1147: SimCity Limits

So I played an hour or two of the new SimCity earlier, and I have some thoughts. I shall now elaborate on these thoughts for your reading pleasure.

• After the game applied a patch (which took a few minutes, though this may be more down to the fact that I hadn’t long started up my computer and it was still doing that inexplicable hard-drive churning Windows does for about half an hour after you turn it on when you’ve had a computer for more than a year or so), I logged straight in and started playing with no hiccups whatsoever. Looks like those server issues are mostly sorted out — though there are plenty marked as “full”. The team at Maxis/EA have bumped up the server number by a significant amount, however, so you should always be able to find one on which you can play. Pleasingly, too, you can play on any server in the world, meaning cross-region play is viable.
• Is the “online-only” requirement a form of DRM? Frankly I don’t give a shit, much like I didn’t with Diablo III. As far as I’m concerned, it’s an online game, regardless of the previous games’ single-player status. Thinking of it in that way, regardless of the reasons for it, means considerably less frustration. It’s annoying when you can’t log in, yes, but it’s annoying when you can’t log in to World of Warcraft or Guild Wars 2, too. Getting irritable doesn’t solve the issues, though. Go and play something else for a bit. There are enough neat things added to the game by it being online that I have no problem with it requiring a connection to play. It should have worked perfectly on launch day, yes, but I am yet to see any online game from any publisher — even those who know what they are doing — not have server issues for the first few days after launch. We should be past that by now, but we’re not; that’s a fact we can do little about.
• The actual online component of the game is very cool, giving the game “world” a much greater feeling of life than in any other past SimCity game. I was playing a small two-city region with a friend earlier, and I was constantly kept updated as to what was going on in their city as well as mine. I could set up trade routes, send gifts of products or money or volunteer some of my “spare” emergency services to go and help out in their city, which brought me some money. There’s actually a pretty neat requirement to cooperate here — if your city is manufacturing tons of stuff and has nowhere to sell it, you’d better ask the other people in the region nicely if they wouldn’t mind awfully building some commercial districts so that you can send them your goods. The various city plots also all have various resources that can be tapped using the right specialist buildings, so there’s plenty of scope for collaboration there.
• The actual gameplay is simultaneously familiar and probably the biggest change to the series since it went isometric-perspective with SimCity 2000. Gone is the grid-based system, meaning you can build roads in any shape you like, and even make them actually curve. Gone is the rectangular zoning system, replaced with the ability to only zone immediately along roads, with the maximum building size on a road determined by how big the road is. In comes a much deeper use of various buildings like the police station and fire station, all of which can be expanded by bolting extra bits on to them such as new garages, offices, prison cells and other things appropriate to the structure in question. There’s a huge amount of depth, but it’s kept accessible by a simple, logical interface in which clicking on a particular category of items to build also summons relevant overlay information relating to, say, power, water or crime.
• The available area for buildings cities is quite small, but again I don’t mind too much. I don’t think I ever played a previous SimCity well enough to fill a full region, so I’m absolutely fine with the small space. When it’s full, I can either work hard to try and optimize it, knock it down and start again, or go and play in another region altogether. The game features a sort of “win condition” if you want one — each region has a space for a “Great Work” that generally requires the collaboration of all the cities in the area to complete, and if you want to say that you’ve “won” when you’ve built one, so be it.
• The soundtrack is lovely, being composed by one Mr Chris Tilton of Alias and Fringe fame.
• The tutorial is a bit patronising. I’ve played too many Facebook games to tolerate condescending pulsing arrows telling me what I should click on. I couldn’t see a means of skipping it, either, though it did at least have some useful information to impart.
• On the whole, it’s pretty good. It scratches that nice “creative” itch that SimCity has always stimulated, and the collaborative aspect opens up some really interesting possibilities. Once the server issues are stabilised and the team at Maxis can start concentrating on doing things like the regular special events and competitions, it’s going to be a really cool experience, I think.