Coming on October 24th… and this looks so good, I might finally upgrade my GPU. 😄
RIP SimCity, thank you for all you gave to gaming, but your time is even more over now than it already was.
Coming on October 24th… and this looks so good, I might finally upgrade my GPU. 😄
RIP SimCity, thank you for all you gave to gaming, but your time is even more over now than it already was.
There is definitely something to be said about the game tending towards being car centric. One factor for this not even directly related to transport that I’ve noticed myself a lot is the lack of proper mixed zoning, which can be a valuable tool of creating more walkable and public transport friendly cities.
I do like the idea of a city growing somewhat more organically over the years. I think it would also make it easier to not have one specific approach to transport being the objective best, because your earlier decisions would probably have some influence on that. It does sound rather hard to me though to find the right balance of how hard to deal with those historical restrictions should be.
On the one hand, if somebody wants to Haussmanize their Paris I’d say more power to you, the bulldozer tool is in the menu. On the other hand, some mechanic like Transport Tycoon’s where local councils stop letting you build around them if you get too aggressive remodeling their town could be interesting too.
At the end of the day, though, I wouldn’t want to take to much power or of the player’s hands. Will Wright described those classic Maxis games as “software toys,” and the freedom to mess around and see what happens is both part of the appeal and how games like SimCity came to seen as educational.
I remember those classics.
SimAnt, SimEarth, SimTower, SimCopter, Streets of SimCity. Those last two were particularly cool because you could import your SimCity 2000 city into them and fly or drive around in the city you made. I thought that was the coolest thing.
SimAnt has a warm, weird place in my heart, not least of which for the massive doorstop of a manual that it came bundled with, full of all kinds of science trivia about ants, including something like a very long term paper or a small textbook about them at the back! What a different era that was.