SimCity: the most disappointing game of 2013
Year in review: Plagued by server issues, hamstrung by unfortunate design decisions and scaled back from the previous game, SimCity is a textbook example of how to kill a beloved franchise.
No game came close to the disappointment I felt when I finally decided to abandon SimCity for good, though the people who’ve been having tons of trouble logging into Battlefield 4 would probably beg to differ. The difference is that Battlefield 4 is, at heart, a very good game with major stability and networking issues. But even when it works as intended, SimCity is not a good game. It occasionally feels like it, sure, and I think in the end I got my money’s worth out of it, but it also kills the franchise for me. I’d rather play SimCity 4.
Always online, never connected
I don’t have a problem with always-online games except on principle. I don’t game very often in the absence of a network connection, but I like to be able to do so if the need arises. The argument of “who doesn’t have an internet connection nowadays?” is a red herring, because the complete lack of internet access is almost never the actual problem. Always-online games chain you to the network infrastructure of the game’s publisher, and if that infrastructure fails for whatever reason, your game is toast. Not even Diablo III experienced the sort of game-breaking heartaches SimCity did in its first month and beyond. Entire cities would be lost and servers were often inaccessible. I started at least three or four cities on different servers, only to lose them all because I either could not log into those servers again or because the game had lost the cities in question and I had to start over. And never mind that the servers are run by EA, who has a long history of shutting down multiplayer servers for their games as early as a year after a game’s release. Who knows if anyone will even be able to play SimCity in a few years?
But let’s assume the game’s networking issues were completely solved and the always-online requirement taken out (as intrepid hackers discovered was possible by changing a single line of Javascript code). SimCity would still be a highly flawed game; SimLargeTown would be a more apt name. SimCity 4’s regions allowed you to create sprawling, interconnected meshes containing everything from rural farmland to sprawling suburbs to towering metropolises. In their place, the new SimCity provides regions where 80% of the visible land cannot be built on. Instead, there are anywhere from three to twelve small sandboxes where cities are allowed to grow. Each city map is 2km squared, which roughly matches the medium maps in SimCity 4; the large maps in SimCity 4 are four times as big. As a result, any remotely large settlement feels confined. You run out of space for new roads and zones quickly, especially with the increased emphasis on utility buildings that eat up precious space. The only way to expand after a while is up, turning SimCity into a race for density.
If you succeed, you’ll have built a city of skyscrapers that extends exactly a kilometer in all four directions before collapsing into empty fields, which is ridiculous. But chances are you’re going to have some trouble even making it that far unless you really dedicate yourself to the game. Your sims will complain of lengthy commutes and no places to shop, even though you’ve built public transit and cleared congestion and created shiny new commercial blocks right by your residences. A lot of those problems have to do with the Glassbox simulation engine Maxis has built for the new SimCity.
Glassbox: half-baked
It was a laudable goal: instead of relying on the statistical aggregates of previous games, where overall city trends like traffic density and crime were calculated based on a bunch of formulas, Glassbox built its simulation on the direct actions of each individual “agent.” Agents could be Sims looking for jobs, but they could also be packets of water or power looking for a home to consume it, or a job request looking for an unemployed worker. It sounded great. Unfortunately, as anyone who’s ever played Dwarf Fortress can tell you, modelling each individual citizen properly is an incredibly demanding task; few games have made my system crawl like Dwarf Fortress, which runs in an 80x40 ASCII window. Maxis had to cut corners. Oh did they cut corners.
What Maxis built, then, is not a city simulator the way you or I would think of a city simulator, with relatively intelligent and autonomous citizens going about their normal lives. What they built was a system where every participant is a dumb automoton with no prior history. They have no home and they have no job, only places where they sleep and places where they work or shop that change every day depending on the whims of traffic. Sims always find the closest job available and beeline for it, and if they spend too much time getting to that job they give up and go home. Sims never work and shop; they must be a worker or a shopper, and never the twain shall meet. And when Sims go home, they find the first available house; they have no concept of a permanent residence.
Ideally, at some point someone should have thrown up their hands and said, “this is madness.” Go back to the statistical models, forget the autonomous agent model for now, and work on things people have been asking for ever since SimCity 4’s release—things like mixed-use zoning and better transit and pedestrian options, things that better represent the way cities are planned and built now. SimCity is not a game that is interested in those things, but it also doesn’t seem to be interested in building on SimCity 4 either. These are great intentions, to strike out and build something again from the ground up, but Maxis failed. And now the SimCity franchise will have to die again before we see the next kick at the can.
Instead of fixing core issues like the autonomous agents and the small city sizes, Maxis put out an expansion pack with things no one asked for: futuristic skins for your cities. Shortly after the pack’s announcement, Maxis also confirmed they had stopped working on trying to expand city sizes, as the performance hit was too great for their new engine—yes, the very same engine where concepts of a permanent home or workplace don’t exist. They are, at least, “investigating” the possibility of an offline mode. Presumably the company has rejected the single-line JavaScript fix someone found eight months ago as being too simple.
It is hard to even think of a game that had the potential to disappoint on the level that SimCity has. The fact that Battlefield 4 is the only other game that comes to mind—a game published by EA that has also had stability and network issues—reflects very poorly on EA. We may look back in a few years and think of SimCity as the point where EA killed Maxis or the SimCity franchise. Certainly I’ll have to think long and hard before I even consider buying another SimCity game.
Instead, you should buy Cities in Motion 2. It’s definitely not the same kind of game as SimCity and it has issues of its own, but it’s a transit-building game that has enormous cities, allows you to play offline, and actually feels like it has a heart. If the small team at Colossal Order ever feel up to making a full-fledged city builder, I’ll be the first in line to buy it.
