
Sim City adopts a tilt-shift style look and feel - aaronbrethorst
http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2012/10/wireduk-sim-city/
======
aresant
A picture's worth a thousand words . . .

[http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/fch4fp/simcity-
gameplay-d...](http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/fch4fp/simcity-gameplay-
debut)

Surprising that Wired actually wrote close to 1,500 words with a headline
about the graphical style of the game, but included one scant screenshot. . .

~~~
natesm
Interesting. I hope that this doesn't become Sim Suburbia. The lack of
"subway"/"rapid transit" (just "rail" and "streetcar") is worrying. Hopefully
larger buildings won't be surrounded by parking lots - streets in the city
(besides 14th, 34th, etc.) are narrower than those in suburbs.

I also don't like how the trains just instantly turn around and how T
intersections on rails are possible - these are things that were okay in the
90s, but that I would have hoped to be fixed by now.

~~~
arrrg
Ha, that’s exactly what I was thinking. It seems you can only ever build the
same kind of boring city in Sim City, one fundamentally built around streets
and cars. It seems even worse with this newest incarnation: Streets form the
backbone through which everything runs. You can only build along streets, they
are (or at least seem to be) the only thing that carries water and energy. It
seems you cannot deemphasize the role streets play even if you wanted to.

I want pedestrian only streets and avenues, bike lanes, subways, different
kinds of trains, etc.

I can see why they didn’t (making only streets the fundamental building block
simplifies the game), but the cities you can apparently build with this Sim
City are not very appealing to me.

~~~
jeffool
So, "SimCity Planner"? I like it.

Personally, I'd love a "SimCity Manager" that was ran from a local government
perspective, rather than a "God Hand" one. You change zoning, woo potential
investors/business, decide if kids can skateboard downtown, build a skate
park, or just arrest them, etc.

~~~
quotemstr
Master of Orion 3 tried to "SimCity Manager" approach: the result was one of
the least enjoyable games of all time.

~~~
jeffool
That's... Unfortunate. But hey, I'll give it a shot. Maybe I was the person
they made it for; thanks!

------
cletus
All I've read about the new SimCity so far makes me sad.

The gameplay video [1] makes it look like a nice game but I just can't
countenance this trend towards making all games online, social and/or
persistent. Why do I need to be online to play this?

I played, precisely once, Civ V and it was (IMHO) a terrible game. Civ IV OTOH
was an amazing game... not for the game itself but for an amazing mod called
Fall From Heaven II [2], which volunteers spent years on. I can't tell you how
much time I spent playing that mod and playing out the different races and
winning strategies.

The beauty of Civ IV is that it Just Works. You don't need to be online. You
don't need to sign in to one publisher's bullshit social platform (one
advantage of consoles like the Xbox 360 is at least the bullshit social layer
is standarrdized as Xbox Live).

Sadly this doesn't work on a Mac as it adds a number of DLLs. I believe the
guys who did that are developing their own game.

Civ has been one of the (now) very few turn-based strategy games, which is
what I like to play. Not everything needs to be an FPS/RTS. I've seen reviews
of Civ and Heroes of Might and Magic and the like being knocked for "not being
an RTS" even though they never weer and hopefully never will be.

Seriously, I'd like something I can put on my laptop and just play on and off
as I please without having an Internet connection (eg on a long-haul
international flight). I was hoping that SimCity would be at least that but
apparently not.

Screw Origin and the rest of the mainstream PC games industry. I can't be the
only one. Where are the Kickstarter campaigns for kind of game? If I saw one,
it'd be "just shut up and take my money".

[1] [http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/fch4fp/simcity-
gameplay-d...](http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/fch4fp/simcity-gameplay-
debut)

[2]: <http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=171398>

~~~
mortenjorck
I really do understand your dissatisfaction, as I've felt the same way before
about Blizzard games, but I actually feel like this is a game where always-
online makes sense.

I've played SimCity since the last time there were no numbers on the box, and
the best changes have always been the ones that fundamentally alter the
gameplay, rather than add asked-for features like diagonal roads. SC 2012 may
add plenty of those (curved roads!), but its real change is making multiplayer
integral – playing in a live economy with other players. If it's executed
right, opening it up to play solo on a plane should be as desirable as doing
the same with Team Fortress 2.

As long as the multiplayer remains in service of gameplay (and not the
quagmire of wall-posting "social gaming"), I'm really looking forward to this
game.

~~~
DrStalker
> If it's executed right, opening it up to play solo on a plane should be as
> desirable as doing the same with Team Fortress 2.

More accurate to say "as desirable as doing the same with Diablo 3" Team based
FPSs don't work for solo gamers, ARPGs and building Sims do.

There will be benefits to the online community model which for some people
will be wonderful, but for others the benefits are not wanted so it's just a
pile of drawbacks.

~~~
mortenjorck
I don't think you're quite using enough imagination here. I'm not talking
about ARPGs and building sims in general - I'm talking about a very specific
sim game that's structured entirely around multiplayer. If SimCity 2013 isn't
that game, then yes, Diablo 3 is an appropriate comparison, but if it is, I
think the Team Fortress analogy is apt.

------
freehunter
I've been craving a new SimCity since SimCity 4 left me wanting. I've played
Cities XL, and while it has it's own unique deal going on, it just grinds on
me a bit. I don't like that your townsfolk will demand things that you can't
provide, for example. You need to constantly juggle multiple cities,
developing each in order to build a world rather than build a city. I need to
ship oil from this town to that town I get water from, etc. This is all
possible and advisable in SimCity, but far, far from required.

Even in Cities XL, I still spend most of my time micromanaging road traffic. I
sit waiting on population levels to grow so I can unlock the rest of the tools
(I hate having to sprawl my city out so far before I can unlock apartment
buildings, then have to consolidate things back downtown).

I want a Sim City that I can play as my own, not how the game demands I play
it. Sim City 2000 really was the last game like that I played.

------
apike
I've long been a SimCity fan, but every edition of the game has suffered from
performance problems. It's fine when your city is small, but once it gets
large enough to be interesting, it's unbearably slow. I've learned that the
real minimum requirements on these games are a computer released 2-3 years
after the game is.

Given the amount of marketing around the new game's excessive simulation of
unimportant details, I expect it to be at least as bad as its predecessors.

~~~
mortenjorck
I read somewhere that the tilt-shift effect is actually a performance booster
as well as stylistic choice – it creates an LOD cutoff that enables lower-poly
models to be rendered in the background to offset extra-high detail in the
foreground.

~~~
apike
If true, that is a really awesome hack. I've always assumed the performance
problems were more about O(n^2) simulations, such as every Sim evaluating
every route for driving to work, etc. If it's mostly graphics bound this could
be a big help.

~~~
icefox
The whole application sounds like an optimizer's dream. Improving performance
(especially startup) has always one of the most fun aspects of programing for
me and to take one something like sim city where there are probably tons of
opportunities and many different things to consider would be a real fun job.

------
navs
_sigh_ I'll need to create an Origin account and always be online to play
this, right? I miss the days when we could simply install a game. The only
validation being a product key.

~~~
vibrunazo
> I miss the days when we could simply install a game.

When was that? A decade ago my games required me to put the CD in the drive to
play. And two decades ago my games required me to find random words in the
user manual to make sure I wasn't a pirate.

I hate the game needing me to stay online. And it's a stupid strategy to hurt
legitimate users to try to stop pirates. But to be honest, that's much less
bad than what came before it :P

~~~
barrkel
No, it's worse; in 5 or 10 years, you may no longer be able to play these
games. With CDs / manuals, it's not a problem.

I'm currently playing (or rather, trying to play) Assassin's Creed. It's a
series I never got into, so I bought the first two on Steam. Guess what? The
servers at Ubisoft have been turned off. This leads to multi-second pauses
every 60 seconds, and after various game events -
[http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?p=33046...](http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?p=33046228)
. At least the game still sort-of works, but if they "improve" the DRM any
further, they'll be completely broken in the future.

~~~
bduerst
You lose a CD or Manual (with install code) and you're SOL when it comes time
to play the game again.

I hate DRM as much as the next guy but installing from server accounts is
amazing.

~~~
barrkel
In principle, I agree. But I haven't lost any CDs or manuals; if anything,
they've become collectible items. Importantly, I have control over them; and
no-cd cracks aren't exactly rare.

But with servers, there is no control. And it seems an obvious further
development of DRM is to host some of the application code remotely, so that
no simple workaround will be available to your children, should they want to
see what games were like in your youth.

~~~
trhtrsh
Luckily, the games of our youth will still be playable 10 years from now, and
they are better than the current crop of games.

------
Gring
Somehow this looks a lot uglier than other tilt-shift photos I've seen. I
wonder why that is. Bad blurring algorithm?

In the trailer, they mention "experimenting" as being a big part of the game.
As a programmer, I would love to have a tree of save points, like in git. So I
try out something, change a second thing, revert the second thing, try a third
thing, revert it as well, revert everything back to the start. Wouldn't that
be fun for ordinary people as well?

~~~
icefox
Hmmm I wonder if you could make a game built around this core idea, not just
of save points, but taking different branches and even merging choices.

~~~
scott_s
Read up on the recent re-release of Tactics Ogre for the PSP, and Radiant
Historia for the DS.

------
scottchin
I'm quite excited about a new SimCity game. One thing I do wonder about is
whether there will be an 'In-App-Purchase' type marketplace in the game. EA,
on mobile at least, seems to have fully embraced the freemium model, and has
been quite successful at it monetarily speaking.

I hope any IAP aspects don't get too out of hand.

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notJim
I hope this is optional, as I've always had this powerful irrational hatred of
tilt-shift.

~~~
trhtrsh
It's totally rational to hate fake tilt-shift, which is actually just fake
tilt, as "shift" isn't involved in the process at all; it's just thrown in
there by people who have no clue what they are doing, and just at blur
indiscriminately to make their pictures "artsy".

------
jsemar
Looks beautiful, but I admit I am not a fan of removing the
pipes/subway/electrical grids

------
unkoman
I can't get hyped about this game. It will become the always only failure that
Diablo III became.

