simcity moving closer

So the new version of SimCity is moving closer.

Current release date appears to still be February 2013.  I'd wondered if it might slip or perhaps if it was tied in to something (only thing I can think of in February is Valentine's Day).  You'd think they might try to hit an important date or get it out for Christmas, but I guess the date they've given is based on realism and not rushing it out.  Hopefully, anyway - I wouldn't mind if it slipped so long as it means a better product at the end.

Anyway, it's looking good from what they've shown on the website and various places.  In particular my big concern about SimCity 4000 I expressed before was that it was full of horrible micro-management.  Not meaning micro-management is horrible, but that the way you had to go about the micromanagement was horrible.

In the new game engine they've developed there's a lot more in the way of clever graphics to show you the numbers.  Now sometimes this can be quite a token effort, but here they appear to have done it in a really sensible and easy to use way - at least, that's what it looks like from the gameplay footage.

I have to say it doesn't look massively different to SimCity Societies (or SimCity 4000 for that matter) but then those games looked pretty good.

One thing they do appear to have developed is the idea that your city sits in a region - you can either control all cities in the region or other people can control other cities.  I'm pretty sure this was in SimCity 4000, but there was a thing on the site where people were asking questions and the implication was that this was new.

My guess is I'm miss-remembering quite how it worked in 4000 - perhaps although multiple people could control cities they interaction between them was minimal?  Certainly in the new game it appears to be going more for a specialisation idea.  So one city might be industrial, another residential and a third all about education.  In a sense then this means that the region kinda operates like a single big city, or a network of interconnected towns.

It sounds interesting either way - interactions sound like they might be quite complex and multi-faceted.  Although only if you want them to be seemed to be the implication - you could have them all isolated.

There seem to be some changes, though.  You can no longer terraform.  The way they explained it was that it gives it more of a puzzle element, which makes some sense.  I never used to be that big into terraforming anyway.

However, a slightly odd change is the lack of subways.  They appear to have trains, buses, boats and even trams, but apparently subways have gone.  I'm not quite sure why - subways could presumably be represented in some fairly simple ways.  Perhaps they're saving it for an extension or as downloadable content?

I mean, it's not a big loss, just a bit unusual.

Still, it's looking good.  And hopefully it will be a game I will play properly, rather than sitting on my shelf like all the others!