simcity

There's a new simcity game in the works.

The website is http://www.simcity.com/en_US

The last simcity game was simcity societies, which was a staggering 5 years ago (and will be more like 6 by the time this new game hits, which is due in February of next year).  It was also awful.  In fact I'm not sure it doesn't rank as one of the worst games I've ever played.

The problem with it was that they seemed to be trying to bend a game that's about simulating a city (i.e. a real thing) into some sort of weird levelling up thing.  So the big sell for it was that there were these particular factors that affected the look of your city, like happiness or industry and when they hit certain levels the look of your city changed to reflect these.

The problem was that none of the levels made much sense and, since this new levelling was what the game was about it basically encouraged you to slap down a load of random stuff that would boost the particular level you were going for.  And none of it really mattered - you didn't gain anything my taking the city in that direction.

In order to achieve this focus they had hacked out a lot of what simcity was supposed to be about.  So the more complex stuff where you had to balance all sorts of numbers and statistics to ensure a properly functioning city was basically chopped out and everything became simpler.

It's a bit like deciding to improve football by taking away that pesky round thing everyone kicks about and instead replacing it with a hair salon and now the point of the game is to get all of your players to have identical haircuts.

Anyway, the point is that this new simcity looks to be going back to what simcity is all about.  Looking at some of the preview stuff there does appear to be an element of what the societies had in that a greater focus on industry will affect certain things in the game, but I get the impression those aren't just confined to the graphics that are being used.

But certainly from what's there it looks much more like it's about simulating a city again.

Before societies the last simcity game was simcity 4 which was a staggering 10 years ago.  I have to confess I didn't really enjoy 4.  The simcity I loved was simcity 2000 on the PlayStation.

Now one issue I had with 4 was at the time I had a fairly basic PC and it was a monster hog for resources, so it never really worked very well even on small towns.  However, I seem to recall that my main issue with 4 was the degree of micromanagement that everything required.  Or, more specifically, that the micromanagement was tedious and boring.  I don't mind micromanagement, so long as it's fun (or at least simple or pretty) to do.  But in 4 I seem to recall loads of sliders and tweakers that affected tiny little things.

I'll use two specific examples.

So in 2000 I recall you had a single slider that allowed you to adjust the funding you gave to each police station and this affected the area where they could cover.  It had a nice simple display that showed the spheres of influence expanding and contracting.

In 4 you had a slider for each station which you could adjust tiny amounts to affect the coverage (I have a vague feeling there was actually more to it than that as well) and I think you had an overall slider as well, so it was much more complicated, but not in a fun way because you could only adjust the individual slider at the individual station.

The other example is to do with water pumps.  In 2000 you put down a water pump and that was basically it - it cost you an amount of money to run, but once it was there that was basically it.  In 4 the pumps (I've a feeling they had water towers instead, but same difference) had a lifetime, so after that period they would basically blow up or stop, so you had to replace them.

Now imagine you went on a water pump building spree one year.  In x year's time you're going to have to replace all of those pumps.  Except it's not that simple because the pump's lifetime is affected by its level of usage, so pumps that are used heavily blow up quicker, so now you've got pumps randomly blowing up and needing replacing across several years.  And you could only find that out by keeping an eye on every pump or waiting until there's a big area of your map with no water and that's therefore going desolate and hunting for the one pump that's stopped working.

It was all way too tedious.

My hope is that they manage to get the balance right or at the least make the micromanagement a lot easier and more fun.