Sim City Becomes an interconnected Sim World - Preview
by Karl Koebke , posted on 08 June 2012 / 3,747 Views
There hasn’t been a new Sim City game since 2003’s Sim City 4. In the 9 years since then, EA’s sister-franchise The Sims and its plethora of sequels and spin-offs has taken the world by storm. Earlier this year, EA announced its return to the original city-planning series that started it all, and we got a detailed look at it at this year’s E3, simply
titled Sim City.
At a core level, Sim City is the same game you know and love, with a giant city, people and cars bustling about, and building and organizing the city to best maximize it potential. But the new engine means that a few things are different this time around. Players can now make any types of road-curves that they want, no longer limited to just the road-shape templates of previous games. According to EA, the new engine used is also advanced enough that every Sim resident shown in the game has their own AI, with their own places to go and duties to perform.
Of course, the biggest new change is the game’s new social aspect. Sim City is played online, and the city’s of other players are connected by a system of freeways. During our demo, EA showed us the different directions that town development would go. The first town we saw seemed to be a nice, clean, suburban town, but the next town over
was huge, full of factories and huge buildings. This town was soaring in profits, but its population was suffering from the effects of pollution and an alarming crime.
Most interesting is how the towns are connected. Going back to our nice town, EA pointed out to us a group of hooligans who had driven in from the crime-ridden factory town. The crime rate of another player’s town had adversely affected our own. These thieves arrived at the bank, and the robbery ensued. Luckily, the police station was next door, but horrible traffic conditions meant they almost didn’t make it in time.
Players can actively work together for mutual gain. There were three connected cities in the demo we were shown, and they had pooled their resources together to make a new airport. This not only brought more benefits to all three cities, but also assumedly lets Sim-residents travel to even more player’s cities throughout other parts of the world.
The online-mode may be an issue to some players, as a persistent online world takes much of the fun out of purposefully screwing up your city just to see what would happen. Hopefully EA will offer a kind of offline, sand-box mode where players can simply screw around. That aside, EA’s new Sim City looks to be a welcome return to form for the franchise. We’ll see it released February 2013 for Windows only.
