Preview: Hands On With SimCity

It's kind of hard for me to write about playing the new SimCity, because in most respects it's exactly what you think it is: a prettier, more detailed version of the classic city simulator on a somewhat smaller scale. I feel like most of the nitty-gritty is stating the obvious: I spent my starting budget of $50,000 to put down roads, placed power generators and water towers, garbage dumps and police and fire stations, hospitals and a city hall. Zoning residential, commercial, and industrial areas is free this time, guided by roads. The fundamentals are all there -- where this SimCity both outshines its predecessors and pales in comparison is in the multitude of details.



And not just in the mesmerizing graphics. I loved the endorphin rush when I placed a civic building or park, sending happy faces cascading out like a ripple through water. It was as if a thousand independent sims basically did The Wave in celebration of my action. Plunking down a sewage outlet in the midst of a residential area produced the same effect, except with anger.


I love being able to pick a sim at random and track him or her throughout their whole day, going to work, going shopping, and returning home at the end of the day. I love the way the Glassbox engine allows that, and how plunking down a new bus stop doesn't just alter a number on a spreadsheet -- it gives a simulated person a "real" way to get to work. I love the data layers, which show an astonishing level of detail for nearly every aspect of my city's existence, from happiness to pollution (either air or ground) to traffic congestion and more. I love how the new curvy roads system allows me to build more organic-looking cities as well as rigidly grid-based ones. Expanding existing buildings to increase their effectiveness, like adding classrooms to a school, feels like a realistic way to go about things. I love how building a town with a tourism-based economy looks dramatically different from one that's tech or industrial based. It's a game full of interesting ideas and awesome sights.

Department of Multiplayer

The event I played at, held at the Maxis office, was meant mostly to show off the multiplayer aspects of SimCity, but that ended up as mostly a bust. Only one of my two region-mates showed up correctly, and it was very inconsistent about whether I'd have access to buildings (such as a large hospital) that would unlock if anyone in the region built a Department of Health addition to their city hall.


When that aspect did work, however, it allowed some good co-op coordination -- I'll build the Department of Education, you build the Department of Transportation. I'll build a bunch of power plants to keep your lights on, you build a bunch of garbage trucks to clean up my town's trash. Later, I'm told, you can get into more advanced economic ally-oops such as having one player mine ore (one of the finite natural resources a player can extract from the map) and export it to another, who refines it. There's a lot of potential there, both for players working together and for single players who build each part of a network of cities independently, but it remains to be seen. (The dynamic economy system, which causes prices to fluctuate based on what real players are currently buying and selling, was not enabled for this demo.)

What ended up being the biggest shock to the system was the size of the map. After playing for just a couple of hours I started running up against the borders of the two-square-kilometer map, and felt the pangs of anguish as I struggled to find places to plop down major buildings. This was much more of an issue on the maps with a lot of hilly terrain, compared to the flat ones.


Sure, there are a lot of ways to expand my city's population by increasing density, and I can always start a second neighboring city that's effectively an extension of the first, but the feeling I get here is similar to running multiple households in The Sims 2: the cities exist concurrently on the same overworld map, but there's a loading screen between them that makes the switch between territories slightly more than painless. I certainly can't say that there isn't enough room to build a thriving city in, but I did find I hit the limits a lot sooner than I thought I would. I long to experience that feeling of freedom in The Sims 3 when I first zoomed out and then smoothly zoomed into another lot without loading.

Eminent Domain

This of course raises the question: why can't I have a bigger map? After all, I have a Core i7 CPU -- surely my PC is burly enough to handle a big-boy map? Lead Designer Stone Librande says that larger maps are "on the wishlist," but at launch every map in every region in SimCity will be 2x2. This is one of those times when the lack of mod support is a very disappointing decision. We can only hope that Maxis and EA decide to add them in the future, if only for players with the hardware to support it.
On the always-online front, I conducted a little test: I built up a small city, braced for the apocalypse, and yanked out the ethernet cable. And yet... the cheery music continued. I opened my eyes to find that, outside of a "check connection" notice that popped up in the corner, nothing at all happened. My city continued to hum along, with sims strolling down the street as though completely unaware I'd severed their connection to the outside world. It was kind of anticlimactic, really. After about 15 minutes I plugged back in, and no one was the wiser. It looks like we won't have to worry too much about internet outages unceremoniously dumping us.

Off The Record Mode?

Of course, the limitation of requiring a connection to the server to start remains (in fact, I was unable to restart for several minutes after a crash because the local server was down). Eventually, Librande tells me, my city would no longer be saved, and progress would be lost. Wait... that's exactly what I want to happen! I want to be able to stop saving my city so that I can trash it and explore all kinds of "What If?" scenarios, like fires, tornados, monster attacks, and meteor showers. Can I just unplug, trash the town, Alt+F4, plug back in and load up my un-destroyed city? Well, sorta.
Librande says there will be a local save buffer of a to-be-determined length that will continue saving your city and then upload when reconnected. So yes, there will be a workaround that will allow you to trash your city and then restore. However, it will involve physically unplugging/disconnecting your PC and then waiting an unspecified amount of time before going nuts. It's inelegant, to say the least. I asked Librande if there was any plan to enable a "What If?" mode button that simply stops saving after you push it... but no. Sadly, no matter how I implored, that feature doesn't seem to be on the table.

I know that a lot of gamers find the limitations I've noted here unforgivable. To them, I can only say this game isn't for you, and we should try to find one that is. For me, though, I find myself eager to get back into SimCity -- there are dozens of buildings I never got to construct, trade networks I never got to explore, and perhaps most important of all, I have to build a bus network with an average wait time (a statistic displayed when you click on the station) of less than 45 minutes. After all the complaining I do about San Francisco's MUNI system, I owe it to my citizens.