SimCity coming back!

[Zmapper]

EA just announced that SimCity will be coming back in 2013!   

Livestream here: http://www.ign.com/videos/2012/02/29/ea-game-changers?show=HD

More later.

[DaBigE]

Another take: http://gamerant.com/simcity-5-leaked-screenshots-details-dyce-136029/

Color me optimistic.

[Zmapper]

After speech thoughts:

It appears that this game will be more GreenCity than SimCity, considering that they interviewed the guy who produced An Inconvenient Truth, a movie about Al Gore. Personally, I don't like that Maxis is making SimCity a politicized game. I want a game where I can build whatever the hell I wish, without having to worry about a "sustainability index" or other such things.

It appears that buildings will be able to be customized, though I am not sure what modding features are being planned at this stage. A 3D view will be incorporated, which means that it will run veeeeery slow on my 2011 laptop (like everything else 3D). Other than it being the latest "great thing", why does everything have to be in 3D? Personally, I prefer 2D games, though I am in a shrinking minority here.

[kurumi]

Hopefully there will still be a sandbox mode and a healthy mod community. It looks like the roads might not have to be orthogonal anymore, which could be a big win. SC4 + Rush Hour + network mod was my favorite game ever.

[Crazy Volvo Guy]

No re-issue of Streets of SimCity, no care.

[OCGuy81]

Should be good.  Hopefully, they'll take a few pages from Cities XL (such as allowing curved roads) while keeping a lot of the customization that SC4 allowed.

[agentsteel53]

It appears that this game will be more GreenCity than SimCity, considering that they interviewed the guy who produced An Inconvenient Truth, a movie about Al Gore. Personally, I don't like that Maxis is making SimCity a politicized game. I want a game where I can build whatever the hell I wish, without having to worry about a "sustainability index" or other such things.

I hope that they make that an option.  some people would want to build sustainable, so for them the presence of that in-game goal would be worthwhile.  others just want to build.

[DeaconG]

The last thing I need to see is a repeat of Sim City Societies-no, no, NO! 

And the CitiesXL mess left a bad taste in people's mouths (I am SO glad I waited to see how it would turn out, that "pay to play" fiasco took Monte Cristo down).

Give me my buildings and my myriad transportation options (freestyle interchange designs would be LOVELY) and they can do what else they wanna do...otherwise SC4 is gonna be running on people's systems for a LOOOONG time...

[Takumi]

Looks really good so far, but I agree with Jake that it should have options for sustainable nd non.

[algorerhythms]

If it's anything like SimCity Societies, they can keep it. If it's anything like SimCity 4, bring it on (though I haven't played SimCity 4 in a long time since it crashes on my laptop).

[triplemultiplex]

Hey look, it's the Death Star!

[Duke87]

No re-issue of Streets of SimCity, no care.

This.

Seriously, though. I loved SimCity 2000 and SimCity 3000. Also played SimCity 4 and liked it at the time but in retrospect I kinda feel that at that point the game lost its innocence, so to speak. SC2 and SC3 are kids' games, simple and cartoony. SC4 is decidedly not - it's more complicated and more "realistic". I will never feel nostalgia about SC4 the same way I do about its predecessors.

And, while it's nice to know that a possible proper SC5 is coming, I honestly feel kinda "meh" about the idea. It just won't be the same. Will Wright isn't even involved.

In a way, it's part of a greater trend: game series which had their origin in the 2D pixelly era very often don't transition well into the 3D hi-def era - because it inevitably requires adding sophistication to game concepts which were not designed to be sophisticated. New, more complicated gaming technology needs new, more complicated ideas. You can't just take something 8 bit and say "hey, let's reinvent this as a PS3 game!".
Mario didn't age well past the SNES. SimCity didn't age well past SC3. Duke Nukem didn't age well past the PS1 era (and that it got there is an achievement, considering the game's early DOS origins). Capcom did it right when they realized that there was no better way to make a new classic MegaMan game than to do it NES style.

[Stratuscaster]

http://kotaku.com/5891764/first-simcity-gameplay-footage-reticulates-my-splines

[DeaconG]

^But will there be llamas?

[bulldog1979]

And will it run on Intel Macs? I haven't played SC4 in several years now because it only runs natively on PowerPC Macs. I've never installed Rosetta on my MacBook Pro, and if I upgrade finally to MacOSX 10.7 "Lion", Rosetta doesn't work. Without Rosetta, PowerPC-only programs like SC 4 don't run on Intel Macs. I've heard that SC4 runs very poorly under emulation so I never tried it.

[vdeane]

Why wouldn't it run on Intel Macs?  Does anyone really write software for PowerPC Macs any more?

[kurumi]

Now I'm tempted to fire it up in Fusion (XP guest, MBP host, 8 GB RAM, 2.66 GHz i7) and see how well it performs.

[vtk]

Someone said freeform interchanges would be nice. I can't imagine how that could be done without making the game inaccessible to non-engineers or non-roadgeeks.

That said, I would LOVE a version of SimCity that embraces CAD-style design tools. But such a thing would have such high development costs, and such a niche market, it would probably cost $10,000.

I still play SC4.  I like it, and I like the NAM.  I'm just frustrated by frequent crashes and a traffic simulator that directs inter-city commuters in circles rather than into the CBD.  I wonder if Maxis would consider open-sourcing old versions of SimCity so dedicated fans can improve problems like that?

[vdeane]

Why would free-form interchanges need CAD-style design tools?  Couldn't you just paint the ramps like you do with roads?

[algorerhythms]

And will it run on Intel Macs? I haven't played SC4 in several years now because it only runs natively on PowerPC Macs. I've never installed Rosetta on my MacBook Pro, and if I upgrade finally to MacOSX 10.7 "Lion", Rosetta doesn't work. Without Rosetta, PowerPC-only programs like SC 4 don't run on Intel Macs. I've heard that SC4 runs very poorly under emulation so I never tried it.

On an Intel Mac, you always have the option of running it in Windows... (in fact, SC4 ran better on my Macbook than on my current HP laptop).

[Bickendan]

In a way, it's part of a greater trend: game series which had their origin in the 2D pixelly era very often don't transition well into the 3D hi-def era - because it inevitably requires adding sophistication to game concepts which were not designed to be sophisticated. New, more complicated gaming technology needs new, more complicated ideas. You can't just take something 8 bit and say "hey, let's reinvent this as a PS3 game!".
Mario didn't age well past the SNES.

I don't think Mario's a good example. Mario 64 was very well done, though the 3D series did flag with Sunshine and Luigi's Mansion; Galaxy seems to have solved that fairly nicely, not to mention the New SMB series.

SimCity didn't age well past SC3.

Yet SC4's done incredibly well thanks to the modding support it has.

Duke Nukem didn't age well past the PS1 era (and that it got there is an achievement, considering the game's early DOS origins).

Bad example, DNF excluded. DN3D was still a DOS game that got ported to the other systems. DN3D set a high bar, had a decent modding engine... and then the development hell and ultimate finished product that was DNF failed.

Capcom did it right when they realized that there was no better way to make a new classic MegaMan game than to do it NES style.

Can't comment on MegaMan because I never was a big fan of the series, lol.

[vtk]

Why would free-form interchanges need CAD-style design tools?  Couldn't you just paint the ramps like you do with roads?

If done that way, everything would be snapped to the grid resulting in a clunky appearance, and you'd need a dozen different tools for ramps at different levels and different numbers of lanes... it would be almost as complicated as proper CAD with poorer results.  Actually, the RHW mod for SC4 kind of does this already, and I wouldn't say it's suitable for a general, non-roadgeek market.

[Tarkus]

So far, I've been quite impressed by what I've seen, particularly with the details on the new engine.  There's a very clearly defined sense of levels of hierarchy in the design.  Regarding the whole "GreenCity" thing, while they did feature Davis Guggenheim in that presentation, I think that was primarily to show that SimCity can be used to foster discussion about those sorts of issues--not necessarily enforce it on the player.  Maxis has generally done a solid job balancing different approaches in previous titles, and I suspect that in spite of this, they'll do the same here--in the end, I wouldn't expect anything more intrusive than the adviser system in SC4. (How many times has Neil Fairbanks freaked out about your tendencies to sprawl?)

As far as the transportation side of things, many of the game's designers are NAM fans.  The RHW has, at least since about 2007, been intended for a "roadgeek" audience with the goal of gaining some crossover appeal down the road (no pun intended).  As we've added more functionality to it and increased its flexibility, it has gained acceptance among larger segments of the community, and it's proven to be our most popular separate-download plugin over time (about half of all present-day NAM users also use the RHW).  Most of the reasons folks have taken issue with its "user-friendliness" have been in large part due to hardcoded limitations with the game, that we've done our best to overcome, and because people have been spoiled by the horribly under-scaled default highway system.  There's also just so much to make to fully cover all contingencies.  The current revamp of the base draggable network code, the so-called "Project 57" effort, is currently up around 200,000 lines of RUL2 code, and likely to approach 500,000 when all is said and done.

One of the big inspirations for me when I began approaching the Modular Interchange System for the RHW was Rollercoaster Tycoon's custom ride building mode.  Something along those lines--with a cleverly designed UI--could go a long way toward easing the learning curve of such a system.  

The new game is still pretty early in development--they haven't really discussed just what will go in, in terms of transport functionality, probably because they're not at the point of being anywhere near finalizing that sort of thing (it is worth noting, however, that there are some roads that look very much like the Network Widening Mod seen in some of the concept art and prototype demonstrations at the GDC).  I'm quite interested to see how they handle highways, and since the game's creators have expressed a desire to create an extendable/moddable game, the possibility exists that something RHW-like could be created if it does not exist in the base game.  We'll know more in the next year or so.  And given that these guys actually have some understanding of what we've done to SC4 (unlike Monte Cristo, who was a big pile of fail), I think they'll take some cues from it.

[vtk]

Sounds like I need to check out recent developments from the SC4 modding community.  I understand the base game engine imposes some difficult limitations, and most of my frustrations stem from that.  As for scale, I think a bit of scale distortion is appropriate for a game where cities are crammed into 3-mile squares, and if the cities fill up these spaces completely, some absurd traffic patterns arise.  If SC4 were released to open source, we could fix some of these core simulator problems.  For starters, commuter trips should originate from jobs in search of appropriate residences, not the other way around – then a CBD will more realistically create its own traffic and successfully attract commuters from far-flung suburbs...

[vdeane]

If done that way, everything would be snapped to the grid resulting in a clunky appearance, and you'd need a dozen different tools for ramps at different levels and different numbers of lanes... it would be almost as complicated as proper CAD with poorer results.  Actually, the RHW mod for SC4 kind of does this already, and I wouldn't say it's suitable for a general, non-roadgeek market.

Given that SC5 will have curved roads and a better bridge model, we can't infer how difficult and blocky things would be from RHW.

Sounds like I need to check out recent developments from the SC4 modding community.  I understand the base game engine imposes some difficult limitations, and most of my frustrations stem from that.  As for scale, I think a bit of scale distortion is appropriate for a game where cities are crammed into 3-mile squares, and if the cities fill up these spaces completely, some absurd traffic patterns arise.  If SC4 were released to open source, we could fix some of these core simulator problems.  For starters, commuter trips should originate from jobs in search of appropriate residences, not the other way around – then a CBD will more realistically create its own traffic and successfully attract commuters from far-flung suburbs...

Agreed.  I do not understand the modding community's obsession with adhering to the 16x16m tile scale.  Maxis never did (not with highways, not with buildings, and not with anything).  Making scale highways given the other scale issues just makes the highways look oversized and absurd.