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It want it not to suck so bad. From this preview it looks a little bit like the Caesar series and a little bit like the Anno series as well. EA obviously scares me to death and Maxis isn't what they used to be but the new SimCity has a lot of potential if the preview is any indication. Its PC only for one which helps a lot too. I hope Maxis remembers what life was like before The Sims and I hope they aren't setting us up to be disappointed like with Spore (which was not even close to what most were hoping for)... I'm not going to complain about the DLC potential, I am free to buy or not buy it as I see fit. I would even sign up for Origin if it turns out to be worth it but of course I hope EA and Valve sort out their differences before then... *finger very tightly crossed* for this one.

Wow a new simcity, the preview does look cool.

I do agree I hope it doesn't go the way of the Sims. I also hope the performance scales for large citys which was a problem with Simcity4.

I saw this the other day and I cannot wait! I loved the Simcity games along with the oldschool various sim games. Believe it or not I still play simtower on occasion...SimEarth was confusing to me back when it came out and I haven't played it since. As much as I loved simcity 4 it certainly did have some performance issues even on the beefiest of machines! I also have not been able to get simcity 4 to play nice on windows 7

This game might be enough to get me on Origin. I can't believe I just admitted that. I've been playing Simcity since the 1st PC version. I probably still also have a boxed version of SimEarth floppies kicking around too.

@Omniman: what kind of issues are you having with Sc4? My steam copy works fine on W7P, however I haven't tried out my boxed version cause who uses optical media these days?

Gosh, simcity 2000 was such a time sink. Haven't played anything since though. I'd hope they allow you to do more than design and build a city. I'd like to see commerce competition and global politics or something, I'd like to see sim city become sim nation or something ya know. I love civ but I cold do with something more real time and comprehensive. Zoom in on your city, etc. zoom out and compete. I could really go for that.

What I'm thinking is a better realized larger scale version of black and white2.

Yea, the new trailer looks good. I was a big fan of 4, so looking forward to this..

I only played the first one and SimCity 2000...

What I want is friends/community competition. Say 1 region is composed of 4 players and has a total population. They can work in one city and live in another. Have the players fight it out for revenu/population/etc.

I played thousands of hours- I kid you not- of SimCity 2000 in 7th-12th grades or so. I mastered that game. Wasn't very impressed with its sequels, 3000 or 4; they had better graphics but less intricate gameplay. And I just didn't invest the time a research into learning their ins-and-outs like I had the second game.

I found that preview video very impressive. I like some of the ideas they've got going. I will wait and see on the execution.

In case you want a City Sim game now, click here.

the first one and 2000 were good, never tried the others but heard they were not that good

Never tried any of the sims either, but does not really seem interesting to me

riviera74 wrote:

In case you want a City Sim game now, click here.

Sorry, I tried XL 2011 and it just didn't work for me.

So now that the embargo has lifted on previews across various gaming media sites, what are people's thoughts?

ShadowEyez wrote:

the first one and 2000 were good, never tried the others but heard they were not that good

Never tried any of the sims either, but does not really seem interesting to me

SimCity Societies was really the only PC/Mac title that just plain wasn't good. 3000 and 4 are fine games in their own right but I agree that 2000 was really something special.

Unfortunately none of my favorite computer games from the 90's are playable because they were all for pre-OSX Mac and unless you still possess working vintage hardware, nothing will run them. I have most of the discs but sadly they're little more than coasters at this point.

I read the preview at 1up, sounds pretty good so far.

I love these games. I lost a lot of the late 90's to Simcity 2000, skipped Simcity 3000 (IMO, it was just SC2K with pretty graphics), and then lost another truck load of time to Simcity 4 Rush Hour and (un-related) RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 that come out at the same time.

However, I picked up Cities XL 2012 in a Steam sale - It's a lot more technical than SC4 in so many ways, but from looking at this thread no one's mentioned this rival city builder franchise. You do more than just build a city, you really have to delve deep into the whole financial economics of how a city will function, and this only gets harder as your city grows.

Sure, there's downsides to CitiesXL 2012 - The biggest being that it runs like a dog on my PC once the city gets big. Maybe this is why Simcity always stuck with a fixed 2D enviroment rather than a full 3D cityscape? It's a pleasant stop-gap for me while I eagerly await Simcity 5 though...

Ugh... Always on DRM - ...but its a feature!

Anno 2070 was the first game I ever bought with anything remotely like an always on requirment - I knew what I was getting into but I took the chance anyway and got burned a few times - and Anno at least HAS an offline mode.

EA just went from me possibly being willing to accept Origin to a no buy status for now.

I hope they pull their head out of their butts because it looks awesome otherwise. Just when I thought the big players were starting to wise up... Oh well.

YEAH, Origin was originally annoying because it was another platform inside a platform. I'd bought into steam and didn't care to have to buy into another one. Then it started scanning your HDD and chewing up my bandwidth by reporting to home base what it'd found when I wasn't playing games even and I was like ok this sucks. Privacy please. Atleast steam asks if you'd like to participate.

Has anyone played this? If so, is it any good?

This is germane especially since the new SimCity will not be out for at least a year.

That is awesome. Thanks for linking that: I hadn't heard about it.

It's very cool they are actual giving some 'substance' in the form of "agents" to the mechanics of the game. And the "tens of thousands" quote is exciting.

To put it in the form of an example, in the old Sim City 2K when traffic was light you'd see the "light traffic animation" which was the road with the occasional blue car going by, versus the "heavy traffic animation" which was nonstop blue cars. I realize they specifically did not include traffic as agents (leaving those to paths) but my example is to point out they are actually having resources move around, which in turn then have to use your infrastructure.

For people that get into making cities and developing optimized ways of doing things, that's going to be like digital cocaine.

drfish wrote:

Ugh... Always on DRM - ...but its a feature!

So what exactly does this ALWAYS ON DRM mean? Explain it to me like I'm 5.

drfish wrote:

Anno 2070 was the first game I ever bought with anything remotely like an always on requirment - I knew what I was getting into but I took the chance anyway and got burned a few times - and Anno at least HAS an offline mode.

Also, did you purchase this via Steam? They sell it there for $49.99 - way way too high for my purchasing justification. Bring it down by 50%, and then I'll bite.

thegleek wrote:

So what exactly does this ALWAYS ON DRM mean? Explain it to me like I'm 5.

No internet, game fall down go boom.

IOW, without an active, working net connection the game either refuses to run at all or puts you into some limited toy/demo mode (there are probably other variations of this too, but basically no net == no game). And you can't just connect to get the game started and then disconnect (putting your laptop to sleep so you can wake it up on the plane to play, for example) -- it is "phoning home" continuously and will take its ball and go home if it can't get through at any point.

It's a pity, because I played both the first SimCity and SC2K a lot, and I was thinking I might like to pick up the latest. But I now have a strict policy of keeping DRM (at least anything that requires drivers or other low-level crap) off my machine, so...

They backpedaled and now say it only needs to be online when you start it. Not much better but I'm back on the fence instead of running away from it screaming...

drfish wrote:

They backpedaled and now say it only needs to be online when you start it. Not much better but I'm back on the fence instead of running away from it screaming...

The pirated/cracked version won't need to be online. When will they learn..

travbrad wrote:

drfish wrote:

They backpedaled and now say it only needs to be online when you start it. Not much better but I'm back on the fence instead of running away from it screaming...

The pirated/cracked version won't need to be online. When will they learn..

Exactly Pirates will fix it don't worry.

Some tasty bits on RPS... It's really been a long time since a good Simulator... Simcity 4... The Sims didn't count and neither did Societies. Anno is alright, but way too complicated and not autonomous enough.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/04 ... interview/

There are some trailers on there if you haven't seen the glass box engine, really cool stuff.

This is a game I am really waiting to come out, I will prob pre-order the deluxe version after xmas and I hope this will tide me over long enough for Project Eternity and Star Citizen.

The gameplay I have seen so far looks really awesome in MHO.

I still really like Sims 3 and the connected feature of this sounds pretty cool. I don't know if it'll be great, but I'm sure it'll be fun.

Gotta love the Origin misinformation in this thread though. Heh.

Savyg wrote:

I still really like Sims 3 and the connected feature of this sounds pretty cool. I don't know if it'll be great, but I'm sure it'll be fun.

Gotta love the Origin misinformation in this thread though. Heh.

EA is known for a lot of stuff but I never had an issue with them about recovering lost cd keys or adding games to my origin account that is pre 2008. They even upgraded a couple of my old games to collectors editions as they didn't have a digital version of the standard one I had.

d53642 wrote:

EA is known for a lot of stuff but I never had an issue with them about recovering lost cd keys or adding games to my origin account that is pre 2008. They even upgraded a couple of my old games to collectors editions as they didn't have a digital version of the standard one I had.

And yet they never mined peoples hard drives or did much of anything Steam didn't. It was a widely held belief that was never actually based in fact (otherwise known as fodder for people who already hated EA and just needed an excuse to hate them more.)

Hell now they even let you opt out of most of their data gathering, which last I checked Steam doesn't.

There is this pic floating around the internet, showing what is considered a "medium" city in the new Sim City, versus one in Sim City 4. It basically showed that the new game is scaled way down, way simplified (though I do like some of the resource systems), and you have to link specialized cities together just to have what is considered a true "city".

For example, you need to have a city devoted solely to the international airport, it can't be put into a "standard" city. I dunno exactly how it all works, but it sounds like they developed a bunch of brand new ways of doing things, and didn't bother integrating them all...as well as giving all those nasty "online only" hooks that big companies like EA are famous for nowadays.

I'll try and find the pic.

This thread sheds some light on the city size issue, scroll down about midway on the first page till you see the pics, then start reading:
http://community.simtropolis.com/topic/ ... tile-size/