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    SimCity

    Game » consists of 9 releases. Released Mar 05, 2013

    The fifth major installment of the SimCity franchise is a new take on the old city simulation formula. It features asynchronous multiplayer as well as Maxis' new Glassbox engine, allowing for real time customization and upgrading of buildings.

    Short summary describing this game.

    SimCity last edited by MelodicVirus on 10/29/22 12:59PM View full history

    Overview

    SimCity puts players in charge of their own urban sprawl
    SimCity puts players in charge of their own urban sprawl

    SimCity is the fifth installment in the long running and critically acclaimed SimCity city-simulation franchise, developed by Maxis Software and published by EA for PC and Mac, both in retail and via EA's Origin digital distribution service. It was released in the US on March 5, 2013 for Windows PC. The game was released in Australia, Japan, and most of Europe on March 7, 2013, as in Europe, and in the UK on March 8, 2013. A Mac version was released later in the year.

    As in its predecessors, the game puts the player in control of planning, building, and maintaining a simulated city. As the mayor of a virtual city, the player is given information and statistics regarding pollution, public happiness, crime rates, water levels, etc., to help make decisions about how to build and run the city. The player's responsibilities include laying roads, setting zoning, controlling the power and water supply, managing public services like education and health, setting taxes, managing sewerage and waste, trading supplies with neighboring cities, and more.

    Gameplay

    An example of zoning from SimCity 3000
    An example of zoning from SimCity 3000

    After a ten-year hiatus following the release of SimCity 4, the previous major installment in the franchise, developer Maxis underwent a lengthy development cycle to create a new SimCity experience. As the name implies, SimCity is presented as a reboot of sorts for the series; while it doesn't necessarily reinvent the game entirely, many of the systems have been re-imagined and streamlined.

    One major change is to zoning. In previous games in the series, the player could only lay down squares of residential, commercial, and industrial zones in low, medium, and high density varieties. In SimCity, the player assigns residential, commercial, or industrial zones along roads rather than in a grid. Zones will gradually become more dense over time as demand rises. Whereas zoning in previous games would require spending simoleons, zoning is free in SimCity.

    Maxis has also streamlined how resources, such as power, water, and sewage, are propagated through cities. The player no longer has to manually lay underground pipes and power lines, instead, resources in SimCity flow through roads. Because roads now carry all the resources in and out of the city, road design is even more important, and as such roads are also more costly.

    Always-online Requirement

    Due to the game's focus on multiple players sharing a landmass, SimCity was designed with an always-online connection requirement in mind. All cities and regions within SimCity are saved on EA's central servers, requiring an internet connection and authentication through the Origin client before a person can play the game. While also serving as DRM, this system allows players to interact with not only other cities in real time, but a larger global market for buying and selling resources. The game can be run in sandbox mode to allow players more freedom to create whatever they want, but they cannot interact with other cities and the global economy in sandbox mode.

    As of the game's tenth update, the always-online connection requirement will be disabled. Players will be able to play the game in an offline single-player mode, though aspects such as the limited city sizes will remain unchanged.

    New Features

    GlassBox Engine

    No Caption Provided

    SimCity retains the scope of previous games, but scales back some gameplay aspects in order to expand upon others. For example, cities are scaled back in geographic size and are not as large as in previous games. This design decision is attributed to the game's GlassBox engine, which was purposefully developed for this SimCity game, and is said to visually represent every element that makes up a city. As an example, each citizen (also called a "Sim") will be seen performing daily tasks, such as walking around, going to work, driving to school, and heading home. The GlassBox engine also allows players to view the individual wants and desires of each Sim in a city.

    Due to the amount of data that is visually represented within the game, the size of any one city had to be made smaller so that the game could be playable on a larger range of computer hardware. This also made cities much less self-sustainable, which in turn pushes players to take advantage of the always-online multiplayer to interact with other players in the same region, in order to share resources and ease management of cities.

    Social Flow

    One of the new primary additions to the franchise is the "Social Flow", or the ability of the player's city to impact other cities surrounding it, in what's called a region. Each region can have up to 16 cities within it. Players can choose to control each city plot within their region, or to open plots up to allow friends or any other SimCity players to be able to build in the region. This can lead to both positive and negative effects. For example, a player can create an entirely industrial city that provides jobs for people living in another nearby city, but pollution from the industrial city may also make its way to that same residential neighborhood. The game also allows the sharing of resources between cities, letting players sell any and all resources and waste, from electricity to garbage, to other cities within a region.

    Each region has one region-wide project that multiple cities can contribute money and resources to completing. Cities can also be abandoned, opening them up to other players.

    Buildings Editor

    In SimCity buildings and structures are customizable too
    In SimCity buildings and structures are customizable too

    Similarly to the editor in Spore, individual buildings can be upgraded and modified in a modular manner. For example, instead of buying two coal plants and placing them next to each other, the player can add extra smokestacks to an existing plant, increasing its capacity. This even applies to utilities such as police and fire stations, which can be made more effective through upgrades.

    MAC OS Version

    According to a blog post on the official SimCity website, the delay between the PC and Mac releases of the game is due to the Mac version being a native MAC OS application, as opposed to a port of the Windows version.

    Reception

    The game was initially generally well-received by game critics, at one point holding a metacritic score of 95 out of 100. However, reviews submitted after the game's release to the public were far more negative due to the persistent server issues which, by nature of the game's always-online gameplay and DRM requirements, heavily impacted the experience of playing the game. SimCity currently holds a metacritic score of 71 out of 100 based on 21 reviews, a reception that the review-aggregator website qualifies as "generally favorable".

    The current metacritic user score is very negative, averaging at 1.6 out of 10 based on over 2690 ratings - the vast majority of which gave the game a score of 4 or less.

    Publication (aggregators in bold)ScoreUser Score Avg.
    Metacritic79/1001.6 out of 10
    GameRankings76.12%n/a
    Giant Bomb3/51.67 out of 5
    GameSpot5.0/103.8 out of 10
    Game Trailers8.0/106.4 out of 10
    PC Gamer69/100n/a
    Polygon4/10n/a

    Russ Pitts of Polygon originally gave the game a 9.5, lauding the game as a well-engineered addictive experience in which "every element of this game has been perfectly and patiently engineered to engender an endorphin rush of accomplishment", concluding that SimCity "is in every way the fully realized evolution of the franchise and a much welcome iteration". Giant Bomb's own Alex Navarro was less positive in his review, giving the game a 3 out of 5 score, along with a very mixed narrative. He wrote that SimCity felt like two different games, one of them "a brilliant, vibrantly realized reboot of Maxis' classic SimCity franchise" and the other a "stricter game... one more dedicated to a single-minded way of cooperative thinking".

     Implementation of a standard size-limit to every city drew criticism
    Implementation of a standard size-limit to every city drew criticism

    Alex negatively dubbed the always-on co-op multiplayer facet SimCity a "skeletal structure in which the city building meat of the game has been somewhat awkwardly stuffed into", while Pitts said that he enjoyed seeing "disparate towns form an interconnected whole that is stronger than its parts", but also cautioned that the "fun of cooperation will, of course, vary depending on with whom you are attempting to cooperate".

    Reviews published days after the game's launch were far more negative in their appreciation, since the server issues were unexpectedly persisting. Online publications such as GameSpot which occasionally publish a review prior to a game's release seemingly waited out to account server issues into their review. Kevin VanOrd of GameSpot gave SimCity a 5.0 stating "SimCity is both a fun city builder and a broken product, equal parts joy and misery".

    Server Issues at Launch

    The game's always-online DRM requirement drew heavy criticism upon the game's launch, since server errors weren't allowing players to enter the game. Some players weren't even able to download the game, and others reported spontaneous server disconnects while playing SimCity.

    Eventually in an alleged attempt to decrease server malfunctions, some features were removed from the game. These included the ability to increase gameplay speed (referred in-game as "Cheetah" speed) as well as leaderboards and achievements. However, reports from both players and professional critics indicated that these measures had not visibly stabilized the servers.

    Because EA issued early reviews from popular video game editorial entities, many professional reviewers didn't take these controversies into account on their review. Ben Kuchera of Penny Arcade Report issued a cautionary article titled "Why you shouldn't trust our SimCity 'review'", alerting readers that the experience reviewers had been exposed to wasn't prone to server issues because "EA knew exactly how many reviewers would be playing the game", and therefore not necessarily indicative of the experience players would have with the game at launch.

    Russ Pitts' review at Polygon had its score reduced from an 8 to a 4, after having been downgraded from an original 9.5 to an 8. The first score reduction was due to early server issues, while the second, much harsher downgrade was due to the removal of gameplay features that were seen as crucial. Pitts wrote that "EA's decision to remove certain features of the game in order to attempt to stabilize server performance has resulted in a dramatic change to the way SimCity is played".

    On March 7th, just two days after the game's launch, Amazon temporarily stopped selling digital copies of the game.

    As part of its efforts to re-endear customers after all of the server issues, EA handed out one free Origin game to all players, from a choice of Battlefield 3, Bejeweled 3, Dead Space 3, Mass Effect 3, Medal of Honor: Warfighter, Need for Speed: Most Wanted, Plants vs. Zombies and SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition. Underage players automatically received a copy of Bejeweled 3 and SimCity 4.

    Special Editions

    Limited Edition cover
    Limited Edition cover

    A Digital Deluxe Edition is available only through Origin, which comes with extra missions, achievements, and the British, French, and German City Sets. These buildings will affect how Sims act around their neighborhood, adopting customs and other intricacies native to that culture.

    A Limited Edition of the game will be given to everyone who pre-orders, adding the Heroes & Villains pack to the game.

    Customers can purchase the Deluxe Upgrade Pack from Origin for $19.99 which contains the British, French, and German City Sets from Digital Deluxe.

    DLC

    Electronic Arts will be offering DLC from the day SimCity is available. Pricing has not been revealed, although promotional material has indicated that the Heroes and Villains Set has a $6.99 value.

    The Digital Deluxe edition is available exclusively from Origin, and comes with the following DLC:

    • British City Set - Big Ben landmark, Great Britain themed tile set, and large bus stations and double-decker buses.
    • French City Set - Eiffel Tower landmark, French themed tile set, and large french police stations.
    • German City Set - Brandenburg Gate, Germany themed tile set, and high speed rail stations and vehicles.

    Closed Beta

    SimCity accepted beta applications beginning in August 2012 and ending before first closed beta ran on the weekend of January 26-27, 2013. A second closed beta ran for 24 hours on February 16. The closed betas were limited to one hour play sessions, and cities could not be saved. A third closed beta was held on Febuary 27, 2013. This beta session was only open for four hours, but it allowed players to use all the tools in the game with no time or building restrictions.

    Access to the beta was granted to people who had pre-ordered the game via EA's Origin game store.

    System Requirements

    PC minimum system requirements

    • OS: Windows XP / Windows Vista / Windows 7
    • Processor: Intel 2.0GHz Core 2 Duo / AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core 4000+
    • Memory: 2GB
    • Graphics: 512MB video card with nVidia 7800, Radeon HD 2x00, or Intel Series 4
    • Hard Drive: 10GB

    PC recommended specifications

    • Processor: Intel Core i5 or better
    • OS: Windows 7
    • RAM: 4GB or higher
    • Graphics: nVidia GTX 275 or better, or ATI 5850 or Better

    Mac minimum system requirements

    • OS: Mac OS X 10.6.4
    • Processor: Intel 2.0GHz Core 2 Duo
    • Memory: 2GB
    • Graphics: Intel HD3000 or nVidia 9400M
    • Hard Drive: 10GB
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