~~~ I may be heavily biased with a favoritism towards sim city 4, because as I played this I was just thinking of how I did it in Sim City 4 and how things made more sense. Things traveling by roads, that makes no sense. Pipes were cool, added literally another layer of gameplay.
- Some flaws in the beta are that you can't pick from more than 4 types of roads, there may be a train track coming through your city, your city may be next to water, but you can't do anything with them in the beta; I have on idea how they'll be implemented in the actual game, which makes this pretty hard to judge.
+I like how zoning is free, that's a step up from Sim City 4; and I also approve of only zoning next to roads. However you don't feel remorse when you bulldoze houses, as a side effect. That's not accurate of how a city actually works, so Sim City 4 is more accurate in that. Not sure if Sim City is even going for an accurate portrayal of how to build a city, Sim City 4 was much more so, and I think Sim City 2013 just threw that out the window, for new players.
- For new players I think this is gonna be a bad time - icons for maps (which are so important in making a good city) are pretty hard to figure out, since they're freaking tiny icons that I can barely see, and need to spend precious time hovering over each of them to figure out which one is for land value.
= Graphics are neat, but very simplistic, coming from the previous two games Sim CIty 3000 and Sim City 4: Rush Hour, I'm not sure how I feel about this.
- Music is nowhere as good as the previous games. All the music is similar to Godmode music from Sim City 4. No jazz? This isn't even Sim City...
+/- curved roads are cool but they really mess with the space efficiency of your city.
-We only get one region, and it's small. Small enough that I could fill it all up with a grid road system in less than an hour. I'm not sure if that's fun to do more than, say, 3 times. I played Sim City 4 for perhaps hundreds of hours. I think I could feel done with Sim City 2013 after a few hours. There's a distinct lack of incentive, no people QQing at you in your feed, that I could see. Traffic problems were nonissue since I only got an hour, and high density wasn't an issue either because I couldn't build high density avenues in the beta. There was no point investing in mass transit, then, and didn't get to explore anything beyond grade-school education city, which means I don't get to see the land value gains of high tech.
-In the beta it's very vague as to how region-allocation works, like the big question of: are those damn dead space between cities going to be there on release?
-This is going to cost $60. It'll be tough convincing me to shell out 60 bucks for the game in my beta experience. Nothing in the beta made me go "Wooooow" except for the pretty data maps, but will that get old after a few hours? Yes.
? Not sure how I feel about the UI. However, I feel no drive to spend the quality time with the game to learn it. I don't feel that it's necessary to improve the city in such a limited beta.
It's really hard to tell anything in a game where you basically have infinite money no matter what you do and you can't build half the stuff in the game. But so far:
The thing that bothers me most is the lack of efficiency or at least guidlines of where you can or should build roads. You never know how much room you need or dont need and it can totally mess up the zoning. Everything ends up really oddly spaced out.
It doesn't really feel like a sim city game to me. It's so small and simple. I almost feel like it's some sort of console port or something. I don't know how large the cities can get in the real game, but if it isn't at least like 5 times bigger than what we get in the beta it's not worth playing. If cities are always going to stay really small and the concept is you build multiple cities with different specialization in an overall bigger region like in the demo, this game is a massive waste of time.
Graphically I don't like it at all. It's a very cartoony tilt shift world that is then covered in absurdly muddy textures and shadows and mediocre lighting. It looks amazing when it's a clean look with the charts and graphs and diagrams, and it's a shame that it loses that completely in game mode.
Speaking of the charts and graphs it shows you, those are really cool and well done. However, it's hard to tell how useful they are when the beta is simple enough for a 5 year old to play.
All in all this game seems nothing more but extremely mediocre, at least judging by the beta.
Oh and when your city goes into night mode I find myself just anxiously waiting for the sun to come back up so i can actually see what's going on. Hopefully there's an option to turn day/night cycle off in the real game.
On January 27 2013 11:22 Ktk wrote: So I played the beta for an hour today.
~~~ I may be heavily biased with a favoritism towards sim city 4, because as I played this I was just thinking of how I did it in Sim City 4 and how things made more sense. Things traveling by roads, that makes no sense. Pipes were cool, added literally another layer of gameplay.
- Some flaws in the beta are that you can't pick from more than 4 types of roads, there may be a train track coming through your city, your city may be next to water, but you can't do anything with them in the beta; I have on idea how they'll be implemented in the actual game, which makes this pretty hard to judge.
+I like how zoning is free, that's a step up from Sim City 4; and I also approve of only zoning next to roads. However you don't feel remorse when you bulldoze houses, as a side effect. That's not accurate of how a city actually works, so Sim City 4 is more accurate in that. Not sure if Sim City is even going for an accurate portrayal of how to build a city, Sim City 4 was much more so, and I think Sim City 2013 just threw that out the window, for new players.
- For new players I think this is gonna be a bad time - icons for maps (which are so important in making a good city) are pretty hard to figure out, since they're freaking tiny icons that I can barely see, and need to spend precious time hovering over each of them to figure out which one is for land value.
= Graphics are neat, but very simplistic, coming from the previous two games Sim CIty 3000 and Sim City 4: Rush Hour, I'm not sure how I feel about this.
- Music is nowhere as good as the previous games. All the music is similar to Godmode music from Sim City 4. No jazz? This isn't even Sim City...
+/- curved roads are cool but they really mess with the space efficiency of your city.
-We only get one region, and it's small. Small enough that I could fill it all up with a grid road system in less than an hour. I'm not sure if that's fun to do more than, say, 3 times. I played Sim City 4 for perhaps hundreds of hours. I think I could feel done with Sim City 2013 after a few hours. There's a distinct lack of incentive, no people QQing at you in your feed, that I could see. Traffic problems were nonissue since I only got an hour, and high density wasn't an issue either because I couldn't build high density avenues in the beta. There was no point investing in mass transit, then, and didn't get to explore anything beyond grade-school education city, which means I don't get to see the land value gains of high tech.
-In the beta it's very vague as to how region-allocation works, like the big question of: are those damn dead space between cities going to be there on release?
-This is going to cost $60. It'll be tough convincing me to shell out 60 bucks for the game in my beta experience. Nothing in the beta made me go "Wooooow" except for the pretty data maps, but will that get old after a few hours? Yes.
? Not sure how I feel about the UI. However, I feel no drive to spend the quality time with the game to learn it. I don't feel that it's necessary to improve the city in such a limited beta.
I hated pipes so much in SimCity 4, I'm soo happy they're gone. They did add a layer of gameplay, but one that was NOT fun at all in my experience. Especially because you were always punished so hard if there's even a bit of pollution and some guy screws up the pipes every minute.
How is it any different compared to SimCity 4 when you bulldoze an existing zone? I never felt any remorse doing that in SimCity 4 either. Nothing for me changed, that's just a weird perception I feel like.
The music is subjective but there's a really awesome track in the beta. Also I bet there's a lot more music, the beta is like 180mb which is kind of silly.
The previous games used sprites, so It's really hardly comparable and looking at the files it seems to use the same format as SimCity 4 and Spore, so texture mods should be plentiful. (I hope!)
I personally really do like the filters, I especially like the bleached filter.
I like curved roads, sure they are harder to make super effecient but they make your city look more organic and resemble something closer to what you often see in European cities instead of straight lines like in SimCity 4 which got super boring really fast for me (thanks for mods!)
I personally really enjoyed the beta, it's not as complex as SimCity 4 which they did say beforehand and remember it's a maxis game. the sims 2 base game felt empty compared to the Sims 1 with every expansion. Features will be added over time through dlc and expansion if the game does well. I'm not too worried. My biggest annoyance is the always-online but I can live with that. Though it'll suck quite hard if the internet fails.
IDK, I didn't really do any calculations in Sim City 4 seriously, but if you had to bulldoze a residential area which is like 50$ per tile, it kinda sucked when you bulldozed a 3x2 high density region to replace it with another item that also costs you money and doesn't give you an income, so you're sacking all sorts of investment for something else that will somehow otherwise benefit your city. Was I overthinking this?
Also I need to think about whether having no density is a good or bad thing. On one hand it's free to zone all areas, but on the other hand you need to run some errands for any region if you're allowed to have a high density building built. Then again it could be argued that you'd probably do the same regardless; raise land value, get better roads.
Beta: Was the game not compressed or something? Very small, as we all sorta expected I guess.
I suppose it's not a fair comparison between Rush Hour and SimCity 2013, since Sim City 4 was lacking in a few things as well. I found it was also difficult to judge the full enjoyability of the game when we get an hour to make a city which I would normally be over with in a few minutes.
Also I'd like some (probably very convoluted) hotkeys for construction and the sort :3
On January 27 2013 19:43 Ktk wrote: IDK, I didn't really do any calculations in Sim City 4 seriously, but if you had to bulldoze a residential area which is like 50$ per tile, it kinda sucked when you bulldozed a 3x2 high density region to replace it with another item that also costs you money and doesn't give you an income, so you're sacking all sorts of investment for something else that will somehow otherwise benefit your city. Was I overthinking this?
Also I need to think about whether having no density is a good or bad thing. On one hand it's free to zone all areas, but on the other hand you need to run some errands for any region if you're allowed to have a high density building built. Then again it could be argued that you'd probably do the same regardless; raise land value, get better roads.
Beta: Was the game not compressed or something? Very small, as we all sorta expected I guess.
I suppose it's not a fair comparison between Rush Hour and SimCity 2013, since Sim City 4 was lacking in a few things as well. I found it was also difficult to judge the full enjoyability of the game when we get an hour to make a city which I would normally be over with in a few minutes.
Also I'd like some (probably very convoluted) hotkeys for construction and the sort :3
Oh, I thought you actually cared about the sims living there and not how costly it was to bulldoze something lol.
There's a lot of things the new SimCity does better, like zoning feels much better and you don't have those really annoying parts where the roads don't quite align. Not to mention of people complaining they didn't have space for their car and stuff. Hotkeys would be sweet, but there are already some. Just not for building specific things I htink.
I didnt get to play the beta but from what im reading all over the web it seems they screwed it up
For me the main point of playing simcity was to build a huge city with all the top tier buildings that looks nice and has no problems. In this game it seems you are given a small area where you build some stuff and specialize in a few things. That defeats the whole purpose for me. Should be called sim village or sim backyard.
I'm not very impressed. I feel its SimCity light. It feels way to easy and the Mapsize is a joke. And I really dislike the graphics - there is some kind of MotionBlur or something.
Only real gripe is how terribly inefficient anything you do that isnt straight (i.e. curved roads). With the limited space we have, I could see it turning into a problem...
But I do look forward building a megacity together with friends.
On January 28 2013 04:45 Dirkinity wrote: I'm not very impressed. I feel its SimCity light. It feels way to easy and the Mapsize is a joke. And I really dislike the graphics - there is some kind of MotionBlur or something.
THey haven't added the alien invasions yet relax :D
I'm so excited for this game (having logged hundreds of hours of simcity 4 on steam)! I didn't even know that you could apply for a beta key and now it appears to be too late. Does anyone know the next time you can apply for a beta key?
I played today and I really enjoyed it. I think a lot of the complaints in this thread are based on things we can't really make a call on yet, i.e.:
City size - who knows how big the biggest plots of land will be? Road types - you can make a grid if you want with the perfect square function, but the diversity the other types add is nice and we'll see how that impacts a real city later on. Music - yes we need jazz but it's not unreasonable to assume that the full soundtrack is more than what we get in beta. The full game takes up 12 gigs (per install screen), but I certainly didn't download 12 gigs when I got up this morning. Online experience - goes w/out saying
everyone say they are so small maps, its sure there wont be bigger maps in realise ? i cant beelive but hey i think they wanna make money with ALOT!!! of DLC's (even having german frensh etc houses only with collectors edition and such shit will be with DLC's for sure)
as for long i still play citiesXL 2012 which is pretty cool and i will try sim city 5, if its crap, then there is still citiesXL ^^
EPT
