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The 'SimCity' Empire Has Fallen and 'Skylines' Is Picking Up the Pieces

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Re: The 'SimCity' Empire Has Fallen and 'Skylines' Is Picking Up the Pieces

#111

Post by burger_moon »

robwilliams wrote: post #85
hobs wrote: post #14

I don't know if it is just my incompetence, but I wanted to mention is that it can be unclear what the citizens want unless you cycle through all the available overlays and check things out. I feel like they could definitely summarize important counters for you so you don't always have to click 10 times to get all the information on your city. This is especially true early game when your city is expanding by leaps an…

My side project is creating a mod that displays city vitals just like you want. Hopefully I can get it done in the next couple days.

That would be great. It is a little annoying having to click around to make changes and click back to check it again after say adjusting your power budget. If it was semi transparent when not in focus and solid when in focus that could be a good way to make non intrusive. anyways I will keep an eye out for it.

Re: The 'SimCity' Empire Has Fallen and 'Skylines' Is Picking Up the Pieces

#112

Post by megalomanu »

interpol_p wrote: post #32

I'm probably in the minority here, but for me the biggest appeal of the SimCity series was the aesthetic and music. The music in particular. I absolutely love what I have seen of Skylines so far, but it seems to be missing the SimCity charm — that urban soundtrack, the way the buildings light up at night, the unique architecture and art style. I'm hoping mods will fill in all these areas.

This. Sim City 4 is maybe the only 3D management/strategy game I have loved. Unlike most 3D sequels of 2D games (like Rollercoaster Tycoon III, much more profound than the II, but vulgar, unattractive, charmless), Sim City kept all its charm typical of the 2D era. The modern games have lost the cuteness so present in the old strategy/management games like Transport Tycoon, Theme Hospital, etc. This cuteness was important to me because it allowed to play in a satirical way, or in a non-realistic way. To be honest, I don't know if I would have loved this new game when I was a child, I remember being first attracted by the colorful graphics and the funny councilmen. My cities were like a full world, closed and unique, not like Paris or London but like Springfield or Duckburg. Sim City (or Caesar III, Pharaoh) allowed me to learn how to manage a city, but also to imagine stories.

Re: The 'SimCity' Empire Has Fallen and 'Skylines' Is Picking Up the Pieces

#113

Post by zo1 »

creshal wrote: post #27
intull wrote: post #13

The Colossal Order team, in my opinion was very lucky! There were three games - 1. SimCity 4 with the statistical simulation model, big maps (region-wise) and plenty of features. 2. SimCity 5 with a pure agent-based simulation model (it had flaws though, especially traffic), but again the series pioneered a new way of creating games in this genre. And, 3. Cities XL having a HUGE map, few unique features like bus rout…

> 2. SimCity 5 with a pure agent-based simulation model (it had flaws though, especially traffic), but again the series pioneered a new way of creating games in this genre. It irks me how SimCity 5 is praised for that. The Caesar series had pure agent-based simulations in the 1990s, and somehow had none of the agent routing bugs SimCity 5 had. How can being worse than your competition 20 years ago be considered an ac…

I think you guys make it sound a whole lot more glamorous than it really is. I played those city-building games back then (Caesar, Pharaoh and later Zeus). And do note, I absolutely loved them.

Caesar 3 basically had delivery "serfs" that would move stuff from one place to another. Each building had it's own unit to get supplies (materials to do it's thing), and it would simply retrieve it from the relevant store, so it had to path-find across a very simple road network to get to the destination, then back.

As for the other "agents", they were simply "roamers" that would randomly walk out of their "base" building, and go straight until they hit an intersection, and pick one at random.

There were no "dwellers" that would go to work. You simply had population, and buildings got magically filled with workers if they head dwellings nearby.

#Edit. Forgot to mention, you could have as many "agents" on the same road tile as needed. There were no collision checks, nor were sections of the road uni-directional.

Re: The 'SimCity' Empire Has Fallen and 'Skylines' Is Picking Up the Pieces

#114

Post by shostack »

bentcorner wrote: post #102
blueskin_ wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To many, many gamers, as soon as the word EA comes up, it already means "prepare for disappointment, DRM, and disastrous launches".

To me they're a mixed bag. I've enjoyed many titles from them (Dragon Age, Titanfall, Dead Space, NFS: HP, Mass Effect, Bulletstorm, BF: BC2, and countless other titles from older gen consoles and even older PC games like Archon and Kings of the Beach). I think that when expectations are set high (most any recent BF release), disappointment is sure to follow.

It's not that expectations are high. It's that the games would be outstanding if EA hadn't crappified them. Many of these games have very player-hostile elements designed purely to suck more money out of people.

Maybe it's just me, but for all people like to point out how expansion packs back in the day used to be bad, I don't remember ANYTHING on the level we're seeing with how aggressively they try to milk their customers at the expensive of the experience.

Re: The 'SimCity' Empire Has Fallen and 'Skylines' Is Picking Up the Pieces

#115

Post by conwaytwitty »

burger_moon wrote: post #107
lucaspiller wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've got an Air with Intel HD 5000 and it runs ok. The framerate is a bit low, but for a simulation it's fine.

That's good to know. I bought it for my pc but wouldn't mind getting a copy for my mb air.

copy? unless you want to play on two machines at the same time, you don't need it, it's steam after all

Re: The 'SimCity' Empire Has Fallen and 'Skylines' Is Picking Up the Pieces

#116

Post by rdsnsca »

edias wrote: post #108
dsl wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have a look at Activision/Blizzard. They built essentially the same thing (Origin/Uplay) but being very customer friendly about it and have had crazy success with Battle.net.

You've never played their recent games then. Battle.net 2.0 is routinely called 0.2 and considered a step back in every single way, aside from FB integration I guess. It didn't even have chat channels until recently or clan support. Promises made for starcraft 2 5 years ago have yet to be delivered on. Diablo 3 was a terrible cash grab and mostly abandoned by players. After Activision purchased blizzard it has not be…

Diablo 3 was fixed in the expansion when they got rid of the real money AH... its actually enjoyable now.

Re: The 'SimCity' Empire Has Fallen and 'Skylines' Is Picking Up the Pieces

#117

Post by ffn »

toxican wrote: post #53
zzleeper wrote: post #52

I think we are all playing into EA's strategy by calling it Maxis instead of just EA. Simcity 2013 was a failure of EA, but by mentioning Maxis 11 times and EA only once (and in passing), it's as they give EA a carte blanche to fail without the lowered reputation for future games (which means many people will preorder, and so on)

Honestly I think Maxis deserves a ton of blame as well. They operate semi-autonomously for how long and they routinely churned out terrible games. On reddit, I see far more people blame EA than I do Maxis. And while I'm all for EA getting a ton of bad press, I think it's bs that nobody points a finger at Maxis because they're just as guilty, imo. Nostalgia for 90s and early 00s Maxis is blinding people from the reali…

This is the classic symptom of changing oneself to fit the mainstream once one hits the mainstream. Whether it's EA's fault of Maxis's fault is just fruitless finger pointing (it's EA's, these guys are literally the cancer that's killing the video game industry), but the real mistake is updating your game to fit "mainstream standards" of connectivity, social, high quality 3d graphics, etc. Some management official or engineer probably sold these ideas as completely required innovations if Simcity wanted to stay competitive with things like facebook or MMOs (i.e. other time-consumers), and everyone just jumped on board.

And it's that very idea of "we need to stay competitive" that really killed Simcity. Here in capitalist societies, we're sold on the idea competition is great, but it's not, it assumes the fact the rules stay the same and focuses attention on what our "enemies" are doing. We become obsessed with not doing what we do best, but with doing what we think will beat the others. In Simcity's case, it was adopting online connectivity and social interaction despite the fact Simcity is inherently a creative game and not a social one (in fact, unless you're a trash-tier mayor, you've spent time researching city layouts, reading through strategies, and possibly even simulating various algorithms and geometries in matlab or whatnot... whereas in a social game, you'd be spending your time name-calling the other players). Strategies and ideas that emerge from competition focus on trying to capture customers from an adversary, and completely ignores the fact people are complicated, don't like change, and that a company can capture them by just being incrementally "better" in some engineering metric.

Today, it's too late for simcity, but to a new rising city game like skylines, I hope they ignore what "the competition" are doing and just focus on making their fun city building game more fun (e.g. instead of worrying about online, social, or the 2018 version of online-social which will probably be 3d holograms or something, spend time introducing new mechanics like strategic resources, "work from home" algorithms, flying cars, racism / gentrification, etc.)

Re: The 'SimCity' Empire Has Fallen and 'Skylines' Is Picking Up the Pieces

#118

Post by michael_h »

GhotiFish wrote: post #88
interpol_p wrote: post #32

I'm probably in the minority here, but for me the biggest appeal of the SimCity series was the aesthetic and music. The music in particular. I absolutely love what I have seen of Skylines so far, but it seems to be missing the SimCity charm — that urban soundtrack, the way the buildings light up at night, the unique architecture and art style. I'm hoping mods will fill in all these areas.

yup, I think you're in the minority here, I can't imagin anyone appreciating simcity for the music. It had some pretty graphics, for sure, but I think most people view that as fluff. You should hear me gush about factorio, and it looks like this: https://www.google.ca/search?q=factorio&tbm=isch&gws_rd=cr,s... edit: ok, apparently not. apparently people really really really care that their games look pretty, color me…

I really like the jazz tracks from SimCity 3000 (the ones that play when things are going well). They tickle my brain in just the right way.

Re: The 'SimCity' Empire Has Fallen and 'Skylines' Is Picking Up the Pieces

#120

Post by nolok »

gdulli wrote: post #76
zzleeper wrote: post #52

I think we are all playing into EA's strategy by calling it Maxis instead of just EA. Simcity 2013 was a failure of EA, but by mentioning Maxis 11 times and EA only once (and in passing), it's as they give EA a carte blanche to fail without the lowered reputation for future games (which means many people will preorder, and so on)

It's likely just as unfair to tarnish the Maxis name for the game design failures of the EA SimCity era. Would a pure Maxis game have been as badly received? I guess we can't know for sure.

SimCity 3000 and 4 were both made with EA owning Maxis. They were both great.
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