Over 20 years of city building games...

[-Slacker-]

...and developers haven't realized that most people are tired of the same boring, standard selection of buildings and structures that make every city look virtually the same (and by "most people" I of course mean me). "Heyy, look at my awesome, thriving city of 1 million, took my 50 hours of gamepley to finish - bet you're impressed, right?" Yeah, awesome, yours and all the other 387.654.991 models that you can find on google images...

To get to the point, I think the element that's missing the most right now in city building games is the ability of customizing your structures in terms of what they look like and their function - within reason.

For example, when you attempt to build something, you should have the option of designing it yourself by piecing it together from an array of scalable templates, like the way you build ships in galactic civilizations 2.

The selection of pieces, the size, the entourage etc would determine the price of the structure and the building time, and it's effectiveness as whatever type of building it is.

To prevent people from building stuff that would be classified as the 8th wonder of the world at the drop of the hat, these buildings would not scale linearly in price/build time with complexity and size, but rather exponentially - like you can build, say, a 400m skyscraper for a humane price but, if you want to build something twice as tall, you'll have to pay 30 times more and it takes forever to complete. Then you might have something to brag about. Or you could just get laid, but either one is fine in my opinion.

This is really a matter of utmost urgency - the next dev that makes a city builder and doesn't implement this kind of feature in the game should be jailed without parole or bailout prospects, and I realize that most people wouldn't exactly consider this to be a very pressing issue when compared to world hunger, rampart disease, genocides, terrorism, civil rights or weather Obama is really a US citizen, or a Muslim in disguise from Kenya, secretly trying to hand America over to the terrorists, but if everybody thought like this throughout history, the mexicans would have never built the great pyramids.

Think about it.

 

[AstroManLuca]

My wife is in architecture and would love this. She likes building games, but she likes designing and arranging buildings a lot more than any other gameplay aspects.

 

[Maximilian]

I think the element that is missing the most right now is a good city building game. Last good one was simcity 4 and it had its share of problems at release.

 

[Lonyo]

I guess you missed Simcity 3000?


http://simcity3000unlimited.ea.com/us/simexchange/index.phtml?frame_src_content=downloads/

 

[-Slacker-]

^What, simcity3k has that? All I remember is that there were 2~3 different models for every building and that they would "spawn" randomly.

I'm going to have to check this out.

edit: Ah, these are mods. Nice.

 

[novasatori]

Sim City 2000 had one pack that came with the app needed to create buildings, it was a lot of fun, I used it a bunch.

Unfortunately it was still very limited in how it varied the building designs.

 

[Cheesetogo]

Frankly, I'd be more concerned that developers aren't developing city building games at all anymore. Aside from Cites XL, which from most all accounts is terrible, the last good game was SimCity 4, which came out in 2003.

 

[llee]

I played spore and bored my self to sleep when it came to designing new models for each building, ship, and plane. Perhaps instead of burdening the player to design every skyscraper, you take existing designs from around the world and have the developers convert them into game models. Heck, they could even sell these in game models as DLC packs for new content, kind of like how Maxis sells items for the Sims.

 

[-Slacker-]

Frankly, I'd be more concerned that developers aren't developing city building games at all anymore. Aside from Cites XL, which from most all accounts is terrible, the last good game was SimCity 4, which came out in 2003.

I don't see devs bailing on city builders just yet ... from the top of my head, I can name what I think are enough games in the last 2 years: Anno 1404 + venice expansion, Tropico3 + Absolute power expansion, Tropico 4 in a week, cities xl, cities xl 2011, the upcoming Anno 2070 - and these are just the real time city builders. So there is enough competition between developers, which is why I find it odd that no one is trying anything new (or at least going back to some older concepts, since it's already been established that my idea is not new).

I played spore and bored my self to sleep when it came to designing new models for each building, ship, and plane. Perhaps instead of burdening the player to design every skyscraper, you take existing designs from around the world and have the developers convert them into game models. Heck, they could even sell these in game models as DLC packs for new content, kind of like how Maxis sells items for the Sims.

Actually:

you should have the option of designing it yourself by piecing it together from an array of scalable templates

Meaning that you would just use the default model if you don't feel like getting creative.

 

[smackababy]

I think the problem is reality. How many truly unique buildings do you see? Sure, there are a couple, but the majority are pretty standard design. This is because functional, cheap structures are what businesses want. Sure, there is that Antoni Guadi church being build and the spinning Dubai towers, but those are merely for people with far too much money.


And since I know you're all wondering: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagrada_Fam%C3%ADlia is the church to which I was referring.

 

[zinfamous]

I was going to say that the biggest thing missing from city building games is that there hasn't been one worth noting since Sim City 4....but it looks like that has been covered...

 

[paperfist]

What are these city building games you speak of?

 

[Bateluer]

Such games aren't made or sold any more, they lack mass market appeal. Couple high development costs and support to relatively low sales, its easy to see why publishers don't waste the time money making them. People want first person, modern military games, set in the eastern hemisphere.

 

[bentheman939]

Such games aren't made or sold any more, they lack mass market appeal. Couple high development costs and support to relatively low sales, its easy to see why publishers don't waste the time money making them. People want first person, modern military games, set in the eastern hemisphere.

:'(

RIP fun

 

[smackababy]

Such games aren't made or sold any more, they lack mass market appeal. Couple high development costs and support to relatively low sales, its easy to see why publishers don't waste the time money making them. People want first person, modern military games, set in the eastern hemisphere.

And here I was thinking that after you killed the population of these eastern hemisphereic (word?) countries, you'd be forced to rebuild them. CoD: Kill and Rebuild edition. Everyone would be happy!

 

[-Slacker-]

I think the problem is reality. How many truly unique buildings do you see? Sure, there are a couple, but the majority are pretty standard design. This is because functional, cheap structures are what businesses want. Sure, there is that Antoni Guadi church being build and the spinning Dubai towers, but those are merely for people with far too much money.

True, but I wasn't really suggesting that all buildings should be unique. In fact, my exponential scaling in price and/or build time feature would make customizing standard buildings counter productive and impossibly expensive, so, unless you have the time and patience of a carcass, you'd be pretty much limited to customizing only some of the major projects and maybe creating a few new building models to improve their functionality, like making parking spaces for an office building (they would be part of the building itself, not a separate structure)

And, besides, no need for that much realism in a game anyway eh?

 

[smackababy]

True, but I wasn't really suggesting that all buildings should be unique. In fact, my exponential scaling in price and/or build time feature would make customizing standard buildings counter productive and impossibly expensive, so, unless you have the time and patience of a carcass, you'd be pretty much limited to customizing only some of the major projects and maybe creating a few new building models to improve their functionality, like making parking spaces for an office building (they would be part of the building itself, not a separate structure)

And, besides, no need for that much realism in a game anyway eh?

If there is no need for realism, you can't call it a sim can you?

 

[-Slacker-]

Didn't say there's no need for realism.

 

[ichy]

Such games aren't made or sold any more, they lack mass market appeal. Couple high development costs and support to relatively low sales, its easy to see why publishers don't waste the time money making them. People want first person, modern military games, set in the eastern hemisphere.

From what I recall the SimCity games sold fairly well, or at least SC2000 did.

 

[Maximilian]

From what I recall the SimCity games sold fairly well, or at least SC2000 did.

Yeah but city simulators would be more difficult to make than something like MW2 and likely will never beat MW2's sales. So more effort + higher cost + less rewards = developers wont bother.

I think it will take someone with a passion for city simulators to reignite interest in developing for this genre. Will wright 2.0

Ive been thinking about giving lincity a shot... it looks like simcity 2000 kinda, i dunno im just bored i want something new lol. Noone ever talks about it for some reason.

 

[Anneka]

The topic title just made me remember the days of playing SimCity and other tycoons....

 

[smackababy]

The topic title just made me remember the days of playing SimCity and other tycoons....

I still play the original Roller Coaster Tycoon regularly. I just wish it had 1920x1200 support. =(

 

[Schadenfroh]

Yet they still cannot give me a proper Caesar 2 2 and a Sim City 2000 2.

We need classics remade ever 5 years or so with updated graphics, compatibility fixes (for modern OS), and minor gameplay tweaks / improvements at a discounted price.

 

[paperfist]

Such games aren't made or sold any more, they lack mass market appeal. Couple high development costs and support to relatively low sales, its easy to see why publishers don't waste the time money making them. People want first person, modern military games, set in the eastern hemisphere.

Not sure if that's entirely true, we do have/had Cities XL which isn't the greatest game, but still a city builder. Certainly not massive, but simtropolis has 400,000 members. So there's still an audience for this style of game.

 

[CPA]

I don't buy city building games so I can micromanage the actual building, I buy them to play different city-building strategies. Piecing together a specific building is boring and too time-consuming. But I'm not an artsy kind of guy, either.

Plus, like any good single player game with a story, I like to see what the developers created and are presenting as part of the story of your city - if that makes any sense.