The new SimCity | Hacker News Reader

The new SimCity

slate.com

35 pointsanigbrowl44 comments

http://i.imgur.com/u4DVg94.png

Always on DRM overloaded. Please come back in half an hour to play your single player game?

As my friend pointed out: "see if you can spot who got paid off by EA" http://imgur.com/E9Nkgyo

Playing around with the client some, that count-down is really misleading to users. It's not actually a queue, it seems to be a hard-coded "try again in 30 minutes" timer.

If you click the "Select Server" button in the bottom-left, pick the same server you are already on, it will attempt to connect to the server again.

EDIT: looks like I may have just gotten lucky when I did this before... it now just queues you from the start again. :(

That's exactly what it is; EA has now documented this behavior: http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9337036.page

Isn't it a matter of time before someone release a crack/patch that eliminates the online DRM requirement? The bitter complaints seem a little pissant to me. (Then again my experience with the game is limited to one 20 minute session on friend's PC during the first beta period.

I'm annoyed that they didn't release concurrently for Mac. Also a bit relieved since I can't afford to spend a lot of time playing right now.

It depends how it's made. They're probably running some logic in the "cloud" to make it more difficult, or even impossible.

Well if the game logic/state is all server side (à la Diablo 2) then you would have to reimplement the game client side to get around DRM. However, not all games are like this.

IIRC, there is logic that is done server side, but it is more of a basic simulation of the cities in the same region you are currently in, but are not currently managing.

For obvious reasons, the entire simulation couldn't be done server side. I've gotten numerous "trying to reconnect" messages and the game happily continues until it does reconnect to their servers.

It's hard to take a review seriously that doesn't even mention the always on DRM issue.

Or the insanely small limitations on city size.

Or the large amount of bugs. Or the lack of a save & load feature. Or the impossibility of customizing the starting terrain. Or the severe lack of information the game gives you (seriously, were are all the graphs?).

It's a step back on many many ways.

Whoa, you weren't kidding: http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/city-o...

I think the Giant Bomb quick look here highlights a lot of the games strengths and problems better than this hyperbolic statement of "seriously addictive":

http://www.giantbomb.com/videos/quick-look-simcity/2300-7103...

It looks really nice. I played for about an hour but it started crashing so I'll have to wait for them to patch it before I can really dive in.

They've done a great job improving a lot of the UI issues of earlier games. In fact, the entire UI is really nice. I'm not too bothered by the small city size. It seems like by the time I'm done filling up an entire city's land area, I'll have pretty much dealt with whatever growth issues there are and any further increases will simply be more of the same. I don't really care about the DRM because, for all intents and purposes, I am always online.

I'm curious about the ongoing plans for the game, though. I have to admit I'd be surprised if they don't eventually increase the limits on city size.

> I don't really care about the DRM because, for all intents and purposes, I am always online.

Sure, but what do you do when you want to play the game again in 10 years? 20 years? The servers will be long gone. DRM is going to steal away vast swathes of videogame history, which is a bit tragic.

It's teaching us all to treat videogames as a disposable commodity rather than something to be treasured. How much poorer would pop culture be if The Godfather or Lord of the Rings disappeared shortly after their creation, never to be seen again?

SimCity 2000 is nearly twenty years old, and it's still a great game. It's still important and worth remembering for all its innovations.

I don't have enough time to play all the good games that come out. I don't think I'll be broken-hearted. But I admit you have a point that it would be better if it was DRM free. It is still not a super big problem to me.

If you view DRM as a negative and you believe that there are more good games than you can play, you can subtract every game with DRM from your list, and still have enough good games!

It certainly doesn't annoy me enough to skip a game that would otherwise be at the top of my list.

My guess is that the city size has a lot to do with the CPU cost of running an AI for so many agents so until hardware improves or their algorithms improve they won't allow larger sized cities.

No Subways

Small City Size

No Thanks

They should call it Sim Neighborhood. That's more like it.

The article's title is" Bigger, Better, Even More Crazily Addictive"

So, have they ever played any other SimCity games?

Of course.

Metropolis DLC Underground DLC

Give it a month or two and I sadly suspect you'll be able to purchase all the features you'd like with micro-transactions.

"We're building into all of our games the ability to pay for things along the way." [1]

This kind of thinking from the games industry concerns me. If I've paid full price for a game, I don't think I should be nickel and dimed for more content.

[1] http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/187421/EA_details_microtr...

I don't think that microtransactions are wrong, per se, but I do generally find it to be in bad taste. But that's an art versus entertainment question and the vast majority of the industry (and its customer base) have landed very firmly on "entertainment" which leads fairly inevitably to caring about nothing except profit.

The first impressions article from Ars was a lot more useful to me:

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/03/simcity-impressions-we...

That article gives me the impression that it's more of a Sims game with Sim City bolted on than a real Sim City game.

That's absolutely false -- there are some obvious flaws with the game, but the complexity of simulation and macro-level focus is not one of them. I beta-tested, aka I actually got to play the game since all the servers are down.

The new Simcity seems to be immensely detailed and specific, every action has a reaction and so on. Could this be used for city planning, I wonder just how specific you can get to a real life environment based on land mass, population, placement, climate, etc? I can't wait to play it, but am definitely not a fan of the always on DRM that ships with the game as it just deters and annoys actual purchasers of the game.

This didn't feel like a game review, rather just an excited guy gushing over the nostalgia of the original games but it was still an entertaining read and got me excited for the game even if details about DRM and features weren't mentioned.

So many great games coming out this year, games are getting extremely intelligent and advanced. Watch Dogs (the open world hacking game coming at the end of 2013) looks great as does GTA 5 and of course Starcraft 2: Heart of The Swarm.

> Could this be used for city planning...

Yes, yes it could:

http://www.tested.com/tech/gaming/453186-simcity-vs-suburban...

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/MikeRose/20130219/186896/Usin...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5245249 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1286253

Except for that whole online DRM fun. The notion that you can't play the game if their servers are overloaded is outrageous. So now I can't just put it on my laptop and play it when and where I like, I need to be always connected to their servers.

Oh and no save/load feature. How stupid is that?

It's a seriously flawed game.

Sounds a lot like a graphical version of Dwarf Fortress, without a lot of the complexity.

Whoever makes Dwarf Fortress with a Minecraft-like renderer will be rich :)

Or even a user interface which is not totally alien to anyone under 30 :)

[EDIT] Before anyone jumps in, I do know about towns etc. but in terms of gameplay depth they are all DF Lite.

[EDIT #2] Totally alien to most people under 30 :)

Or even a user interface which is not totally alien to anyone under 30 :)

I am 21 and the game interface is not alien to me!

It makes me sad that all the Dwarf Fortress imitators are not only quite shallow (they're management/building games rather than full-on sims), they also have fairly terrible interfaces. Towns' UI is poor, Gnomoria's is godawful.

I don't really know what they're thinking. Sure they have graphics, but that's about it.

My thoughts exactly. Additionally, their obsession with remaining 2D is probably one of the biggest apparent design flaws. The whole point of a GUI to a DF-like game would surely be to render it in a more information dense, immersive way - not seeing that at all when we're dealing with isometric 2D.

Discrete simulation of every agent has been done before in 1996: Roller Coaster Tycoon. Each visitor would visit the park with a set amount of money, and would only spend their money if a ride interested them enough. Rides were modeled on intensity (among other factors). If a ride was too intense, some visitors wouldn't be happy. While if a ride was not intense enough, visitors would complain. All the while, your staff is out mowing the lawns, policing vandals, cleaning up vomit, and dealing with discrete interactions between every agent. It was a marvel in the 90s.

Other titles that model individual behavior are Tropico, Caesar 3, Pharaoh, and Dwarf Fortress (which has already created its own sub-comment thread).

I admit though, Sim City has always taken on a much larger scale. While Roller Coaster tycoon would scale to thousands of visitors, Sim City needs to scale to hundreds of thousands of citizens or even millions, on a much larger area than just a single amusement park.

I'll have to try it out, and see how it compares to the other simulators.

EDIT: For those curious, Tropico, Caesar 3, Pharaoh, and Roller Coaster Tycoon are all available DRM free download at "Good Ol Games" for ~$5 to $10. Dwarf Fortress is an ASCII-art free game with a niche following, but definitely deserves a mention in this category of "discrete agents".

I loved this game.

Question though: It was very closely modelled on bullfrog's theme park and although my memory is hazy I thought that also had individual agent modelling?

That would push the Date even further back to 94

Sim City usually needs to scale that far, but this version has a much smaller scale. The "cities" are only something like 2km by 2km squares. It's really more "Sim Suburb"

You can still have populations of over 200,000 in your city. Which is impressive given that all agents are simulated individually.

Caesar 3 was an absolutely amazing, amazing discrete simulation game - circa 1997/1998. Another one, as good if not better, was Stronghold - a Castle simulation game. What I loved about both of those games is that you would see the wheat being carefully sewn, then grown, then carefully taken up to the stock pile, people would take wheat from the stock pile and grind it up into flour, flour would then be carefully baked into bread.

All of this was just a crazy assed hyper detailed element of a game in which you were trying to defend your castle from invaders.

Final awesome discrete simulation game (on my iPad) was Settlers. In this case, the tool/market chain was circular. As eventually the ores and coal that you mined would be required for tools that like fishing rods that would catch fish to feed your miners, etc...

Those three games Caesar 3, Settlers, and Stronghold were the three best gaming experience in the last 15 years for me.

Still looking for #4. We'll see if SimCity is there, I'm certainly hoping.

I like how this article lies from the very first word (of the title). City size limits are tiny compared to earlier versions of SimCity, so it's the exact opposite of "bigger".

I'm pretty sure the DRM aspect of this entire thing is very secondary to the "significant server side work being done"

Yeah, servers are overloaded. Join the club of every other MMO ever. They won't be in a few days.

So it's like Minecraft?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com