The new SimCity game is almost out, and parts of the Internet has already condemned it into the incinerator of shame. What could possibly be the problem? At E3 last year, we were shown the power of the game's engine, Glassbox, and its ability to simulate a whole bunch of individual stuff in real time, and that along with other new impressive features made this seem like the streamlined modern SimCity game everyone's been waiting for. Fast-forward 6 months to the game's first beta release, where players could interact with the game for the first time, and an air of skepticism had formed around the game already.

Their biggest rallying cry: the city size is small. The game limits all cities to an area similar to a medium city in SimCity 4. That is a 4-square-kilometer box for those who want numbers and shapes. Getting a large city with a population of over 250,000 is a challenge, let alone 1,000,000, and that does not fare well given that there is only one size type of city. Further more, you can't put a city right next to another, and cities are only connected to each other via a single freeway offramp and some random railways, leaving vast tracts of empty space that will never be used. How visually unpleasing!

The above photo is a region from SimCity 4. From an aesthetic viewpoint, this region looks pretty awesome. There's a huge urban area that you could imagine existing in the real world. Those mountains are your mountains, and those cities are your cities that you made the effort to make look like a real city when viewed form orbit. The mountains and waterways in the new SimCity, by contrast, are premade, unmodifiable blocks of terrain. Yes, there is no terraforming.

From the looks of things, SimCity 4 looks to be a real winner in this fight. Over the last 10 years, SimCity 4 has accumulated a large and dedicated fanbase of modders determined to make their cities not just function properly, but also look pretty. Mods like ploppable RCI buildings, custom regions, and the well-known NAM mods have given this game a life that it wouldn't deserve if left on its own.

It's understandable then that much of the SimCity fanbase are crying foul over the new SimCity. The changes the new SimCity brings to the table are incompatible with the old way of building cities, a way that fanbase has had 10 years to get used to, and enjoy, particularly.

The new SimCity also brings a focus on city specialization. You can choose to have a mining town and sell your resources to your neighbors or invest in a gambling city to attract tourists, as examples. It's an interesting gameplay aspect that forces you to adapt to the region's characteristics and form not just good cities but a functional region on top of that. The problem many have with this is that there's no way to build a large city that includes just about everything. Huge primate cities like London and Paris are all but impossible to build. By the time you add all the special buildings, your city's population will have dropped dramatically, and your city won't be making any money. Lots of people just want one big city that does it all for them, and this SimCity does not offer that.

Apart from the game's looks, a lot of people are giving EA shit about how the online is handled. SimCity 2013 requires an always-on Internet connection due to the way the multiplayer is set up, or something. A lot of people don't buy it. Because of the way the game is built, city saves are located on the cloud instead of the hard drive, meaning players don't have access to tweak their region and don't have control over what happens to it. If something bad happens to their city, it's the developer's fault and not the player's, a responsibility many don't want to give up. The Multiplayer allows many players to build cities in a region and work together to improve everyone's cities. There is easy potential for griefing, however. Many SimCity fans don't want others screwing up their region, and there's a real problem to back that up with. What's to stop an idiot from joining someone's region, claiming a plot and building a shitty city, only to abandon it and never return. That only hurts the people in the region who legitimately want a good experience. Time will tell how this experiment goes, but a lot of people aren't happy about the instability of this situation.

I encourage you to try and play SimCity 4 if you have an interest in playing SimCity 2013. Actually, I dare you to try, as I bet the game will run poorly many of the latest video cards (The game only runs on one core and only rarely takes minute advantage of my GTX 680) Also, the game is extremely buggy, and often when I am building a great city the game inexplicably crashes and sends all my hard work down the drain. The vanilla game also has some terrible traffic pathing issues that can grind even the best cities to a halt (Mods have dampened this issue greatly, however) Looking at SimCity 4 today, it is a functional disaster.

Among the cluttered mess, however, it is easy to appreciate SimCity 4 for what it is best at: a sandbox. The modding community has shown for years that people really care about how their cities look, and SimCity 4 provides players and modders the ultimate playground for their experiments. The new SimCity, however, is treated more as a strategy game than a sandbox, limiting the customization options older fans have gotten so used to. The additions the game has added are admittedly amazing, but without some of the great features of SimCity's past, and some questionable aesthetic design choices, it's left many sour.

The new SimCity is a completely different game from its predecessors, and the features it has added and taken away are dividing fans of the older SimCity games and those who have never played them before, and that uneasy apprehension makes it difficult to predict the game's success. If the game can't attract older fans and newcomers alike, it will likely be a disaster bigger than any one city could handle.