vibe of "Don't piss on my shoes and tell me it's raining".
It was particularly sad, because it really still is an enjoyable game.
EDIT: After a bit of fact -checking, I realize that I've mis-remembered the "Subway" DLC story. It was instead the "Metro" content pack (metro is french for subway), which was for a newspaper distributed for free near French subway entrances. There is also a Subway sandwich mod, but for SC4 only.
I'm so glad City Skyline had such a success, because I feel that other Paradox Interactive games wouldn't have existed otherwise.
As an avid player of Stellaris, and as someone eyeing the Crusader Kings series or Europa Universalis, I'm feel that Paradox games have DLCs done right. They are clearly on the expensive side, but they are contentfull, and feel less shameless than EA counterpart (especially with the Sims who has the same DLCs over and over again).
On a side note, there is also Caesar III (& Pharaoh) on Gog, and it's still a gem.
I mostly said that because of a gut feeling that CS is their main cash cow, while their others series are solid but with a more niche player base.
Might have been so in the past, but Paradox games are relatively mainstream, although they seem a bit niche.
Hearts of Iron IV is the 32th most played game at Steam right now (https://steamdb.info/charts/), while Cities: Skylines is on spot 56. Might have something to do with recent news or released addons, but still, other Paradox games are wildly popular and Paradox would surely do just fine even without Cities: Skylines.
More interesting stats comparing Hearts of Iron with Cities: Skylines
> Cities: Skylines - 18,280 players right now | 24,541 24-hour peak | 60,386 all-time peak 8 years ago
> Hearts of Iron IV - 32,652 players right now | 44,193 24-hour peak | 70,997 all-time peak 5 months ago
Really night and day in term of bugs. Idk what they did, better hire, better process or more people on it (or all 3), but it made multi-player bearable on EU4, and great on Hoi4/stellaris (I do not like the game that much, but it's a better MP game than EU4, let's be honest.)
Anyway, Hoi4 isn't niche anymore. It's like top5 MP strategy game.
The games Paradox itself develops are the grand strategy games in the Crusader Kings, Europa Universalis, Hearts of Iron, Stellaris, Victoria, and Imperator: Rome lines. The flagship games here are the strongest games in the genre, and even among the broader category of strategy games, they're definitely in the most-played games, with the main competitors being the Civilization, Age of Empires, Total War, and Mount & Blade series.
Probably parent meant the developer of the game, Colossal Order, which only developed Cities in Motion before, which was successful in it's own right but not on the scale of Cities: Skylines. But then "other X games wouldn't have existed otherwise" doesn't make sense, because Cities: Skylines is the latest game they've launched, and it was in 2015.
But it's a great city building simulator.
SimCity on the other hand is challenging to keep going throughout. You need to make thoughtful choices on what you're building next and where or else due to some quirk of the Agent system you're going to be on the brink of collapse (Why won't the power go down this one street??)
Obviously there's room for improvement on the SimCity front, but my point is that if you're looking for a challenging city builder, Skylines is not it unless you wanna spend time configuring mods.
Sounds like a great selling point to me.
But not for me, that's not what I'm looking for in a city builder. Different strokes.
Other than that, you can see what's included with every DLC on the C:S wiki: https://skylines.paradoxwikis.com/Downloadable_content. That way, you can decide which DLCs you care about and which you don't.
They do occasionally go on sale, so you can always just wishlist something and come back later.
Mass Transit is a joke, all the options are just memes.
Perhaps not as bad as all the BP solar arrays and windmills in SimCity Societies!
Game came out 3 years before the New Horizon spill.
The marketing hype leading up to it featured lot of outright lies in terms of how the game works. Compute was not offloaded to the cloud, but bigger than that there was the lie that every sim had a daily routine that was simulated and when a factory had an output it was an input somewhere else and that was all simulated like Factorio. It wasn't. It was all faked and not even convincingly well.
I have been hoping for a new city builder for awhile. Cities Skylines was great, but I am looking for something a bit more in depth. I think I want the original promise of SimCity (2013) with the transportation flexibility of Cities Skylines. Solving transportation issues and bottlenecks to make sure your city is operating efficiently sounds incredibly rewarding.
It's really rough right now, and frustratingly manual in places, but it does a good job of simulating resources at least. If you play in Realism Mode then vehicles and resources are dispatched and consumed realistically. (People too, but they teleport home at the end of their job and they don't appear to take transfers for public transit)
Once you can control all routes and trains, you can never go back! You get used to the control, the timetables, the organization that's possible.
It was added maybe 5 years ago, but as an Open source project, advertising for this feature is pretty bad.
It turns passengers/mail into agents who will perform 2 or 3 or more hops to reach their destination.
Every passenger (or mail or manufactured good) has a unique destination in your system that you need to get it to. They are roughly balanced based on demand (two stations in large cities will generate a lot of traffic between them, but a small town will only generate a small amount of traffic to and from a large city). It makes the transport routing game way more interesting and more like the routing of passengers in more traditional Sim City type games.
That means you can form "Hub and Spokes" for passenger traffic, and the individual passengers are smart enough to figure out how to route themselves to their ultimate destinations.
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Its the most "realistic feeling" traffic mod I've found of any of these games, honestly. Even Cities Skylines seems rather basic in comparison.
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I play on Passengers/Mail as CargoDist, and then all other traffic (Coal, Wood, Cargo, Oil, etc. etc.) as default / original rules.
I also set the "symmetry" of CargoDist to 80%. That is, 20% of traffic is one-way, which seems to be correct in my opinion? I think it defaults to 100%, but it doesn't make sense for _ALL_ traffic to be bidirectional (ie: for all agents to make a return trip each time).
EDIT: I do think that a "big mod" to OpenTTD under a new name would be beneficial to the project. Something that redefines OpenTTD's sizes (each square is supposed to be a square km, but it doesn't "feel" like it. Roads aren't a square km wide after all...). I think that if each square were 10m x 10m nominal, and then for all other parts of the game to be redesigned off of that (scaling up docks, rail depos, cities, etc. etc. as appropriate to this new size), would be really all that OpenTTD needs. Plus CargoDist Passengers/Mail by default.
Personally this isn't really a negative. I've found that I only care about "agents" when the scale of the game focuses on caring about individual units. Once you get beyond that, I don't think the simulation necessarily is more interesting just because it uses unique agents. And conversely, I've never thought while playing SC4 or similar game that "This game would be better if it simulated all citizens as unique units".
Its a different game entirely compared to games like Sim City or City Skylines. I've noticed that these "individual agents" games are very "unstable". They're only designed for a limited number of agents before everything goes to crap.
As such, "individual agent" games tend to be scenarios that you play for a short time, rather than trying to play for months on the same map (like Sim City or City Skylines or OpenTTD can be).
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Tropico Boom/Busts grow too variable and uncontrollable. You'll eventually have an island-wide boom/bust collapse that probably triggers the instant-loss endgame (aka: Soviets and/or USA invades).
Ceasar 3 / Cleopatra are reasonably stable, but definitely a smaller map and designed for scenario play instead.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox?wprov=sfla1
Maximize the distance of these singular roads, and build out your road system like a computer-science definition of a tree. Its not very realistic, but it solves more or less all the issues of Cities Skylines. (Or perhaps it is realistic, and matches the behavior of neighborhood planners in the real world).
In contrast, OpenTTD encourages hub/spoke model and recycling of centers. I think its sizes are off but the overall gameplay loop is correct here.
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OpenTTD's "traffic" is pretty dumb, but its infinite. As long as you've got high station ratings, the station will expand and traffic will increase. It doesn't matter what design you have, the traffic increases until you can no longer support it.
So OpenTTD is somewhat self balancing. The stronger a player you are, the more traffic you generate. The weaker a player you are, the less traffic you generate.
It absolutely does come back? I've had major traffic headaches from returning trucks. If I don't build rail for trucks, my cities are usually screwed over by that.
> Maximize the distance of these singular roads, and build out your road system like a computer-science definition of a tree. Its not very realistic, but it solves more or less all the issues of Cities Skylines. (Or perhaps it is realistic, and matches the behavior of neighborhood planners in the real world).
Trees create massive chokepoints when traveling within the city, so I don't think its likely to work in a large city (though if you squint, road hierarchy is somewhat tree-like, I suppose, though with more intra-branch connections). I suspect you simply haven't gotten cities big enough to actually have traffic, especially if you think most traffic is trucks. It does take a bit for personal car traffic to be heavy enough to be a problem.
The unique thing about car traffic vs station demand is that the overall speed depends on the quantity of cars on the road, with maximal throughput occurring before a fully occupied road. That's how you get weird effects like Braess paradox.
OpenTTD is much better at simulating public transit systems, Cities Skylines is better at simulating traffic.
Don't the trucks go into the Cargo station, and then disappear?
In OpenTTD, if you have a truck -> rail station, the truck drops items off, then have to return to Coal/Forests/whatever to pick up items again.
In Cities: Skylines, the truck hops onto the train, and then vanishes. Its been a while since I've played Skylines, maybe I'm mis-remembering?
> Trees create massive chokepoints when traveling within the city, so I don't think its likely to work in a large city (though if you squint, road hierarchy is somewhat tree-like, I suppose, though with more intra-branch connections). I suspect you simply haven't gotten cities big enough to actually have traffic, especially if you think most traffic is trucks. It does take a bit for personal car traffic to be heavy enough to be a problem.
Or maybe I'm just abusing the behavior of cargo stations too much.
The cargo-station "teleports" traffic somewhere else, and seems to magically erase return traffic. Use / abuse of cargo-stations seems key in making cities grow larger.
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EDIT: Ah, I misremembered. Seems like the return traffic does need to be accounted for. In any case, the industry -> Cargo Train terminal is really all you need to design against. With a proper industry block (or S-road / snake-like road), all industry goes to cargo train, and all of them return to industry, with no intersections potentially wrecking them.
Intra-branch connections are your mistake. Don't do that. If you're purely a tree-shape, there's no Braess paradox because each neighborhood (or housing unit) only has _one_ path to the rest of the city.
The minute you have 2, 3, or 4 different paths to reach the same house, is the minute that paradox starts to bite you in the ass. So just avoid it completely with a 100% tree-like branching behavior. One path means you have absolute control and force the little cars to go down the exact paths you want.
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Yes, roads and intersections will saturate. At that point, stop building in that neighborhood and build another branch of your tree.
I don't think I ever found a reason to do a non-tree design in the game, aside from simulating realism. But if you're just designing neighborhoods to minimize traffic and maximize population, a pure tree is the obvious approach.
IIRC, there's no residential-to-residential traffic. Its all residential-to-commercial, and then commercial-to-residential. That's why a pure tree works. Or industry-to-commercial, and then commercial-to-industry.
I do agree with the depth, something Cities Skylines was really lacking. Most of the logic of the game was quite shallow, and the people really don't live anywhere near as "deep" lives as in SimCity (2013). I'm hoping this is something they address in the sequel, but seeing as the community has rallied so strongly around the idea of creative designing vs functional planning, I'm not holding my breath.
I'm up for a challenge and I think transport is actually a fantastic gameplay element for the player to scale, but as it is the only way to "solve" transport feels like cheesing whatever algorithm is under the hood, rather than designing a transport system that makes any real kind of sense.
I have some beef with agent-based simulations in this regard. They're fascinating in the abstract, but IMO too many game devs are obsessed with it to their own detriment. Heavily agent-based sims tend to scale really poorly (an issue I suspect is true with SimCity 2013 and Cities: Skylines) and imperfections in modeling the agents causes extreme divergences at-scale that break the illusion of realism badly.
At this point I'd honestly much rather - especially with large-scale sims where you build cities of millions rather than a town of dozens - have non-agent-based statistical simulations. I want to build cities that I can imagine seeing IRL, not some metagame-game-mechanioc-defeating monstrosity that's optimized against the game's pathfinding.
Now I use a mod to unlock all the map tiles (actually, the entire map) at game start, and I build specifically around my envisioned future transportation needs. It's still a challenge, and I highly recommend the traffic management mod mentioned elsewhere in these threads, but it is not an insurmountable one.
It has been in development for 20 years.
It's worth mentioning that Colossal Order (the studio behind C:S) cut their teeth on transit simulators, namely the Cities in Motion series.
Incidentally, Cities Skylines 2 was announced just earlier today. There aren't many details yet, but perhaps that will scratch your itch.
> Same, they had a cross-promotion with Nissan, so your Sims would feel happy when they recharged their electric car, and the charging station has the effect of a park in your neighborhood.
That's kind of insulting. If you were to ask me "what's an environmentally friendly piece of mobility infrastructure that should count as a park" the answer is very obviously a bike trail.
more like SimTown than SimCity: https://youtu.be/GRLyvPi7X4c?t=131
> A few months in, I see that there was a 'Subway' content pack, which got my hopes up... until I realized it was to add 'Subway' sandwich shop in your city.
this is hilarious, but sadly sums up gaming these days
I have a rule, if it's an ea game it's going to be hot garbage.
This shredded the last bit of trust and goodwill Maxis had with me.
SimCity, at it's core, is an offline single player game. EA really fucked this one up.
Also EA already had the reputation of ruining every franchise they bought.
The series lives on through Theotown and City Skylines.
Seemly this happened to multiple people, trolls were all too happy to ruin serious players cities by spamming pollution near them.
There are too many people out there who make it their mission to ruin other people's fun.
C&C, WingCommander, Bullfrog, le sigh…
Nightmare prompt: “What if EA acquired Wube (Factorio)?”
Factorio 2 would come out this decade.
7 green science for 2 alien artifacts
5€ for 120 green science
it would kill the series for most but some happy whales and have docents of micro transactions and would be celebrated as huge success by EA management and biggest failure ever by everyone else
Thankfully, a lot of other studios have rejected this. Even though Cities: Skylines has its long list of paid DLC (some great, some meh), at least you don't have to buy them, or have internet to build a city by yourself.
Lastly, and this is anecdotal but, if you make a good game, and respect me as a player, I am more than happy to shell over money for it. I'll pay for quality. Penalize me, nag me, treat me like a child or a criminal, and my money is going to a competitor who doesn't. (I've always felt it was absurdly insulting to plaster anti-piracy rubbish on DVD's...that someone just paid money for. It's the same with games.) Forcing paying customers to suffer because some people steal things, is a losing strategy.
It seems like EA's MO in the early 2010s was to buy the rights to a successful game, strip the stuff that makes it unique, add some more cover shooting, multiplayer, and boobs, spend $100mil on advertising, then close the studio when they didn't get a return.
I would never buy a game that requires an internet connection (especially always-on) for a whole bunch of reasons, including those. Ugly connection screens or taking an annoying amount of time to connect wouldn't be the deal-breakers for me, though, if the game were good enough.
https://www.paradoxinteractive.com/games/cities-skylines/abo...
There are still modders and a very active community for SC4 for that reason alone. Reminds me, I need to install some city again
But the ultimate limiting factor with my cities was transportation. No matter how much I worked on mass transit, I couldn't get more than 80-90% of my citizens to use it, and the remaining cars eventually choked even fancy road systems into tailbacks and gridlock.
To be fair, this is a problem with real cities, too.
Not very realistic, but it's an utopia roughly matching what I would prefer so works well for my cities.
The main problem with the simulator is "shortest pathing" but the mods can help fix that.
I sunk a lot of time into Cities Skylines too, but the simulation has too many fundamental flaws under the hood. Drivers don't make proper use of turning lanes. Everyone moves in at the same time at the same age to new residential zones, and then dies at the same time. Etc. It's a good game, but the underlying simulation is hamstrung. I'd agree it's a more enjoyable "paint a city" sandbox, but trying to challenge myself with it as a game the way I did with SC4 doesn't feel as satisfying.
IMHO C:S is only playable if you use the TM:PE mod. (Traffic Manager:Presidential Edition) It gives you the tools to completely solve the traffic problems.
Whether this is an argument for or against your point is a matter of perspective.
There exist other mods that change the population sim; I'm not familiar with them. C:S mods ... well there's a ton of them. It's a pretty deep rabbit hole.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=20251...
Note that it is VERY easy to make the game impossible with this mod, and to make it painfully easy.
Compared to the sophistication of Maxis' UIs twenty years ago, CS' clunky interactions, awkward visual hierarchy, and downright amateurish typography are indeed a poor replacement.
The only way skylines 2 gets released is if they find a way to ramp this behavior up.
All game companies end up the same way in the end. Capitalism demands it.
Honestly I don't find the DLC behaviour that annoying with CS. You can get most of the DLCs on allkeyshop for $5 each. I've probably spent about $100 on the game and DLC and have had many hundreds of hours of gameplay for that, which compares extremely well with many games which are $60/70 and you get a 10 hour campaign max. $/hour CS comes way ahead.
If nothing else, consider the mandates from EA:
1. Make it "unpirateable" even if it compromises gameplay
2. Make it depend on EA's online service, b/c we need to sell that even more than we need the game to succeed
3. Make sure it can handle a steady trickle of "expansions" like The Sims
(Of course, it is not JUST the mandates -- the game was screwed up in many other ways as well. But the mandates alone would have been bad.)
The developers of SimCity should have realized that people don't play sim building games to play with others, it's a very much a solo game. City Skylines navigated this beutifully by letting players still play the game alone but also letting them collaborate through assets rather than through gameplay.
Any "open" SimCity-like game?
But for me, Sim City/Cities Skylines isn’t about resource generation as much as it is about just… building and expanding a thriving city.
I like the way CS approached this and made it a thing you can do to earn extra money, but it’s not strictly necessary (your industrial areas will auto-import everything they need).
Just in keeping with the times, look at the landscape of warehouses that surround the periphery of our major cities. What is that stuff? Amazon Prime "last mile"warehousing? Some other leg of an intermodal network?
(And I suppose server farms would be another element — perhaps a modern Sim has already added that feature to city expansion.)
Perhaps SimPort needs to happen — simulate the international container-ship and port traffic (+ rail, + trucking) and make it all about resource management, canal bottlenecks, supply-chain fragility... (SimSupplyChain — now there's an exciting title.)
If no one has written that game/sim, let me know. Maybe I'll play with the idea.
Could be a learning experience for all of us.
SimCity was a resource manager and city planning game.
City Skylines is a traffic manager.
This is the hill I will die on.
Although to be fair the dlcs improved that quite a lot (not enough Pol Sim, but I understand why)
So SimCity (2013) would be the most expected way to refer to the game.
Sure the name was "SimCity". But this is about the 2013 game, not the 1990s game. Clarity is preferred over 'Wellakshually Correctness'.
How many other hot takes do you have to share?
The title makes absolutely no sense to me.
It’s flat out wrong. SimCity obviously wasn’t released a decade ago.
But I'm more of a Cities:Skyline fan anyways-I'm glad the Maxis devs aren't too sour grapes about the competitor.
This almost exactly describes what I thought before I started reading the article. (And the whole reason I started reading was because of this confusion.) Except I didn't think "1999" because I don't know what year the original SimCity came out, I just know that it was more than a decade ago.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cities:_Skylines :
> "While the developers felt they had the technical expertise to expand to a full city simulation game, their publisher Paradox held off on the idea, fearing the market dominance of SimCity. After the critical failure of the 2013 SimCity game, however, Paradox greenlit the title."
Finally EA pushed the project too far and it imploded. Too bad, because Maxis didn’t reserve it.
I play sometimes Cities Skyline but - to me - CS misses the vibe of SimCity.
[0] https://twitter.com/MaxisScott/status/310835756107177984
I know I'm probably not a typical gamer in EA's eyes, but SC4 was such a solid release. It just needed playable regions (build multiple cities, join them together) and some more graphical polish. I'd buy that game in an instant.
Graphical polish would have been nice, but what the game really needs today is an engine upgrade -- it arrived just before the broad adoption of x64 and multi-core consumer CPUs, so it can't take full advantage of modern systems.
Cities Skylines really put a nail in the coffin of SimCity for me, the huge playable area, no faux online requirement, realistic cim routines and the amazing mod support (I've only used the steam workshop)
Now Colossal Order just need to make a sequel with more in depth mechanics akin to some of the mod tools made available (traffic management, I'm looking at you), also I don't know much about the Unity Engine but making the sequel more efficient on multicore CPU's is a must.
I’m sure the development team knew everybody was going to hate that so it couldn’t have been a surprise.
But that's the problem: it was really a multiplayer game, sold to a crowd who wanted a predominantly single-player experience. So users were effectively angry from day 1 simply because they were being sold something they didn't want; the fact that this also precluded them from salvaging a bit of entertainment from it (since you'd be booted out even if you had little or no intention to ever interact with other players), was a further slap in the face.
While that was the marketing line "simulation so complex it can't run on your PC", I remember there being an offline crack shortly after release and later one of the official patches even enabled it officially.
The server side simulation was a joke. It was mostly an excuse for why the game performed poorly and the cities were so small.
As I understand it, this wasn't the case, and the claims that it was were primarily bullshit to justify requiring always-online access for DRM purposes.
The always online requirement was just a form of DRM, and wasn't actually necessary for the game. EA even patched in an official offline mode in 2014.
I think you're right, but the misconception comes from the fact that EA actively played up the fact that they were doing work "in the cloud", to make it seem more powerful and advanced of a simulation (and to justify their reliance on the always-on network DRM).
We can only hope that every app/game that adopts this policy dies an excruciating financial death.
In that case, I do find it morally objective to say the person is "buying" a game. If anything, they're renting the game.
There were some game journalists muddying the waters with some assumptions about it back then, which can make it difficult to get an accurate retroactive historical context today.
I remember that's what they said, but I doubt it was ever the case. Wikipedia says the cloud functionality "enable[d] cloud saves and multiplayer functionality", and shortly after launch it was determined you could patch the game to run offline for an indeterminate length of time. To me, it was pretty obvious back then that it was purely an attempt at copy protection.
Beyond that, the game was just bad. The simulation just didn't live up to the hype, and while it did have a lot to live up to given its fantastic predecessor, SimCity 4 was old by then, and people expected a big upgrade. Specifically, I remember "sims not living persistent lives but rather going to the nearest available workplace for work and nearest available house after work" (Wikipedia again) as being a huge deal in the community back then. And then there was the limited play area, which was just ridiculous when you consider what people want from these games.
That was bullcrap. Soon after launch a crack showed up that made the game playable without a server connection, for the features that didn't actually need a server connection. EA just lied.
Not to mention that they made an official patch available 1 year after launch that enabled a proper offline mode :)
https://www.eurogamer.net/simcity-can-now-be-played-offline
As for this interview, I guess mr lead designer isn't allowed to be honest by his contract.
Unfortunately EA's lack of support for the game was definitely felt by us consumers. It started off well enough but instead of becoming a better game they turned it into a brand-tie-in DLC-fest.
It's hard working at an organization on such a long, ambitious project that the leadership wasn't prepared to support and didn't really believe in to begin with. As a developer I've been on such projects and I recall being invested in the work itself, the project, and our users: but getting management on-board to give it the funding and direction it needed was always a struggle.
Apple hit this problem a lot too in the early days of the iTunes and App stores. Marketing wants a huge midnight release with all the hype but the scale just isn't there.
The only way to go imo for this sort of thing is a staggered release, an invite system, or an open beta.
And it also sucks that stupid management and marketing decisions killed such an important franchise in gaming history.
There was so much dodgy slimy stuff going on with the publisher also, https://wccftech.com/kerbal-space-program-2-dev-fired-employ... the fact that they kept development closed for years, then release garbage into early access and charge €50.. I think they might have no intention of fixing it and are just making a cash grab now while there is still so much goodwill floating around from KSP1.
Imo there is an opportunity here for a smart small indie team to scoop them and make the real successor to KSP faster than the KSP2 team can fix their crap.
I mean, adding trees to a rocket game? Who asked for that? All they really seem to have done is make the game require a more expensive GPU for no good reason.
Note: Juno new origins is sort of a KSP sucessor. Its rock solid, but the ships are 100% rigid which definitely affects gameplay and decreases the challenge and fun perhaps.
"When SimCity got serious: the story of Maxis Business Simulations and SimRefinery"
Maxis / SimCity
BioWare / need i say what?
Bullfrog / Populous, Dungeon Keeper
--
Blue Byte / Settlers, Battle Isle
New World Computing / Might and Magic and Heroes of...
And that's just what I remember off the top of my head.
ea have always ridden trends mercilessly. and ms with its bungled launch of always online xbox. the hubris of those executives is a staggering in hindsight.
If they could make the maps larger and improve things like homeless/park issues (I've placed parks like crazy, increase the property values and density, etc) but always wind up having to bulldoze and deal with homeless people which seems like it shouldn't happen based on my understanding.
Go the no man's sky route and give us an infinite world to build on.
Then it turned into everything it was opposed to at the start.
I find it a bit shortsighted to center the blame for a boring game on its launch date debacle. Many other games with similar problems at launch became hits.
I'd like to see the entire city builder genre challenged by changing the perspective from city planner/god-mayor, to those whom they serve.
Imagine, instead of a birds eye view, you could only build from the perspective of a pedestrian.
Maybe in certain instances you'd have to see a wider swath of land for planning purposes (transit as an example), but it would be interesting to see how the forms of cities created by users change from this new perspective.
However, I'd also like the insertion of balance against the "god" part too - like eminent domain costing goodwill or stability points. Too unstable or not enough goodwill, and the citizens start acting antagonist against the player on some level (e.g. higher crime/fraud, causing less taxes, protests, people leaving, etc)
Almost like city-state on some level, but less about the political compass and more about city government interacting with the local population.
As frustrating as it can be sometimes, I prefer playing with fuzzier logic based on randomness. There's a great breakdown on EU3 vs EU4 that highlights this.
In CS, it'd be like if the economy went up and down randomly, affecting taxes or expenses, or if citizens randomly changed behavior patterns (e.g. started driving more when previously walked or vice versa).
I've been enjoying Workers and Resources because of some of this fuzziness is introduced by construction taking time and resources.
SimCity was the worldbuilder and they let you play in that world in a variety of ways. I must have spent hundreds of hours playing these as a child: these were basically my Minecraft.
What happened to their vision? Was the EA acquisition the beginning of the end, or did the magic start disappearing earlier?
Torpedoed by one bad business decision after another, despite being a promising game.
Found the problem!
I just keep playing the older versions instead.
I was heartbroken when I saw how they massacred and desecrated the Sim City franchise.
It was one of the early online-only cloud microtransaction trash games, like Diablo 3.
Skylines feels less like a game I want to play in my free time and more like a city planner tool. The graphics style also somehow feels much colder and more outdated in comparison.
I honestly think SimCity 6 with bigger cities and updated graphics would be a massive hit without changing much else - the multiplayer aspect of sharing resources, contributing to pollution, workers and students, etc is really unique and should be kept.
Even Skylines is too small unless you get the mods that let you bust out all the adjacent land areas.
I get that games have to release at some point or else some devs will be perfecting forever. But I can't count the amount of times a game was a flop at launch (and never recovered) because they needed to hit an arbitrary date and it wasn't fully baked.
Wouldn't the best interests of the shareholders be having a financially successful game?
If true (the whole article is unsourced), that is a classic failure of undergrad business 101.
I want to build cool cities full stop. I think what was more the problem is that a LOT of studios realized that a sim city clone works better on mobile hardware, because that's where the target audience is at.
Since then they did realize it and I was playing it with my fiance for hours and hours on end. With the multiplayer with multiple cities.
Graphics and disasters where not so much the problem in 2013 but they more or less screwed the game by liming it so miuch
That's not exactly free. (Not saying it should be free, but just don't claim it is when it isn't.)
As far as I know, Android apps can't be shared with other accounts, but all our tablets use my account, so they can all use my apps. Unlike with Steam, where they need their own account and their own purchase in order to play simultaneously.
So my partner and I can each play Civilization VI on our own tablets at the same time, but if I were to purchase one of the add-on packs in the game, that could not be shared (as there is no store-level way to distinguish a consumable sale like a free-to-play game's fictional currency).
Yes they can.
https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/7007852?hl=en
You can share purchased apps, games, movies, TV shows, and e-books and audiobooks from Google Play with up to 5 family members using Google Play Family Library.
the "diamonds" are mainly used to install mods from the mod store, however, you can get the same mods from the official forum and drop them into the mods folder without any issues.
again, you comment without knowledge. this is not a freemium game. it can be played for free with no significant limitations.
Time really does fly faster when you’re older.
I'm sure I'm forgetting other stuff that's missing, but they both scratch the same itch for me.
Not sure why they just didn't build a second one
I think the article is extremely charitable. They could have named every exec who made the call on the key features that brought about disaster (forcefully turning a solo game into a multiplayer one, underestimating requirements, etc etc) and instead they just said "EA", effectively absolving everyone but "the man".