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Comment by Pannoniae | Hacker News Reader

Yeah. Cities: Skylines just feels so soulless to me. It's like me looking at a model railway - it might look cute but it's just dead. The game is effectively a traffic simulator, with citizens not really having agency (beyond the Chirper which most people are annoyed by), and next to zero economic management. No mixed zoning or organic growth, you effectively run a completely planned economy. There's not much external trade or a real economy which needs all sorts of skills to function. It feels really eery and creepy to me.

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The goofy aspects of Simcity like the animated advisors and the music really made it feel alive. It’s why I still prefer the old ones to CS.

I agree -- I still prefer the stark simplicity and pure fun of the original "classic" version of SimCity, as well as the rich multimedia graphics, sound, and music of SimCity 2000.

This 1996 talk by Will Wright to Terry Winograd's user interface class at Stanford takes a deep dive into SimCity 2000's design, what made it so successful, and how it compared to other less successful Maxis games. It includes a retrospective of SimEarth, SimAnt, and SimCity 2000, and a preview of The Sims (called Dollhouse at the time).

I attended the talk and took notes, which I had Will review, and years later (after working with Will at Maxis and EA on The Sims) updated it with more details and retrospective learned by developing The Sims.

Just this year I discovered that the Stanford Library had finally published the video of that talk and many others, so I made a transcript and updated the article with lots more quotes and screen snapshots and analysis.

Egregoria looks really cool and impressive, and I'm glad to see it carry on the tradition, benefit from the inspiration, and learn from the successes and shortcomings of the SimCity and City: Skylines franchises, and other great simulation games like Factorio.

Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996) (2023 Video Update):

https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-s...

>A summary of Will Wright’s talk to Terry Winograd’s User Interface Class at Stanford, written in 1996 by Don Hopkins, before they worked together on The Sims at Maxis. Now including a video and snapshots of the original talk!

Will Wright - Maxis - Interfacing to Microworlds - 1996-4-26:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsxoZXaYJSk

>Video of Will Wright's talk about "Interfacing to Microworlds" presented to Terry Winograd's user interface class at Stanford University, April 26, 1996.

>He demonstrates and gives postmortems for SimEarth, SimAnt, and SimCity 2000, then previews an extremely early pre-release prototype version of Dollhouse (which eventually became The Sims), describing how the AI models personalities and behavior, and is distributed throughout extensible plug-in programmable objects in the environment, and he thoughtfully answers many interesting questions from the audience.

>This is the lecture described in "Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996)": A summary of Will Wright’s talk to Terry Winograd’s User Interface Class at Stanford, written in 1996 by Don Hopkins, before they worked together on The Sims at Maxis.

https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-s...

>Use and reproduction:

>The materials are open for research use and may be used freely for non-commercial purposes with an attribution. For commercial permission requests, please contact the Stanford University Archives (universityarchives@stanford.edu).

https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/yj113jt5999

SimCity did a lot of things right, especially the ability to upgrade your facilities rather than having to plop another whole one down like Cities: Skylines demands (apparently this is addressed in the upcoming sequel). And the 'specializations' in SimCity offered much more interesting industrial opportunities to pursue than anything in Cities: Skylines. Also the 'agent' system was used to simulate pressure over distance in the water and sewage systems, which made for interesting challenges in placing your pumps and treatment facilities. I still come back and play it every once in a while :)

You perfectly describe my sentiment every time I try playing CS. No matter how gorgeous it looks at some point it just strikes as hollow and disengaging.

<3 I feel this way with many other simulators.... They try so hard to have many things but there's zero element of "is this fun" and plain quirkiness. Good old Sid Meier's Pirates has more fun than playing these soulless games:(

The most recent example is KSP2 - they unironically have degraded the physics engine on purpose because the lead designer thought that wobbly rockets were fun. I think that person has never played KSP1, KSP2 is simply another soulless game with small injections of carefully controlled-dosage "fun".

The simulation is just so fake, almost everything that goes on is just decorative.

There is a budget, but after the first 30 minutes you'll always be running an enormous surplus without trying.

Citizen commute to work, but if they can't get there, the workplaces will continue to work, with some trivial penalty to efficiency.

There is traffic simulation, but if a jam forms, vehicles will start vanishing to unblock the road.

You can build public transport, but it doesn't matter if it's efficient, because the city's entire population can be standing at bus stops waiting forever with seemingly no ill effect.

Citizens will use parking spots if they're available, but if they aren't, they'll just disappear their car and reappear it later.

Zoned buildings get built and upgraded autonomously, but what gets built doesn't depend on economic factors, just on how many upgrade points are accrued from nearby services and attractions.

There is a large number of special buildings of various types that can be unlocked and built, but they all count as a tourist attraction and don't perform their actual function, they're effectively statues.

Cities Skylines is a bizarre un-game that has all the UX and presentation of a city simulator without any actual simulation.

It sounds like they tried to remove failure modes, when they should instead have figured out a way to forgive failure modes after they occur. That way, players could still fail but it wouldn't result in a death spiral that wrecks the last hour+ of citybuilding.

I think a lot of the issues are symptoms of a greater design issue that I don't think is solvable:

Wanting traffic to visually flow in real-time speeds without having a 24-hour (real-time) day cycle.

If you want 1 day to be 60 minutes, and someone's commute takes 10 minutes, that means their car will be on the road for 33% of the game time, when in reality, a 10 minute commute would be 1.375% of a day's time. The result is the overall, there's FAR more traffic on the roads in C:S than is realistic.

Industrial especially just spawns far too much traffic, far more than is realistic. If you think 1 factory produces 5 semi-trucks worth of goods per day, but they spawn all those trucks in a 1-hour period and have them drive at real-time speeds, you end up producing 24x as many trucks as you should.

But as I said above, I don't think the problem is solvable and still make a fun game. You either have to make an in-game day take 24 hours, or make the cars animate faster.

The train simulators that have city building as an afterthought often feel much more like a game than the city builders; probably because you have external forces acting on you and driving your decisions

It’s ironic since that’s the origin of Cities: Skylines. They were building transit simulator games (Cities in Motion series) and turned it into a city builder when they saw the gap after Sim City 2013 crashed and burned.

The sequel, from what it seems like, is focused on zoning and growth via land values, and does feature some kind of trading mechanic, though I guess the real proof is when it comes out.

The question that is hard to balance in sims like this is how do you make something like this a fun game. it's a pretty tricky balance.

Upcoming Citities Skylines 2 seems to have improved a lot on the simulation parts. Removing "pocket cars", giving more agency to agents, more types of zoning, hopefully more challenging economy, trading of resources with external cities, etc. So at least I'm hyped about it!

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