Quick Look: SimCity

I'm echoing the echos of past echos.

@godzilla_sushi:

Same here. Seeing how dead space 3 panned out I will be picking up that game at probably pennies on the dollar. So, waiting for SimCity to bomb and apply the same logic. Because business people are fickle.

@alternate: Please never say "son" like that again.

@thiefsie: Watch the rest of the quick look.

Definitely picking this up when the price drops. Looks interesting.

This might be me being a real dumby, but do you guys think that mods could be the answer to city size, terraforming and all the good stuff. It really burst my bubble watching this. Or is that a ridiculous idea and that will never happen?

When this is out on Steam i will buy it.

The only Sim City I've played was 3000, but the city size limitations and lack of terraforming in this one would make me rather play that one in stead. I also somewhat enjoyed the underground water stuff and all that.

Why is the ability to watch a video on youtube a premium feature?

I was excited for this.

After seeing it more in action, not so much. Bummer.

Man, fuck this?!!

You also can't load or save your cities in the traditional way. There is no "quit without saving" option. There is no "load saved game".

Every thing that you do to your city is permanent, including the natural disasters that happen. I don't think you can even demolish and entire city and start it again. There is no room for experimentation and without the ability to destroy your city, it sounds like you end up having all these abandoned cities laying around your region. Let that sink in.. you can't save a version of your city and load it up later.

You also can't move highways into your city and it doesn't sound like there's much need for any roads other than avenues (as traffic builds up so quickly).

Ars Technica posted an article about their annoyances which made me go from an instant can't wait Day 1 purchase to "I'll wait 4 months for it to go on sale"

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/03/simcity-impressions-we-waited-ten-years-for-this/

i loved simcity on windows 95. this game from the quick look doesn't look appealing to me. i also refuse to play a single player game that has always on tech. i will quit gaming altogether if there are no games left that i can't turn off. why? because screw them.

I have the original box and manual for SimCity 2000 (plus the game of course). It's 140 pages long.

Also, where's the naming of streets? Where's the placing of labels? These are things I loved in SC2K.

Man this is disappointing, this looked promising.

@undeadpool: Well, I'm still interested in this, but herehere for Afterlife!

I'm probably late to the party but why the fuck are the cities this tiny?

Jeff said at the beginning of this Quick Look that he did that very thing with Delta City.

I'm really taken aback by the size of these cities. I was ready to start pouting about not having a PC good enough to run this but it doesn't look like what I'm looking for in a simulation city. Could not care less about social gaming hooks. Alex's city looked pretty cool but if you have to sacrifice maximum efficiency output for the region it sounds like a bum deal for other cities. The disasters look appropriately goofy though ideally I'd want to set them loose in a bigger city to see what kind of damage they do. A great video guys. Very fun and informative.

Mind officially blown. Random PC Game crew is slipping, though it looks like there's plenty of game play footage out there.

Pick tomb raider instead. You will be glad that you did.

Apparently, as I understand it (not too well, to be fair) it's twofold:

1) They did not put anything in the game that wasn't directly represented by the simulation. IE: If you couldn't see it moving, in real-time, actually there in the game, then it wasn't put in. Means some serious computational power.

2) The multi-city region thingy. Multiple cities super large would be tough to do with the "All things are simulated in the simulation" aspect they were going for.

Note: Don't think I'm saying these were the "right' choices to make, I think the size of the city is quite disappointing, also.

Jeff Gerstmann: "I hate that I like it so much."

My sentiments exactly.

Looks like I'll just pick up SimCity 4 on Steam for my fix.

Even with all its shortcomings and, most importantly, very consumer-unfriendly 'DRM', I still want to play this game so badly.

Must... resist... urge...

What's more disappointing than the city-size restriction (which is seriously not as big a deal everyone seems to think it is, please stop talking about it) is when you watch an hour long quick look and the only they can say is "THE BOUNDS IS TOO SMALL." Ugh, so boring. Please tell me what this game is and not what it is not.

A decade long wait after SC4 and this is what we get. Hugely disappointing.

Giantbomb's Most Disappointing Game of 2013?

Extremely tiny cities restricted to perfect squares ruin any excitement I had for this game. I feel like even the SNES version hey played on Unprofessional Fridays was a larger playground than this, can anyone confirm?

I see myself purchasing this during a future Steam sale.

@theganjaking: Let me try: it's just like SimCity, but really, really small.

The small cities are a real deal breaker. People just wants to make gigantic cities. Looks like I will have to go back to Tropico or try SimCity 4 again to scratch my city building itch for now.

It will never happen... too much of the game is outsourced to the server side and handled by Origin that having mods would simply not work (thus the requirement to be always online).

And this whole game looks weak.. i wonder if the whole "region thing" is the result of EA forcing their business ideas like "social gaming and microtransactions!!1" onto developers just like they did with Dead Space 3. I wouldn't be surprised if they start selling "increased city sizes" as some kind of DLC.

Even more insane is that they are selling this at $60 a pop, seriously? They should have made this F2P and add some more microtransactions to it, that way Origin would have something to offer to the F2P market and give people a reason to install it. But charging $60 for this feels all kinds of wrong..

@nethlem: Thanks dude I never thought about that. Well I guess im dipping out

I was able to grow my residential and commercial areas to big buildings. I understand that this seems more like planning and management rather then expand to huge cities. I can image how overwhelming it can become if your city was too large. Buildings can grow bigger if u gave it more space around for expansion.

Different but I like it.

Yeah, thats annoying. But its mostly because Jeff and crew arent interested in what the game is now. Sim City now is more of a management game than a city building game. So its easier for Jeff to go "urghh this isnt what i wanted it to beee!!" instead of going "well i get what they were trying to do.."

I do not see you doing this.

I wish I'd watched this quick look before pre-ordering the game. I'd heard the cities were small, but jeez, that still took me by surprise and while I was initially kind of excited about the idea of being able to play with multiple people in a region, I didn't expect it to be set up in such a restrictive way. Having to run multiple cities, even if you can do it all by yourself, really sucks.

I wasn't aware that there was no teraforming tools, let alone no randomly generated either, so that's another huge let down. I guess it's my own fault for intentionally trying to stay in the dark and then pre-ordering anyway.

@lake: I don't think he got the memo, that this is Origin only. Man, fuck EA and their bs rules ie. Origin only, DRM, microtransactions for FULL reatil games, etc. Sorry went on a tangent.

Wow. Apparently almost nobody in these comments sections played the Betas. Every negative thing said in this quicklook has been well known public information for weeks.

awww, it's like they took out the things that made simcity awesome D:

http://www.beyondsims.com/39601/ocean-quigley-simcity-5-built-with-mods-in-mind/

Man... What a bummer this game is. The city size is ridiculous, which is probably a decision made to improve performance, which is ironic since the game still runs pretty poorly even though the graphics aren't very impressive. Having several cities in a region is a decent idea, but having a loading screen between them kinda breaks the flow of playing the game. And no terraforming whatsoever? Seriously?

I was looking forward to this game, but I'm the kind of person who gets most of my enjoyment out of those games when building a big-ass city, not maintaining a small one.

This Quick Look is yet another example of why I always check with Giant Bomb before buying a game. They seem to be among the few in this industry who can give both honest and accurate criticism. The game currently (March 5.) has a 91 on Metacritic, which if this QL is any indication, is not deserved. At. All.

Looking forward to hearing the podcast discussion of this one.

I'm not completely convinced by some of the complaints I'm seeing about size here. After a certain point, what does it matter how much sprawl you can have? Sprawling cities aren't really that great a way to make a city anyway. There seems to be plenty of room to build a reasonably sized city.

The real gameplay was never really about size, it was about managing the city as it developed (development should not be considered synonymous with sprawl). Yes, you may be able to fill those borders in an hour, but managing the city and keeping it developing after that is still very possible.

Jeff's argument seems to be "I don't care about density, I just want to make it bigger!". To this argument I pose a counter: Why is the one form of growth any more fun than the other? I get that there's something satisfying about watching the city grow, but isn't there also satisfaction to be found watching the buildings change to allow for that greater density?

Haven't played the game yet, so maybe when I get my hands on it I'll better understand, but these were just my thoughts as I watched the video.

The issue with size for me isn't that I want to make an insane metropolis, it's just that I don't want to feel constrained. I would be perfectly happy building a city the size of what they have in the quicklook, but I want the option to have organic edges to my world.

looks way more limited than I expected.

no terraforming and no random regions seems like a poor choice.

oh right, EA and Origin, and online-only too. Thanks, no thanks, I'll pass.

Every time I try to start this game nothing happens and I have to use the task manager to end it.

Really the only thought I need - too small. No thanks. I'm staying with SC4.