Sim City beta

[Ubiquitous]

I've been keeping an eye on this game and I was really looking forward to it, until I heard about how small the cities are. I don't want to be restricted by space, although I am prepared to give the game an opportunity with its regional city system to win me over.

I know the beta has started the weekend, and I was wondering whether you guys have tested it out and what your thoughts are?

[Vendetta]

I don't want to be restricted by space,

Since budget is a problem trivially solved in minutes in every simcity game ever, space restriction is probably the best way to generate interesting gameplay, by which I mean give the player choices to make where the answer is not "all of the above".

If you can have everything you want if you're willing to wait long enough, where's the game?

(For the same point in another context, see the discussion on points values in tabletop gaming here)

[ryacko]

For some reason, in video games, generally players avoid budget issues by waiting for revenues to come in before spending money. I rarely had to take out loans in most SimCity games.


Although in real life politicians don't exactly have time as their constituents demand new projects and cash accounting is used to obscure future crises.

Dear god, a pre-order is $60.

[Prannon]

I went ahead and signed up for the beta. I guess we'll see if I get selected, though chances are I won't. Still, I've been looking forward to this game like no other PC game in a long time. I practically grew up on Sim City.

[AniThyng]

I hope its more sc3 and less sc4 to be honest. Sc4 was good but got too complex at some point and lost the charm.

[PainRack]

Just another few more weeks before its released......... I can't wait to be honest. My gut is telling me, BUY the pre-order! Damn the whole "connected to server", its SIM CITY!

This even though my brain is frantically blaring out hot games that require a server connection= crashed server=lousy game experience for the first few weeks until patches.......

[ryacko]

I hope its more sc3 and less sc4 to be honest. Sc4 was good but got too complex at some point and lost the charm.

You know, there are actually youtube videos of the SimCity [5] Beta.

But since the only good videos of it are made by the worst narrator on youtube, I'll sum up the changes or key features I saw:
1. Powerlines, waterpipes, have been replaced by roads. Sewage will flow under the roads to your designated sewage outlet.
2. The ability to alter zoning density has been replaced by road size.
3. You can upgrade buildings like Tropico, but unlike Tropico, you can specify where you want to place em.
4. You cannot choose where you're going to connect to your neighboring cities.
5. You're still Commissar Mayor.
6. You can check up at city hall to find out what your citizens are demanding of you. Still have to build city hall.
7. There's still unidirectional wind.
8. Your budget is apparently money per hour.

Although if you want to watch the videos, go ahead:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6Dvleqn ... -5-fLDasok

Not exactly sure what $60 would pay for.
Over what I've already purchased.

[Metahive]

Game's about to be released and then I find out it's got one of those "MUST ALWAYS BE ONLINE!!" -drms. Which'd mean that due to my sometimes wonky internet connection I'll probably be kicked out of sessions regularly. I gave Diablo III a pass because of this, so I'll be passing that one too.

Seriously, sodomize with a rusty chainsaw whoever thought first of this chickenshit scheme.

[bilateralrope]

Game's about to be released and then I find out it's got one of those "MUST ALWAYS BE ONLINE!!" -drms. Which'd mean that due to my sometimes wonky internet connection I'll probably be kicked out of sessions regularly. I gave Diablo III a pass because of this, so I'll be passing that one too.

Seriously, sodomize with a rusty chainsaw whoever thought first of this chickenshit scheme.

Don't worry too much about your connection. There are half hour queues for server access and EU players aren't allowed in yet.

[Stark]

If you don't want the multi stuff, it'll just be cracked out anyway.

Too bad there's no console version I guess. :V

[Vendetta]

Mayyyybe. From what I'm hearing there's a bunch of server side processing going on which would be difficult to replicate. Data traffic from the game is p. high for a singleplayer game.

Also, the "half hour queue" is because once the client has failed to connect to the server it will wait half an hour before trying again, if you connect to a different server that has space (but not your savegame, which is all server side) then go back to the original you'll always get an exactly half hour wait time. This may have been to avoid a self DDoS with clients forever spamming join requests.

It's sad though that EA have so little originality left they had to rip off Error 37.

You can already be a city building hermit who shuns human contact anyway, just create a region and make it invite only, though with the small city size forcing specialisation, and the fact that cities are only running when a human is actually looking at them, you can't really make a big ol' region of interlocking cities by yourself, and apparently when you are in multi the actual cooperative interaction at the region level feels a bit shallow. There are "great works" that you can build in the region directly that I presume are supposed to foster co-operative effort to create the resources required, but if one player just builds a really rich city they can buy the resources for cash and do it all themselves without input from anyone else. The only input that other people really have on the running of your city is if they fuck up and you suffer for it because they have super high crime rates or loads of pollution or something that has a negative effect on the region as a whole. (Or as I saw in one impressions video, their dimwit population can't work the nuclear plant and it keeps melting down and belching fallout all over a different city, because some buildings now require a certain level of population education to work properly)

It does sound like they've missed at many levels what originally made people like Simcity without the new things they've added or changed necessarily adding value of their own. I'm sure that the core experience is still there, and none of it should be unfixable unless there really is that much processing load that they can't run all of the cities in a region all the time as long as someone is viewing the region, allowing an actually satisfying singleplayer game)

[RogueIce]

The only input that other people really have on the running of your city is if they fuck up and you suffer for it because they have super high crime rates or loads of pollution or something that has a negative effect on the region as a whole. (Or as I saw in one impressions video, their dimwit population can't work the nuclear plant and it keeps melting down and belching fallout all over a different city, because some buildings now require a certain level of population education to work properly)

Sounds like an open invitation to start griefing people in your region to me.

So basically like every other multiplayer game out there.

Why they thought this would be a positive for a game like SimCity I don't know. The general "point" of the game (as much as it has one) is to build and run your own city. Having that city be fucked up because some jackass on the Internet built a shit ton of dirty industry, no police stations and refuses to maintain nuclear power plants properly does not sound like it would further that goal.

I would imagine the vast majority of regions end up invite only pretty quick. But then nobody really like PUGing so not sure what EA/Maxis thought was going to happen.

Though I still maintain EA only cared for the DRM always online presents, and Maxis just tried to make it work within the game. It's either that or they just don't know why people play SimCity, or figured because Farmville is popular the whole Internet thing would totally work here.

[Stark]

Its probably because they mistakenly felt that people would have friends and want to do cooperative things. Like on a console? :V

Since the city-building genre has been a vacant cadaver for pretty much 20 years, I'm not surprised people are trying to make it actually interesting (maybe even one day actually hard).

[Vendetta]

Its probably because they mistakenly felt that people would have friends and want to do cooperative things. Like on a console? :V

It's more like they wanted to have a persistent online microtransaction farm.

They also appear to have decided that their natural demographic is Sims players, and think that the "simulate 200,000 people as individuals with individual desires, finances, and so on" is a really good way to arrive at city management. Which is probably also why the city sizes are as restricted as they are and only one city is simulated live per client connection, because all that stuff is done server end and they are being conservative with estimating their server load.

But that stuff isn't really relevant when you're dealing with a city scale, because you need to know about wider trends not individuals so you can make large scale plans to deal with them. It's not even all that relevant in Tropico where you only have a couple of hundred people tops and all you'll use it for is deciding which ones to send to the gulag.

[phongn]

They also appear to have decided that their natural demographic is Sims players, and think that the "simulate 200,000 people as individuals with individual desires, finances, and so on" is a really good way to arrive at city management. Which is probably also why the city sizes are as restricted as they are and only one city is simulated live per client connection, because all that stuff is done server end and they are being conservative with estimating their server load.

Glassbox simulation is done client-side, I think. The target PC is something like six years old, too (aka "Sims players") hence why the city sizes are so small right now. I'm also hearing rumors that large portions of the game are single-threaded, too!

[Losonti Tokash]

Welp, guess I'll be buying this when it comes out, then. Stupid games making me have fun with my friends.

[bilateralrope]

Welp, guess I'll be buying this when it comes out, then. Stupid games making me have fun with my friends.

Your location puts you in the US, which means that it has been released for you already. But I'd suggest treating it as an MMO launch and waiting until the launch issues have been fixed before you buy it. Especially since it hasn't been released for Europe of Asia yet, so the number of people wanting to play hasn't peaked yet. So I'm expecting the problems to get worse.

Along with the queues, I'm seeing people complaining about rollbacks and preloading wasn't an option which led to problems downloading the client.