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The New Flagship Game in the SimCity Franchise

After a decade of waiting, us SimCity fans have finally got what we wanted. The new flagship game in the SimCity franchise, simply titled SimCity, has arrived.

At least you'd THINK it's what we wanted, right? I mean just look at this cover! It's got all the SimCity box needs: a clean-looking logo, a bunch of sweet buildings, a UFO hovering over the metropolis - the freaking Maxis logo.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enWell, here it is.After a decade of waiting, us SimCityfans have finally got what we wanted.The new flagship game in the SimCity franchise,simply titled SimCity.At least you'd THINK it's what we wanted, right?I mean just look at this cover!It's got all the SimCity box needs:a clean-looking logo,a bunch of sweet buildings,a UFO hovering over the metropolisthe freaking Maxis logo, and, uh...Oh, no!Ah, come on, are you kidding me?\"Persistent Internet connection required to play.\"Ugh...Oh, one might argue that it is a reboot after all.It's not SimCity 5,so a few changes are to be expected.But I am not one to get in the habitof excusing bad calls on behalf of my fanboyism.\"Explore a world of endless possibilities.\"Ah, \"endless.\"Innumerable without limitations.Ah, yeah. We'll come back to that later.So, you heard me correctly earlierwhen I said that SimCity requiresan online connection to play.To even install and start the game,you need an always-on,stable Internet connection,so if you're without a decent connection,for whatever reason,or just want to play a single-player gamewithout having to connect to a server,then tough luck.Feel free to leave.For those of you that are still here, let's move on.Once it's installed and activatedthrough a mandatory Origin account,you're greeted with the SimCity launcher.From here, you'll be able to get updatesfrom Maxis regarding SimCity andchoose a server to start up the game.At least, in theory,since at this point it's not uncommonto run into a bunch of piss-aggravating roadblocks,where the launcher can't connectto the server to get servers,or if it can, the servers may just be offine entirely.Or even worse, they may be busy,which means you'll have towait anywhere from ten minutesto upwards of several hours.You might think, \"well, I'll justmove on to another server,and continue playing while theserver I play on is down,\" right?Nope.Not unless you wanna lose all your progresswith regions, cities, achievements, unlocks,and all saved data in general,since right now this data is exclusiveto whatever server you started it on.And the data is not saved on your PC.It's a mandatory cloud savethat happens on its own,so that's fun.Anyway, once you finally start the dang thing up,you're greeted with an intro videoand, of course, the main menu.From here you can start or continue a city,change the options,and browse SimCity World,which shows off all sorts of online worldwide statsand challenges regarding the game and its players.At least, you could if it worked,and at this point it doesn't whatsoever, so... I...I really don't know anything about it.But at least starting a city works!Most of the time.You have three choices here:continuing a previous region,joining an existing online region,and starting one of your own.Joining a game will put youinto SimCity's multiplayer mode,which is the focus of this game,even though previous SimCity gameshave been largely a single-player affair.Unlike in previous multiplayer SimCitygames, though, like Network Editionwhere you played as multiple mayors in one city,here, you're able to play as one or more citieswithin someone else's region.Personally, unless I know the people playingand trust their judgment with urban planning,that I don't give a crap about this modesince objecting myself to greefingor people abandoning their citiesis not something I tend to enjoy.Starting a new game gives you achoice of eight regions to play in,each of which has a set numberof cities to play within that region.Though some of the larger ones are appealing,since that should mean thatmore cities can work together,it's almost not worth bothering with themsince some of these are actuallyjust clusters of smaller cities of fourthat aren't connected to all the others in the region.Once you pick one, then you get the choice to name it,make it playable to anyone whowants to join or by invitation only,and whether or not you want Sandbox Mode,which disables achievementsand a bunch of other stuff,but gives you a handful of cheatsand immediately unlocks most everything in-game.Choose your starting city plotand assuming the server loads everything properly,you're free to do whatever your heart desires.As long as it desiresto start building at a fixed point on the mapwhere the regional highway enters the city, that is.Yeah, you can't change this,not without modding the game,so screw you for desiring choice.Anyway, at this point it reallyfeels like a SimCity game.You'll start off laying some roadwork,some residential, commercial and industrial zones,placing a power plant and gettingsome water infrastructure started.It's not long before zoned areasstart turning into construction sites,which give way to buildings,and that awesome feeling of having planted seedsand watching it blossom into something coolis very much there.All while some sweet music byChris Tilton plays in the background,giving it a feeling of purpose somehow.It's much more orchestral thanprevious SimCity soundtracksand even gets a bit Philip Glass here and there,but being a fan of his music onFringe and many other things,I think it's pretty awesome.Not to mention the awesomebackground noises and city ambience,which really helps the area feellike a place you could get lost inand possibly come to love over time.The awesome new graphics andfreely-moveable camera angleshelp in the immersion department as well,and the option tilt-shift effectgives it an interesting, though potentially tiring, look,and one that does make it look abit like a model train set at times.And since it's more like The Sims,where you have a day and night cycleinstead of dealing with months and years,watching your city grow is a bit more ofan intimate and relatable experience here.Then you've got the new agents system,which is something SimCity'sGlassbox engine makes possible.In theory, for the first time,all of the individual Simsvehicles and resources areactually represented graphically.It really makes the older gamesfeel a bit like looking at aspreadsheet in comparison.I mean, yeah, you can still usethe incredibly useful data layersto judge the state of things,but even those look better.And the agents wandering aroundhelp visualize things even more.If you want to, you can zoom in andfollow a Sim on their daily routine,watching them go to work, go shopping,hit up a ballgame, rob a bank,get eaten by zombies, whatever.Though they do seem kind of mindlessand tend to just enter whichever building is closest.But still, watching everything from the viewpointof an eagle flying over the oceanis awesomely zen-like.And you can't help but lose massive chunks of timecarefully tailoring things to tryand create something beautiful,even it doesn't seem likely with what you've been given.It's mesmerizing to watch theresources flow throughout the citylike some kind of urban circulatory system.The water, sewage and powerall run along the roadways,meaning you don't have to worryabout power lines or pipes anymore,so I hope you weren't tooattached to such infrastructure.The roads also function as themethod of adjusting zone density,with higher-density roadsallowing higher-density buildings,so they're a lot more importantthan in previous games.In addition to the agents wandering around,there are some key changes to the gameplay.For one thing, we finally get curvedroads in a main SimCity game,so that's cool.And while the game does a pretty good jobat automatically adjustingthe landscape to fit them in,there is no terraformingin the game whatsoever,so you're at the mercy ofwhatever land you're provided.Ploppable buildings make areturn where it makes sense,with things like power plants,water and sewage treatment facilities,emergency services, schools,parks and special buildings.But now you also have theability to upgrade each buildingusing a snap-on systemsimilar to Spore's building editor.This mostly works just fine,though it can be a painif you haven't consideredthe land around the buildingwhen you first plopped it.It's also a huge pain when the ploppableservices just don't work for some reason,most of which seems to be related to pathfinding.Since everything is an agent,including things like police cars,ambulances and garbage trucks,you have to hope they're smartenough to go where they need to.To put it lightly, they aren't.I've watched fire trucks bypass burning buildingsor all crowd around a single buildingignoring others just down the street.Police cars seemingly get lostin the grid and drive in circles,garbage trucks take themost inefficient route possible,and on and on.It's the same with road and foot traffic in general,since Sims seem to take a direct,mindless path to wherever they're heading,ignoring better roads andless-congested routes entirely.I pretty much just gave up onmass transit efficiency after a while,since it seems kind of pointlessto worry about bus stop placementwhen the minds of the bus driversseemingly left the planet long ago.The agent problems aren't limited to vehicles either,since I've had several timeswhere power and water agentssimply don't reach a certain part of thecity for no discernible reason whatsoeverdue to their random meandering around the grid,even if you have plenty ofexcess resources to go around.If things do happen to work,you have the option to share resourceswith the cities linked to yours,either via online playersor just your other citiesthat are in stasis when you'renot playing them in the region.Vehicles also travel betweenthem, along with resources,so it's quite possible for a deficiencyin one city to not be a problemif another city can provide what you need.However, a lot of this is limited even furtherdue to city sizes.To give you an idea of whatyou're working with here,this is an approximation of thelargest map size in this new SimCityversus the largest in SimCity 4.And yes, I know there are excuses asfar as technical limitations to consider,and the game does slowdown a bit with dense citieson even higher-end systems as it is,but it would be nice to at leasthave the option for larger citiesbecause as it is now, the gamejust starts getting interestingwhen you run out of space.Supposedly, you can get populationsof a million or so in a single city,but I have yet to see that happen with anyone,and even if you do,it doesn't seem that all of those Simsare actually simulated in the city.Sims not being simulated in SimCity...Yeah, think about that.The result of all this is that you end upfocusing on density and efficient design,which means largely ignoring someof the fun additions, like curved roads,since they aren't exactly an ideal useof the small space in most situations.Though it does prod you into usingthe included city specializations,another new addition to the series.With these, you have special buildings thatcan boost multiple aspects of your city.Things like coal and ore mining,drilling for oil, placing tourist traps and landmarks,manufacturing and trading scarcegoods like processors and TVs,or creating row upon row of casinos.Some of these, like mining and drilling,rely on limited underground resources,and others simply require that you have theinitial population and funds to support them.You also have great works to deal with now,which are something multiple cities in aregion can put funds and resources towardfor the betterment of the entire area.And while I admit relying on big, regional projectsand playing a mining outpost is enjoyable,in that quaint, Small Town,West Virginia kind of way,I'd rather have a city thatencompasses a bunch of strengthsand is actually capable ofworking how a proper city should.\"A world of endless possibilities?\"Yeah, not so much.Even if I become attached to my little plot of landand love seeing how it gets more complex over time,it's just not something that holds my attentionthe same way as previous SimCity games.It's like I can never really get intothe game to the degree I want to,because I either run out of space orrun into some kind of crazy roadblockinvolving the game going wrong.There are a ton of little thingsthat just drive me crazy,from the aforementionedpathfinding agent issuesto the weird glitches withbuilding and road placementand even time stopping altogetherwith no way to turn it back on,to not being able to manuallyrotate things like parks,to the lack of decorative optionsto fill in all the blank space behind certain lots,to all the blank space inbetween cities and the regions,to the inconsistencies with availableworkers versus total population,to the lack of ordinances,subways and modding capabilities,to the fact that you can'tsave a game, try something out,and reload it if it doesn't workbecause the saves are allautomatically linked to the cloud.The auto cloud-saving in particularall but eliminates the desireto play with the disasters or experiment too heavilyoutside of Sandbox Mode.And then you can't always rely onthe cloud to even save your game,and I've even seen cities get rolled backto a previous state or disappear entirelydue to something going wrong in the process.Then you've got all the other issuesrelating to the always-on DRM of the game,which has caused no small amountof headaches for me thus far.It feels like a promising cover bandthat has its own strengths,but somehow just doesn't holdthe same allure as the original,and then starts throwing up on stageand playing out of tune halfway through the set,then wanders into the crowd andstarts punching people in the neck.So, is SimCity worth buying or not?Well, as a SimCity fan,it pains me to say it,but at $60 for just theregular version of the game,no way, not right now.The issues here COULD be fixed, at least in theory,but I can't say I have much hope for many of them.I'd love to be surprised.I mean, I WANT to recommend this gamebecause it's SimCity.I love SimCity and Maxis games,and it IS incredibly fun whenit's not being a huge pain.The game has its charm, for a while at least,and it's quite obvious that someserious talent is on the team at Maxis.I mean, just look at all the little touches likecolor filters and the music thatbeats along with the simulation.And I really like how graffitishows up in higher crime areasand the quirky names for eachbuilding and things like that.There's a lot to like here and in many waysit feels like a step towards the SimCity that I want.But the problem now is that I alwaysend up feeling a bit disappointedin either the simulation or theserver side of things when I play it.And for a full-priced game, that'sjust not something I can let slide.Sorry but as it is now,SimCity sucks.\n"