SimCity Societies
 

Anyone heard anything about the upcoming SimCity Societies? I saw a bit of an impression here, and I'm intrigued. It looks like something that could give the game more flavor, something that I have been looking for, but it may turn off the pure city builders.

Ask the creator of Hollywood Mogul for his impressions...

Welcome to Hollywood

Yeah, there has been quite a bit of hell raising on the Simtropolis boards about this. The consensus among the Sim City die hards is that this is death of the series.

I think the new game will be a whole new dimension to SimCity, but it'll be totally different than what we're used to seeing from the game. But...I'm intrigued enough to check it out.

I won't delete SC4 off my machine anytime soon though.,

Here is an interview with a guy from EA about the game, posted on the simtropolis boards.

I'm looking forward to it. Should be a nice departure, since I actually haven't played a SimCity game since 3 I think... and that wasn't very long either. I'd like to see a change.

I'm really excited about this. Often when I would build a city, i would play around for a while and then sort of drift away, with no real connection it. I'm hoping that this game will add more of a bond between the city and the player.

I'm looking forward to it a lot. I tried to get into SC4, but I always felt completely detached from the cities. I zoned, I sat and watched things unfold for long stretches of time, I plopped down a building every once in a while, and that was that.

The team that is working on SCSocieties already has put out some other city-building games such as Children of the Nile, which I might check out some day.

exactly. that's why SC has never had much of an appeal to me. always felt like i was playing a game/toy, and never felt like i was building something where "actual" people were living. i always found myself zooming in really close and just watching the people, just wondering where they were going to and what their life must've been life. this Societies aspect of the game is much more likely to draw me in (if i were to get this game, which is unlikely unless i can buy it at a discount). i want to have a connnection to the people living in my city, not with the city itself. a city isn't buildings and zones - a city is people and the buildings/zones they need to live their lives.

Well said.

In the last SimCity game I played, it looked like the cars in the streets for some of my roads were going in circles. I would build more roads to get rid of the traffic, and would wonder where the people were going or if they were pissed about my stupid streets. I don't think this game will allow that, but it's getting closer to it. :)

I like that they got rid of the micromanagement of water pipes and electricity grids. Allows you to really concentrate on the important aspects of the game rather than minutae.

I liked the minutae.

I like all of the details. I don't really like building pipes and power lines. But given there were easy ways around it, it wasn't as if you had to do it and so...I think that given how far the game had come with regions and all of that..I can see why they changed it up to reach 'casual' players. But a lot of physics of how stuff worked like cars going places, actual tracking of city statistics and all of that was done EXTREMELY well in SimCity 4.

A testament to how well the game worked is that it's over 4 years old and there is still a huge community of people developing tons of add-ons and plugins for it each day. The sheer quality and volume of what they've been able to do for that game is really remarkable to me.

So it would've been nice to see them expand on that. But at the same time, I can see how it might not sell to folks who enjoy playing The Sims for reasons other than building houses (as I do) or games like that.

I think this will be a new facet of gameplay, but I tend to agree with the school of thought that this is a remarkable departure of what a lot of us were waiting for in regards to what we hoped would be SimCity 5.

But since SCS will be released in November or around Christmas, we won't have much longer to wait to find out whether Tilted Mill can pull this off and the game can sell.

So the whole region thing has gone from the new version?

Looks like a different game, a merge of Children of the Nile and City Life, but given the SimCity name to sell it.

Not that that means it will be a bad game.

Having seen it twice in the last month, it is very different from what's come before, but it's mostly in a "you're not a fucking moron" way.

The idea is "look, this stuff we've always made you do before? You're not a fucking moron. You'd do it anyway, so we'll just assume you would have done it, do it, and get it out of your hair. YOUR job is to build your city and design it in whatever image you see fit. Leave the water, the power, and the trash to us."

that's pretty logical, i would agree with that line of thinking. my interest level in this game has now increased to 10%. maybe 14%.

That's precisely what it is. And no, it doesn't mean it's going to be a bad game. But it's not going to be Sim City.

How is that? Maybe I'm missing something, but you still decide on what you want to build. But now, instead of having the basic effect of raising or lowering your property values or making it easier for your sims to get to work, a new building or structure can affect the mood and lifestyle of the people around it. It seems like the logical progression of the SimCity line, where your decision actually affect the lives of the Sims rather than just their wealth and migration patters. It seems like the spirit of the game is intact, but evolved.

New trailer...doesn't show too much as far as game mechanics, but my warm fuzzy feeling is growing.


http://kotaku.com/gaming/clips/simci...ies-285565.php

Sweet.

I bought SC4 and wanted to love it. I loved the terraforming at the beginning, even if nothing I did looked realistic. And I played and played and played and everything took so long to develop that I stopped playing. A friend said I needed to get the expansion pack, but it was to late. For me, they needed to do something different to make it more personable. Maybe this is it.

You can drive down the road and have my Children of the Nile that I bought for my fiance and she spent 10 minutes with ;)..

I'm only joking, she'd kill me.

EA press release: http://www.ea.com/article.jsp?id=simcityseries

no word about on-line play.

Too much like The Sims for me. But I can appreciate the evolution of the series and respect that it had to go in a different direction. I'm just not particularly interested in that sort of sim. I'll probably still buy it, because I enjoy building cities and the aspects of being able to get more engrossed in the 'culture' of each city rather than them being clones of each other, would be fun.

But I don't care about the citizens.

So, this game is coming out in about two weeks. Has anyone preordered it?

I will probably buy it, being a SimCity devotee and all. But...no way I preorder it. I'm not excited about it, just...curious to see how much they changed it.

The Impressions Historical City Building games (Pharaoh, Zeus, Emperor, Caesar - even though I never bought the last) have been and still is my 2nd favorite series of all time (after Civ of course). I was eager to play Children of the Nile since it was done by the orignal Pharaoh designer. But they evolved it to a society-building game which, in my opinion, didn't work. As someone said, they tried to merge two disparate gameplay styles and for those traditional/hardcore city builders like myself, it was a turn off, unfortunately.

No Maxis = No good

Impressions/Tilted Mill > Maxis

My issue is not this game, but that SC still had a lot of directions you could develop it.

If you've read my dynasty, you know what I fan I am of SC in general and SC4 in particular. (If you haven't, what are you waiting for? http://www.operationsports.com/fofc/...ad.php?t=51381)

Some of the comnplaints people make about SC's franchise can;t be made of SC4, because it changed them. For example, in SC4 you can follow around individual sims, and they will tell you issues in your city before your managers and grids will, at the early stages. You can do missions. There's more than laying zones and waiting until buildsing emerge, and you can speed it up for that to happen instantly.

The intricacy of the game is simply staggering, and I still would not consider myself a master of it, today.

SC still had room for development, that's why I'd prefer that another entry be made with even more of it, instead of soemthing else. I have nothign against this game, and I will try the demo and see what I think, but it's not SC.

It'd be like Jim releasid FOF: The Fans, with a small sim abnout living as a pro fan. It might even be an alright game, but it ain;t no FOF.

I've been purchasing SimCity since the very first and I love franchise. Up until now. I can't see how they can slap the Sim City name on this. Shame on them. I can see this being an off-shoot of SimCity, which it appears to be with the Societies tag, but I don't see a SimCity 5 on the horizon and that upsets me.

I haven't preordered this simply because there are too many good games coming out in the next 2 weeks, but this will be on my christmas list.

No kidding. The fact that Simtropolis.com folks spent the past five or so years developing every kind of mod you could imagine to tweak that same particular game lets you know that there were a million things they could do with it. But they've stopped catering to the real gamer and are going after people who buy The Sims franchise.

I only bought that game so I could build houses in it. And nothing else at all.

So you can't build houses anymore? From what I was reading, I came away with the impression that you could build individual houses now.

No no..i was saying I only bought The Sims 2 because you could build individual houses. That was the only thing I used the game for. You still can. It just gets old after a while, was all. I was being confusing...

No, my reasons for liking Sim City over the years was due to the amazing depth of the game and just what it offered up -- as evidenced by some of my past dynasties and just...the sheer amount of stuff you can do.

I imagine the new one will be high on the gloss factor and slight on the options and depth. But we'll see.

This feels to me that it will be like the Trains! game that was put out where it was a dummed down version without as many features but "prettier". I bought it anyways, but it lost most replayability quick...

I want a Sim City 5 that has the ability to do even more things, not something dummed down and glossed up.. I fear I am in the minority these days based on what software companies are designing though.

Here's a SimCity Societies preview from simtropolis.

http://www.simtropolis.com/forum/mes...&enterthread=y

And here's CityLife, a game that I haven't played..but looks SimCity-purists ish to me...

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/...g=tabs;reviews

Anyone here played it?

I don't like the fact that it looks too out of the box. I want a game where I can get a map and do whatever I want like SC4 allows me to do.

This might be the first version of SimCity I actually pay for.

FYI.....good deal on a pre-order for Sim City Societies. $25 pre-order at Toys R Us. Only good for today and tomorrow (11/9-11/10).

http://slickdeals.net/?pno=10658&lno=12&afsrc=1

Early review for SimCity Societies and it isn't good.

http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=87312

It's like The Sims, City. But worse. Maxis dropped the ball giving this one away.

There's a CityLife sequel coming out some time next year, may be worth holding off and waiting for that instead.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cities_Unlimited

I think I'm just going to fire up Sim City 4.

Did anybody get this one? Should be out in the US. Impressions? I was interested at first, but after reading some reviews it seems that the whole concept is "pointless".

Maaaaaan. I really wanted to play this. :(

Yuck.

Well, that's one thing I don't need to put on my list!

I loved the Caesar series, and was hoping that this would be a worthy successor. I'm disappointed that it appears that it may be a dog.

Ok..So I dogged this game pretty bad in this thread and at simtropolis. But the past week or so, I've wanted to get back into SimCity 4 again. Well, I lost my copy -- as I've done four or five or six times before -- and was going to get a new copy from Wal-Mart. But before I did, I wanted to see if SCS was out and to read a few more reviews from non-Sim City loyalists like myself.

After I did, I decided that this game wasn't going to be the old Sim City, no one purported it to be and that it would satisfying OTHER curiosities I've had over the years of building my monstrous cities.

Things like "what's going on down there? What are the people doing? What does that building look like? Let's make it look more like a real place..."

The thing with SimCity 4 is, without cheating and lots of mods, it wasn't THAT great a game. I mean, it turned out to be downright amazing once you did all of the tweaking, but out of the box..it would get really old after a little while. In the later years, that's all I ever did with it. I played essentially in Sandbox mode, I built cities and tried to create a variety of them across a region that had a different flavour/character.

To me, SCS looks like the building elements of The Sims plus some city building aspects of SimCity. If they do it even half right, it might be an enjoyable enough experience to warrant the purchase (and for most, when the price comes down, that is..)

Not that this Societies will be amazing or anything close. But given that SC4 came out in 2001 and this game is released now, given how much better computers are now, etc., I imagine that if nothing else, it'll be a lot more interesting to LOOK AT for hours.

So...I'm going to check it out and I'll post some impressions here after I've messed around with it for a while, it'll probably be all weekend.

Strange turn of events, I guess. But...I enjoy the game enough to give it a chance and there isn't anything out there that's a suitable replacement that could convince me to do otherwise at the moment.

So...we shall see.

Here's another review of the game from a SC4 vet, that convinced me to give this one a chance.

http://www.thesporum.net/smf/index.php?topic=1822.0