- cross-posted to:
- gaming@kbin.social
- cross-posted to:
- gaming@kbin.social
Coming on October 24th… and this looks so good, I might finally upgrade my GPU. 😄
RIP SimCity, thank you for all you gave to gaming, but your time is even more over now than it already was.
I got my money’s worth from the original, but I have two major complaints about it that, from what I can see, the new game doesn’t address:
First, the developer originally made transport games and that bias shows. C:S makes it incredibly hard to design a city that isn’t car-centric, and gameplay in practice tends to center on optimizing car traffic at the expense of everything else a city-builder could be.
Second (and this ties into the first, to an extent) is that the game doesn’t represent the passage of time, in a technological or societal sense. Real cities grow and change over decades and centuries, with decisions made in prior eras imposing informing and imposing restraints on those made after. C:S cities exist in a weird, timeless and anachronistic “now” from the start. This was something that classic SimCity games did well, at least in the context of an American boom town: as the years advance, so does the tech tree, opening up new mass transit options, cleaner and more efficient infrastructure items, and new kinds of commerce and industry.
Personally, I’d love a game in this genre that plays like SimCity but takes in the whole arc of history, say from from the Middle Ages onwards, so that players can start to appreciate how decisions they make hundreds of years prior can leave their mark on the city in the present – for example, where a defensive wall gets placed during a medieval time of war leaves a mark of the street networks, and changes the way that that social classes distribute through the city and leads to a high-rent luxury district in a future era.
There is definitely something to be said about the game tending towards being car centric. One factor for this not even directly related to transport that I’ve noticed myself a lot is the lack of proper mixed zoning, which can be a valuable tool of creating more walkable and public transport friendly cities.
I do like the idea of a city growing somewhat more organically over the years. I think it would also make it easier to not have one specific approach to transport being the objective best, because your earlier decisions would probably have some influence on that. It does sound rather hard to me though to find the right balance of how hard to deal with those historical restrictions should be.
On the one hand, if somebody wants to Haussmanize their Paris I’d say more power to you, the bulldozer tool is in the menu. On the other hand, some mechanic like Transport Tycoon’s where local councils stop letting you build around them if you get too aggressive remodeling their town could be interesting too.
At the end of the day, though, I wouldn’t want to take to much power or of the player’s hands. Will Wright described those classic Maxis games as “software toys,” and the freedom to mess around and see what happens is both part of the appeal and how games like SimCity came to seen as educational.
I remember those classics.
SimAnt, SimEarth, SimTower, SimCopter, Streets of SimCity. Those last two were particularly cool because you could import your SimCity 2000 city into them and fly or drive around in the city you made. I thought that was the coolest thing.
SimAnt has a warm, weird place in my heart, not least of which for the massive doorstop of a manual that it came bundled with, full of all kinds of science trivia about ants, including something like a very long term paper or a small textbook about them at the back! What a different era that was.
I think someone spotted mixed zoning in the promo material, but we don’t have any real details.
Yeah, your first point is so true. I always wanted to build walkable cities and see if that would work, but without mods you’re just missing the tools.
Even when modded to hell I didn’t feel like my bike lanes or pedestrian walkways really helped to lighten traffic. My sims would rather wait a full ingame year in congested traffic to reach their destination, than just walk 10 minutes. 😵💫
Well even walkable cities are car centric, and will be for a long time, so it’s only logical that a game set in a strange “now” will be like that.
You’d need to have something like future Anno time line or what simcity touched (although only with like single buildings) to change that. And even most fiction is not about changing cities to remove cars, but changing cars (blade runners 3d roads, self driving in minority report etc)
It’s interesting how car centric it feels when their previous games focused entirely on building public transportation. In a lot of ways Cities in Motion 1 is more fun for me than Cities Skylines, building a better transit system in a static city almost feels like solving a puzzle in away rather than pursuing mindless growth. I hope they can capture that feeling again.