I unfortunately don't have a beta key, and missed out on all the free beta-key giveaways (at least the ones I was aware of). Instead i have been watching videos of people playing the game. So far, no one has build anything complex (I don't know how much is in the beta to let users get carried away), but it seems like the UI is super clean, notifications can be obvious or discreet, and smart building tools (like for roads) seem pretty nifty. It seems like a really fun SimCity, but what are your thoughts on it so far?

It's fantastic. It runs smooth, looks great, and has incredible music. The UI is LIGHT YEARS ahead of the previous Sim City games, especially in terms of giving you the information you need to improve your city. The building options, whole totally different, actually end up working a lot better once you get a hang of how it all works. I especially like the modular city services buildings (police, fire, education, etc.) Instead of spamming schools and what-not all over the place to cover it, you can just build a single one near the center of town, and expand the services with modular add-ons as necessary. Schools are great, because you can extend the coverage by simply placing bus stops around town.

Overall, i'm blown away, and can't wait for the full version.

Since you havent' see some complex cities or whatever yet, check this out.

I wish for bigger cities, and it's something they are looking into after release. Saving/reloading like in previous games is sadly not possible anymore. Looks fantastic though, and plays great.

I want to test the region play where you can have 16 players/cities interacting and influencing the gameplay. You can build larger projects like a space station together which sounds fun.

eh

What's the economy like in this game? Like, how do you manage income and so on? I can always use a new citybuilder game and recently enjoyed Anno 2070 immensely, but the last time I tried a SimCity game I was too stupid/young to understand the mechanics of it.

The always-on DRM is making me seriously dislike the game already, which sucks because I loved SimCity 4, and a lot of what they are attempting to do with this game sounds great but I just cannot get behind that form of DRM.

@Azteck:

Do you think people overreact too much to DRM that requires you to be connected to the internet?
Yeah, I do. But I don’t know, maybe these people are elite businessmen who are always playing games on laptops while flying on planes?

@Azteck said:

The always-on DRM is making me seriously dislike the game already, which sucks because I loved SimCity 4, and a lot of what they are attempting to do with this game sounds great but I just cannot get behind that form of DRM.

Well, have you played the game, and has the "DRM" directly affected your enjoyment of it?

I would argue that it's not actually DRM, because it's not put in place solely to restrict access to the game. Sim City is built around online, multiplayer client-server architectures, which is completely different from, say, CD keys, or Ubisoft's Solidshield Tages SAS software which is a completely arbitrary restriction designed solely to attempt to enforce copy protection.

I agree that there should be an offline-only single player mode, but I think it's disingenuous to call Sim City's online architecture "DRM".

@MURDERSMASH said:

It's fantastic. It runs smooth, looks great, and has incredible music. The UI is LIGHT YEARS ahead of the previous Sim City games, especially in terms of giving you the information you need to improve your city. The building options, whole totally different, actually end up working a lot better once you get a hang of how it all works. I especially like the modular city services buildings (police, fire, education, etc.) Instead of spamming schools and what-not all over the place to cover it, you can just build a single one near the center of town, and expand the services with modular add-ons as necessary. Schools are great, because you can extend the coverage by simply placing bus stops around town.

Overall, i'm blown away, and can't wait for the full version.

Since you havent' see some complex cities or whatever yet, check this out.

that guys city is amazing and i love the little progression run down, seems like a lot of charm in the game.

I find that I'm disliking the game for pretty much the exact reasons I thought I'd dislike it for. At this point it's pretty much a SimRuraltown.

Some elements are pretty neat, though. I'm liking some of the new data maps, though I wish they had graphs for things like SC4 did (Maybe I missed them? I got my invite late at night and just had to try it out). What I don't like is how they've implemented the access to the maps in the interface. Just put that list of all maps on screen at all times, don't stick it in the corner like it's unimportant, dammit! I also think the "upgradeability" of the ploppables is a really neat idea, especially for the schools (school bus stops is pretty swell, and rather realistic too).

I have some gripes with the road mechanics and zoning, though. I find that the road picker (straight, curved, etc) is a bit unimaginative. Do we really live in an era where we don't have modifier keys? Is it so hard to figure out how I want my road to curve based on how I draw the mouse? I was struggling with the curved road with quite some time because it wasn't curving the way I wanted it to. I can't remember how exactly Cities XL did this since I didn't play it for long (it's not that good), but I think I do recall it did it better than this. One major issue I noticed was that it's not possible to replace a 1-"tile" street with a 2-"tile" street, which I thought was very restrictive. I have to demolish the street and all the zones around it to replace it? Not good at all.

The zoning is a bit meh. I guess it makes sense to only be able to zone near streets, but what happens to the space in the middle that isn't used? Do the buildings creep in toward the center? Maybe I just didn't get that far in the allotted hour.

Also, where are the different zoning densities? You're not letting me decide where the various building sizes go? Why not? Too much thinking for your average video game player? Gotcha.

All in all, I probably won't be getting this. Cities in Motion 2 seems promising, even though it's not really a city sim, and I guess there's always Cities XL for whoever actually thinks that's a good game. And there's always Sim City 4.

@buft said:

@MURDERSMASH said:

It's fantastic. It runs smooth, looks great, and has incredible music. The UI is LIGHT YEARS ahead of the previous Sim City games, especially in terms of giving you the information you need to improve your city. The building options, whole totally different, actually end up working a lot better once you get a hang of how it all works. I especially like the modular city services buildings (police, fire, education, etc.) Instead of spamming schools and what-not all over the place to cover it, you can just build a single one near the center of town, and expand the services with modular add-ons as necessary. Schools are great, because you can extend the coverage by simply placing bus stops around town.

Overall, i'm blown away, and can't wait for the full version.

Since you havent' see some complex cities or whatever yet, check this out.

that guys city is amazing and i love the little progression run down, seems like a lot of charm in the game.

"Charming" doesn't even begin to describe how awesome this game looks and feels. Here's a couple pics I took of a city I built last night. I just love how, when you zoom in all the way, the buildings, road, trees, and everything else look like miniatures, like it's part of a train set, or those scale-model city layouts people make.

Except for the whole mess yesterday afternoon with the server being down and stuff, when I actually got to play it, it was awesome. I wanted to keep playing way past the one hour.

@Bevinsky said:

I find that I'm disliking the game for pretty much the exact reasons I thought I'd dislike it for. At this point it's pretty much a SimRuraltown.

Some elements are pretty neat, though. I'm liking some of the new data maps, though I wish they had graphs for things like SC4 did (Maybe I missed them? I got my invite late at night and just had to try it out). What I don't like is how they've implemented the access to the maps in the interface. Just put that list of all maps on screen at all times, don't stick it in the corner like it's unimportant, dammit! I also think the "upgradeability" of the ploppables is a really neat idea, especially for the schools (school bus stops is pretty swell, and rather realistic too).

I have some gripes with the road mechanics and zoning, though. I find that the road picker (straight, curved, etc) is a bit unimaginative. Do we really live in an era where we don't have modifier keys? Is it so hard to figure out how I want my road to curve based on how I draw the mouse? I was struggling with the curved road with quite some time because it wasn't curving the way I wanted it to. I can't remember how exactly Cities XL did this since I didn't play it for long (it's not that good), but I think I do recall it did it better than this. One major issue I noticed was that it's not possible to replace a 1-"tile" street with a 2-"tile" street, which I thought was very restrictive. I have to demolish the street and all the zones around it to replace it? Not good at all.

The zoning is a bit meh. I guess it makes sense to only be able to zone near streets, but what happens to the space in the middle that isn't used? Do the buildings creep in toward the center? Maybe I just didn't get that far in the allotted hour.

Also, where are the different zoning densities? You're not letting me decide where the various building sizes go? Why not? Too much thinking for your average video game player? Gotcha.

All in all, I probably won't be getting this. Cities in Motion 2 seems promising, even though it's not really a city sim, and I guess there's always Cities XL for whoever actually thinks that's a good game. And there's always Sim City 4.

I disagree that the road drawing tool is "unimaginative". There are key modifiers as well for drawing the roads; holding the shift key will lock it into 45 degree or 90 degree angles, or keep roads completely straight, depending on what tool you have selected. Why do they all have to be bound to keys, anyway? The tools are still there, you just click them instead of holding down one of several modifiers.

I also disagree that the zoning densities streamlining is somehow "dumbed down" to paraphrase your tone. If anything, it's streamlined. The game now automatically adjusts the zoning depending on wealth, roads, public services, proximity to other types of zones, etc. So, if you build your city in a way that doesn't allow for bigger buldings, they won't expand. The player choice is still there, it's just presented differently.

Also, the way the buildings are placed into the zones, while I feel should be drawn on screen in a more defined manner, also makes sense once you get used to it. It's not better or worse, it's just different. You'll get a feel for it once you play it enough, and space out the roads accordingly as is.

@Morningstar said:

I wish for bigger cities, and it's something they are looking into after release. Saving/reloading like in previous games is sadly not possible anymore.

Can you or anyone else elaborate on these 2 points. I keep hearing that and that sounds like an instant no buy to me.

Not that I'm worried about my Tower of Power running it at buttery-smooth FPS, how is it handling on mid-to-low-end setups?

@Ghost_Cat: Ah man your username is so freakin awesome. It's....a.....g-g-g-g-g-g-ghost cat!

@Flaime said:

What's the economy like in this game? Like, how do you manage income and so on? I can always use a new citybuilder game and recently enjoyed Anno 2070 immensely, but the last time I tried a SimCity game I was too stupid/young to understand the mechanics of it.

It's presented in a very accessible manner. Basically you get a balance sheet that breaks down the income vs expense of all the various parts of your city such as residential, commercial, water, etc. with the total simoleans-per-hour you're currently earning. Form that same screen you can change your tax rate and issue up to three bonds if you're in need of some quick money.

@Pr1mus said:

Can you or anyone else elaborate on these 2 points. I keep hearing that and that sounds like an instant no buy to me.

The game is online only so you can't create a save then do whatever you want then reload, and each city area is smaller than past games but you can now create a region with multiple cities connected and working together. Personally, neither of these are big deals.

@MURDERSMASH said:

@Azteck said:

The always-on DRM is making me seriously dislike the game already, which sucks because I loved SimCity 4, and a lot of what they are attempting to do with this game sounds great but I just cannot get behind that form of DRM.

Well, have you played the game, and has the "DRM" directly affected your enjoyment of it?

I would argue that it's not actually DRM, because it's not put in place solely to restrict access to the game. Sim City is built around online, multiplayer client-server architectures, which is completely different from, say, CD keys, or Ubisoft's Solidshield Tages SAS software which is a completely arbitrary restriction designed solely to attempt to enforce copy protection.

I agree that there should be an offline-only single player mode, but I think it's disingenuous to call Sim City's online architecture "DRM".

But it is DRM. They can keep talking about their vision for the SimCity games as more connected as much as they want but at the end of the day, they are restricting the usability of the game to make sure that it cannot be downloaded illegally. What they are attempting to do can certainly be done without imposing an always-on protection, just tie the online aspect to the origin account like every other multiplayer game on PC and let people play offline if they want to. Their reasoning for not including an offline mode is lackluster at best, and makes absolutely no sense. This is EA trying to fence off pirates just like they always do.

@Red12b said:

eh

I think that's short for ehmygodthisgameisactuallyprettysweetbutIshouldprobablyputspacesinmywordsbecausethatwouldmakemoresense

@Bane122 said:

@Pr1mus said:

Can you or anyone else elaborate on these 2 points. I keep hearing that and that sounds like an instant no buy to me.

The game is online only so you can't create a save then do whatever you want then reload, and each city area is smaller than past games but you can now create a region with multiple cities connected and working together. Personally, neither of these are big deals.

Depending on how regions work i could live with smaller individual cities. But no saving/reloading is a complete deal breaker. What is the point of building a city if not to blow it up, reload, blow it up again in a different way, reload, keep playing as if nothing happened.

The game so far is great the only thing i think it needs is better balancing for building costs like wind power. I personally think wind power is to cheap and cost effective i have yet to really need a coal or oil power plant and, i have filled the map with buildings and it all runs off 1 wind power plant but maybe i am missing something.

Also i wish they wouldn't use the circle AOE feature with parks and such they should have stayed with the road AOE feature that everything else uses.

@Pr1mus: I think they should still have an offline mode too. That being said i think what they are trying to do is make everyone dependent on someone for online play i am just not sure how it will work because from what i have played you really don't need other player unless you want to build a mega structure ie space shuttle.

I'm loving it and can't wait for the full release. This game is just complex enough (of course, not everything is in the beta yet) yet simple enough to make building great cities very easy. All the UI stuff makes the game much easier. For example, you can see what residents are unhappy and see the effect from placing say a park. Also, power and water management are SO MUCH EASIER.

Does anyone know how to take screenshots?

Nevermind, reading the digital manual helped.

I should not have played the beta.. March might as well be forever away.

@AbeBroHamLincon said:

@Pr1mus: I think they should still have an offline mode too. That being said i think what they are trying to do is make everyone dependent on someone for online play i am just not sure how it will work because from what i have played you really don't need other player unless you want to build a mega structure ie space shuttle.

I don't want to play with others so for me this is deal braker, kinda. But I'll probably end up buying it anyway, it's strengths are greater than it's weaknesses. I'll probably wait until a week or two after release though, in case there are server issues and the like.

More time

"10 minutes so better start wrapping things up" or what that message says isn't what you'd expect from a beta with limited/restricted content.

They want us to test, but not really. Now they have feedback on the first hour of gameplay, what about the rest?

The city space is too small. The beta doesn't really have much, most of the structures and features are locked out for now. Other than that, it was fun for 45 minutes because after that you run out of things to do.

The music and the sounds of the game are just fantastic. So far, it looks great! The only thing I didn't like was how every structure had to literally hug a road to be built.

@Flaime: The Economy is really easy as long as you keep on adding zones when there is demand for it I never felt like I was ruining out of money. Plus it is done hourly which helps a lot not monthly like in previous Sim City games. The one down side to the game was where by the end of the Beta I pretty much had a full city up and running with all the facilitates I needed and still making 6K an hour or so.

What I am looking forward to is messing around with regions and specializing each city. If you Zoom out of the city view they showed the options for the great works which are awesome. I just wish there wasn't always on DRM and the city's were larger.

@AbeBroHamLincon:

I think the space that wind power plants takes up would make you want to upgrade. I had managed to get 40K citizens in my city and had 5 of those chugging along I wish I could have gone Nuclear.

@potatomash3r: I agree. Another thing that needs to be mentioned to them in feedback is that the player has no idea of the space a specific zone needs to develop from lower to higher value buildings. Your only indicator when zoning is the initial one-tile strip that hugs the side of the road. I'd like to be able to see the space between city blocks needed to accommodate a specific value building site. If I'd like there to be room enough for medium sized apartment buildings or high value apartment sky scrapers for example. Now I don't really know enough to plan. Of course you can bulldoze the entire area and rebuild, but still it seems awkwardly designed. Another example is factories, how big can they get? I have no idea because the game doesn't let me know anything about the potential of the plot I've just outlined.

At the very least let me designate areas where I'd prefer to see bigger buildings appear. I've noticed that it takes a really good mass transit system to keep the roads from clogging when apartment buildings appear in a network of roads previously used by smaller houses; Perhaps you couldn't afford the type of roads that can take a lot of traffic early on for example and then your service vehicles can't reach shit.

If you agree with me on this please mention something to them in using their forum or the feedback feature.

About the regional cities: How about building Trash City? A region outer border city meant for accepting trash. Loan cash and add a trash collector service building and plot garbage areas all over and have your nice cities ship their to Trash City. :)

I'll be 'that guy' and say that I'm not touching it until it hits steam because I don't like Origin.

(So never then)

@Soap: Seems like a big title for Origin so I'd guess later rather than sooner, yeah. I'm too into video games to stop playing because of Origin's weird policies on stuff that -should- have been straight forward. Steam needs proper competition, that much is clear to me, sadly Origin isn't even on the horizon to becoming as popular. Giving Steam demi-god status and a monopoly-like freedom to run things isn't going to help the gamer.

A weak point for Origin is that by disallowing Steam to sell and host EA games they admit to be the lesser service.

So, I noticed that I had a beta invite in my email about two hours before the end of the beta period. I got it downloaded and installed with just enough time to get the hour in. I have to say that I am interested in the game for sure. I love the aesthetic. The game is straight pretty. The sounds and music are great.

What I don't like:

• As mentioned earlier, the zoning system needs to give more feedback. With the ability to build super curvy roads and make plot sizes just about any size, often times you'll find that you'll end up with areas where no one wants to build or that aren't suitable for larger buildings. Unfortunately you have no way of knowing that.
• The city size does indeed feel small. Maybe I am missing out on something since I only was allowed an hour to mess with it, but it seems like a seriously small plot of land.
• Is it really a good idea to make zoning free? I never felt that I was going to have trouble with money at any point because I could just plop down more zones for development free of charge. That leads to more tax revenue and fat coffers. Part of the fun of SimCity 4 for me was balancing expansion with the cost of development.
• Maybe it was just me, but the tutorial elements (outside of the actual tutorial mission) felt like they needed work. There were things that I wanted to know that eventually were disclosed via the pop-up bubbles on the right side of the screen, but it felt like they should have shown up much earlier. A specific example is building/zone density. I wanted to get my buildings to hop up to the next density but I had no idea that it was dictated/limited by the quality of road the building was placed next to.

That said, I'll probably grab the game eventually. I won't bother around launch though. I'm smart enough to avoid that inevitable mess with server stability and queues.

@MURDERSMASH said:

It's fantastic. It runs smooth, looks great, and has incredible music. The UI is LIGHT YEARS ahead of the previous Sim City games, especially in terms of giving you the information you need to improve your city. The building options, whole totally different, actually end up working a lot better once you get a hang of how it all works. I especially like the modular city services buildings (police, fire, education, etc.) Instead of spamming schools and what-not all over the place to cover it, you can just build a single one near the center of town, and expand the services with modular add-ons as necessary. Schools are great, because you can extend the coverage by simply placing bus stops around town.

This sounds like exactly what I was hoping for. I love the idea of modular buildings--it makes so much more sense. I'm not surprised by the music, though--SimCity has usually had great music.

@MURDERSMASH said:

@Azteck said:

The always-on DRM is making me seriously dislike the game already, which sucks because I loved SimCity 4, and a lot of what they are attempting to do with this game sounds great but I just cannot get behind that form of DRM.

Well, have you played the game, and has the "DRM" directly affected your enjoyment of it?

I would argue that it's not actually DRM, because it's not put in place solely to restrict access to the game. Sim City is built around online, multiplayer client-server architectures, which is completely different from, say, CD keys, or Ubisoft's Solidshield Tages SAS software which is a completely arbitrary restriction designed solely to attempt to enforce copy protection.

I agree that there should be an offline-only single player mode, but I think it's disingenuous to call Sim City's online architecture "DRM".

I agree. I don't get the sense from what I've heard from people playing the beta that it's intrusive. And it makes sense, given what they're trying to achieve, to have a connection going. I'll be interested to hear details, though, as more people play the beta.

I think we might be playing this sim city 5 a little to much like sim city 4. I honestly think you get much more out of the game making a small town with a specialty that trades with other towns but, we all are still trying to make grid square cities to see how many sims we can shove in there. this is why i think they made it all online that and a game like this offline would be way to easy to pirate.

I just wish they would have had us test the online multi player with regions instead of this advertisement beta because we all still know nothing about how it will really be played once your on with 3 other people playing and a global market.

@MURDERSMASH: That album, more than any other videos or previews, has made me extremely excited as well as extremely nostalgic.

@MURDERSMASH said:

It's fantastic. It runs smooth, looks great, and has incredible music. The UI is LIGHT YEARS ahead of the previous Sim City games, especially in terms of giving you the information you need to improve your city. The building options, whole totally different, actually end up working a lot better once you get a hang of how it all works. I especially like the modular city services buildings (police, fire, education, etc.) Instead of spamming schools and what-not all over the place to cover it, you can just build a single one near the center of town, and expand the services with modular add-ons as necessary. Schools are great, because you can extend the coverage by simply placing bus stops around town.

Overall, i'm blown away, and can't wait for the full version.

Since you havent' see some complex cities or whatever yet, check this out.

Wow, that city space is really really small.

Another nice thing that helps with the DRM stuff is if the online connection is broken, it lets you know in game without stopping the action and gives you some time (like 10 minutes I think) to finish things up and fix the connection. Or, like many times in the beta, it will reconnect and just keep going. At least it doesn't just kick you out as soon as the internet goes down.

The beta turned my opinion nearly entirely around on it. I'm still apprehensive about the online aspects, since we couldn't actually use them in the demo, but I'm willing to gamble on it.

Every time when my hour was up, I'd start a new city, and that fact alone has convinced me to buy it.

I refuse to purchase games that are "online-only". I can see how many people probably wouldn't notice, but that shit is abhorrent for my lifestyle.

I got a beta key but was away the WHOLE weekend! gutted :(

@RVonE said:

Wow, that city space is really really small.

That was my immediate reaction as well. To those who have actually played the game, does it seem like it'll be an issue? Are there ways to get more land?

@Keres said:

@RVonE said:

Wow, that city space is really really small.

That was my immediate reaction as well. To those who have actually played the game, does it seem like it'll be an issue? Are there ways to get more land?

I tend to build slowly when I play Sim City games, so I wasn't ever able to fill the map up in the 1hr allotted time, but that's just me. According to the devs, the map size is about the same size as the medium maps from SimCity 4.

I think the "beta" doesn't give you enough time or options to really come out of it with a fully-formed opinion. But from the few hours I saw and played of it, that game seems RAD.

Will it be like The Sims that there isn't much content out of the box and they plan to sell us the various buildings and road types as expansion packs?

@MURDERSMASH said:

@Keres said:

@RVonE said:

Wow, that city space is really really small.

That was my immediate reaction as well. To those who have actually played the game, does it seem like it'll be an issue? Are there ways to get more land?

I tend to build slowly when I play Sim City games, so I wasn't ever able to fill the map up in the 1hr allotted time, but that's just me. According to the devs, the map size is about the same size as the medium maps from SimCity 4.

Doesn't seem too small, a little silly that they would restrict the size at all though. Is the terrain in the demo locked? Will the actual game randomly generate what the map looks like or what?