SimCity looked very promising at its initial unveiling. The
best known city building simulation getting another instalment, coupled with a
brand new game engine which promised an even greater level of detail. Then EA made
the horrendous decision to slap useless, always online DRM on it. They didn’t
just manage to match Blizzard’s cock-up with Diablo 3, but actually beat it.
And just like Diablo 3, you’re left wondering if there’s a game worth playing?
Thankfully for everyone who bought and persevered with the launch
day troubles, the answer is yes. The updates in the new instalment bring some
interesting re-works to the mechanics of previous SimCitys. Most notable is the
changes to roads. They now act as the veins of your city, distributing the
heartbeat of the power stations and other utilities. Water and electricity trickle
down them to all attached buildings, whilst sewage is pumped back along them to
your waste treatment plants.
Because of this, you can no longer place buildings in the
middle of nowhere. Instead you have to build a road to every space you want to
make use of. It seems odd a first as it redefines how you plan your city. Now
roads are the most important element, and building the right roads at the start
will save you a lot of painful demolition work later on.
Roads also control the density of your city. Previously your
choice of zoning defined an area as low, medium or high density. Now your roads
are the key to your city’s development. Upgrading a road to ease a traffic jam
can suddenly cause a whole street of skyscrapers to pop up out of a trailer
park.
The core gameplay remains unchanged. You take on the role of
city mayor with all the powers of a dictator. You mark out areas for residential,
commercial and industrial buildings and then entice tax paying Sims to move in
by providing all the utilities and services a budding metropolis will need. As always,
you have a group of advisors who’ll keep you informed of your Sims needs.
And it’s just as hard as always to keep everyone happy. Your
Sims will often speak up with speech bubbles, alerting you to services or
objectives they’d like you to achieve. If you accept their challenge, you’re
often provided with a monetary reward to help you city grow. The only problem
is you’re often asked to ‘plop’ buildings which will be useless for your city’s
specialisation. You can be a mining tycoon; then out of the blue be asked to
build an airport for tourism. Even worse are the constant requests you receive to
build any DLC you have. I get constant requests to build the superhero DLC I received
with the limited edition, and there’s only one way to shut your Sims up. You
have to turn all Sim speech bubbles off in the options. It’s a minor problem, as
speech bubbles really serve the purpose of being an extended tutorial. However I
know I’m missing out on any challenges and money rewards I might be interested
in which is a little annoying.
The UI is very nicely laid out. Clicking on any icon on the
tool bar brings up all the construction items associated with it, as well as
the appropriate city overlays. Each overlay provides a living graph, displaying
all the information you need to track anything you need to see in real time. As
you wait for your taxes to roll in, it’s satisfying to sit back a flick through
the overlays; watching your city grow and spotting how its needs change.
And there’s an impressive level of simulation occurring. Although
the big problem, as with many simulations is; if you look too closely the
cracks show. And this comes from the new ‘agent’ simulation used. Each blob of utilities,
vehicle and Sim can act independently, which leads to some odd scenarios. Often,
conga lines of rubbish trucks form as they compete to serve the same buildings.
And this happens with plenty of other services such as busses and emergency
vehicles. Even more bizarrely, the AI is enticed by the freeway like moths to a
bright light. I’ve observed my fire trucks drive straight past Sims in
desperate need of saving from a horrible fiery death, just to go for a joy-ride
on the freeway! Presumably all my emergency crews crave the open road where
there’s no red lights to stop them, because for no explicable reason they will
stop at red lights!? Until a recent patch, they would happily join traffic
queues and junctions and patiently wait their turn instead of using open lanes
to jump the queue.
The AI also acts like a fool when it comes to resources.
Your city specialists bleat like new born lambs as soon as any coal mine or oil
well is full. Completely oblivious of the fact that your fleet of delivery
trucks is en-route, just stuck in traffic. Meanwhile your power and water
advisors will happily fall asleep on the job and not warn you of any problems
until the lights go out. And if I could
shoot the zoning advisor, I would. Many of my cities end up in a bizarre
situation where he demands I build more residential housing as there aren’t
enough workers for my industry, but also tell me to build more industry; with
no explanation for the industry demand.
Multiplayer has the most obvious simulations issues, or
really, the lack of simulation. Your city will often receive ‘spare’ workers or
vehicles from neighbours to help you, despite having a shortage of the same
thing. And it’s not surprising that this element of the game is very loosely
based on actual game data. Each city runs asynchronously so that all players
can use their preferred game speed. This would make it impossible for real time
sharing of resources. It’s a little immersion breaking, but equally it doesn’t
really add or take away anything from the experience.
In fact, the majority of the simulation issues are just
distractions, only mildly annoying when you notice. The biggest problem by far
is the incredibly limited city sizes. You barely have to zoom the camera out to
view your entire city. It takes me only a few hours to fill all the usable
space. Then all I have left to do is a bit of tinkering. The limited space also
means you can only really specialise in one type of industry, and once that’s accomplished
your budget takes care of itself. Without being able to build a sprawling
mega-city, it’s hard to go wrong. The challenge is prematurely cut off, leaving
you with the choice of trying to please all your Sims, or moving on to found
your next city.
In the build-up to the game’s launch, EA and Maxis went to
some lengths to explain the limited city sizes were due to the complexity of
the simulation. Also thrown in was the ‘fact’ that the origin serves handled
some of the calculations for you, allowing the game to run on lower end
machines. It sounded like a reasonable comprise that even led me to a somewhat optimistic view on the DRM.
It turned out to be a complete lie following some excellent
detective work by RockPapaerShotgun, and modders quickly exposing the nature of
the DRM. We really shouldn’t have expected anything more than anti-piracy
measures from EA, and poor ones at that. The game will only check in with the
servers at around a twenty minute interval, do a quick cloud save, update some
region stats and then merrily continue on. You can play offline during that entire time
until it reaches the next arbitrary check. And if there’s any synching issue
during a cloud save, your progress is lost leaving you the choice of abandoning
the city or doing a rollback, undoing the last twenty minutes of play!
Clearly there are no server side calculations going on here.
So why were there so many explanations to the contrary from the head of Maxis? Why
are we limited to small cities and no local save feature? The likely answer is
that EA was expecting to get away with selling some city size DLC before the DRM
fiasco blew up so spectacularly. EA showed their corporate side horribly with
this pointless DRM, which can be easily removed.
It would be nice to see EA do a U-turn on this stupid
decision, and you’d think with their share price failing, they might would to
improve their reputation. Instead, it seems dragging it through the mud has
been the plan for the past few years. We can only hope than a change of CEO
might see a change in direction.
There’s an enjoyable, measurably good game buried under the DRM.
Like Diablo 3, it has suffered a similar fate. Until modders remove the DRM
(something I’ve never hoped for before now), it’s difficult to recommend
because of the message that would be sent to the industry by SimCity being a
sales success. Hopefully the wave incredibly bad press coverage will outweigh the
‘success’ of any high sales figure, something I shouldn’t have to wish on any
game.
