Sim City 5

[Leonid Brozhnev]

Aw yeah, going to mod myself some communisms into this shit...

http://www.joystiq.com/2012/03/01/simcity-5-rumors-building/

[Metacomet]

Awesome. Can't wait!!!!!!!!

[smellincoffee]

Aw yeah, going to mod myself some communisms into this shit...

http://www.joystiq.com/2012/03/01/simcity-5-rumors-building/

Have you done this with prior games? In SimCity I'll run cities with zero residential tax, replying only on business deals and taxation of commercial and industries to run my city...and in SimCity 4 I make the taxes progressive so that the common working men aren't getting hurt too much by me. The problem is they keep getting bought out by the $$ and $$$ residents. :lol:

[Leonid Brozhnev]

I modded SC4 so I had massive industrial demand without the usual commercial CO$$ & CO$$$ demand outstepping it as your city reaches a certain population. Industry also provided 4x the usual jobs. Industry and the little commerce paid the majority of the taxes, so the R$ residents and Agriculture could live relatively tax free. This was trying to simulate Soviet style socialism anyway, full blow communism isn't possible in SC4 without changing core gameplay mechanics (money, classes ($,$$,$$$), policing, CEO's, etc). Also had 2GB of new buildings... game crashed so fricking much.


Was announced today that mods will be supported so I'm looking forward to seeing how much workers control I can cram into this one. :thumbup1:

http://www.shacknews.com/article/72768/simcity-designed-to-support-mods?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

[Sperm-Doll Setsuna]

Looks like forced online gamplay so far (certain to limit the usefulness of modding as well in the name of "fair play". What a fucking joke.

Down the gutter like Cities XL's initial incarnation.

[Leonid Brozhnev]

Nah, having it hooked up to the internet all the time will be for DRM, as with Anno 2070 (which had both sandbox and multiplayer) and Spore (which was all sandbox). Pirates can circumvent that no problem, as they did with Anno 2070 and Spore (which quickly became the most pirated game in history I believe). Multiplayer will be there, but I highly doubt it'll be forced... modding is a massive part of the Sim City series and the guys at Maxis understand this.

[Sperm-Doll Setsuna]

modding is a massive part of the Sim City series and the guys at Maxis understand this.

I would have hoped this was so - but let's not forget the influence that EA have, and EA are incompetent and revolting beasts. There someone who said, in an interview, with regard to the new Simcity, something along the lines of:

"The Sims is single-player, the new Simcity is multi-player". Paraphrasing, roughly, but statements like this indicates that they are indeed looking to force multi-player. This is further reinforced by that tacky trailer they just released, which reeks of Simcity Societies having mutated children with Cities XL.

I hate this when they go to these lengths with rubbish multi-player features and end up utterly watering-down the single-player, if not removing it entirely; it's a common trend these days.

[Leonid Brozhnev]

Trailer was crappy, but Maxis have fared well with SimCity over the years despite EA having it's filthy paws all over it... I think Maxis enjoy a degree of autonomy that other EA studio's don't. It would be stupid of them to force multiplayer given the failure of CXL's Planet Offer. It should be obvious to EA and Maxis that SimCity generally targets an introverted audience who prefer to do things by themselves and in their own time, so forcing them to be social in any way is going to put them right off the game very quickly, regardless of modding potential.
Speaking of modding, I don't think it would be viable to have a multiplayer only plus modding, and they have stated (in the link I put above) that SC5 has been designed from the ground up to be compatible with mods.


"We're huge fans of our modding community," creative director Ocean Quigley told the audience. "We've designed all this stuff to be moddable."


"We know modding is hugely important to our community," Quigley noted. "We know the reason why people are still playing SimCity 4 ten years later is because the modding community has kept it alive. GlassBox is built to be moddable...

So I don't believe it will be multiplayer only, although, I don't particularly understand why they are pushing the multiplayer aspect so hard when nobody really gives a shit about it... probably just to fill some room... I mean 'More of the same... in 3D' might make SC4 players happy but it doesn't drag in new players.

[Leonid Brozhnev]

Just an update... Ocean Quigley, Maxis Creative Director, posted this to a question on Reddit...


[Ocean] Yeah, like SC4, you can build out a region by yourself, and make all of the cities serially. There are lots of players who just want to control their own world, and they don’t want anybody to interfere with it. But even those solo players are going to be participating in the flow of resources that constitute the core of the games economy – the economic landscape that they’re operating in will be shaped by the actions of other players, even if they are only playing solo. In addition, there will be regional challenges and opportunities that you’ll be competing against other regions for. So you can play by yourself. More social players can play with their friends and accomplish more, faster, but that’s their choice.
As for custom content – think back to SC4 - first we just need to get the game out, and make everything work robustly.

So yeah, no forced Multiplayer :thumbup1:

[piet11111]

This will get more expansions then the sims :glare:

No way i will buy this because of that and due to Origin i wont be tempted either.

[Sperm-Doll Setsuna]

Just an update... Ocean Quigley, Maxis Creative Director, posted this to a question on Reddit...



So yeah, no forced Multiplayer :thumbup1:

That whole concept still stinks. How can you have resource mods if it is online-dependent? That would make the entire thing useless and skew the online "market", and would probably not be allowed.

And they have now announced that the size of the city plots is... like "medium in SC4", i.e. tiny.

Things are a bit so-so at this point. To some extent I fear that they will make it dumbed down to appeal to "casual gamers". They've insinuated that SC4 is too complex and that they will not do that again.

[smellincoffee]

I'm reaaallly not liking the sound of this internet-dependent crap. That's the reason I never purchased GTA IV, Civ5, etc.

But dammit, I may have to do it for SimCity. SimCity got me into PC gaming.

I spotted a little tidbit of information over at Forbes (http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidthier/2012/03/06/simcity-5-confirmed-maxis-taking-social-and-environmental-bent-to-classic-franchise/):


“We’re building a simulation that really captures the world that we live in today,” says Bradshaw. “We’re talking about a Simcity where the resources are finite. Where you’re going to be struggling with some of the same decisions that people are struggling with today.”

Online and social elements are going to become a bigger part of the franchise: if you put a lot of polluting power plants near your borders, your friends might start to get some smoke rolling into their suburbs. You might even start to contribute to global CO2 levels.

And PC Gamer also has an article, which someone at another forum (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=11318708&postcount=33) quoted:


At EA’s Game Changers event yesterday, Maxis senior VP Lucy Bradshaw confirmed that SimCity is back, and showed off a very pretty, but very gameplay-less, trailer. Today at GDC, however, Maxis went into detail when it unveiled the game’s engine, GlassBox, which I also got a look at during a recent visit to the studio. Wow. Spore was certainly ambitious, and The Sims has reached incredible commercial success, but GlassBox may turn out to be Maxis’ most impressive achievement yet.

The previous SimCity games rely on relatively high-level statistics to tell us what’s going on–the pollution number goes up, so the happiness number goes down. GlassBox does the opposite. It simulates the little things–thousands of individual Sims–and lets the city mechanics emerge naturally. You won’t have to look at a spreadsheet or graph to identify a crisis, because you can watch it all happen in real-time. Pollution will taint the soil and thicken the atmosphere with smog, Sims will get sick and fill the hospitals, businesses will lose employees, and everyone will be really ticked off about the whole thing.

Fire stations no longer provide statistical coverage–a fire truck must drive from the station to the scene of a fire, and the longer it takes, the longer the building burns. Every car and every pedestrian (which are referred to as “agents”) is someone going somewhere to do something, and every traffic jam is the natural result of the patterns they create as they navigate your roads.

Creative Director Ocean Quigley demonstrated how agents operate by artificially populating a closed loop of road with vehicles and pedestrians.

“We’ve created all these people in here, and there’s no jobs for them, no houses for them, and no place to shop. They’re basically all miserable and would love to get out of here as fast as possible,” said Quigley, as hundreds of his sadsack residents drove and trudged in an endless circle.

“So let’s connect their little maze to the outside world, and these people are going to abandon the city as fast as they can. So, all the little agents, they have an agenda, a mood, something they want to do. They hate it here, they want to get out, and so that’s what they’re doing.”

Now consider that Maxis is striving to simulate tens of thousands of agents at a time, and that resources such as power, water, coal, and oil are also treated as individual units, as well as every house, business, and factory, and you can start to get an idea of the incredible number of emergent possibilities GlassBox introduces.



Of course, if SimCity were an ASCII game, this wouldn’t be quite as impressive. Lots of games feature detailed and intricate simulations. But it’s not–every one of these agents is modeled, animated and dynamically lit. The engine’s data is even detailed enough to play a different sound for a sedan turning a corner than it does for a truck approaching a stop light.

And, most importantly, everything you see and hear in GlassBox is really something happening in the simulation–it never creates ambiance for the sake of it. The jingle of a shop’s door is a Sim entering, and the sound of a cash register is a purchase being made. A power plant’s smoke puffs represent pollution entering the atmosphere, and the size of its coal pile represents its current supplies. When I saw all of this (and much more), happening at once, I really got the feeling that I was looking down at a tiny living world. So, wow. I think a bit of excitement for the project is justified, even at this early-ish stage of development.

But, of course, this is still an early stage (SimCity’s release date is projected for sometime in 2013, and Maxis is only releasing concept art so far), and things can change. And while GlassBox is the foundation, there are all kinds of rules and systems that are going on top of it to turn it into a proper SimCity game, so there’s still a lot to discover. We’ve got 8-pages of details in the May issue of PC Gamer US, which is on its way to subscribers, and will be on newsstands later this month. We’ll keep you updated as development continues and more of our questions are answered.