SimCity impressions: We waited ten years for this?

It’s not every day you get a proper new title in the SimCity series. In fact, it’s been a bit over ten years since SimCity 4 last showed us what it was like to control the fate of a vast metropolis (Socities and Sim City Social notwithstanding). So it’s fair to say that our expectations were high as we sat down with final release code for the new game, which launches in the US tomorrow. Even without access to the full global servers, which EA hasn’t turned on yet, we were excited to try promised new features like undulating curved roads, government buildings with snap-on expansions, and a regional commodity system that lets you buy and sell excess resources.

After spending around a dozen hours each playing the game this weekend, Microsoft Editor Peter Bright (who considers himself a bit of a SimCity die-hard) and I (Gaming Editor Kyle Orland) were pretty disappointed with what we found. What follows are edited excerpts from the various conversations we had over instant messaging this weekend, discussing how we were finding our initial time with the game. We’ll have a more detailed review later when we’ve had a chance to try out the final release, complete with all the globally connected, Internet-enabled features EA has been playing up, but just going by first impressions, maybe EA shouldn’t have messed with its successful city building formula quite so much.

Curved roads and crippling size limits

1. Peter: You know, it’s dumb. I have wanted curved roads for so long, but I’m only building grids, because space is so tight. Grids are more efficient.
2. Kyle: I build curvy roads. They make the city look more natural, and I’m not that concerned about just min-maxing.
3. Peter: Well the thing is, I want clean, well-educated cities, and that is expensive.
4. Kyle: That said, I have 35,000 residents and I’m almost out of space, so they are really inefficient. Then again, I also have a ton of ridges and plateaus that use up my limited space, and I don’t see any way to flatten them. For my second city I built a grid core with parallel curves coming out, like a rainbow pattern. It looks great and is pretty efficient.
5. Peter: I love curvy roads in theory. If I had a SimCity 4-size city I would use curvy roads. There simply isn’t enough space to have fancy curvy roads. I find it super frustrating. I have the tools to build the kind of city I would like, but I’m so pushed for space I just can’t afford to. I’m so pushed for space already.
6. Kyle: Yeah, the space limits are way too tight. You reach the limit much too quickly. It always felt like it took longer when I use to play SimCity 2000. Maybe I was just younger.
7. Peter: SC2000 was way bigger. I’m honestly finding the size crippling. The small size means I can’t regenerate one area funded by other areas, because anything short of a full city leaves me cash deprived.
8. Kyle: It makes very little sense, too. I mean they are already modeling the area outside that dotted white line that’s your square city limits. I can see that empty, lightly forested land. Just let me build on it! I’m guessing it’d be too hard for them to do that detailed, low-level modeling of every citizen and bus and fire truck and such, computationally, if they allowed for bigger cities.
9. Peter: That’s my assumption.
10. Kyle: But even then, they could let me build a separate suburb that’s immediately adjacent and continue my city by connecting them together with a road. That’d be better than this “regional” crap that separates cities by miles of emptiness, never to be developed.
11. Kyle: (Later) I’ve reached a functional limit around 200,000 people. I have no more space.
12. Peter: Yep. Basically as soon as I hit 200K it starts going to shit. Which is weird, because SC2000 maxed out around 20 million, I think. SimCity 4 could have 8 million in a perfectly tuned city.
13. Kyle: Also, would it kill them to have subways? Streetcars are nice, but…
14. Peter: Or anything that allows transport without taking up gobs of space on the surface.
15. Kyle: Yeah, next time I am building no streets, because avenues are just tons better.
16. Peter: Yep. I find it very disappointing.
17. Kyle: No mixed use zoning, either.
18. Peter: Not enough transport options. No mixed zoning. Curved roads that I end up not using because I don’t have space.
19. Kyle: I managed to have curved roads and 200K people. So I think you’re being too stringent on that.
20. Peter: Well, I want to hit 290K, to max out my town hall.
21. Kyle: I want to EXPAND CITY LIMITS. Sigh.

Watching those happy faces go up when you do things like placing parks is pretty addictive.

Simulation/Interface issues

1. Peter: My industry is complaining that it has nowhere to send goods, and I have no idea why. I have a depot that should let it sell freight to the region, but it doesn’t seem to be filling up.
2. Kyle: I am getting constant complaints about not enough medium-income residents to fill jobs. No matter how much residential I zone in medium-cost areas, it never seems to be enough.
3. Peter: They seem hypersensitive about crime, even though I have practically a cop car on every block.
4. Kyle: Yes! One crime per week, and I’m still getting constant alerts that “crime has the upper hand.”
5. Peter: Zero crimes committed per day = “Crime has the upper hand.” I don’t get it.
6. Peter: I’m being destroyed by traffic even with street cars and buses, and there’s nowhere to go from the streetcar avenue. I want to build a tunneled highway or something, but there are no real transport options. Also, I’d like to extend the freeway right into my city, have a highway backbone so that industry can easily get goods out of the city.
7. Kyle: I had the game complaining at one point that I should connect to the highway. I was like, “Um, I already did that at the start in the only point I’m allowed to.”
8. Peter: It’d also be nice to have multiple connections instead of one train track and one highway.
9. Kyle: Yeah, why can’t I build more highways through town? Plenty of cities have highways in the middle of them, not just friendly avenues.
10. Peter: I didn’t realize the importance of sticking big wide roads on the highway connection.
11. Kyle: There seems like very little reason to use small roads at all, except very early.
12. Peter: Because upgrading is so destructive. if you have to tear down a street to build an avenue, you lose the buildings on both sides.
13. Kyle: Yeah, paid buildings should stay if you’re just upgrading a road, that’s a bit silly.
14. Peter: I want to be able to hide buildings when laying things out, like streets and zoning.
15. Kyle: I didn’t find it that bad. It tells you when there’s gonna be overlap, and looking from overhead makes it easy to see where things go.
16. Peter: It’s for plopping down things like police stations. I want to be able to easily see where I have them.
17. Kyle: Go to the crime map. You’ll see the police stations.
18. Peter: No, I know, but there’s so much clutter, because you also get an icon for every police car that’s out on patrol, so I get a huge mess of icons.
19. Kyle: The stationary ones with the big icons are the stations… I didn’t find it to be confusing.
20. Peter: Maybe I have more police cars. I must have 40 driving around, if not more.
21. Kyle: I don’t have that many yet.

The skyline view of my city, with Peter’s visible over the river in the background.

1. Peter: So it’s complaining that some buildings don’t have water, even though I have an excess. It just doesn’t seem to notice that I fixed my water shortage.
2. Kyle: Yeah, the game seems pretty slow to respond to fixes to problems sometimes.
3. Peter: I just don’t get it. I have 66 kgal/hr excess water, but half my city is still complaining of shortages.
4. Kyle: Also, I have a sewage plant that periodically warns me that it’s full, then it gets fixed without my intervention seconds later. Is it a problem or not, game? Make up your mind.

1. Peter: Fuck. People are abandoning my city. I got hit by a meteor. It burned down a ton of buildings. Now it’s all fucked. Game over man. Game over.
   WTF, a zombie attack. How the fuck do I solve that? My population just got halved by a fucking zombie attack.
   And because there’s no save games, I can’t go back in time to try a different route. There’s no freedom to experiment. Because you suffer permadeath.

1. Peter: I really don’t know about this game. Older SimCities, I always felt that there was something I could be doing. Tuning traffic, urban renewal, reducing pollution. This one I’m just not sure.
   I’m having wild and crippling fluctuations in income. I can’t determine the cause. From a net gain of 7K an hour it’ll drop over the space of an hour or two to a loss of 5K an hour, so I’m spending all my time just trying to cope with that. It’s stopping me from building up any serious cash reserves.
2. Kyle: It seems to bounce up and down a lot. Because pretty much anything you build besides roads comes with a regular per-hour cost. And the benefits come a little later, through higher land values and such.
3. Peter: Right, but what I don’t get is why the fluctuations are happening. In the old SimCity, I could bring up a graph of income and expenses over time so I could at least easily tell if it’s income going down or expenses going up. As far as I can tell, there are no graphs at all, except the population graph (if you click on the population number).
4. Kyle: It seems like the income bounces around a lot as businesses/residences go out of business and/or upgrade to bigger buildings. While they are constructing those new buildings, no taxes come in.
5. Peter: Yeah, but I don’t know why they’re doing it so periodically.
6. Kyle: One big building doing that renewal cycle has a huge temporary effect. They could smooth that out. I’m pretty sure the construction companies could pay taxes on the land, for instance.

1. Peter: Damn. My schools are overfull. So now my nuclear power plant is being run by morons. Which means it might blow up. Shit. Melted down.
   Fucking hell, it’s going to blow up again.
   I don’t understand. They have stopped enrolling in high school. So my education level is falling. So my nuclear power station keeps blowing up. But nothing is telling me WHY they’re not enrolled at school. I have plenty of school buses. Well placed bus stops.
   Man. Once things start going wrong, they go seriously wrong.
2. Kyle: (Later) Did you ever figure out why people stopped enrolling in high school, thereby blowing up your nuke plant?
3. Peter: I think, but may not be sure, that to keep the nuke plant safe you need a community college or university. I have one city with the CC, one the university. Both are keeping the workers at the “safe” rating. Grade schools didn’t seem good enough.
4. Kyle: That kind of makes sense.
5. Peter: Yes, but it would have been nice for it to tell me that explicitly before irradiating my city.
6. Kyle: Sure.
7. Peter: Plus, SimCity 4 showed an over-the-top explosion to signify a meltdown. This time, I just got an advisor pop-up explaining the situation and no steam from the cooling tower.
8. Kyle: In general the game is good about alerting you when there’s a problem and what precisely needs fixing.
9. Peter: Oh, I disagree. In theory, if an advisor has something to tell you, the button in the toolbar goes yellow or red, depending on the severity. Several times I’ve had buildings lose water (even though I have plenty of water), and the button didn’t change color. But when I switched to the tool for unrelated reasons, all of a sudden red tap icons would appear on buildings and the advisor would complain.
10. Kyle: Huh. I haven’t noticed that.
11. Peter: Of course I had no idea what to do to fix it, since there was plenty of water. I feel it’s more “bug” than “by design.”

My quickly depleting water table. Apparently if I placed my water pumps on the shore line this wouldn’t have happened…

Regional/Connection issues

1. Peter: I hate to be “that guy…”
2. Kyle: (No you don’t.)
3. Peter: …because I honestly don’t care about “always on” or DRM or any of that stuff in general, but I just don’t like the positioning of SimCity as an always online, networked game. It’s not consistent with what SimCity has meant to me historically.
4. Kyle: Well, you can still pretty much largely ignore everything outside your city, as long as you are logged in. Though pollution levels seem to rise in every region I’m in regardless of what I do.
5. Peter: Yeah. I don’t know if that actually matters, but some things are regional.
6. Kyle: How much tourism you can get, and how much your industry can ship out, depends on healthy neighboring cities, it seems. I think that’s kind of neat. Changes how you have to tune your city each time, depending on factors outside your control. That’s kind of realistic.
7. Peter: In “old” SimCity you could just connect a road to the “outside world” and be done with it, more or less.
8. Kyle: That said, it would be nice to have an option to ignore that stuff too, and like you said earlier, to save and reload and try something new.
9. Peter: Yeah that’s the real killer. Basically I want to tear down my entire city and start over in the same place, but I can’t figure out how to do that. I can abandon it, but that just lets someone else move in. I can’t experiment. My city is too precious. It took too long to get to the stage it is. I can’t try something risky. Honestly while lots of things irk me, the lack of save/reload is the number one.
10. Kyle: The main thing I’ve noticed with my new city is how the wind shifted to make all my air pollution blow right into my city center.

I would kill for proper savegames instead of this nonsense.

Credit: Peter Bright

1. Kyle: Do you think things will change when the global servers are turned on? EA is really pushing us to withhold final judgement until the game is truly connected.
2. Peter: No, not really. Frankly, if EA thinks that that’s what it’ll take, I think EA is deluded.
3. Kyle: I agree… the regional stuff so far seems much more incidental than I expected.
4. Peter: The only thing that would be interesting to try is one of the “great works” things. And that needs a bunch of people in a region.
5. Kyle: Yeah, but I haven’t been able to get close to the one million simoleons you need to start one. I guess everyone is supposed to chip in?
6. Peter: Yeah, you can give people money on the region screen.
7. Kyle: Ah, I guess that’s how you’re supposed to do it.

In the year of our lord NaN.

Bugs

1. Peter: Is this final release code? Because it is really buggy!
   So my city is basically fucked. I had a casino providing me mad cash, but then I had to demolish my city hall to widen some roads. I rebuilt my city hall, but now my casino isn’t working.
2. Kyle: I’m sure they’ll be tuning it right up to release (and after), but yeah, I am encountering bugs too. I have a train station that won’t connect to the power, water or road structure in any way I can figure and it’s just taking up space instead of being useful.
3. Peter: At one point the game stopped showing any numbers, showing corrupt text instead.
4. Kyle: Yikes!
   After a tornado, I had a house that was break dancing in place, like vibrating in its slot. When I bulldozed it, the new construction was similarly jittery. That’s… a pretty big bug.
5. Peter: Now my in-game clock is stuck on 8:02pm. Hours are still ticking by, because I’m still getting money, but the in-game clock isn’t moving.
   I reloaded the city—now the clock isn’t showing up at all.

Random thoughts

1. Kyle: So you get a “bonus” truck and ambulances to give to a nearby city for every one that you create in your city. These free resources don’t cost your neighbors anything… yet they still give you money. What is this, Farmville?

1. Peter: Also, I am running the game in windowed mode, but that stops bump scrolling from working (when I move the mouse to the edges of the screen), which means that in some views I can only scroll with the cursor keys.
2. Kyle: Personally, I find bump scrolling gets in the way, when I try to click Xs and such and scroll accidentally. Also, I really hate how you can’t mouse-scroll while placing something.
3. Peter: Right, exactly.

You can see every single person walking up the steps to University… but do you want to?

1. Kyle: I do like how things often just work.
2. Peter: How do you mean?
3. Kyle: You plop down a power plant and don’t have to worry about placing power lines. Or water mains.
4. Peter: Ah, right.
5. Kyle: That’s the kind of simplification I can get behind.

1. Kyle: I like the informational mapping options too, like for land value and fire coverage. Though it’s odd on the crime map that it shows the criminals that are in jail. Um… I’m not worried about them.
2. Peter: Yeah, that’s only a concern if your jail is full, then they release the criminals.
3. Kyle: Even then, it should be separate from “where is crime a problem.”

Micro vs. macro

If you want to watch people waiting for the bus and playing soccer in the background, have we got a game for you!

1. Peter: I feel that this game has just gone so far backward.
2. Kyle: I’d tend to agree.
3. Peter: There are parts I like. I love the ability to bolt things on to buildings. I’ve been wanting that for years. But it feels like they’ve spent all their time figuring out ways of modelling Sims, when I want to model cities.
4. Kyle: I agree with you on the “modeling the Sims” part. I have no desire to zoom in on a bus and watch its route in near real-time. I ended up following a streetcar for a minute or two. It just kept going back and forth between two unimportant stops. This is what the low-level simulation gets you?
5. Peter: Yeah, I have no idea how well that stuff is actually modeled.
6. Kyle: My citizens are clogging up one of my main streets and ignoring one that is like five feet to the east and parallel. And that has a lot of bad effects, like fire trucks and ambulances can’t get where they’re going. So… I’m not impressed with the traffic modeling.
7. Peter: I find myself wanting curvy roads and bolt-on buildings, but everything else from SC4, with the Rush Hour expansion.
   Honestly, this is not the game I wanted it to be, but it’s not far from the game I expected EA to deliver.
   I think fundamentally, it feels like a very small game. It should be SimVillage, or SimTown perhaps.
8. Kyle: It seems like they had to make a lot of city level sacrifices to accommodate the low-level modeling and high-level regional/global stuff.
9. Peter: Yeah, I think their Sim-level modelling required them to simplify stuff, but I don’t really see what that gains me.
10. Kyle: It isn’t that interesting to know the name of every single Sim in the university.
11. Peter: I mean the idea is cute, but I don’t see what it’s really enabling that the probabilistic versions couldn’t do. Like modelling the police/fire/ambulance/etc., that’s sensible. But the Sims? I don’t see the point. I don’t see how it makes it a better game.
    Fundamentally, I don’t care about sims. I care about my city. Focusing on modelling the Sims at the expense of the city is ass-backwards.
12. Kyle: Agreed. It probably seemed like a cool idea on paper. They saw how successful The Sims was, and thought, “People will want this person-level stuff on top of the SimCity experience.”
13. Peter: Once you start getting the big income fluctuations, I find the game seriously unforgiving.
14. Kyle: Yeah, I kept dipping into the red for seemingly no reason.
15. Peter: Of course, their one-hour beta would never pick up on that.
16. Kyle: Nope. That’s what we’re here for. =)