A major complaint about SimCity is that the city sizes are very small. One of the reasons they (maxis) said this was the case was that the simulation was very complex and that in order to have it play on a wide variety of machines they needed to limit the size.

Why would they create a game engine that was so intensive as to create such a noticeable size difference, especially when other competing products (Cities XL, Tropico) clearly have much larger areas? If there was no way around that limitation, why not:

• Ask the user to choose smaller sizes based on performance. OR
• Detect hardware and limit larger city size regions based on those metrics. OR
• Allow users to check a box to show larger city sizes which have CPU recommendations near them

It seems like they could have done a few things to allow for the option of larger cities for consumers with more powerful hardware.

Yeah, listening to the bombcast the guys all seemed to just accept that the simulation was so intense that it couldn't be done on a larger scale city. Why is that acceptable? SimCity 4 wasn't so simple that it couldn't run those huge cities and that game is pretty old at this point.

It sounds more like an excuse to me, if your simulation is to complex to run big cities then scale it back in, no one can even tell the difference anyway.

The real reason for all of this though really is just to stop Piracy. How do you stop people pirating your game, make it multiplayer dependent, how do we do that? Well make the cities small and reliant on other cities. Oh and then add terrible always on DRM. Done!

They shouldn't have made a game that is about simulating large city structures down to the individual sim walking in the street if they didn't feel they had the tech to make it work.

Why indeed.

I wouldn't be surprised if the smaller city limits were some type of concession for a possible future console port. Knowing the way EA runs their business, the probably want to capitalize on the SC brand and next gen hardware that's based on PC architecture. They reduce city size, convert many of the graphs from SC4 to dynamic visualizations and make the game more "social" which seems in line with what people say with the next Xbox and PS4. The recommended specs even seem analogous to the PS4 specs. Even if they don't do it immediately the engine probably needs to be designed with this in mind. If Maxis wants to use it in future games they need to start thinking about that now and ramp into it.