SimCity 5 Disappointment-All

I'm feeling confident!

That's a first.

I forgot about my new N7 ball cap. I don't want to eat that one either, cuz it goes with my N7 shirt.

Gremlin wrote:
Quintin_Stone wrote:

I'll eat my hat if there aren't invisible borders somewhere in that shot.

You may be right. The latest tweet seems to imply that:

Ocean Quigley wrote:

Here's another view of this high-population city. You can see a neighboring city in the background. pic.twitter.com/jDyN0p9E

IMAGE(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BAXgVaVCEAA038X.jpg:large)

That looks pretty badass though. I never liked megalopolises all that much anyways.

Not Ocean Quigley, although it's via his blog. This time it's Chris Schmidt testing high-tech cities.
IMAGE(http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-a4yeJ59Ph2w/UPW8QanLfuI/AAAAAAAAJww/BLa63fjscII/s1600/Done+Recomputing+Strata+%5BDebugRelease%5D+1152013+110910+AM.jpg)

Some hands on beta experience is up on Reddit. Sounds like city size is the biggest complaint.

http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comm...

Edit: Was posting from phone earlier... for those who tl;dr on the reddit link here's the manual and here is a good screenshot showing city size (at least for early beta).

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/m3FwouM.jpg)

MOAR:
IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/EjoYdER.jpg)
IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/HK4WogP.jpg)
IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/ivYflWc.jpg)

Actually, running the regional sim on the company servers is an elegant solution to the problem of how to coordinate with your neighbors. Think about the problem. Say you're on a grid. You have 9 immediate neighbors. If each person's computer held the data relevant to their city, they'd have to communicate with your system in order for the region to update. That would not be possible if the other players were not online when you were. It would require the creation of an ad hoc grid, with constantly changing connectivity, and then a grid of grids, and so forth, and where would all that computation take place?

But with the data held in online servers, those can track the relationships between cities, and updating every three minutes seems realistic to me. It's essentially taking a small (maybe tiny) subset of your data and using that to interact with other cities' data. I'd be curious about whether the updates are simultaneous, or proceed in waves/rings or some other solution. Your city network connections would be updated even when you're not online.

Think of it as one game you play locally, and a meta-game that is played remotely, beyond your direct control, with the results sent back to you every three minutes.

Game play video on Vimeo while it lasts. Dead.

Is it bad that I kinda wish they weren't to release in March and were actually going tp release in August or September? Maybe it's just me but I'm starting to think this game might need more time in the oven and more beta testing. If anything to figure out what they need to improve and fix before release.

Beta videos:

Hmmm, the UI is a lot closer to the Sims layout (ploppables along the bottom) than Simcity 3000/4 (ploppables along the left side). Interesting.

shoptroll wrote:

Hmmm, the UI is a lot closer to the Sims layout (ploppables along the bottom) than Simcity 3000/4 (ploppables along the left side). Interesting.

Widescreens make 4:3 UI layouts less palatable.

Guess ill buy it one day now.

I have Anno2070 for small cities so far, but maybe growing a "GWJ" country will be tempting. And Anno showed me what is good online play so far.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/vide...
references
http://www.polygon.com/2013/1/11/386...
kool-aid drinker or very obedient mouthpiece?

$24 USD more expensive on Origin for Australian's. Not purchasing, even though I'm really interested in it.

RolandofGilead wrote:

http://www.polygon.com/2013/1/11/386...
kool-aid drinker or very obedient mouthpiece?

Ocean Quigley wrote:

SimCity is always kind of a lonely experience; you're planning your cities all by yourself. [...] The things that you do for other people give meaning to your own life and your own existence.

This is straight-up an extrovert manifesto, and it is the main reason I will not be playing this game. Playing a city by myself is not a sad and meaningless exercise, it is what I enjoy, because people suck. I am an introvert. I don't define myself by how I interact with other people. Therefore, this game is not meant for me.

It's too bad they didn't bother to figure out how to make the game appealing to both extroverts and introverts.

Ocean Quigley wrote:

"If you look back at previous SimCities, they were almost all self-contained," he said. "Every city wound up doing pretty much everything. That drove all the cities to a certain level of homogeneity, and all the cities sort of converged onto the same sort of thing over the arc of play. That struck me as being a little sad.

He's saying it's sad that most cities ended up being kind of the same, not that playing alone is for sad people. At least that's how I read it.

I think the way Sim City handles 'multiplayer' is perfect for an introvert like me: you get the sense of playing 'together' in a living world, but don't need to interact directly with strangers.

By the way, I just had a weird thought. If it's too hard for one computer to handle the task or rendering city data in the background, then how the heck did "The Sims 3" do it when their keeping track of who died, how old someone is, how they eat, how their lives run, what they do and more during a day that has nothing to do with your own sim.

I know it was a lie to not say DRM but the simple fact is Sim City is only copying something The Sims 3 did and it seems the Sims 3 did it better. Am I crazy or is this actually the flaw in their logic of why Sim City is required to be online only?

BadKen wrote:

It's too bad they didn't bother to figure out how to make the game appealing to both extroverts and introverts.

So... the ability to play a region by yourself without dealing with other people doesn't appeal to introverts?

I'm very strongly introverted and that option makes me content.

Wolfen Victrocious wrote:

By the way, I just had a weird thought. If it's too hard for one computer to handle the task or rendering city data in the background, then how the heck did "The Sims 3" do it when their keeping track of who died, how old someone is, how they eat, how their lives run, what they do and more during a day that has nothing to do with your own sim.

I know it was a lie to not say DRM but the simple fact is Sim City is only copying something The Sims 3 did and it seems the Sims 3 did it better. Am I crazy or is this actually the flaw in their logic of why Sim City is required to be online only?

The type of simulation they're running is a highly parallel, cpu-intensive process. A lot of commercial discrete event or agent based simulation packages are pretty slow when you start modeling very complex systems. When you've got hundreds of entities running around a system with traits, desires, needs, etc, all interacting with one another, it makes a CPU work hard. Oblivion's and Skyrim's NPCs all have that Radiant AI that governs their behavior, but you rarely have more than a dozen or so characters on screen at a time, and the interactions and motivations of those NPCs are relatively simple. So while i'm skeptical that the computations required must be done in a server farm somewhere, it's not completely outside the realm of possibility, in my mind at least.

Purely speculation, but they may have decided the do always-online, and then from there explored how they could use that capability to add to the game. Managing simulation interactions between cities in the cloud is one way to do that, and increasing the complexity of the simulation so they can improve the fidelity is another.

beanman101283 wrote:

Purely speculation, but they may have decided the do always-online, and then from there explored how they could use that capability to add to the game. Managing simulation interactions between cities in the cloud is one way to do that, and increasing the complexity of the simulation so they can improve the fidelity is another.

Which doesn't really give much encouragement that they won't shut the game down without notice at some point down the line, once the server farm becomes too expensive to maintain.

That along with the addition of microtransactions to Dead Space 3 single-player has made me go from 'definitely not buying SC5' to 'most likely not buying any future game from EA'.

MeatMan wrote:

That along with the addition of microtransactions to Dead Space 3 single-player has made me go from 'definitely not buying SC5' to 'most likely not buying any future game from EA'.

Read the fine print on the Limited Origin Exclusive Edition for SC5. There's definitely a DLC pipeline in place for SC5, no doubt about it. Or just look at Sims 3 and its huge microtransaction shop.

I know I'm interrupting the hate festival were having here but, I'm really excited about being able to have my kids build their cities next to mine. I think it's going to be great helping them design their cities to benefit m...US, to benefit US!

Kommissar wrote:

I know I'm interrupting the hate festival were having here but, I'm really excited about being able to have my kids build their cities next to mine. I think it's going to be great helping them design their cities to benefit m...US, to benefit US! ;)

Your people's Republic, as it were.

I'm going to buy this but EA is leaving me with a sour taste in my mouth lately. What happened to the good EA about 4 years ago? The one where I actually was cheering for them when they released Mirrors Edge? I miss that EA. Oh well, I'll gladly join up with a few GWJers for a region when 5 comes out.

Farscry wrote:
BadKen wrote:

It's too bad they didn't bother to figure out how to make the game appealing to both extroverts and introverts.

So... the ability to play a region by yourself without dealing with other people doesn't appeal to introverts?

I'm very strongly introverted and that option makes me content. :)

We shall see what "antisocial" players say when they get their hands on it. The game is gorgeous, and has some neat features, but Quigley's tone in that particular interview discourages me.

Wolfen Victrocious wrote:

I'm going to buy this but EA is leaving me with a sour taste in my mouth lately. What happened to the good EA about 4 years ago? The one where I actually was cheering for them when they released Mirrors Edge? I miss that EA. Oh well, I'll gladly join up with a few GWJers for a region when 5 comes out.

I think there's a song about that...

Wolfen Victrocious wrote:

I'm going to buy this but EA is leaving me with a sour taste in my mouth lately. What happened to the good EA about 4 years ago? The one where I actually was cheering for them when they released Mirrors Edge? I miss that EA. Oh well, I'll gladly join up with a few GWJers for a region when 5 comes out.

I miss this EA:
IMAGE(http://www.c64-wiki.com/images/d/d5/Electronic-arts-wee-see-farther.jpg)