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Maxis explores offline mode for SimCity; Bigger cities ruled out.
- Thread starter Saty
- Start date
I don't ever since the release i haven't be bothered to install it again. But even worse it was a gift for my birthday and such a shame though could have been a good game but..EA is doing EA and Maxis doesn't know what there doing. So back to Simcity 4.
Yeah, the agent model is the one thing that keeps breaking SimCity. Basically, Sims do not remember their last location/job and will go to random locations depending on the time of day. This means massive influx of shoppers, incoherent job filling, and so forth.
Even power distribution and water are on the agent model and the pathfinding for that is ridiculous. You can get water/power shortages if your road network was designed in a certain way.
thelurkinghorror
Member
350 hours in... i have a lot of fun and I appreciated what they tried to do
Interesting, i dont remember such an option in my Settlers, but i was playing on PC.
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They've got enough hate for SimCity release, which is understandable. But now people are hating engine, which only fault is that average person CPU is not good enough. Its not an issue with an engine, its issue with average consumer.
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As i said, i have no problem with people hating SimCity 2013, but i have with hating future proof engine.
I personally dont hate new SimCity, i had quite a fun time playing it, but i stopped, because small cities annoyed me. It was still pretty decent game, it just wasnt near as good as old SimCities.
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All PS3 players have the same experience. And its different to have even bad framerate drops and have completely unplayable content within a game.
Haha, come on. If that were possible the people who bought the PS3 version of Skyrim would have already seen their day in court.
An engine has to be built to scale for the needs of the game today, not just for some nebulous future that may or may not come to pass. GlassBox is wholly inappropriate for a modern city builder so it's an unequivocal failure.
The size of the cities IS the biggest reason not to buy it. It should be called Sim Neighborhood. It just sucks you end up trying to figure out what to remove from your city just to get upgrades, which sometimes are HUGE.
If I worked on the game I would be very depressed for what their product resulted in. I would rather work for the Detroit city planning & budgeting
If I worked on the game I would be very depressed for what their product resulted in. I would rather work for the Detroit city planning & budgeting
That's a back of the box quote if I ever saw one.
Some people in this thread don't seem to know they've updated the path-finding formula in a recent patch.
Meanwhile, I bought it a week or so ago. I've played it for above 50 hours so far and enjoyed it heaps.
It *is* very challenging though, indeed, to make efficient use of the plot size, especially if there's a river or ridge running through it. But it's kinda fun IMHO. You learn what works and doesn't work and apply it to the next city.
It's fun to try and cycle through specialisations: start with mining, profit from it with trade depots, transition to processors with help from recycling materials, then computers/TVs, profit like crazy, transition to gambling-tourism megalopolis.
Meanwhile, I bought it a week or so ago. I've played it for above 50 hours so far and enjoyed it heaps.
It *is* very challenging though, indeed, to make efficient use of the plot size, especially if there's a river or ridge running through it. But it's kinda fun IMHO. You learn what works and doesn't work and apply it to the next city.
It's fun to try and cycle through specialisations: start with mining, profit from it with trade depots, transition to processors with help from recycling materials, then computers/TVs, profit like crazy, transition to gambling-tourism megalopolis.
Very disappointing, looks like I am done with this version of SimCity 
Why would I buy the xpacs if I can't add the new stuff to my existing cities without major sacrifices?!.....
The small city sizes is the single biggest flaw with this game and now their is no hope for improvement. Maxis should just move on to the next iteration of the franchise.....
Why would I buy the xpacs if I can't add the new stuff to my existing cities without major sacrifices?!.....
The small city sizes is the single biggest flaw with this game and now their is no hope for improvement. Maxis should just move on to the next iteration of the franchise.....
The simulation is half fake. Things like AI in the traffic and even water, power, and sewage distribution were HORRIFIC. Game breakingly bad. The population numbers were proven to be falsely raised and most of the sims just went from random house to random business and some just stumbled around the sidewalks doing nothing. There was no detailed simulation going on.
cascardian
Member
This right here. Their lauded agent-based simulation was a goddamn mess and they would have done better just to stick to statistical approximations (some NP-hard problem solutions, you know, are actually pretty optimised), which would probably be more accurate and tax the hardware less. It took someone to crack their game to fix the populations mess and allow people to build outside the city limits (with certain restrictions, though), as well as already providing a sort of offline mode. All this was done months ago by AzzerUK etc. The online "cloud" portion of their engine was proven to be nothing more than thinly veiled fakery.
See RPS's covering of this story. This game was a mess from start to finish. I am also fairly certain that, besides Maxis' design decisions, EA also shares a very particular (*cough* DRM *cough*) part of the blame, too. The whole thing was just... wow. It is baffling.
To be sure, I am not blaming the individual programmers, artists etc. I am confident that Maxis, for the most part, consists of competent people. I simply do as I always do: I blame the actual decision-makers. I blame upper management.
maniac-kun
Member
No bigger cities = fuck this game.
Mengy
wishes it were bannable to say mean things about Marvel
Wrong.
Per Dan Moskowitz, of Maxis:
https://twitter.com/moskow23/status/296355832998801408
This is the single reason why we can't have bigger cities, confirmed several times by Maxis themselves. Just a poor design choice from the start really.
GrizzleBoy
Banned
VicDaMoan03
Member
Too late.
crazygambit
Member
I understood that reference.
Why do you keep capitalizing the word "you"?
Mengy
wishes it were bannable to say mean things about Marvel
Exactly. It's an ambitious concept but shitty execution. And you can't fault the interface nor the graphics nor the music because honestly those areas are all top notch with Simcity 5. The fault lies in the game design and the game engine. Glassbox may have been neat in concept but it can't run the game as it needs to be run, hence shitty game play. Bad agent AI, small gameplay areas, the need to fudge numbers and lie to the player, all a result of an engine that can't run the game properly. What good does simulating thousands of Simpeople do if the gameplay sucks due to it?
Simcity 4 had it right, and even though it is a decade older it still is an astoundingly better simulation game than Simcity 5. Ridiculously better. And that's very pathetic IMHO.
Yeah, I do feel that this is how the game started out, until the call came to turn it into a full retail product. So at that point they had to make the best of it by polishing a turd, and sticking features onto it. SimCity is a fecal Buckaroo, you -really- don't want to increase those city sizes.
Tropico, CitiesXL, Anno 1404 (2070 if you want a futuristic slant), the upcoming Banished. Medieval Mayor might be worth checking out, but I have a feeling thats vapourware, there's pretty much no information on that game at all. Bear in mind however, a lot of these games have a strategy/resource management element to them, so check out youtube before you make a purchase. They're not as sandboxy as Sim City. CitiesXL is probably the closest modern take on a Sim City game that I can think of.
I think its too late for most people, the hype, or should i say outright rage at what the game ended up being is long over. The interest is minimal in this game now.
How on earth did they misunderstand the core appeal of Sim City ill never know, at least Blizzard had the decency to move Jay Wilson to other projects after Jay "Then We Doubled It" Wilson completely missed the entire point why people like Diablo and action RPGs in the first place.
SimCity feels now like a bunch of smart designers got too smart, and dug deeper into the series and concepts to try to really make a great game, while completely missing the point. Waste of both money and human resources if this engine cannot handle a bigger city.
People want to make a huge ass city, its the whole appeal. The most basic explanation is also the correct one most of the time.
How on earth did they misunderstand the core appeal of Sim City ill never know, at least Blizzard had the decency to move Jay Wilson to other projects after Jay "Then We Doubled It" Wilson completely missed the entire point why people like Diablo and action RPGs in the first place.
SimCity feels now like a bunch of smart designers got too smart, and dug deeper into the series and concepts to try to really make a great game, while completely missing the point. Waste of both money and human resources if this engine cannot handle a bigger city.
People want to make a huge ass city, its the whole appeal. The most basic explanation is also the correct one most of the time.
chickdigger802
Banned
if the whole each guy was a single sim worked out as how they said it would, i would be ok, but currently all the stuff is just visual fluff.
beato_angelico
Member
but, but they told me that glassbox was the best engine ever!
Rentahamster
Rodent Whores
Ah, so there is a main page thread on this. Sad news indeed.
But, look on the brightside, at least Lucy Bradshaw got promoted to EA senior vice president 2 days ago!
D:
But, look on the brightside, at least Lucy Bradshaw got promoted to EA senior vice president 2 days ago!
D:
beato_angelico
Member
Ah, so there is a main page thread on this. Sad news indeed.
But, look on the brightside, at least Lucy Bradshaw got promoted to EA senior vice president 2 days ago!
D:
well in the end didn't this piece of junk sold quite well?
Rentahamster
Rodent Whores
Yes, but I suspect that like Diablo III, it mostly sold on name recognition and developer trust. The next test will see how the expansions do.
Personally, I think I'll give the DIII expansion a chance. I think the devs might be turning it around. On the other hand, I'm planning on skipping the SimCity expansion for now.
Exactly right. It's SimCITY, not SImVillage.
Mengy
wishes it were bannable to say mean things about Marvel
It sold great initially, but very quickly lost momentum. I believe it's just a little over 2 million copies sold today? Not bad by any means, but far, far below EA's expectations for the game. Far worse than Simcity 4 had sold by this timeframe comparatively.
demosthenes
Member
D3 is removing the biggest hurdle many had, the Auction House and in general fixing a TON of things that people had with the game. I haven't followed SC as close, are they doing that?
Rentahamster
Rodent Whores
Maxis has not addressed the basic gameplay failures in their design that caused many of their problems in the first place. One of the results of this, is being stuck with an engine that cannot give players a larger city size, for example. They have made improvements to the base game, sure. Overall, however, it's too little, and the flawed design philosophy of the team doesn't look like it's on its way to being fixed any time soon.
At least the Diablo III team is trying to rework the game at some kind of a fundamental level. Sorta. I need to give them credit for that.
Or only render/processes actively a section of the map/city equivilant to what the min specs require and divide it up sectionally, so that when different areas are accessed, it is still only rendering/processing the same quantity of data actively similar to how many MMOs do "zones" to improve performance of the client.
OldAsUrSock
Banned
Optimize or make your customers just have to deal with upgrading to decent PCs.
Black Mantis
Member
I was holding off buying this in the hope they'd eventually patch in bigger cities. Guess I'll wait till I can get a copy for less than £15.
Agree with this i am sticking with SC4 just like i stuck with 2000 until 4