A decade ago, EA/Maxis launched their latest version of SimCity with much anticipation and fanfare. The launch was so disastrous that it killed both the franchise and the studio that birthed it. (The publisher EA, alas, still thrives.)
We Dopers gave it a go way back when. I organized several shared regions with pretty good participation. But the problems with the game were so big that they rather quietly died as folks lost interest. And not just server problems; those were quickly solved within a week of launch. No, there were more fundamental problems with the gameplay itself. I remember trying to build a tourism-centered city, only to learn that casinos – upon which I built my economy – didn’t work as intended. I think landmarks in general were broken. The global market was frozen and real trading between players didn’t get switched on until months afterwards. Then there was the small city size and the general lack of anything to do once you filled it up.
Thankfully the debacle didn’t kill city builders in general. Paradox neatly stepped in and released Cities:Skylines to fill the void. They’ve just now announced Cities:Skylines 2.
I remember those SDMB games! They were fun. It’s a shame the game sucked.
A few years ago I reinstalled it and had another go. Still not fun. The requirement to build a bunch of interconnected cities just made everything feel too fragmented and stop n’ go. Bleh. What a shame.
I loved the earlier versions of SimCity but was really disappointed in that launch. And I’ve always been annoyed that The Sims seems to get all of the public attention and love.
The fiasco makes an excellent case study for how to mismanage a game franchise. It would’ve been better off for the company cancelling the game than releasing it in the state they did. But they did perfect how to prevent pirating: make a game so unplayable that no one want to play it.
I noticed that after playing SimCity, I would look at a city block and imagine how it could be redeveloped. (Well, that’s just a 1x1 block, such as for a convenience store, so it can’t become a really big building.)
SimCity 4 is still going strong with lots of mods and custom content, twenty years after release. NAM is up to release 46 with release 47 around the corner.
The decisions they made were just so weird and baffling; it’s as if they forgot why people liked the game in the first place.
The best part of the whole fiasco was that Maxis claimed there was no way to make it so the game could be played offline, that it would take a huge amount of development. A player discovered that just altering one line of code allowed the game to be played offline. One wonders why Maxis and EA would insist you play it online. Hmmmm.
I cautiously optimistic about Cities: Skylines 2. I still play the shit out of C:S but one thing I realized is that part of what makes it the greatest city game ever is the collection of mods and DLC that actually makes it playable.
At the very least, C:S2 will be huge. 150 playable squares instead of the original 25 (9 playable without a mod, 81 with an additional mod).
Yeah, the only way that would have worked as they pretended it did was if most (if not all) of the game processing happened on the central servers and the only thing that was actually sent to your PC was graphics for rendering, i.e., cloud gaming a.k.a video game streaming. That’s arguably possible nowadays. Back then, not so much. I think that If they had tried it, those servers would have gotten slammed even more than they had.
Slightly off-topic, but I just discovered that the publisher of Cities: Skyline is taking another cut at EA. They’ve announced Life by You, which will be a direct competitor with The Sims. They’re promising Life by You to be extremely moddable, which is a high bar considering how moddable The Sims is.
I’m a huge fan of The Sims, but not EA, and I’ll be following this development closely.
An identical level of moddability combined with Steam Workshop support would clear that bar with a mile or two to spare.
So it’s worth noting that this game isn’t being developed by the Cities: Skylines folks. It’s being developed by Paradox itself or, rather, a subsidiary that appears to have been created specifically to develop this game.
This is good because I like Paradox as a developer. Despite some very legitimate complaints about at-launch quality, they’re responsive and they support their games for a long time. Paradox - like EA - likes to release a great many DLCs for its games over several years. But their DLC also goes on deep discount and into deep-discount bundles fairly frequently. It probably won’t end up like The Sims where ‘the game’ costs close to a thousand dollars.
It’s maybe not-so-good because Paradox doesn’t make pretty games. It makes pretty (and very entertaining) spreadsheets. This represents a significant departure from their oeuvre, and the fact that Cities: Skylines took showed EA how to do a modern Sim City doesn’t mean this game will do the same for The Sims. I’m a little worried that the more realistic graphical approach from the videos will make the game feel staid and sterile when compared to EA’s more vibrant style.