Real ones recognize this as what the Maxis team promised with The sequel to SimTown that they promised they’d revisit after the success of the first sims and then absolutely nothing happened and the EA effectively fired the entire original Maxis team leaving a hollow shell of programmers not quite competent enough to make Sims 3 performant and game designers not quite competent enough to make a sequel to SimCity 4.
EA essentially ended Maxis as a creative entity around the time of release of Simcity 4/The Sims 2.
They’ve mostly been cashing in on The Sims since then. I have a feeling the core concept of Simcity (2013) was developed under orders from some executive who only had superficial experience with city-builders.
I am not saying every employee needs to be a 360 expert on the products in their segment (including historical ones), but you at least need a high level understanding of what people are looking for and how your product is used.
I will hereby admit that countless sims have died horrifically on my watch.
While there are a lot of cool things to demo visually with this game, I am personally interested in the following:
Metropolis 1998 is a fresh take on simulation games from the 90s and 00s while applying modern-day features to the city builder genre. As the player, you will be able to see inside of your citizens homes, featuring two different camera modes: classic isometric and top down. Demand is no longer zone based, but driven by your citizens specific needs. As the mayor, you’ll be able to set aside land and designate where specific businesses can open up their doors.
The game features:
- State of the art traffic simulation, capable of pathing around 100,000+ people/vehicles. No more CPU death! (at least, for a very long time)
- Granular demand based on the summation of your citizens needs
- Complex simulation of the citizens. They will go to work, sleep, relax, eat, and more!
The visuals are very pretty though. I prefer this style to realistic visual style of say Transport Fever 2; it gets a bit boring late game (I do like the early game historical building style in 3D).
no linux makes me sad but this might be the first game i’m interested in in a while
I am intrigued.
Thing with Sid Meier and Maxis was, they kind of adapted their simulation algorithms to their games, or rather the other way around- they knew simulation and had simulation engines, and Sid Meier made games kind of top of that. That’s why the Sim City series was so successful, because of the strategic depth that came from the underlying framework. That’s hard to replicate when you start with the game and then try to work your way backwards to depth.
Sid and the team released so many games based on this bottom up approach- SimEarth, SimAnt, Sim City et c, and most notably they had SimRefinery that a lot of people don’t know about, a tentative attempt to simulate the daily running of an oil refinery.
You can find it online, but it’s hard to make sense of unless you are an actual oil refinery worker, as far as I recollect they were hired to make this as an educational tool or whatever. Later they built on this type of coding and pivoted into more commercially accessible games.
But I ramble, it’s late, my point is, there’s a reason titles like SimCity never got replicated or emulated, no pun intended, mainly because there was so much actual engineering laying the groundwork for these timeless games that isn’t easy to create when you start out instead with the aim to make a game and then add simulation complexity as a means to that end, you just don’t end up with the same kind of product.
I will always cheer attempts, buy I stay realistic in my anticipations.
Ok, colour me very interested!
Me three
I have been watching and waiting for this one for a long time!
I really love the look and am super excited to give it a try!
