The new SimCity looks amazing, and I'm certainly still looking forward to it, but it comes with at least one major downer. As anyone who's played one knows, one of the simplest pleasures of any SimCity game, dating back to the 1989 original, is the consequence-free "What if?" scenario. The kind where you obliterate your city by triggering an apocalyptic wave of fires, earthquakes, tornadoes, and monster attacks, then time-warp it back to pristine condition by loading a saved game. When I asked Lead Producer Kip Katsaelis if the 2013 SimCity would allow that same pleasure in its Glass Box-powered cities, the answer was a simple, disappointing "No." The online connectivity Maxis has built in means that reloading saved games will be impossible, even when no one else has a city in your region.
The caveat, Katsaelis says, is that there will be a cheat mode that will disable achievements and let you quickly and easily build large cities for the purpose of wrecking. That's some consolation, I suppose -- after seeing a brief demonstration of a giant bowling ball inflicting physics-based damage to skyscrapers, I am very interested in watching cities get demolished in this new engine. But this is a prime example of how the benefits of online connectivity in new games can deprive gamers of some of the things we love most about their classic predecessors. Disasters will be far less fun if seeing their effects means potentially losing hours of progress.
At least we'll always have the old games for that, right?
Update: Maxis clarifies on some misinformation out there: You can have multiple regions going simultaneously, and multiple cities within those regions. You are not limited to a single city, and you do not have to delete one city to start another.
Update: Here's the new E3 SimCity trailer: