E3: SimCity 4 Preview Goodness

Anonymous Coward writes "Wowie! The folks at Electronic Arts look to be working hard on the next installment of SimCity! Although there's no official, dedicated release date, they plan on demoing it at the Electronic Entertainment Expo. Gamers.com has an article, as does GameSpot, and both seem to have a number of screenshots. Interesting: there now seems to be a nighttime mode, and perhaps there's some weather effects? The note from MaxisJoseph claims there will be a personal angle to every high-level action taken; will there be a chance for dynamic screenshots of our cities during, say, lightning storms, blizzards or sandstorms? And will they ask Koch or Guiliani for endorsements?" I know I'm not the only one who wants to play the Sims in the SimTower in the SimCity on SimEarth with the pesky SimAnts in the balcony garden.

Quite interesting

I heard that they're using SDL/Mesa to do the port. It should work natively with most joysticks and mice, sound via OSS and /dev/sound. They're probably using SDL in conjunction with Transgaming's new product as well, so this will show many flagship technologies for Linux. I don't know if they're using the dynamic bytecode recompilation technique or if they're going with a straight transcription matrix for portability, but I'm looking forward to it all the same because I'd like to see SimCity with a full colour depth.

Maxis was cool.

They made SimCity 2000.

Then they made SimCity 3000 and The Sims and now they're not cool anymore.

Hopefully Simcity 4000 will return to it's roots....

"Citycopter 1 reporting Heavy Traffic!"

Tim

Re:Maxis was cool.

>Yeah.. the Sims is the best selling PC game of all time because it totally sucks

Another person already mentioned Myst. How about other top-sellers like Deer Hunter?

Windows (of various flavors) is the best selling operating system of all time. Does this mean it doesn't suck?

Should we mention the music examples of NSync and Britney Spears? They sell an assload of records. Do they suck?

I'll even push a few folks' buttons: The Phantom Menace made a TON of money. It's #20 on the top 100 grossing American films list, adjusted for inflation. (Full list here: http://www.filmsite.org/boxoffice.html ). Was it a great movie?

Being popular doesn't mean it doesn't suck.

-l

Ahhh Crap.

Look's like I'd better tell the g/f that I'll be incommunicado for a few weeks after this game comes out. And I had just got over my Civ III addiction too.

Hi, my name's Bill, and I'm a gameaholic.

SimSim

Maxis should merge the technology of The Sims together with SimCity 4. From max zoom in, on one particular house or building, you can play a game of the sims in there. Whatever actions they take in there has some effect in the outside sim world.

Damn, wouldn't that be cool?
-Cyc

Oh memories..

I hope they will bring back the SimCity 2000 ability to have riots burn down your entire metropolis. I used to have endless fun watching the rampaging proletariot storm the abodes of the fat capitalist running dog lackey bourgeoisie while screaming 'Viva la Revolution!' Until my parents yelled at me to go to sleep.

"Burn! All of you burn!"

Re:Oh memories..

Better yet, Rockstar Games should get together with Maxis and combine Grand Theft Auto with Sim City. That would be interesting!

Eh?

I know I'm not the only one who wants to play the Sims in the SimTower in the SimCity on SimEarth with the pesky SimArts in the balcony garden.

Are they in talks to merge the SimFranchise with Clue?

thank god

Not to troll or anything, but SimCity 3000 was a bit of a disappointment and a waste of my money as it was really just a graphics-enhanced version of SimCity 2000. From what I can see from the prelininary screenshots, SimCity 4 will not be like it's older brothers and will breathe fresh air into a game that has always rocked.

One feature I really want is the ability to work with other Sim players. Net support in the game would rock because you could work with other players on water, garbage, and electricity deals and also work on transportation plans together. Hell, even have sports teams competing against eachother. :)

Another is to have what SimCity 2000 with Streets of SimCity and have the ability to drive through town. Have it simulate actual traffic at certain sections and make it so you can determine, for real, what areas have problems.

With SimCity becoming more intricate

Will it also become less interesting like MOO:BAA?

Micromanagement can kill a game.

Better gameplay, please

Weather effects are cute, and I love details in games, but Simcity's gameplay is quite primitive, and I hope they really improve it. The game is unfortunately wedged in a very twentieth-century-american mode. You cannot build a city without building roads everywhere. Even if your reliable and convenient subway spans the city, nobody will move in until you build roads. This isn't exactly allowing you much flexibility. Now it seems that the designers have changed the game engine to automatically build roads, bridge and tunnels. In Simcity, cars are a given.

I'd like to play a Simcity game where I could build a car-free city. I want a button for bicycle paths. I want to mix residential, commercial, and industrial without zoning. I think the fire department should operate without trucks. I want a city with 95% green open space, and a community-supported agricultural belt. Where's the button for farm? In Simcity, it is assumed that farms are "over there", far from the glorious car temple you are constructing.

In short, I want the Simcity people to exercise some imagination.

Re:Better gameplay, please

I'd like to play a Simcity game where I could build a car-free city. I want a button for bicycle paths.

That's in the indefinitely-delayed "SimCity Beijing." Do you have any idea how many megs of RAM your video card would need to render millions of people bicycling all over the place? Motorized transportation is environmentally friendly to your system because it's cheaper to render 5 people in a carpool or 50 people on an underground (unseen) subway car.

Where's the button for farm?

SimCity 3000 had farms. If you zoned residential near a rural road with little/no pollution, the land would develop into farms instead of apartments.

Re:Better gameplay, please

I don't want to be a jackass, but the game is called SimCity for a reason - it's a simulation of a city. The idea is to realistically recreate the experience of managing a town or city.

You want 95% green space, no cars, communal agriculture, etc.? I'm not sure what you're looking for, but it sounds more like FantasyCity than SimCity.

Citys and Cars don't necessarily mix.

We've had successful cities for well over 2000 years and we've only had cars for about 100. The tendency to think cities = cars is what's wrong with a lot of modern city planning today.

For instance, a thriving business district in a city neighborhood is a precarious thing. There area ton of things you can do to screw it up:

Let's say you tear down a low-end commercial building and build a city parking lot. Your goal is to increase the number of people who can visit the area:

• You reduce the number of possible destinations in that neighborhood.
  
• Low-end buildings provide much of the unique character of a neighborhood (they never tear down the GAP store).
  
• Low-end, smaller businesses usually represent local owners and economic strength. Removing them might cause others to move.
  
• You create a traffic nexus that can screw up driving on all the streets near the parking lot.
  

Let's say you decide to ban parking along the business distruct people complain that it takes too long to drive through it.

• You decrease the number of people who can visit the area (by reducing parking).
  
• You channel people into the parking nexuses described above.
  
• You make an implicit assumption about the mobility of your visitors (people with children and the elderly might not want to 'Park and Walk'.
• You remove a perceived safety buffer (parked cars) which make pedestrians feel safer from street traffic.
  
• You are decreasing actual safety by improving 'flow' (read increase speed) of the traffic. Pedestrains are more at risk from vehicle accidents.
  

The Fire service claims that they need to widen the street to get the new longer fire trucks through. It's only a couple feet per side so you take it off the sidewalk.

• Well, Fire deaths are down (thanks to Smoke Alarms) and by widening the street you may increase the number of traffic fatalities. Is the benefit worth the risk?
  
• Is the new giant truck really an improvement over a smaller vehicle or just the 'bragging rights' of your Fire Chief?
  
• Narrowing sidewalks reduces the neighborhood's appeal. If you can't walk arm in arm with a child or a spouse, you're not going to hang out there.
  

The original poster made a good point, there's a lot of cities in the world and throughout history that do not follow the 'American Suburban Model' of Bubble Zoning that has brought sprawl.

SimCity was the original popular "simulator game". If they want to continue to surprise and delight us, they should better explore the relationship a neighborhoods success and transportation. In cities especially, people LIKE not using a car for every little thing. The continued suburbanification of cities won't make them more successful and SimCity should explore that.

For the Palm

Can't wait until they port the game to the palm!! :-P

Airplane Disaster

I wonder if they'll include the Airplane Crash disaster from previous versions. Just think of all of the people who would demand to see the game banned from stores!

The key to doing a Sim-Everything: MMORPG!

Combining all the various Sim* into one game would be tricky, but we came up with a better idea.

A Sim* MMORPG. Some people could play Sims, others could be mayors, others would build life-forms, others could control ants, and the building managers, and so on.

It could be a really cool MMORPG...

Mac port please?

I hope I don't have to wait for 2 years to see this on Mac OS X! I agree with the earlier poster that Sim City 3000 was really a graphically enhanced (slower) version of Sim City 2K. Sim City 4 sounds like it will be all new and shiny again! Yay!

The thing that made the original great.

I think we all know what made the original SimCity so great:

*The ability to get more money by holding down SHIFT and typing F-U-N-D-S.

If Maxis simply returns to its roots by including this in SimCity 4 they'll have a sure-fire hit on their hands!

:)

PS. You have to remember not to do it to many times in a row though... otherwise you cause a 'Natural Disaster'... Ooooh WATCH OUT!!! It's a GIANT LIZARD!!!

My question is,

Will the game prevent you from having two large towers built right next to each other? If there's a NYC scenario, will it have the WTC "edited" out?

Just curious.

-Kasreyn

my biggest problem with simcity

was always that I would run out of land. Great, I can spend more time making the buildings evolve, but a lot of that involves waiting . . . I loved the expansion, planning, seeing what works, etc, but after a while there's just no more land left . . .
i can only hope there's some way to buy more land in this game! :)
(even if it's buying a new city to have next to your original one, if it's influenced by your other city, it's close enough for me)

I don't know, personally...

I think most people would be rather SimGolfing than locked up managing some city, no matter how posh their office was.

SimMaxis

Try our new game, SimMaxis!

Start with a computer, a cool idea for a game that simulates a city and a meager budget to develop and market your game to the masses.

If you're successful, your little software company will be bought by a gaming conglomerate headquartered on a Silicon Valley landfill. Can you keep the corporate types happily rolling in dough while still producing games that please your fans? Can you balance the budget in a recession, survive earthquakes and avert costly developer food riots?

Finish it this time, please

This time around I hope they forgo the $30 patch....I mean Expansion Pack, and actually finish the game before shipping it.

It's sad that you had to buy two Sim City 3000 titles to get the functionality of Sim City 2000.

Now, all we need is a Constructor sequel (or a version of Constructor that will function on XP) and a expanded version of Capitalism 2 (brilliant game, BTW)

A few bugs left?

They did so much work getting the landscape to flow more realistly but the buildings seem to be based on the lowest level on the grid and then other sides don't look right. I wonder if that has an effect of property values :-)

simcity 4 shold be fun

BUT is there a point to it? all the sim cities havebeen build watch, repeat. BORING. I should hope that there would be a point to the new one.

zzz

The game was really fun when it first came out but they've stretched the premise way too thin without introducing much innovation. The Sims was a bit overrated too if you ask me. When I watched a guy spend 3 hours playing the Sims in a local Internet cafe, doing nothing but forcing some woman to drink coffee over and over and piss on herself, I knew this software had hit the wall.

These people need to come up with something new and interesting.

More of the Same

I read the preview on GameSpot about two weeks ago. SimCity 4 just looks like more of the same. They may enhance the simulation but it's basically still the same game as the original.

Remember when SimCity 3000 was first announced? It was supposed to be a fully 3D game with a very detailed business simulation. They eventually scrapped it claiming it was too ambitious.

Okay, back them that might have taken a pretty high-end system, but why not now? I'll bet even my crummy system (P3 500, TNT2) would more than suffice. (It runs Black & White and I doubt SC4 would need to be that fancy.)

Computing power's evolved, the game hasn't. SimCity 4 may have a 3D engine but it's a long way from being fully 3D, and while the enhancements to the simulator sound good they still fall way short.

When they develop a SimCity that is what SimCity 3000 was supposed to be, I'll be the first in line to buy it. Until then, SimCity 2000 is still pretty damn fun!

We need a new Sim Earth

I don't think you could integrate SimEarth into that...unless we get to see the Sims evolve from tiny eukaryotes. Maybe we could see insect or cetacean Sims?

A game of Sim City would fit in a few microseconds of Sim Earth. It just woulnd't work.

Hope SimCity is better than...

I hope the game is a lot more fun than SimWork [ezupa.com].

Yes I actually managed to finish it today.

SimsVille

my girlfriend loves these Maxis games.

Hopefully, though, they'll rethink their canning of the potentially really interesting SimsVille, which I might even deign to play.

It's been my hope for a while that they tie all the Sim* games together.

vectored road and such...

When are they finally going to stop using the grid-like roads that only allow you to create an american looking city? Why not use vectored roads, with realistic curves, so you could recreate Paris, or Amsterdam, or some mountain town, or whatever.
That would be a game I'd buy immediatly.

Sim City + Grand Theft Auto = Grand theft City?

I want to be able to make a city in a Sim City Fashion for GTA3 and have a living breathing, changing simulated city.

sim everything!

if i had been doing my own life instead of playing these:
simant - passed the 7th grade with As
simcity - learned C at a early age
simearth - never figured out what the hell i was doing
simtower - simelevator gave me vertigo!
simcity2000 - first played this on mac.. it had a monster of a cheat code but i never memorised it... i miss the placement of signs
simcity3 unlimeted - i could have passed last year of college...
simcopter - i could have gotten a real life

Sim Sim Sim

you could integrate SimFarm too. And maybe ThemeHospital but please not ThemePark.

ckd [crushkilldestroy.org]
go, look, rate, comment

Dear Maxis,

Dear Maxis, I'm a grown man with responsabilities, a job and a family! Who the heck is going to take care of my family if you release this? Can you seriously claim that you have considered the consequences of such a release? Please Maxis, calmly reconsider, put down the mouse and take two steps back from that compiler...

Sim Integration

Way back when I first played SimCity I read the notes in the manual that mentioned their goal was to make a bunch of modular games that could be integrated into a vast sim world.

The technology was not there at the time but it is now.

I would like to see my sim tower (yoot saito) running for each tower in my city. Sim Farm running for each farm in my city. The Sims running for each village/town/house/apartment. Streets of SimCity running for the roads in my city. Sim Safari for the wilderness areas of my city.

Combine internet access with the comupters available today and you have the ultimate platform.

Break out and modularize the components and sell them individually with "SimCity CORE" as the base engine with all other modules either downloadable or seperately purchasable. Make sure SCCORE is a playable game in it's own right.

Release the spec for building modules and watch as the gaming community starts coming up with modules that were never before thought about.

I am pleased to read that this release will alow for multiple cities to interact with each other. I would like to see how that actually turns out.

Hey, if you are going to dream, dream BIG

Realistic.

This things can only get so realistic.

Bloody screaming coming from your speakers, "The volcano burned off my legs! If you love me, you'll kill me quickly!"

sim city online the next big thing

When asked about his favorite games, Wright's answers reveal his love of simplicity, wide-open experiences, and gameplay. Number one on his list is Go, the ancient boardgame; number two is Sid Meier's Civilization; and number three is the original Legend of Zelda on the NES. [gamers.com]

So what's next? First up is Wright's current obsession: The Sims Online. "It's an interesting project," he explains, "because I'm discovering that, in many ways, this game is a combination of The Sims and SimCity."

And after he's sucked our lives away with The Sims Online? The Hall-of-Fame designer hints that he's got a brand-new project in development, but he chuckles, "If I talk about that, Maxis and EA are going to kill me."

SC3K was also hyped...

I remember reading a magazine article about SC3k before it came out. It sounded a lot like SC4K does now, but in the end, almost everything was left out. How can we be sure that sc4 won't just turn out to be the same as the previous 2 with yet more graphics changes?

The Sim Universe

> I know I'm not the only one who wants
> to play the Sims in the SimTower in
> the SimCity on SimEarth with the pesky
> SimAnts in the balcony garden.

While the cows are feeding on the fresh strawberries ready to harvest on your SimFarm?

What OS?

Has anybody announced what OS they'll run on? If they stick to the 9x series like most of their other games did, I'll never see it.

For Windows only??

Too bad that Sim City will most likely be available for only Windows. Perhaps if we are lucky, maybe a port to the Mac in a couple of years. Linux? Forget about it.

Sim City started on the Mac, but it did not take Maxis long to abandon it's roots.

More Graphics/Expandable

One thing I used to love in each of the simcity games was seeing the new building pop up in my cities.

I hope that Maxis will take a hint from the Sims game and make Simcity 4 expandable, and have lots of buildings for each type. So I can have more features, buildings, and my city doesn't end up looking like a giant apartment factory (Like it has before).

If Simcity 4 is as good as it looks, I would definitely buy expansions that add buildings and special things without removing any of the other buildings. (So I can have a really varied city)

Here's to a great looking game though.

Not as much as I'd hoped..

I like what I see regarding the new localization features (esp. being able to budget individual schools, etc), but it seems to be mostly eye-candy features that were added. It seems to be missing a few of the more substantial things I'd been wanting:

• Arbitrary road placement - It looks like it's still always tied to the grid. This makes it really hard to do any development on anything but flat land.
• Drive-Thrus - It's hard to really get a good feel for your town. Imagine being able to have a car simulator where you get to experience what traveling is like in the city first-hand.
• Resident Profiling - I'd love to take a random Joe Schmoe from a house and find out what he thinks of the city and his neighborhood, what he does, where he works (drive it?), etc.
• The Sims Integration - An extension of the resident profiling, why could I take a random family from the city and micromanage them? They'd be able to explore the whole city.

Oh well, there's always SimCity 5.. :-)

Unlimited edition

Will they screw me over on this one too and release an Unlimited edition like a month after I buy it?

Not 3D yet.

I'm disappointed that they didn't take this opportunity to finish the original engine they created for SimCity 3000, which was completely 3D. That system was cancelled and SC3K was delayed a year becuase the computer systems at the time were not up to par to run the game. However, today many of us have our GeForce cards and and GHz processors which I'd be quite sure could handle the job.

I still have the screenshots of the orginal SC3k saved on my computer at home. I come across them now and than and wonder if that kind of sim will ever become a real product. I can tell from those screenshots that my GF4/4400 would probably handle the job quite well.

Will it have a monorail?

Otherwise, how can I simulate Japan or Seattle?

Geez

I know I'm not the only one who wants to play the Sims in the SimTower in the SimCity on SimEarth with the pesky SimAnts in the balcony garden.

Get a SimLife!

Plane running into building disaster

I wonder if they will be keeping this disaster :-)

Melting Pot

How long is it going to be until all of the Sim* games start blending together until there is only one game left?

Re:Screenshot javascript doesn't work in moz 1.0rc

Just you.

Mozilla RC2 on Mandrake Linux was fine.

Re:this early post

I refute all your information. this is why I beleive none of your propoganda [prutser.cx]. I think you will understand why I will never travel under this guise again. thanks for your understanding...