Electronic Arts bringing back ‘SimCity’ franchise after 10-year absence | Hacker News Reader

Electronic Arts bringing back ‘SimCity’ franchise after 10-year absence

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123 pointsrickdale69 comments

What I really want is a SimCity where I can build a "New Urbanist" city. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Urbanism

The SimCity games I've played in the past rely too heavily on separated zoning and car traffic, often with broken transit AI (sims don't go backwards to reach a nearby transit stop) and no concept of walkability. While I don't think you should have to build your SimCity in a new urbanist style, it would be nice to make it an option.

In my experience, what you wrote is true. But the insane simcities that this guy built, http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=N..., didn't have any streets.

This exactly.

The rigid separation of zones drove me nuts when I last played SimCity 4. Here in Vienna it's completely normal to have flats, shops and offices in every building. As far as I know this is even more extreme in Asian cities.

What I would love to see would be a triangle slider for zoning where you could for instance say this block should be 60% residential , 25% industrial and 15% commercial. Maybe some industries or commercial venues will require higher percentages to settle but this could also be an interesting tool.

Or no zoning like in some cities in Texas. Where businesses usually, naturally gravitate towards busy intersections and shopping districts on their own.

No zoning? I do not believe it. Or do you mean no-zoning like 802.11 is "unregulated"?

Its true. I know Houston is that way and there might be more, smaller cities.

Houston Texas is like that. A few other cities too. There are no zoning laws. It has pros (economic), it has cons (personal) but it does work in specific situations. It allows the free market to decide where it wants to go. Zoning sometimes fails because you end up with massive neighbors without a grocery store or business areas too close together without residential areas nearby and forcing people from other areas to commute there. It can get messy. But when there are no zoning laws businesses naturally gravitate toward heavy loud noisy streets and intersections anyway. Industrial companies naturally go far out where the land is cheaper. And residents go towards the areas that suit their lifestyle or that they can afford. It doesn't always work out perfectly but that's the theory anyway. Anyone from Houston please chime in.

There are no zoning laws in Houston but there are significant land use restrictions. Free market is such an ambigious term in discussions like this...

No zoning at all.

My engineering ethics class covered a case in Houston, which has 0 zoning of any kind (or at least it did in the late 80's early 90's at the time of the events we covered. things might have changed) and the effects of putting a heavy metal incineration plant near government subsidized housing and elementary schools.

Streets were basically pure downside in most iterations of SimCity. There was almost no point to making them. The second you laid down some road, you were incurring more problems than you were solving. As one of the posters mentioned here, it was entirely possible -- and maybe even optimal -- to design cities entirely devoid of roads.

I distinctly recall more than a few rail-only cities that flourished a lot better than any of my road-based or mixed-transportation cities ever did. Seemed vaguely unrealistic, until I realized what SimCity is actually about. At its heart, SimCity is about two things: 1) Acquiring residents; and 2) keeping the lives of those residents as comfortable and stress-free as possible. (Seriously -- the game would require you to take this to almost Wall-E levels of extremity).

I used to start with a little bit of road and override it with rail. Overtime my whole city was just rail.

That's what really annoyed me about 4. The lack of new traffic and urban designs. I really wanted:

- Roundabouts

- Traffic Circles

- Shared Spaces (no separation between road and sidewalk)

- Light Rail

- Street Cars

- High Speed Rail

- Bus Stops that didn't take up a whole block space

- People Movers (like the one in Miami, FL)

- Bike Lanes / Bike Paths

- Bridging neighborhoods together with sidewalks

- Walk-able Plazas that residents would actually use instead of being lazy

- Small 2 lane highways

- Bridge control

- Better street control so that every intersection doesn't force cars to stop and go.

And why on earth did they claim the Mono-Rail was the fastest public transit and best for intercity connectivity?! Monorails are notoriously slow and terrible for anything other than amusement park transportation.

Monorails aren't inherently flawed, are they? Isn't it just that implementations are generally older and not particularly high quality?

My largest complaint regarding Sim City 4 was that the transportation add-on was almost essential to the game, yet it was an add-on, and cost extra.

What's the distinction between roundabouts and traffic circles?

The terminology isn't fixed, but in my book, a traffic circle is where traffic on the rotary has to yield to traffic entering, whereas traffic on a roundabout has priority over traffic entering.

Roundabouts are typically smaller (down to a mini-roundabout with an island just a metre or two across, compared with traffic circles which can be hundreds of metres in diameter). As a result, roundabout traffic typically moves slower, and they're MUCH safer.

The "yield to traffic inside the roundabout" rule is the safer and more efficient rule, more or less regardless of roundabout size.

Is it just me or was SimCity a better game back when it was still 2D? Personally I lost interest in the series when they switched to full 3D. I might be willing to pay for an advanced SimCity game in the style of OpenTTD (http://www.openttd.org/en/screenshot/1.0/20101010_panswat_to...) I really like OpenTTD but you don't really have direct control over the city, only the transportation.

I don't think they ever did switch to full 3D, did they? Certainly, SimCity 4 was still in the top-down style. There was a competing game, Cities XL, which was fully 3D but never really gained much traction (partly because it was pants).

Well, SimCity "classic" was 2D top-down square tiles with flat terrain. SimCity 2000 was orthographic with terrain elevation but essentially 2D sprite graphics.

Maxis announced that SimCity 3000 was going to be full 3D, and in fact demonstrated early versions of it to the press, but the project was too ambitious, took far too long, and the technology was not quite there yet. Maxis almost ran out of money before they could ship it.

At that point EA bought Maxis, fired all the people who had been fucking around for years trying to implement the full "VR Cyberspace" experience instead of just the next version of SimCity, reverted to the original design of a sprite based version of SimCity instead of full 3D, invited the reporters who they'd shown the 3D SimCity and explained that now it was going to be 2D like SimCity 2000 but with higher quality graphics, and they finally delivered SimCity 3000.

Going 3D at that time in history meant that the quality of the graphic would take a huge hit, as well as the rendering speed, and fewer people would be able to run it because it would require a high end computer, so it was just not worth it.

Using 2D pre-rendered sprites means that the artists can use as many polygons, rich textures and lighting techniques as they want in 3D Studio Max, and tweak them until the sprites look perfect, and that's exactly what the user sees. You just could not approach anywhere near that quality with 3D graphics at the time. Of course things are a lot different now!

That was during the time that The Sims was also in development. One reason The Sims was successful is that it did not try to be full 3D, and ran well on low-end computers (the old computer that little sister inherits from big brother when he upgrades to a gaming machine). It used a hybrid 2D/3D system of z-buffered sprites, with an orthographic projection constrained to four rotations, three zooms, and only the characters were rendered with polygons into the pre-rendered z-buffered scene, using DirectX's software renderer.

I developed the character animation system and content creation tools for The Sims, and when the EA executives were reviewing the technology to decide if they should buy Maxis, to justify our approach I bought them a copy of Scott McCloud's book Understanding Comics, which explained a concept called "masking" -- http://www.themedianinja.com/glenn/legacy/default_links/anim... ...

Hergé's Tintin comics are a great example of how that works: The idea is that by making the background environment very realistic (i.e. rich pre-rendered sprites from high poly models), and the characters themselves more abstract (i.e. efficient real time 3d texture mapped low poly models), the readers (players) can more easily project themselves into the scene and identify with the characters. Much in the same way an abstract happy face can represent everyone, while a photograph of a person's face only represents that person.

The other fortunate consequence was that it was easy for players to create their own characters and objects by editing the textures and sprites with 2D tools like Photoshop, without requiring difficult 3D modeling tools like 3D Studio Max, so that enabled a lot of user created content by kids instead of professional artists, which was essential to the success of the game.

After looking at the "SimCity Announce Trailer Insider's Look" -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T70evBJE93s -- I have high hopes for the new version of SimCity, and I think it could be better than even the original ambitions of SimCity 3000. The best indication that it will be great is that Ocean Quigley is still the creative director, who's the original art director from Maxis, and he's also the one who came up with the hybrid "holodeck" idea that The Sims used.

He's giving a talk about it at GDC called "Inside the Glass Box": http://schedule.gdconf.com/session/13473480/Inside_the_Glass...

Anybody have a link to a presentation or PDF of the "inside the glass box" panel that is being discussed this morning?

The quality is poor, but these appear to be from that presentation.

http://www.hardwareclips.com/video/7183/Sim-City-5-Inside-th... http://www.hardwareclips.com/video/7186/Sim-City-5-Inside-th... http://www.hardwareclips.com/video/7187/Sim-City-Inside-the-... http://www.hardwareclips.com/video/7188/Sim-City-Inside-the-...

I wish I could up vote you 10 times. Your comment is a gem.

Both SimCopter and Streets of Sim City allowed you to import SimCity 2000 cities and roam around in them in 3D, which was pretty cool back then :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimCopter

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streets_of_SimCity

I like the idea of multiplayer, but I'm not sure how interesting would it be for cities to interact... sounds a bit too forced IMHO.

But then I had a crazy idea. Could we have a sim-city + transport tycoon in one massively-multiplayer game where people choose which variant they want to control? I'd pay lots of money for the possibility to play that. Imagine the situation where you actually have to look profitable to other players for them to invest in further development of your city by providing their services...

I imagine that multiplayer interaction would be similar to the 'neighbor deals' system in Sim City 4, with a few additional features.

What led to the demise of games like this? More time-intensive, slow, thinking games; simulations like these have always held interest for a lot of people. I certainly didn't become less willing to buy them. Combat flight simulators are another thing that seems to have disappeared.

I'm far more excited by this then by another mindless space-marine-kills-aliens game.

Once you get off the low-hanging fruit like cities, small countries, and civilizations (SimCity, Tropico, and Civilization, respectively), simulation games require domain knowledge in order to be fun. Since commercial games are aimed at a mass market and require higher costs for things like 3D graphics engines and game assets, this means that anything that narrows the addressable market, like requiring tons of domain knowledge to play the game effectively, makes it a less profitable investment. So you have to go for things that lots of people have domain knowledge about already, something like professional soccer. Which is why one of the best selling time-intensive, slow, thinking games out there is Football Manager.

I'm counting Football Manager over other sports games because in other sports games you actually control the players, whereas in Football Manager you only get to be the manager, and most of what you do in terms of buying and selling players, dealing with contracts, selecting players for a match, designing tactics and so forth are all classic sim-game stuff with lots of going through menu systems and toggling switches and moving sliders and none of the arcade stuff. Even matches you just sit there and watch (in abbreviated highlight form, or with an eye on match data), and occasionally make substitutions or tactical adjustments. If you didn't actually like soccer a great deal, you wouldn't really care; if you did, you might be willing to pay for new features and roster updates every year or two.

Combat flight sims aren't popular, but recent ones do exist; DCS currently has nice A-10 and Ka-50 sims.

Excited, until I remembered it's published by EA, and will likely require their new digital distribution service, Origin. Bleargh.

Dammit, well.... EA has the Sims 3 and Sim City 4 on Steam. I think they only did it with massively high selling games like Battlefield because of Steam taking 30%.

To add to this, buying the "limited edition" won't get you all of the content: http://www.31012.com/images/games/12/scpreorder.png

Instead, you have to dish out $80 for the "deluxe digital edition" which is of course only available on Origin.

Why do I see pictures of iPads and Steve Jobs on the side and top? Seems like a glitch in WP system.

I was expecting that that the game was aimed to iOS devices because of those pictures, kept reading waiting for the revolutionary touch interface to be mentioned

I never thought about SimCity (or any city planning game, really) on the iPad. In hindsight, it seems like a great idea. Most of the game is placing long strips of transportation and utilities, like power lines and roads, or zoning large areas. Both of these tasks are well-suited for a touchscreen display.

Unfortunately, it sounds like it will be PC-only (or PC/Mac, depending on which article you believe).

There is a version of SimCity out right now for iPhone and iPad.

Yep, there's a port of Sim City 3000 available on iOS and Android. It's not a bad port at all, to be honest.

The reviews of the iOS version are less than stellar.

I haven't had much problems with it, and have played it for quite awhile. It's crashed a couple of times, but never lost more than a couple of mins of gameplay. Definitely worth a couple of bucks.

It is due to the trend of putting as much unrelated content on articles to incite clicks to yet another slideshow/top X list and ramp up the almighty page view.

Here is a screenshot of the page with the actual article content highlighted.

http://demenzia.net/shots/online_journalism_nowadays.png

On most screens, only the title is visible above the fold.

(to clarify for future reference - there was a glitch in WP system that showed pictures of iPads instead of SimCity concept art. It is corrected now.)

The article references that it will be in 3D -- not a big deal to today's games, but I remember buying SimCopter because it allowed me to take my SimCity(2000 I think?) city and fly around in it -- including running missions through it. I hope they do something similar with the new build.

I'd prefer to see a SimForum.. "will your online forum thrive or merely survive?"

I was super pumped to see this headline, as just a couple of weeks ago I was browsing the wikipedia articles for the original series of games, and considered getting on some old school action, so I'm psyched that there's gonna be a new Sim City. I'm not psyched that the official site with the video links and new features, etc., is a gigantic mess of Drupal errors :(

http://www.simcity.com/en_US/game/overview

Looks like they got that straightened out.

> Bradshaw said the new title would simply be called “SimCity.”

What's up with this trend? It seems like it's happening with every movie, game, and TV franchise more than 10 years old.

Because they don't want to scare off people by implying that you need to play the older games first.

It's called a reboot, they use it to start the series over with new design principles and modern technology. Calling it SimCity 5 would imply that it was successor tos SimCity 4 or 3 or 2000 etc... when it might not be.

To take an existing example, Star Trek (2009) is not a sequel or a prequel to Star Trek (1966-2008). It's a new piece of work rendering the old line as complete.

The naming convention from SimCity 2000 => SimCity 3000 was not sustainable. The name SimCity 3000 was an over-promise, and should have been simply SimCity 2001. (See my above comment about Maxis almost running out of money trying to deliver on the promise of a version of SimCity 3000 that was 1000 years more advanced than the previous version of SimCity 2000.)

I had an idea a few years back to build a multi-layer sim-world game

You would have players create families of Sims, where they would have full control over their individual Home and families, then add on the ability to get elected to a sort of community leader role with control over neighborhoods, then elected Mayor with full control over the entire city. Maybe even add Governers that have some power over collections of cities to for a state and wold be able to build certain infrastructure between cities. Maybe add another tier above that where a few selected players would be able to become Leaders of Nations and create laws and create national Infrastructure and the like. Of course in this system, all players are elected to positions, creating a sort of Sim Government kind of thing.

Theoretically such a game would appeal to a wide range of gamers, from the casual gamer just creating a couple Sim families to the hard-core gamer with being able to manage huge and complex societies amde up of other players.

I've been fascinated with that idea for years - multi-layer largely independent games that affect each other. I've been playing with the idea in the board game space, for example, having a board game where the players are gods fighting each other, being played at the same time as a board game with the players as men competing against each other, with events in each game effecting the other. Does anybody know of any games (board or other) on the market that operate like this? I'd be curious to check them out.

Well, Spore is a multi layer game, but it's "Massively single player", and it didn't manage to couple the layers as well as was originally hoped.

One problem is that the different layers want to run at different time scales, so you have to decouple the flow of time of each layer, and somehow reconcile things when you move up and down between them. And of course a multi player game can't have the same clock for everybody, so players will get out of synch with each other. Spore avoids that problem by not synchronizing player time, just sharing user created content asynchronously.

Wow, time would be a big problem when designing something like that. You'd either have to decouple or market the different games to different types of players - for example a slow 20 minute a day empire-building game layered on top of an addictive grinding World of Warcrack type thing. Something to think about.

Thanks for the slicecity link.

And here is layered game, SliceCity: SimCity inside The Sims 1:

http://www.simslice.com/Slicecity.htm

Description: Slice City - "the other city that never sleeps". This city is awake and alive with hustle and bustle 24/7! Citizens use businesses, homes, parks, etc. for work and play, and these all cost you money to maintain. The happier the little people are in their habitat, the harder they will work, and the more profit you will make from them. Well-maintained cities can encourage more citizens to move in there. This will not only increase your population, but also your city size... and your profit margin. Cities that are neglected or not well-maintained will cease growing, or slowly deteriorate until they are nothing but piles of rubble. Using the various "disasters" (including a tornado option) can do that in much less time. ;) So to maximize your worker's output, keep all structures "refurbished". Your citizens may even help you do that on occasion too. And if you need more help, ask The Gardener. :)

The citizens also need power from the Power Plant to do any expanding. The Power Plant started in the "ON" position, but you can "Power it down" (by clicking on it) to stop your city from growing any further, and to keep your daily profits/costs stabilized (good for those that like the small town feel). "Power it up" again to allow for potential growth to resume (good for those that like the larger city life). City costs, profits and growth (if any) are calculated each midnight (between 11:55pm and 12:05am).

Lastly, click here for a few Slice City Gameplay Tips. If you come up with a good one, let us know and we can add to the list. We also have extra addon objects for you on our Slice City Addons Page. We sincerely hope you enjoy this, and if you have any questions or comments, please contact us :)

It even has its own add-ons:

http://www.simslice.com/Slicecityaddons.htm

I don't get the Post's headline. EA published 'SimCity Societies' in 2007 and an expansion pack in 2008, they even mention it in the article. With the inevitable impact of The Sims' mass appeal, and the industry-wide interest in broadening their market by making games, well, simpler, perhaps the article writer feels that nothing has been a "real" SimCity game since Sim City 4, I guess?

It's an important point, whether the series is returning to it's roots of complexity from ten years ago, or if it will be a continuation of the franchise's modern-day releases. But the article leaves a very confusing impression.

I suppose they might mean to highlight this is the first SimCity game developed by Maxis themselves since 2003, but with Will Wright gone and 10 years of staff turnover, is there really much difference between a SimCity game being developed by "Maxis" instead of by any other outside developer?

SimCity Societies doesn't count. That's like saying "The Sims: Urbz" was a part of the Sims series. Different developers just using the brand, it played more like a really dumbed down version of Civ crossed with Spore.

Oh, owch. You had to go mention "The Sims: Urbz", didn't you? I was hoping that was long forgotten. But yes that's a very good analogy between SimCity Societies and Urbz. An unfortunate case of brand dilution: Societies was developed by an outside company, and it didn't have much to do with the original game.

To be fair, SimCity Societies was an excellent game. But it was very much a spiritual decendent of Ceasar III and Pharaoh. I think the branding did it more harm than good; the people who love Maxis-style city games disliked Societies, and the people who love Impressions-style city games never bothered to pick it up assuming they would dislike it.

I really hope they dont make this an Origin only release

I'm really looking forward to this. Simcity was my one of my first introductions to a computer, actually. (Yes, I'm young.)

I am really excited about this game.

And I was just starting to get productive....

I was having a chat with a friend about Minecraft and how it's an "on ground" version of SimCity, at a much simpler level of building (literally) from the ground, out, and up.

tried to watch the trailer and other things on http://simcity.com but landed onto a fatal error.

I would really like to make a swimming pool without a ladder and a sim swim in it, and watch it drown evil laugh on the ipad.

Youtube link for trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kztNWdhRdnw

SimCity is not The Sims.

All I want is SC4, but with curved roads and properly lined up zones and buildings.

ohhhh this is terrible news!!! I am quiet possibly going to get NOTHING done as soon as this comes out.

So long progress, relationships and work...hello lost hours and regrets.

SimCity 4 still brings my current laptop to its knees. If it wasn't for the inevitable graphics glitches (which may in fact be my video card overheating, who knows), I would still be playing it regularly.

Its probably because the game itself was designed for single-processor machines and was never adapted to SMP systems. The graphics glitches are likely because the game depended on certain features of older GPUs

Maxis did an IAmA on Reddit about a day ago, and one of their responses addressed this issue:

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/qmi0w/iama_maxis_devel...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com