Quick Look: SimCity

I love the tilt-shift.

Saw the second half of the live stream. Seems like Jeff thinks its a brilliant game that gets bogged down by some annoyances. Great Quick Look Giant Bomb!

Sorta unfortunate that Jeff hadn't completely understood the land value mechanic, which is sorta imperative to the game.

The city size thing still sucks though, but seems like it's sort of a perception thing. If you can get over it playing around with 16 cities on your own is probably more than enough. Just too bad you have to deal with loading screens.

I can't believe they took out terraforming.

Fuck that shit.

oh, the cities are so small! :(

This still looks amazing. Shame about the online only. I've actually got a few flights coming up and I'd love to take SimCity on my laptop.

To be honest, the internet always gets its way, I'm sure there will be away around it but still...

Damn son, you guys gets these live archives up fast these days.

Did you move encoding in-house of sumfink?

Neat.

I love how Jeff hates that he likes it.

I like the idea of the multiplayer thing, but yeah, I would like to still be able to play if my internet provider decides to shut my Internet off

Meh. They removed vital features, added in some cool ones, limited the size of cities, put in always online DRM that is similar to Diablo III (that is to say is fucking terrible), and knowing EA there is probably some backdoor system to throw in microtransactions. And sure you can play with 16 cities and get the same overall thing as one big city, but you can only play one city, the rest get frozen in stasis until you play on them again. So either you put your faith in others, which is stupid, or you do it all yourself but on a scale of retardation.

I'd rather play SimCity 4. And it's a shame because this does look like it could be brilliant, but they gimped it down to the point where I have zero interest. I swore up and down after Diablo III that I'll never buy another game that has DRM like that and I meant it.

I have played and loved every Sim City game since the franchise started and this game makes me sad to see the direction they are going. It seems overly simplified, no terraforming, and a pitiful scale. Sure its a pretty game, but it looks more like Sim Village/Town than a real full blown city. The always online and the lack of saves/loads for this single player game is just an additional kick in the groin.

Looks like I will be playing SC4 for another decade

Wow, Sim City went super political.

probably going to pass on this one. seems more like a whimper than a bang.

Those are some small-ass cities...

There are some neat things about this.

There are some bummer things about this.

No way this game works on day one.

I'll wait it out to see if it's worth buying anytime soon.

Can't wait for tomorrow.

Wow, those cities are small as hell. I wouldn't even call that a city. That's a big neighborhood. Maybe a town at best.

Feels like another game that the critics will love for the weekend they played it, like the fawning Polygon review. But players (especially people who played SimCity before) will hate it for the limited scope and DRM/multiplayer crap that reviewers tend to ignore or paper over. I don't want my city to be done in an afternoon.

Another Diablo 3 divide. Passing on this.

Essentially every awesome new features this game has over its predecessors are crippled by the small size of cities. Plus some major deal breakers like no save/reload to just mess around with your cities and no terraforming. What's the point...

Quick looks galore!

oh no..its too small HAHAHA

The SNES one is still my favorite.

I'd like to get it... But I don't trust the developer. I'm not talking EA, I'm talking Maxis.

Despite having a powerhouse computer, I can't run the Sims 3. All their auto detect settings bullshit doesn't allow me to change my settings. And after trying for weeks, I gave up on it. I have little to no faith that Simcity will work on my computer... A feeling I don't think I've had with any other game. I don't trust Maxis to ship a non-broken game, so I'm gonna skip it.

And Whoa... those cities are small. Hey uh... check out Cities XL anyone? That's a pretty cool game. And the city maps are HUUUUUUGE

Ryan makes his glorious return!

Oh god those zoning colors look exactly the same.

That was it? They should keep streaming, that was entertaining

Did that popup just inappropriately use the word "like"? He did not appear to be a 14 year old girl from Los Angeles.

Looking at this from Tokyo, too soon man, too soon.

can't wait until modders free up the size restrictions and make the close-up view look like GTAIV+icenhancer

VIDEO FEATURE!

Hopefully when the Katy Perry and Black Eyed Peas expansion packs roll out, the cities will be larger.

So tiny. A lot of disappointing choices on display here. :/

I won't euphmise. This just looks so bad for a SimCity entry. D3 was aptly mentioned, I feel more similarities than launch woes are here. Like, who was this made for, the SimCity fan who wanted a smaller city? The SimCity fan who wanted more of TheSims? I don't buy it.

@floofmania: Are there to be mods in this Simcity?? That would actually make me preorder this right the f*ck now.

Just the other day I threw in the recycling my SimCity 3000 manual. It was spiral bound and like 150 pages. The manual is now a 2 page .pdf. Not saying it's a bad thing, I never even read the old manual, waste of paper for me, but it is an interesting contrast.

Guys remember, it's not the size of the city, but how you use it.

@ares42 said:

I thought it was pretty clear from the beginning (back when we first started seeing demos) that there was going to be a compromise between city size and simulation complexity. That these guys are surprised by this is a little odd. We all knew that the city size looked small, and that there was a focus on regional gameplay. The loading screens suck, but it's better than having large city sizes available that no existing computer can actually handle. It doesn't seem like a bad compromise to me. But then I've only seen others playing, and haven't played myself.

@roger_klotz: Brilliant idea & that expansion should help this from the look of it. The GB crew brought up a good point on this that I too found while playing the beta, after you play it a few times, you can do a little experimenting with curved roads like Alex but overall the gameplay is in such a narrow field to really make it not that much different each time versus something like the Sims 3 where you have a wider variety of things to play with.

Maybe I just don't have the mindset for this kind of game, I do like the tilt shift & some of the visual stuff done for this sim game of seeing the city & how the power/water/ect. is distributed but just not as catchy to me other strategy games.

@familyphotoshoot said:

For me that's the big drawback, not the limited city size. How hard would it have been for them to include a tool for creating your own region, with terraforming? It just doesn't make any sense to me. Playing on already-existing maps just about kills replayability. I hope they have some sort of fix planned for this.

I didn't even know what a nuclear panner plant was!

Haters gonna hate. This game is great.

If they let you make your own maps, how would they sell you the next $10 map-pack?!

Okay.

From what I'm seeing, this is basically SimCity Social (the Facebook game...which I play...regularly) except in a full $60 product. That...is a fucking bummer. What I mean by that is this: I really do like SimCity Social, thus I would probably like this game. However, when I'm thinking of "SimCity, a new PC game," I have specific expectations that go along with that. Particularly, I want to build MASSIVE FUCKING CITIES. This right now just...it looks so...sad...and pathetic.

I'm calling it now: SimCity is going to be the same colossal form of mindfuck of a gaming phenomenon that Spore was.

this commentary is bumming me out. i've watched some beta gameplay videos, and nobody else seemed to have as much trouble as jeff

@familyphotoshoot: Why would they when they can just charge you for it later as "DLC"?

thats really strange, i have a mid range pc which allowsme to play games but not at the best quality even with amount of issues i have with my bulldozer processor I can play the sims just fine on the higher settings.

Here's a free tip to the developers about their colorblind mode: change one of the non-blue colors to red. Problem solved.

That is legitimately disappointing. I expected different things.

Was so bummed out I cancelled my preorder. I had no idea the city limit was so small and there was no generate land or terraforming.

I really thought I could build the city of my dreams and watch it at work. Instead it's build a town in a plot of someone else's land.