SimCity 5 Disappointment-All

As much as I totally understand and for the most part agree with most of the concerns on here, this is still on my "MUST BUY" list. It's been too long since I've played a SimCity and and the graphics in this look great. I love the individual building customization and just how smart the AI is on here. I'm hoping that because this is still in production, we have yet to see the bigger cities or more of the regions, but only time will tell.

ahrezmendi wrote:
Kraint wrote:

The more videos I watch, the less impressed I am. In addition to most of the above reasons, this feels like a Sims-style DLC selling beast in EA's eyes. All of the public transport, utility, industry, etc. options that are missing from the main release will be available for $10-15 each, I'd wager. Oh, and modding will probably be verboten.

No modding? Have you played any recent Sims games? While not technically mods, the amount of community produced houses, items, lots, families, etc. is HUGE. If this SimCity follows the trend The Sims has, you'll be overloaded with more user-generated content than you can possibly download.

The Sims is not online MP, nor is it tied in with Origin. That is what makes me pessimistic.

DaScorpion wrote:

I love the individual building customization

You know, it saddens me that feature is the only thing visible thing they managed to salvage from Spore. The massively single player aspect of Spore would solve a lot of gnashing of teeth over the persistent online requirement. Something like that would've done wonders for SimCity or The Sims.

If you can place your cities border to border, they interact with one another and you can switch between them on the fly, I'm not entirely sure what the problem is. If you want a bigger city, can't you just tack another on?

Kraint wrote:

The Sims is not online MP, nor is it tied in with Origin. That is what makes me pessimistic.

But that's not what you said, you said modding would most likely be verboten. I'm pointing out that EA's past actions with The Sims indicate that user generated content is highly likely to not only be allowed, but encouraged.

Just saw this new pic that they posted on Facebook that shows a whole region. I'm also assuming that you can make several regions since the top selected tab has "resume game" and it's showing the whole region. The tab on the right says "create game" which I'm assuming means a new region. I hope so. Hopefully randomly generated regions that players can edit if they please as well.

Hope the link works:

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151317621549866&set=pb.160156464865.-2207520000.1355340169&type=3&theater

LobsterMobster wrote:

If you can place your cities border to border, they interact with one another and you can switch between them on the fly, I'm not entirely sure what the problem is. If you want a bigger city, can't you just tack another on?

It's not a bigger city. It's another city.

Wolfen Victrocious wrote:

The other thing that still drives me up the wall is the fact that this will be the first Sim City without subways.

I don't remember subways in the original, nor in the SNES version. Rail-based public transportation? That was in, but it never ran underneath anything.

ahhhh Origin's cloud system is HORRRRIBLE.

It can barely keep up with my BF3's weapon loadouts. I don't think I like this.

ahrezmendi wrote:
Kraint wrote:

The Sims is not online MP, nor is it tied in with Origin. That is what makes me pessimistic.

But that's not what you said, you said modding would most likely be verboten. I'm pointing out that EA's past actions with The Sims indicate that user generated content is highly likely to not only be allowed, but encouraged.

I'm talking about things that modify gameplay, enable terrain editing beyond default, change requirements for stuff, etc. Part of the reason I believe it won't be permitted is that it is a multiplayer game with always-on DRM (you can break other people's games with your wacky mods, or cheat, or something); the other part is that if a mod introduces all of the cool features that the upcoming DLC will have, sales of the new DLC will likely be hurt. Adding the option to have my police stations rocking a brilliant purple and green paint job is not the type of mod I am referring to. Adding in a whole separate water/sewer system a la SC4 is the type of thing I am talking about.

DaScorpion wrote:

Just saw this new pic that they posted on Facebook that shows a whole region.

So what actually is a region? In every gameplay video I've seen, what the developer calls the region only shows 4 cities, but the comment accompanying that screenshot says "This new region shot supports up to 16 cities."

So which is it? Each region consists of 4 sub-regions?

Can all 16 of those cities share good and bad qualities/resources, or just the (sub)regions of 4 cities shown in videos?

MeatMan wrote:
DaScorpion wrote:

Just saw this new pic that they posted on Facebook that shows a whole region.

So what actually is a region? In every gameplay video I've seen, what the developer calls the region only shows 4 cities, but the comment accompanying that screenshot says "This new region shot supports up to 16 cities."

So which is it? Each region consists of 4 sub-regions?

Can all 16 of those cities share good and bad qualities/resources, or just the (sub)regions of 4 cities shown in videos?

No clue. Great question. It would be nice to know how it all will play together.

Vargen wrote:
Wolfen Victrocious wrote:

The other thing that still drives me up the wall is the fact that this will be the first Sim City without subways.

I don't remember subways in the original, nor in the SNES version. Rail-based public transportation? That was in, but it never ran underneath anything.

Shoot me now but the first Sim City slipped my mind. When I kept thinking back all I could remember was Sim City 2000 and that was as far back as my memory would allow. Still, I feel a disappointment at the subways being neglected.

Don't worry, you'll have a chance to buy them for $19.99 in 3 months.

Wolfen Victrocious wrote:

Shoot me now but the first Sim City slipped my mind. When I kept thinking back all I could remember was Sim City 2000 and that was as far back as my memory would allow. Still, I feel a disappointment at the subways being neglected.

The first SimCity wasn't really all that remarkable compared to 2000. The simulator wouldn't even penalize you for replacing all your roads with rail in order to reduce pollution!

Not sure how I feel about the lack of Subways. I think 2000 is a great baseline for the series since it's fairly approachable compared to the later entries. I know they decided after SimCity 4 they needed to dial back the complexity in order to appeal to more people, but I really think they're dialing things back too far. Not nearly as bad as say Societies, but something about most things they've said so far feels slightly off in my mind.

There is also additional complexity nobody talks about (since most of us wish it would go away). The social media tie-in type online ladder/competitions that they gave hints about. Where you have "challenges" designed to gimp your city. Or force you into a specialization. I have a feeling they will force a small city size just so that it fits their online paradigm (yes I know, I used that word on purpose).

They don't want a player to be able to build a well rounded, well functioning city. They want to force you to build one kind of (several types of) a city. And what you lack you're supposed to get from your neighbours that are supposed to be specializing in a different type. Your reward for doing so will be a privilege of getting cheevo announcements on your Facebook how you built a city with 18 universities, or 30 power plants.

Man, I think I have to step off the negativity train...check me out on Origin when the game's out

jeffsceu wrote:

From what I can see this is not the Simcity I have been waiting for.

Unless future news shows me that my assumptions are wrong, this will be the first Simcity I will skip since the 80s.

Small towns
Region play but not actually connected so that I can build satellite cities
Lack of transportation options
Unable to terraform the land

This ain't the Simcity I'm looking for. Moving along

I totally agree, but I can't quite lose the feeling that it's a game I might want with the SimCity name attached.

Read the comments has me intrigued and worried. Societies was horrible and I hope this is a lot better. That last sim city I really enjoyed was on the ds, and was basically one part sim city and one part pharoh.

master0 wrote:

Read the comments has me intrigued and worried. Societies was horrible and I hope this is a lot better. That last sim city I really enjoyed was on the ds, and was basically one part sim city and one part pharoh.

Societies was a different developer. The last proper SC was SC4. Not sure about handheld versions because they all tend to be stripped down and more like SC2 or SC with some twists here and there.

The SimCity devs did an AMA on Reddit Friday. Let's just say Redditors didn't respond too well to the always online DRM component...

I don't think I've ever seen a comment with over 3,500 upvotes before.

Wow, that was more than I was expecting. I wonder how the dev team feels.

I can't even find any other questions... Lol. Jeez.

OG_slinger wrote:

The SimCity devs did an AMA on Reddit Friday. Let's just say Redditors didn't respond too well to the always online DRM component...

I don't understand how to read this Reddit thing (I am not a regular Reddit reader); I see the opening post from the Maxis team, but I can't figure out how to get a list of the actual questions and answers, just a giant-ass pile of comments.

Reddit comments are nested. Presumably each top-level comment is a question.

Wow. Well given what a mess the comments in that link are, I'm not going to bother trying to sift through all that crap to find actual responses from Maxis.

You can just click on Maxis's name to get a list of dev responses.

Ah! Thank you Demyx. That wasn't intuitive to me; I assumed clicking their name would just take me to their profile.

Demyx wrote:

You can just click on Maxis's name to get a list of dev responses.

While this is somewhat useful, the context is lost.

MoonDragon wrote:
Demyx wrote:

You can just click on Maxis's name to get a list of dev responses.

While this is somewhat useful, the context is lost. :(

http://www.reddit.com/user/maxis

See below each comment, there's a link that says "context"?