There's been so much discussion about the poor online uptime of SimCity that one major topic of discussion that's been overlooked is how good of a city simulator it actually is. Unfortunately in many ways it's a pretty lousy one.
You simply can't build a modern city in SimCity.
While many cities around the world are focused on building walkable, sustainable, transit oriented neighbourhoods that feature a range of housing and job types, SimCity has stuck with 1950s era, car oriented planning ideas that were even out of date when the original game launched in 1989. An updated game could be a valuable learning tool, and that's why it's such a shame that the developers haven't updated the game design to reflect modern city planning approaches.
For example, as it stands it's impossible for SimCity to emulate many neighbourhoods of my hometown of Vancouver. Let's find out why:
SimCity lacks multi-use zoning, and so we can't have the simple and common building type of having commercial on the ground floor and residential on the top. The "Cambie Crossroads" area with mixed big box stores and rental apartments is not possible in SimCity.
There is a direct connection between road capacity and zoning density in SimCity, and so the only way to build high density buildings is to have high capacity roads. The problem is that this connection doesn't exist in real life. Vancouver has been steadily reducing the demand for cars and car parking by refusing to increase road capacity. Having high density buildings with limited street surface works just fine. In SimCity you wouldn't be able to build a neighbourhood like the Olympic Village, where you have high density mid rise residential buildings surrounded by one lane roads.
Separated bike lanes and bike sharing systems are present in Vancouver, along with major cities around the world such as London, New York and Montreal and they're growing in popularity, and yet it's not an option at all in SimCity.
Another feature that goes against what is common in many cities is that in SimCity the only way to get street cars is to build a massive six lane road. Why? In Prague they even have roads that are for street cars only.
Curved streets is a nice new feature, but one that has been implemented in a very limiting way. Due to the bizarre connection between high density zoning and high capacity streets, and the lack of landform modification, recreating the curving inner canals and streets of densely packed Amsterdam is impossible. In SimCity curved roads are only really useful for building a nightmarish, low density, suburban hellscape.
Some missing features may arrive in upcoming DLC, such as subways and other forms of mass transit, but there are lots of fundamentally wrong approaches that I don't expect to ever be fixed. It's a huge missed opportunity here that the designers didn't look around them to how cities are actually constructed in the real world.
You simply can't build a modern city in SimCity.
While many cities around the world are focused on building walkable, sustainable, transit oriented neighbourhoods that feature a range of housing and job types, SimCity has stuck with 1950s era, car oriented planning ideas that were even out of date when the original game launched in 1989. An updated game could be a valuable learning tool, and that's why it's such a shame that the developers haven't updated the game design to reflect modern city planning approaches.
For example, as it stands it's impossible for SimCity to emulate many neighbourhoods of my hometown of Vancouver. Let's find out why:
SimCity lacks multi-use zoning, and so we can't have the simple and common building type of having commercial on the ground floor and residential on the top. The "Cambie Crossroads" area with mixed big box stores and rental apartments is not possible in SimCity.
There is a direct connection between road capacity and zoning density in SimCity, and so the only way to build high density buildings is to have high capacity roads. The problem is that this connection doesn't exist in real life. Vancouver has been steadily reducing the demand for cars and car parking by refusing to increase road capacity. Having high density buildings with limited street surface works just fine. In SimCity you wouldn't be able to build a neighbourhood like the Olympic Village, where you have high density mid rise residential buildings surrounded by one lane roads.
Separated bike lanes and bike sharing systems are present in Vancouver, along with major cities around the world such as London, New York and Montreal and they're growing in popularity, and yet it's not an option at all in SimCity.
Another feature that goes against what is common in many cities is that in SimCity the only way to get street cars is to build a massive six lane road. Why? In Prague they even have roads that are for street cars only.
Curved streets is a nice new feature, but one that has been implemented in a very limiting way. Due to the bizarre connection between high density zoning and high capacity streets, and the lack of landform modification, recreating the curving inner canals and streets of densely packed Amsterdam is impossible. In SimCity curved roads are only really useful for building a nightmarish, low density, suburban hellscape.
Some missing features may arrive in upcoming DLC, such as subways and other forms of mass transit, but there are lots of fundamentally wrong approaches that I don't expect to ever be fixed. It's a huge missed opportunity here that the designers didn't look around them to how cities are actually constructed in the real world.