SimCity Series
PCGamer – SimCity 5 magazine screens
Apr 2nd
Derek Pearce was kind enough to send over images from the May 2012 issue of PC Gamer which covers SimCity. However, the images he had were a bit too small to read, so he encouraged me to head on out to Walmart and pick up the mag. Article is below – make sure you go out and pick up an issue of PC Gamer yourself – it’ll cost around $10 but it is worth it! Thanks Derek!
Official SimCity Wallpapers!
Mar 31st
Sweetness! Now you can have an official SimCity wallpaper from EA/Maxis. w00t! There are 5 sizes in all, just download the zip/rar by clicking the pic below to get them today! Choose from PC/Mac, Mobile, Tablet and Facebook. EPIC!
Thanks to Sims Nieuws for the tip!
SimCity – The Connection Between You and Your World
Mar 30th
Check out what was just posted on the official SimCity Facebook page. Also, SimCity @ E3 2012! Can’t wait to see the many vids from there this summer!
Real cities don’t live in bubbles, real cities are connected to each other.
People and resources flow from city to city in regional economies. Neighboring cities directly affect each other, and through markets, their actions affect other cities across the world.
Because cities are connected, they specialize and differentiate. That’s possible because they’re all playing roles in a larger economy. Cities look different because they make a living doing different things. Clusters of cities working together do things that no city can do in isolation.
From the beginning, we built this SimCity to deal with this stuff realistically. We’re not just simulating the internal mechanics of cities, we’re simulating how cities relate to each other, to resource markets and to the natural world around them.
These are things that we have to do if we’re going to model real cities with integrity.
The larger environment that cities live in, and the global markets that they are participating in are all being simulated on Maxis’ servers. We’re running the underlying simulations that enable cities to transform their regions, to interact with each other, and to move markets. We’re tracking the accomplishments of cities and their effect on each other and the larger world.
This is true whether you’re playing by yourself, or if you’ve invited a bunch of friends to come and play with you. Your impact on the larger world matters, and the larger world in turn influences your city. This will be visible in lots of different ways, from changing commodity prices, to leaderboards to global and regional opportunities.
Here’s what this means in practice – Your cities won’t all look the same, they’ll take on specific roles, and it’s just awesome to create a region with your friends. It’s magical to see Sims come from their city to yours. It’s fun to make stuff and send it to a friend when they need it.
When you see the connection between your city and the larger world, your city is more real than it’s ever been before.
That’s why it’s an online game. We’ll be showing you more of this at this year’s E3 Expo in June.
-Ocean Quigley [Sim City Creative Director]
New SimCity Article by Kotaku!
Mar 30th
I swear the best line in this article is the sentence quoted below…
“Katsarelis told us that no one who worked on SimCity Societies is working on the new SimCity.“
Some more below and what not.
SimCity doesn’t need to sacrifice its light, enjoyably goofy roots and go pursue something as serious and hardcore as, say, Fate of the World. It doesn’t need to betray its fans in the quest for a new level of relevance. But surely there’s a middle ground, a way for a game to be deftly provocative, relevant in a way that a SimCity game hasn’t been before.
The people making this game are smart, and good at what they do. The people marketing this game are also smart, and good at what they do. But what of the dissonance between the marketing message and the game I saw last week?
I hold out hope that the two messages will come together in a more meaningful way by the time the game is released in 2013, that SimCity will have some of the passion and fire of the activists with whom it has been associated. Hope that this isn’t all just a bunch of marketing hoopla, that a video game can take on these pressing issues—how we live, how we govern, how we maintain balance in society—and say something meaningful.
IGN: SimCity 5: More than your borders
Mar 29th
So much SimCity info! Again, with repeating stuff…but I love every word of it. Check out this lengthy article from IGN
Many core gameplay concepts remain untouched, but how you get the information you need to make decisions has been entirely reworked. Kip Katsarelis, SimCity’s Lead Producer acknowledges that the previous games were really dense, and the wealth of information given to the player was hard to consume. To combat this Maxis has completely reworked how you get pertinent information. Yes, you still can view charts and graphs, but a lot of the data is conveyed in ways that take advantage of a player’s innate knowledge. For instance when you’re trying to figure out if your city has power, you can click a small power button on the screen and there’s an immediate graphical change. Instead of seeing your city with an array of symbols, you see through an intuitive colored lens, painting areas that aren’t getting power red and the ones that are green. You can quickly drag and drop in new power plants or connect areas to the grid with lines, watching how the colors rapidly alter to reflect your changes.
RockPaperShotgun – First Look at SimCity 5
Mar 29th
While the new SimCity will be the most granular yet it will also work on a broader level than ever before, due to the introduction of a multiplayer mode that’s intended to bring a new kind of play to a franchise that’s older than many of the 23-year-olds reading this article – and all of the 22-year-olds. In multiplayer mode, your city will be one of several – or several hundred – in a shared region. While cities won’t start out connected, the winds blowing in from SmudgeVille may actually pollute the skies above your carefully greened YouTopia. And if you do care to build some roads between the two, watch out: you may actually find smudgy SmudgeVille workers commuting in to take your higher-paying jobs.
Multiplayer does present some fascinating possibilities for SimCity. A new class of industry, the “Big Business,” can trade goods on the regional market. And if you’re connected to one of your neighbouring regional cities, you can make direct player-to-player transactions as well. The “what you see is what we sim” rule applies to trade as well: the road system between cities is crucial, Librande says, because trade actually flows via trucks between the cities in question. Power lines can be built as well. If YouTopia is producing surplus energy, you can sell some to SmudgeVille, which in turn can shut down some of its air-polluting power plants and open some casinos to generate cash.
Man, I already get my ass handed to me playing single player normally at a SimCity game. Dealing with multi-player is just going to make it that much harder. I’m not dealing with any a-hole mayors though stinking up my town. You mess with my city and I’ll find a way to send a couple of earthquakes/tornadoes your way – even if the game doesn’t allow for it.
JoyStiq – life of a Sim in SimCity 5
Mar 29th
The epic-bearded Ocean Quigley speaks again – this time to Joystiq about the individuality of a Sim in SimCity:
Every car on the road is owned by a Sim and lives in a Sim’s driveway. If a building is on fire and there’s a traffic jam there, the fire trucks won’t be able to get to the fire and the building will burn down. If an ambulance is going down a road and there’s enough room, cars will pull over to the shoulder — if it’s a tiny road, then a Sim could die. So each Sim has a bearing on the city they’re living in.
“Because it’s SimCity, we have to be able to simulate thousands of Sims,” Quigley noted as he showed off how the GlassBox engine simulates each Sim’s life. “It’s not SimHamlet — it’s SimCity. So we built this simulation engine to support many, many thousands, tens of thousands of Sims and vehicles in flight simultaneously. So each one of those Sims is a real Sim.”
Love the bit on how a Sim wakes up and pays their rent – $1. Why can’t real life be like that!? I’m loving how they are paying attention to the finer details and giving Sims a little more life. Getting ran off the road, going bankrupt and becoming homeless, even dealing with arsonist and other special Sims. It’s sounds like it is shaping up to be incredibly fun.
TheGameGuys – Early look at the new SimCity
Mar 29th
Flood of SimCity news incoming – of course, a lot of the info is mostly going to be the same, but always nice to hear other people’s take on the game. Very cool to know Maxis plans to stick with putting llamas in the upcoming SimCity.
If there is one facet of gaming culture that Maxis has been kind to, it’s been the modding community. Since the release of SimCity 2000‘s Urban Renewal Kit, which allowed players to create their own versions of the game’s sprite-based buildings, Maxis has opened their SimCity games to modders who’ve unofficially added their own custom-made and real-life buildings to the games. The new SimCity games is taking this modding spirit and places it directly into the core game by allowing players to modularly customize certain buildings such as a school or a firehouse, with most customizations actually effecting that building’s features and statistics.
As for other buildings and city infrastructure, power plants will still need to be built to chug away producing power (though electricity and other utilities can be imported from other cities), real-world landmarks can still be plopped into cities, and fire departments are still needed to take out the occasional fire. The inclusion of arcologies, which were made popular in SimCity 2000 yet have not been seen since, is an idea Katsarelis says the office is tossing around.
As for the legendary Maxis llamas, the game’s Lead Producer joked that they have “lots of plans for Llamas.”
G4 Previews SimCity
Mar 28th
Oh how I wish we’d also be invited out to Maxis… seeing as SimPrograms is one of the oldest Sims/SimCity sites around.
Ocean and his team went on by showing a traffic simulation, packing a simple road layout with numerous cars, enough to cause a traffic jam. Each car is both a working car and a statistical approximation object. It might sound obvious, but giving cars interior mapping gives a sense of volume that a non-3D model car would lack. This then led to an example of the importance of good road design and how it affects the circulation of a city. A fire in a building was triggered, (thanks to a Sim arsonist) which resulted in alerting a nearby fire truck. Unfortunately, it wasn’t close enough and was briefly held back from the scene by heavy traffic. And yes, people died, as evidenced by the flaming Sims running out of the building.
The depth of GlassBox also stretches to the modularity of buildings, that a school isn’t just a single structure and how the placement of structures adjacent to main building (eg. gym, lab, etc.) will affect the flow of foot traffic and efficiency. As corny as it sounds, Maxis clearly has a mission to ensure that users will only be limited to their…
Loading ...
KP Sweet Treats
Diesel Stuff
SimCity 5
