I want to build cities that I can imagine seeing IRL, not some metagame-game-mechanioc-defeating monstrosity that's optimized against the game's pathfinding. Heavily agent-based sims tend to scale really poorly (an issue I suspect is true with SimCity 2013 and Cities: Skylines) and imperfections in modeling the agents causes extreme divergences at-scale that break the illusion of realism badly.Īt this point I'd honestly much rather - especially with large-scale sims where you build cities of millions rather than a town of dozens - have non-agent-based statistical simulations. They're fascinating in the abstract, but IMO too many game devs are obsessed with it to their own detriment. I have some beef with agent-based simulations in this regard. I'm up for a challenge and I think transport is actually a fantastic gameplay element for the player to scale, but as it is the only way to "solve" transport feels like cheesing whatever algorithm is under the hood, rather than designing a transport system that makes any real kind of sense. I've gotten into Cities: Skylines numerous times over the years and have bounced off of it each time because it was so hard to scale a city past a certain point due to transport. Solving transportation issues and bottlenecks to make sure your city is operating efficiently sounds incredibly rewarding. I think I want the original promise of SimCity (2013) with the transportation flexibility of Cities Skylines. Cities Skylines was great, but I am looking for something a bit more in depth. I have been hoping for a new city builder for awhile. It was all faked and not even convincingly well. Compute was not offloaded to the cloud, but bigger than that there was the lie that every sim had a daily routine that was simulated and when a factory had an output it was an input somewhere else and that was all simulated like Factorio. The marketing hype leading up to it featured lot of outright lies in terms of how the game works. And then despite the game selling incredibly well they abandoned it after launch and never really improved the game much. The playable area was tiny and the game was weird in the way it cycled boom and bust development seemingly at random. There is also a Subway sandwich mod, but for SC4 only. It was instead the "Metro" content pack (metro is french for subway), which was for a newspaper distributed for free near French subway entrances. It was particularly sad, because it really still is an enjoyable game.ĮDIT: After a bit of fact -checking, I realize that I've mis-remembered the "Subway" DLC story. Same, they had a cross-promotion with Nissan, so your Sims would feel happy when they recharged their electric car, and the charging station has the effect of a park in your neighborhood.Īdd to that the server issues, the fact that they said it was because so much computation was offloaded to their servers (which was quickly disproved, and felt bogus to being with), and the whole affair had a vibe of "Don't piss on my shoes and tell me it's raining". until I realized it was to add 'Subway' sandwich shop in your city. A few months in, I see that there was a 'Subway' content pack, which got my hopes up. The fact that you could build multiple cities in the same region alleviated it a bit, but it really felt limiting compared to it's predecessors.Īnother point, which I feel is a good representation of an 'EA'-fied game: I was a bit miffed to discover that you couldn't create a subway system, you were limited to roads (I don't even remember if you could create a bus system). The playable area was tiny, so you quickly felt constrained by the border of your playable area. I've read TFA, and honestly they also failed to mention maybe the worse issue of SimCity 2013: how limited it was compared to the previous instalments. I played SimCity 2013 a few months after launch, and I quite liked it, especially the gorgeous visuals.
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