SimCity 5 closed beta 2 this weekend!

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nageov3t

Lifer
Feb 18, 2004
42,816
83
91
DRM doesn't bother me, but I learned my lesson about buying games on release with Civ 5.

I'll wait till next week when it's been marked down to 50% off.
 

Bateluer

Lifer
Jun 23, 2001
27,730
8
0
The new Sim City is going to be Diablo III all over again.

It will be purchased by thousands of ignorant people whose excitement is based purely off of the nostalgia from older titles in the series, without realizing that the company developing it already went to shit years ago, and this shiny new version coming out is actually a marginalized, dumbed-down, heartless shell of what the franchise used to be, with half of the features.

On release day, there will be massive server outages with the forced always-online DRM, because of the massive influx of people overloading EA's server infrastructure. The problem will last for days and the forums will explode with technical support requests.

When the server login problems finally subside, people will then realize how mediocre the game actually is, and there will be dozens of nerd rage threads all over the internet, complaining "WHAT DID THEY DO TO SIM CITY?" and "THIS IS LITERALLY ONE OF THE WORST GAMES I'VE EVER PLAYED" because people still haven't learned their lesson about giving into hype about unreleased games.

The resemblance will be uncanny. It's hilarious. (I was also going to say depressing, but I have no sympathy for people who blindly put down $60 for a game they know very little about).

Sadly, I think this is exactly right. The combination of lowest common denominator, always on/Online DRM, social network infections, and EA's microtransactions will doom SimCity 5.

Someone else needs to make a real city simulator, the market is open for it.
 

redrider4life4

Senior member
Jan 23, 2009
246
0
0
I'm excited but since I'm on the east coast i won't be able to play it tonight, I'll just start the download/install at midnight then go to bed. Stupid work
 

Maximilian

Lifer
Feb 8, 2004
12,603
9
81
The new Sim City is going to be Diablo III all over again.

It will be purchased by thousands of ignorant people whose excitement is based purely off of the nostalgia from older titles in the series, without realizing that the company developing it already went to shit years ago, and this shiny new version coming out is actually a marginalized, dumbed-down, heartless shell of what the franchise used to be, with half of the features.

On release day, there will be massive server outages with the forced always-online DRM, because of the massive influx of people overloading EA's server infrastructure. The problem will last for days and the forums will explode with technical support requests.

When the server login problems finally subside, people will then realize how mediocre the game actually is, and there will be dozens of nerd rage threads all over the internet, complaining "WHAT DID THEY DO TO SIM CITY?" and "THIS IS LITERALLY ONE OF THE WORST GAMES I'VE EVER PLAYED" because people still haven't learned their lesson about giving into hype about unreleased games.

The resemblance will be uncanny. It's hilarious. (I was also going to say depressing, but I have no sympathy for people who blindly put down $60 for a game they know very little about).

I am highly tempted by nostalgia and apparently getting to wreck other peoples cities with my own pollution but.... yeah... you're probably right.

Bargain bin material if i buy it at all.
 

obidamnkenobi

Golden Member
Sep 16, 2010
1,407
423
136
Sounds pretty 'meh', glad I'm not getting it.
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/03/simcity-impressions-we-waited-ten-years-for-this

I'm skipping solely because of Origin, but doesn't sound like I'm missing much. Sim-village with annoying always-online DRM and no save/reload. blah.

edit;
This is a full city?! What the hell? I know I was younger, but I swear Sim city 2000 was much much larger than that.
city-overview-640x369.jpg
 
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Wyndru

Diamond Member
Apr 9, 2009
7,318
4
76
This is a full city?! What the hell? I know I was younger, but I swear Sim city 2000 was much much larger than that.
Yeah they said that it is the equivalent of a medium sized map in SC4, but I'm calling BS on that too:

qn8Gl.jpg
 

T9D

Diamond Member
Dec 1, 2001
5,320
6
0
Wow ok that is just way way to small. I remember wanting even more room on the big maps of SC4. This is like Sim Neighborhood or something.
 

pcslookout

Lifer
Mar 18, 2007
11,926
146
106
Remember cities interconnect. 16 cities total.

So you can easily have one plot of land just for commercial, another for residential, etc
 

Wyndru

Diamond Member
Apr 9, 2009
7,318
4
76
Wow ok that is just way way to small. I remember wanting even more room on the big maps of SC4. This is like Sim Neighborhood or something.

In SC4 it seemed realistic because you actually had a large area to plan out where you wanted high polluting industry, so that your sims could live in cleaner areas in another part of the map.

I haven't played the 2013 beta, so maybe they modified the affect on pollution, but in the screenshots I've seen, it looks like regardless of how you build your city, everything is within a few blocks of each other, so you are forced to use different tiles for different types of buildings. What this is going to do is cause people to create individualized cities, which might not be a bad thing, but it might look funny from a region view.

I liked SC4 because you could customize tile sizes and setup regions to look like this:
cityregion4.jpg
 

Wyndru

Diamond Member
Apr 9, 2009
7,318
4
76
Remember that would take to much power with how much Simcity 5 has to process.

Which is why I'm surprised they are taking this version to "the cloud".

It's not really SimCity anymore. It simulates some stuff, but it's more about collaboration and eye candy than it is an actual simulation.

It could be EA just testing the waters though. If it's popular and they can expand their server capabilities and allow much larger cities then this will be a very good game. I think they mentioned that they may look into expanding city sizes too, so it might be just the early stages of something amazing. I'm just not sold on it yet.
 
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Kalmah

Diamond Member
Oct 2, 2003
3,692
1
76
I think the problem with larger cities has to do more with cpu power than anything. CitiesXL allowed large cities but it ran like shit due to being single-threaded. I don't know anything about the specifics of programming these things but from my understanding, multi-threading a game isn't easily done. (or it's simply impractical with current technology?)

If I remember correctly, Sim city 4 ran like shit once you got it large and crashed left and right. Traffic control options for roads and such sucked unless you installed mods and other unofficial addons.

Is it safe to say that current cpu technology(or programming api) just isn't up for the task of computing a large city simulator?
 

CU

Platinum Member
Aug 14, 2000
2,409
51
91
Sounds pretty 'meh', glad I'm not getting it.
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/03/simcity-impressions-we-waited-ten-years-for-this

I'm skipping solely because of Origin, but doesn't sound like I'm missing much. Sim-village with annoying always-online DRM and no save/reload. blah.

edit;
This is a full city?! What the hell? I know I was younger, but I swear Sim city 2000 was much much larger than that.
city-overview-640x369.jpg

Sim City 2000. I think Sim City Classic is bigger than that.
 

nageov3t

Lifer
Feb 18, 2004
42,816
83
91
I don't really get the city size qq... I mean, if there are fewer squares but more stuff going on within each square, isn't it kind of a wash?

that said, I'm sticking by my stand that this isn't a pre-order/buy on release game. maybe in a few weeks when the servers are stable and it's on sale.
 

Possessed Freak

Diamond Member
Nov 4, 1999
6,045
1
0
No interest in this at all. Looks hideously small, I have no interest in dealing with neighbors (I like the interaction that was there in AI form with SC2000). I have less than no interest in doing this in a timely fashion online like some sort of grinding MMO. I played my sims in bursts. I might have a marathon session of many hours back to back and then not play it for a while, I can't imagine this would be good for live interaction with my neighbors or whatnot.

Nope. I like to play those types of games at my own pace, on my own time, and with a lot of time manipulation.
 

CountZero

Golden Member
Jul 10, 2001
1,796
36
86
I don't really get the city size qq... I mean, if there are fewer squares but more stuff going on within each square, isn't it kind of a wash?

that said, I'm sticking by my stand that this isn't a pre-order/buy on release game. maybe in a few weeks when the servers are stable and it's on sale.

I don't think smaller is necessarily bad but look at that picture, if that is the biggest single map then calling it a city is extremely generous. It is maybe a town. You can build several of these towns and then get something like a city but if they are being broken down for simulation reasons then what gets simulated when you are playing one of say four regions on your own? The complex interplay between all the various parts of a large city would be pared down to whatever things regions pass between each other. Maybe that's a lot of stuff, certainly it must be more than you get in SC4. But in a 2kmx2km square you can't make NYC, you can't make Manhattan, hell central park is 3.41kkm^2 meaning you could just barely fit central park into one of these maps though certainly not the right aspect ratio. Forget any large scale transit planning, road connections between regions are defined by the overall map and you can't edit that map (or so I've read, maybe they do let you create maps, but I am fairly sure the plan is to sell you maps that resemble famous locations instead of just letting people create them).

All that being said I don't think small maps are the absolute deal breaker. With control of multiple regions interesting stuff may very well be possible that will rival or surpass what you could do in SC4. We'll have to see how it pans out.

The thing that seems much more problematic is the fact that this game is essentially SC the MMO and/or a glorified facebook game. It is an extremely dramatic shift which greatly changes expectations of how the game is expected to be played compared to every other iteration. I personally can't wrap my head around not being allowed to save my city, wipe it out with some natural disasters before calling it a day and then loading up the city I saved to continue. The game's emphasis on leaderboards and "fair" online play just doesn't sit right for me for a game that seems like it used to be about being creative and solving problems and not about getting a high score.

It is a wait and see for me. Minus the online stuff I might've pre-ordered it but with that in the mix it is highly unlikely I will give it a go unless it gets some glowing reviews that assuage all my concerns.
 

Aharami

Lifer
Aug 31, 2001
21,294
148
106
Sounds pretty 'meh', glad I'm not getting it.
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/03/simcity-impressions-we-waited-ten-years-for-this

I'm skipping solely because of Origin, but doesn't sound like I'm missing much. Sim-village with annoying always-online DRM and no save/reload. blah.

edit;
This is a full city?! What the hell? I know I was younger, but I swear Sim city 2000 was much much larger than that.
city-overview-640x369.jpg

wow the comments on that arstechnica link...the game is worse than 'meh'! I'll wait and see if they ever expand out the city size

Kyle: It makes very little sense, too. I mean they are already modeling the area outside that dotted white line that’s your square city limits. I can see that empty, lightly forested land. Just let me build on it! I'm guessing it’d be too hard for them to do that detailed, low-level modeling of every citizen and bus and fire truck and such, computationally, if they allowed for bigger cities.

Peter: Fuck. People are abandoning my city. I got hit by a meteor. It burned down a ton of buildings. Now it's all fucked. Game over man. Game over.
WTF, a zombie attack. How the fuck do I solve that? My population just got halved by a fucking zombie attack.
And because there's no save games, I can't go back in time to try a different route. There's no freedom to experiment. Because you suffer permadeath.

Peter: I really don't know about this game. Older SimCities, I always felt that there was something I could be doing. Tuning traffic, urban renewal, reducing pollution. This one I'm just not sure.
I'm having wild and crippling fluctuations in income. I can't determine the cause. From a net gain of 7K an hour it'll drop over the space of an hour or two to a loss of 5K an hour, so I'm spending all my time just trying to cope with that. It's stopping me from building up any serious cash reserves.

...
 
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Phanuel

Platinum Member
Apr 25, 2008
2,304
2
0
wow the comments on that arstechnica link...the game is worse than 'meh'! I'll wait and see if they ever expand out the city size

So basically, nobody in this thread has even played in one of the betas. I only ordered it after I had gotten into the 2nd weekend and played it for myself. Seemed good to me. *shrug*
 

Wyndru

Diamond Member
Apr 9, 2009
7,318
4
76
I think the problem with larger cities has to do more with cpu power than anything. CitiesXL allowed large cities but it ran like shit due to being single-threaded. I don't know anything about the specifics of programming these things but from my understanding, multi-threading a game isn't easily done. (or it's simply impractical with current technology?)

If I remember correctly, Sim city 4 ran like shit once you got it large and crashed left and right. Traffic control options for roads and such sucked unless you installed mods and other unofficial addons.

Is it safe to say that current cpu technology(or programming api) just isn't up for the task of computing a large city simulator?

SimCity4 ran a little slow when I used my P4, but it seems to run much better on my core 2 duo laptop (even though it is single threaded). After installing the updates for the game (I originally bought the Deluxe edition), I never had an issue with it crashing to desktop other than when I tried to use HW acceleration. With sw acceleration it ran fine. Even my large tile with 1 million sims in it ran ok, and that's a lot of number crunching to do.

I did have some issues with some puzzle pieces I downloaded (they may have been part of the NAM pack). IIRC it was an issue with the Light Rail over road doubledecker pieces I had issues with. If I had a bus stop/subway station combo piece selected and I hovered it over the double decker piece it would crash. But this was all modded stuff, not the vanilla game so it never bothered me.

My hopes were that SC5 would be a prettier, more advanced version of SC4 with more data and graphs. I was hoping that it would be single player, multithreaded and still have region play like SC4, but with a little extra simulation, where the cities you aren't playing at least increment time and spread pollution everything was more uniform across the region. Also shared money between regions would have been nice too (even if it was a bank loan kind of thing).