18 ms·

SimCity launched a decade ago, and it was so disastrous it killed the series

277 points by acdanger 4y ago

seszett 4y ago
SimCity 2013 is missing in the title, otherwise it makes little sense.
- bearmode 4y ago
  The name of the game was SimCity.
  - jcranmer 4y ago
    Strictly speaking, it's true, but when multiple games with the same name are released, it's convention to use the year for the newer one. (It's also generally convention to not use the year for the original one when the newer one is a remake of the older). So SimCity (2013) would be the most expected way to refer to the game.
    - tarotuser 4y ago
      I'm imagining the "Well akshually" guy as the person you're responding to. Sure the name was "SimCity". But this is about the 2013 game, not the 1990s game. Clarity is preferred over 'Wellakshually Correctness'.
      - bearmode 4y ago
        Normal people can infer context. Nobody thinks the original game came out in 2013. Everyone knows it was not a disaster.
        fwlr 4y ago
        I actually clicked on it thinking it meant the original SimCity which I adored, not realizing that was many decades ago, and expecting it to be some interesting argument that SimCity was somehow so good that it proactively ruined every city sim game that would come after it.
        tarotuser 4y ago
        So it's "Wellakshually" and now the rest of us are 'not normal'? How many other hot takes do you have to share?
  - chitowneats 4y ago
    Yes, and the original SimCity was a wild success.
    - bearmode 4y ago
      Yes. So it's easy to tell which the title is referring to.
      - jtbayly 4y ago
        No, actually, it’s not. Because I have no idea there even was a 2013 version. The title makes absolutely no sense to me. It’s flat out wrong. SimCity obviously wasn’t released a decade ago.
        joemi 4y ago
        This is my feeling too. The title as it stands without a date clarifying that it was the SimCity from 2013 makes no sense. If I knew there was a 2013 version, it would probably make sense, but before clicking into the article and reading a little, I had no idea. And the only reason I clicked and read was because I thought "surely there's a mistake in this title".
  - JKCalhoun 4y ago
    So too was the 1989 (and original) version though.
    - bearmode 4y ago
      And which one launched a decade ago? How about we combine the three bits of info and see what we think we have... name = "SimCity", launch = 2013, reception = disasterous. Only one of those matches the '89 game, so it's clear which one is being referred to.
      - JKCalhoun 4y ago
        With the frequency with which older articles are posted to HN, it's easy to imagine this was an older article (re)posted. I'm old enough that I remember the original and SimCity "2000" and had no idea there ever was a 2013 version.
- Rebelgecko 4y ago
  Maybe "Simcity (2013)" to be extra clear. After all, SimCity 2000 came out in like 1994. OTOH the ambiguous naming was intentional by EA. They faced the consequences for all the other bad decisions made around the game, so any confusion about the rebooted name is on them IMO. But I'm more of a Cities:Skyline fan anyways-I'm glad the Maxis devs aren't too sour grapes about the competitor.
- dfxm12 4y ago
  FWIW, the game is called simply SimCity, and the HN title is the same as the title on the article, so, no, not really. HN also tends to put dates on articles that aren't from the current year. If you're totally unfamiliar with the series, it doesn't matter. If you're a little familiar with the series (like me), then you know that the original was released more than a decade ago and pretty much defined the genre, so you know this isn't talking about the original game titled SimCity. If you're familiar with the series, then you know exactly what's being talked about.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - hanoz 4y ago
    Yes really, the title in the article makes little sense in isolation, as even its own subtitle demonstrates.
    - dfxm12 4y ago
      Before reading the 2nd sentence of the article, you seem to have been mixed up about if this article is about the SimCity that came out in 2013 or the one that came out in 1989. I find it hard to believe that you're aware of the original SimCity game and think that this could be an article from 1999 that could be about it being a disaster for the series (and I'm glad you read further to learn more about the series!). But, even in that case, in isolation, you know that 2013 was a decade ago (and not 1989).
      - joemi 4y ago
        > I find it hard to believe that you're aware of the original SimCity game and think that this could be an article from 1999 that could be about it being a disaster for the series This almost exactly describes what I thought before I started reading the article. (And the whole reason I started reading was because of this confusion.) Except I didn't think "1999" because I don't know what year the original SimCity came out, I just know that it was more than a decade ago.
- zymhan 4y ago
  Anyone familiar with the first SimCity would be well aware that it both launched decades ago, and was not a disaster.
  - slowhand09 4y ago
    +1 here. I purchased the original SimCity and soon after the original SimEarth. Loads of fun with both.
  - joemi 4y ago
    That's what I _thought_ but the article title had me doubting it, so I clicked it and only then realized that there was another game in the series with the same name and it came out in 2013. Kind of felt like I was tricked by a clickbait title.
- pdntspa 4y ago
  Gotta love that stupid marketing trend of overwriting history with product names
rcstank 4y ago
The title makes it sound like the SimCity franchise, which started in what, 1989?
smlacy 4y ago
What a bizarre title. Obviously, SimCity has been around for a lot longer than a decade. The original Maxis SimCity launched in 1989.
- yuliyp 4y ago
  I think that's part of the confusion. The title of the game released in 2013 was also "SimCity", not "Simcity 5" or "SimCity 2013"
  - slackdog 4y ago
    Usually when game or movie publishers do this kind of crap, everybody slaps the year onto the title anyway. "Prey (2017)", "Dune (2021)", etc.
ocimbote 4y ago
I'm all in to blame corporate any time, but the narrative here is a bit too much on a "good people, bad corp" slope, even for me.
- toyg 4y ago
  The alternative would have been "good developers, bad project managers", which would have been too brutal. Someone had to figure out the infra requirements, and it could only be someone with knowledge of the volume of preorders. That's not going to be developers, but rather someone in the corporate hierarchy. I think the article is extremely charitable. They could have named every exec who made the call on the key features that brought about disaster (forcefully turning a solo game into a multiplayer one, underestimating requirements, etc etc) and instead they just said "EA", effectively absolving everyone but "the man".
brookst 4y ago
> EA was looking to justify the time and money it had already spent on Quigley and Willmot's experiment If true (the whole article is unsourced), that is a classic failure of undergrad business 101.
tomca32 4y ago
Yeah this was bad. The main problem was that the actual simulation was being done on the servers, rather than on the client…for a single player game. I’m sure the development team knew everybody was going to hate that so it couldn’t have been a surprise.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- toyg 4y ago
  > for a single player game But that's the problem: it was really a multiplayer game, sold to a crowd who wanted a predominantly single-player experience. So users were effectively angry from day 1 simply because they were being sold something they didn't want; the fact that this also precluded them from salvaging a bit of entertainment from it (since you'd be booted out even if you had little or no intention to ever interact with other players), was a further slap in the face.
- josefx 4y ago
  > The main problem was that the actual simulation was being done on the servers While that was the marketing line "simulation so complex it can't run on your PC", I remember there being an offline crack shortly after release and later one of the official patches even enabled it officially.
  - delusional 4y ago
    Yeah, the part that were simulated online was the trade between the cities, a task so trivial it demanded nothing of the servers. The server side simulation was a joke. It was mostly an excuse for why the game performed poorly and the cities were so small.
    - antifa 4y ago
      Yeah there was basically no evidence that the game did anything more intense than the original SimCity (1989) but they loved claiming otherwise.
zzixp 4y ago
I would love for Cities Skylines to implement some kind of multiplayer or online collaborative option.
petepete 4y ago
I'd been looking forward to SC2013 for years and it was beyond disappointing. I know I'm probably not a typical gamer in EA's eyes, but SC4 was such a solid release. It just needed playable regions (build multiple cities, join them together) and some more graphical polish. I'd buy that game in an instant.
- ascagnel_ 4y ago
  SC4 (which I still fire up on occasion) has playable regions; in fact, that was the top-line new feature for that installment. Graphical polish would have been nice, but what the game really needs today is an engine upgrade -- it arrived just before the broad adoption of x64 and multi-core consumer CPUs, so it can't take full advantage of modern systems.
  - petepete 4y ago
    Yeah I meant a continuous playable region, not lots of separate cities next to each other (ie huge cities please)
bromuro 4y ago
I play SimCities since v1 and I awaited long this release. It was indeed beautifully designed and the gameplay was very fun and addictive. Finally EA pushed the project too far and it imploded. Too bad, because Maxis didn’t reserve it. I play sometimes Cities Skyline but - to me - CS misses the vibe of SimCity.
_fat_santa 4y ago
I think if SimCity wasn't such a complete disaster, City Skylines wouldn't have taken off how it did. The big misstep I think they made is hinging the gameplay around multiplayer. While SimCity thought that collaboration would be done through "neighborhoods" and "resource sharing", City Skylines took the opposite approach and introduced collaboration through Steam Workshop. The developers of SimCity should have realized that people don't play sim building games to play with others, it's a very much a solo game. City Skylines navigated this beutifully by letting players still play the game alone but also letting them collaborate through assets rather than through gameplay.
- delusional 4y ago
  I personally believe that the SImCity version of multiplayer could have been impressively successful had it not supplanted everything else in the game. I like the idea of building cities that somehow interact with the cities my friends build, or whatever everyone else is doing. I like the idea of a game that asynchronously "breaks the meta". It just has to be a good SimCity game first and then have that stuff layered on top. SimCity 2013 was never a good SimCity game to begin with.
  - JKCalhoun 4y ago
    Definitely could be cool to have an intermodal aspect. Trains/trucks coming and going with excess resources from your and other's cities. Large warehouse zones on the city periphery... Any "open" SimCity-like game?
    - SteveNuts 4y ago
      OpenTTD fits the bill. But for me, Sim City/Cities Skylines isn’t about resource generation as much as it is about just… building and expanding a thriving city. I like the way CS approached this and made it a thing you can do to earn extra money, but it’s not strictly necessary (your industrial areas will auto-import everything they need).
      - 4y ago
YellowTech 4y ago
Upon launch, I was of course disappointed with the state of the server and the online only nature of it. But the larger problem for why this game was a failure was the simple problem of way to little space to build a city. The whole concept of a few 1km x 1km city patches in a shared world to build in was flawed from the start. I want to build gigantic cities with elaborate public infrastructure and rivers full of sewage. Cities: Skylines simply was a much better fit for what makes the city building genre appealing. I find it a bit shortsighted to center the blame for a boring game on its launch date debacle. Many other games with similar problems at launch became hits.
jeffwask 4y ago
Another victim of the EA acquisition graveyard.
vadansky 4y ago
Speaking on Sim City, is there a chance anyone has a collection of Japanese Sim City 4 bat files? I saved a bunch of bookmarks but link rot has destroyed most of them, hoping someone collected them all.
CoolGuySteve 4y ago
> "Every time they would unblock one pinch point, then they would just discover the next one," says Librande. "You were unblocking the dam and then the flood goes and hits the next dam. Then everybody scrambles, tears that one apart, ok, but it keeps going". Apple hit this problem a lot too in the early days of the iTunes and App stores. Marketing wants a huge midnight release with all the hype but the scale just isn't there. The only way to go imo for this sort of thing is a staggered release, an invite system, or an open beta. And it also sucks that stupid management and marketing decisions killed such an important franchise in gaming history.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
antifa 4y ago
> When SimCity launched on March 6, it required players to maintain an active online connection to the game's servers. If that connection dropped, they'd be booted from the game. SimCity, at it's core, is an offline single player game. EA really fucked this one up. Also EA already had the reputation of ruining every franchise they bought. The series lives on through Theotown and City Skylines.
- slackdog 4y ago
  Some single player games in the same broad genre as Sim City have successfully been adapted to multiplayer, so the premise of doing so wasn't poorly conceived. Transport Tycoon to OpenTTD in particular. The problem in this case was they botched the execution (which was no surprise given EA's abysmal reputation, as you mention.)
  - Jensson 4y ago
    OpenTTD supports singleplayer, being forced into multiplayer was the problem.
    - slackdog 4y ago
      My impression was that the 2013 SimCity was effectively single player if you didn't connect the game to any of your friends, but that it had always-online DRM which they tried to excuse as something other than DRM.
      - JohnFen 4y ago
        You could certainly play it single-player, but it wasn't good as a single-player game. It sacrificed far too much. It was meant to be a multiplayer game, and it showed.
        speeder 4y ago
        I remember seeing a review of a guy playing online, upset that EA wouldn't boot a group of trolls that built cities all around his city, and made their cities to be extreme pollution generators, and then they never played again. Seemly this happened to multiple people, trolls were all too happy to ruin serious players cities by spamming pollution near them.
5350-uiop-1130 4y ago
this felt like the apex of the post facebook/zynga monetise everything always online era ea have always ridden trends mercilessly. and ms with its bungled launch of always online xbox. the hubris of those executives is a staggering in hindsight.
- hudsonjr 4y ago
  I never thought about it, but that is so true. It also seemed like it was roughly the peak of bad DRM as well as trying to curtail resale of console games.
mablopoule 4y ago
I played SimCity 2013 a few months after launch, and I quite liked it, especially the gorgeous visuals. I've read TFA, and honestly they also failed to mention maybe the worse issue of SimCity 2013: how limited it was compared to the previous instalments. The playable area was tiny, so you quickly felt constrained by the border of your playable area. The fact that you could build multiple cities in the same region alleviated it a bit, but it really felt limiting compared to it's predecessors. Another point, which I feel is a good representation of an 'EA'-fied game: I was a bit miffed to discover that you couldn't create a subway system, you were limited to roads (I don't even remember if you could create a bus system). A few months in, I see that there was a 'Subway' content pack, which got my hopes up... until I realized it was to add 'Subway' sandwich shop in your city. Same, they had a cross-promotion with Nissan, so your Sims would feel happy when they recharged their electric car, and the charging station has the effect of a park in your neighborhood. Add to that the server issues, the fact that they said it was because so much computation was offloaded to their servers (which was quickly disproved, and felt bogus to being with), and the whole affair had a vibe of "Don't piss on my shoes and tell me it's raining". It was particularly sad, because it really still is an enjoyable game. EDIT: After a bit of fact -checking, I realize that I've mis-remembered the "Subway" DLC story. It was instead the "Metro" content pack (metro is french for subway), which was for a newspaper distributed for free near French subway entrances. There is also a Subway sandwich mod, but for SC4 only.
- weard_beard 4y ago
  City skylines has more than filled this gap imho. Great community. You should check it out if you haven’t yet.
  - mablopoule 4y ago
    It's on my bucket list since, but I was afraid of falling down the rabbit hole, same as Anno, Civilisation and other cool games. I'm so glad City Skyline had such a success, because I feel that other Paradox Interactive games wouldn't have existed otherwise. As an avid player of Stellaris, and as someone eyeing the Crusader Kings series or Europa Universalis, I'm feel that Paradox games have DLCs done right. They are clearly on the expensive side, but they are contentfull, and feel less shameless than EA counterpart (especially with the Sims who has the same DLCs over and over again). On a side note, there is also Caesar III (& Pharaoh) on Gog, and it's still a gem.
weatherlight 4y ago
But it's death allowed for "Cities: Skylines" to come into existence and the world is better for it. https://www.paradoxinteractive.com/games/cities-skylines/about https://www.paradoxinteractive.com/games/cities-skylines/abo...
- freitzkriesler2 4y ago
  CS is a poor replacement for the otherwise incredible game that is sim city 4. The issue being that the traffic and population simulation engine in CS isnt very good. There are still modders and a very active community for SC4 for that reason alone. Reminds me, I need to install some city again
  - etempleton 4y ago
    I find that CS does a good job with road construction and design and I think the traffic simulation is largely on par with Sim City 4. Other parts of the simulation are weaker and the game really doesn't have much challenge as a city management game. It is a better sandbox though.
    - ekidd 4y ago
      I might go so far as to say C:S is a traffic and transportation simulator. The city building parts are all there, and they're reasonably fun. But the ultimate limiting factor with my cities was transportation. No matter how much I worked on mass transit, I couldn't get more than 80-90% of my citizens to use it, and the remaining cars eventually choked even fancy road systems into tailbacks and gridlock. To be fair, this is a problem with real cities, too.
      - distances 4y ago
        My solution was to remove all roads to outside world. Only railway links allowed, and for those a strict separation of passenger and cargo tracks. Not very realistic, but it's an utopia roughly matching what I would prefer so works well for my cities.
jhoelzel 4y ago
Sim city is a phone game. I want to build cool cities full stop. I think what was more the problem is that a LOT of studios realized that a sim city clone works better on mobile hardware, because that's where the target audience is at. Since then they did realize it and I was playing it with my fiance for hours and hours on end. With the multiplayer with multiple cities. Graphics and disasters where not so much the problem in 2013 but they more or less screwed the game by liming it so miuch
- ascagnel_ 4y ago
  Check out Pocket City, it's the best realization of a SimCity title (especially SC2000) I've seen on mobile devices. https://pocketcitygame.com https://pocketcitygame.com
  - 88840-8855 4y ago
    I can recommend TheoTown, available for all major platforms, even on Android and iOS, completely for free. It has a plug-in system, tons of decorative objects. Controls are good, too. Plus, it has some endgame content that makes it quite fun. https://hi.theotown.com/ https://hi.theotown.com/
    - sundarurfriend 4y ago
      > On Android and iOS we use the freemium model while you can get the full game for a fixed price on Steam. That's not exactly free. (Not saying it should be free, but just don't claim it is when it isn't.)
      - mcv 4y ago
        If there's a limited free mode and for a single fixed price you can unlock the full game, that would be the perfect price model for me. The description doesn't make it clear whether that's indeed the case and what that price would be, though.
        4y ago
kuon 4y ago
I moved to city skylines, which I like, but I miss something from SimCity. First CS forces roads everywhere, this is the biggest con to me, I would love to experiment with biking only neighborhood with mass transit. The other problem is that it's too easy. I love the constraint of having no money and struggling with public opinion. Like "You want to build a train line here? You will have major unhappiness from it". Skylines is good in sandbox mode, but misses a lot in "rogue like" mode. I would also like more terrain diversity.
bromuk 4y ago
Such a shame, I was very excited for this game and though hated it I did enjoy the graphic style, it looked great. (What a palava with the "online" simulation that was found out to be faked) Cities Skylines really put a nail in the coffin of SimCity for me, the huge playable area, no faux online requirement, realistic cim routines and the amazing mod support (I've only used the steam workshop) Now Colossal Order just need to make a sequel with more in depth mechanics akin to some of the mod tools made available (traffic management, I'm looking at you), also I don't know much about the Unity Engine but making the sequel more efficient on multicore CPU's is a must.
kasajian 4y ago
When I saw this title, I had to ask.. a decade ago? I swear I saw SimCity 30 years ago.
- bmitc 4y ago
  There are several versions: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimCity https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimCity
agentultra 4y ago
I remember following every update to this game prior to launch. I hated that it required an Origins account and all that but I signed up regardless just to play this game. And I recall having a good time with this game... for a while. Unfortunately EA's lack of support for the game was definitely felt by us consumers. It started off well enough but instead of becoming a better game they turned it into a brand-tie-in DLC-fest. It's hard working at an organization on such a long, ambitious project that the leadership wasn't prepared to support and didn't really believe in to begin with. As a developer I've been on such projects and I recall being invested in the work itself, the project, and our users: but getting management on-board to give it the funding and direction it needed was always a struggle.
jdlyga 4y ago
It's the classic small, passionate development team gets acquired by large company, and becomes highly bureaucratic and profit driven instead.
mysterydip 4y ago
> We had already begged and pleaded to have more time, and at some point, as a public company, they have certain obligations to their shareholders. One of them was that SimCity would be shipping that quarter. I get that games have to release at some point or else some devs will be perfecting forever. But I can't count the amount of times a game was a flop at launch (and never recovered) because they needed to hit an arbitrary date and it wasn't fully baked. Wouldn't the best interests of the shareholders be having a financially successful game?
- jcranmer 4y ago
  If the release date keeps getting pushed back, then that suggests that the problem isn't that the game needs more time to get fully baked, but rather there's some more fundamental issues in project management or project development that's hampering it. Continuing to push the release date back at that point is unlikely to improve matters, and pushing the result out as-is is actually likely to maximize revenue (the reviews won't get better, and you don't have to maintain marketing buzz for as long) while minimizing the losses from extra developer time.
racl101 4y ago
Sim City 4 needs a spiritual successor.
- dwringer 4y ago
  I guess people might argue this all day but I think Cities: Skylines is mostly that, with the rather large caveat that you can't start separate games on the same large map at the same time. You can still get mods (easily, from the steam workshop) which open up the entire terrain, and then use one of several different approaches to build multiple towns on the same map. I'm sure I'm forgetting other stuff that's missing, but they both scratch the same itch for me.
ianhawes 4y ago
I recall playing on launch day and being shocked to discover that, aside from the internet connectivity requirement, the entire UI was written in HTML using WebKit [0]. [0] https://twitter.com/MaxisScott/status/310835756107177984 https://twitter.com/MaxisScott/status/310835756107177984
- doublerabbit 4y ago
  And that the original SimCity were written in TCL and TK https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/SimCity https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/SimCity
  - fredoralive 4y ago
    Well, for its Unix version anyway, which was a port a few years after the early releases.
spiffytech 4y ago
Related: "When SimCity got serious: the story of Maxis Business Simulations and SimRefinery" https://obscuritory.com/sim/when-simcity-got-serious/ https://obscuritory.com/sim/when-simcity-got-serious/
JohnFen 4y ago
That release certainly marked the end of the SimCity line for me. Making it require the use of their servers when you only wanted to play it single-player was intolerable, but it was an inferior single-player game (compared to its predecessors) anyway. I just keep playing the older versions instead.
cush 4y ago
This site is so full of ads it crashes iOS Safari...
- HighChaparral 4y ago
  I gave up after reloading it for the third time to see if the next chunk of invisible text would suddenly appear. (iPhone/iOS, Safari, Content Blockers off)
- aendruk 4y ago
  I noped out when the auto playing video started following me down the page.
proactivesvcs 4y ago
One of the final statements is rather telling of modern corporate culture: "We had already begged and pleaded to have more time, and at some point, as a public company, they have certain obligations to their shareholders. One of them was that SimCity would be shipping that quarter." Torpedoed by one bad business decision after another, despite being a promising game.
stuaxo 4y ago
"EA closed the principal Maxis studio in March 2015," does EA do anything but close game studios ?
- JohnFen 4y ago
  It also abuses any goodwill and fond feelings people may have for a game studio first, to make sure they squeeze it for every penny possible.
orwin 4y ago
They contacted video games influencers/youtubers (in 2013, always ahead of their time in marketing, that's the only thing EA is good at), invited them to play the game at their HQ. At least one of them confessed he was threatened to not publish the video after sending them the script and refused to change major parts. He wasn't paid the thousand dollars either (at the time influencers were cheaper :))
mcv 4y ago
Nowadays SimCity seems wholly replaced by City Skylines. I had to look up when that was released, but it turns out the release of City Skylines was directly caused by the failure of SimCity: From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cities:_Skylines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cities:_Skylines : > "While the developers felt they had the technical expertise to expand to a full city simulation game, their publisher Paradox held off on the idea, fearing the market dominance of SimCity. After the critical failure of the 2013 SimCity game, however, Paradox greenlit the title."
tripdout 4y ago
I still play SimCity 2013 today, and despite its flaws, I much prefer it over Cities Skylines. SimCity feels alive, with a great soundtrack, good looking visuals even today, and I love the futuristic expansion pack. Skylines feels less like a game I want to play in my free time and more like a city planner tool. The graphics style also somehow feels much colder and more outdated in comparison. I honestly think SimCity 6 with bigger cities and updated graphics would be a massive hit without changing much else - the multiplayer aspect of sharing resources, contributing to pollution, workers and students, etc is really unique and should be kept.
- brnt 4y ago
  Is there any way to get it on Steam Deck? There's no record for it on Protondb.
- bombcar 4y ago
  SimCity 2013 was fine, and the real killer was just how small it was. Everyone coming from Simcity 4 was like "what the @#%@ is this" and went back. Even Skylines is too small unless you get the mods that let you bust out all the adjacent land areas.
FfejL 4y ago
"SimCity should step outside the single-player bubble and embrace the fad of the moment—multiplayer" Found the problem!
Lutzb 4y ago
All I want is Sim City 2000 for mobile. I know it will not happen. Without microtransactions there is no way it will ever get green lighted by EA.
- roytam87 4y ago
  It does. There was SimCity 2000 for PocketPC by ZioSoft.
everyone 4y ago
KSP2 seems like it might be like that.. It seems quite star-citizeny with final AAA graphics and audio, but the core mechanics and UX rather fucked. I reckon it could take them years to fix it if they do. Fixing the core core stuff in a game with final assets already done is like repairing an engine thats running. There was so much dodgy slimy stuff going on with the publisher also, https://wccftech.com/kerbal-space-program-2-dev-fired-employees-poached-take-two/ https://wccftech.com/kerbal-space-program-2-dev-fired-employ... the fact that they kept development closed for years, then release garbage into early access and charge €50.. I think they might have no intention of fixing it and are just making a cash grab now while there is still so much goodwill floating around from KSP1. Imo there is an opportunity here for a smart small indie team to scoop them and make the real successor to KSP faster than the KSP2 team can fix their crap.
- slackdog 4y ago
  I'm hoping that KSP1 gets an open source engine re-implementation, ideally with optional physics fixes. Performance and physics jank were the two problems with KSP1 and it sounds like KSP2 didn't address those at all. I mean, adding trees to a rocket game? Who asked for that? All they really seem to have done is make the game require a more expensive GPU for no good reason.
  - everyone 4y ago
    I was thinking it would be cool to make the real KSP2 using the rigs of rods engine (same one used in beamNG drive more or less) rather then awkwardly simulating intra-vehicle forces by having the vehicle made of an arbitary amount of seperate rigidbodes, instead make it from one mesh but with soft body phsyics. Note: Juno new origins is sort of a KSP sucessor. Its rock solid, but the ships are 100% rigid which definitely affects gameplay and decreases the challenge and fun perhaps.
ch4s3 4y ago
Good news, Cities Skylines 2 was just announced today.
mike503 4y ago
It had so much promise. It was rocky to start for sure. The playable area was so annoyingly small and I felt like I wind up in the same pattern every time. I did play it again a few months ago. It has so much promise, still, as a base for the next level. Ultimately it feels like you have to graduate to using megatowers as the cities pretty much could only advance if you included them... and they were limited by count and eventually those would become stagnant. If they could make the maps larger and improve things like homeless/park issues (I've placed parks like crazy, increase the property values and density, etc) but always wind up having to bulldoze and deal with homeless people which seems like it shouldn't happen based on my understanding. Go the no man's sky route and give us an infinite world to build on.
dragonwriter 4y ago
One thing I think the article leaves out, that is critical, is the damage done to the franchise image by SimCity Societies (2007), SimCity 2013 was the second bad miss in a row for the franchise (and a big part of Societies problems—on top of radical and not well recieved changes to the basic concept—were performance/reliability problems, which IIRC, included a persistent connection requirement even though it was single player.)
nottorp 4y ago
Tbh this would be a good time for a remembrance of the companies/franchises ruined by EA and Ubisoft. Maxis / SimCity BioWare / need i say what? Bullfrog / Populous, Dungeon Keeper -- Blue Byte / Settlers, Battle Isle New World Computing / Might and Magic and Heroes of... And that's just what I remember off the top of my head.
- sniglom 4y ago
  Black Box / Skate series, a number of NFS Games. DICE / Battlefield series Westwood / Command & Conquer series
hapless 4y ago
The interview snippets make it clear that SimCity 2013 was hopelessly compromised from minute one If nothing else, consider the mandates from EA: 1. Make it "unpirateable" even if it compromises gameplay 2. Make it depend on EA's online service, b/c we need to sell that even more than we need the game to succeed 3. Make sure it can handle a steady trickle of "expansions" like The Sims If you are going to implement those mandates, you are gonna end up with something bad. Even if SimCity 2013 had not been otherwise brain-damaged or screwed up, just EA's goals for the product were damning. (Of course, it is not JUST the mandates -- the game was screwed up in many other ways as well. But the mandates alone would have been bad.)
- prox 4y ago
  Looks like they first asked “how can we suck the money out of customers?” instead of asking how to make a milestone game. They repeated that a few more times as I recall. Not sure how they do it now.
vmilner 4y ago
In these days of 100GB games I’m still in awe of how much fun I had from a game stored in 128KB (SimCity on the ZX Spectrum in 1990). And it was perfectly playable in 48KB.
cwkoss 4y ago
Maxis had a really cool integration ecosystem for a period. I remember flying my sim copter in my sim city. Driving cars around Streets of Sim City - in my city. SimCity was the worldbuilder and they let you play in that world in a variety of ways. I must have spent hundreds of hours playing these as a child: these were basically my Minecraft. What happened to their vision? Was the EA acquisition the beginning of the end, or did the magic start disappearing earlier?
denton-scratch 4y ago
Title should say "SimCity 2013".
Traubenfuchs 4y ago
The lead designer was heartbroken? He should have been ashamed of his dastardly creation. I was heartbroken when I saw how they massacred and desecrated the Sim City franchise. It was one of the early online-only cloud microtransaction trash games, like Diablo 3.
bromuk 4y ago
Funny how Cities: Skylines 2 got announced after I’d commented on this earlier
spagoop 4y ago
I grew up playing Sim City 2k and 3k (never got around to the latest one, but wasn't really interested after reading reviews). I'd like to see the entire city builder genre challenged by changing the perspective from city planner/god-mayor, to those whom they serve. Imagine, instead of a birds eye view, you could only build from the perspective of a pedestrian. Maybe in certain instances you'd have to see a wider swath of land for planning purposes (transit as an example), but it would be interesting to see how the forms of cities created by users change from this new perspective.
- ThunderSizzle 4y ago
  I think I'd prefer something more similar to a Factorio setting (e.g. still top-down, but the camera actions/limited to your area as the "pedestrian"). However, I'd also like the insertion of balance against the "god" part too - like eminent domain costing goodwill or stability points. Too unstable or not enough goodwill, and the citizens start acting antagonist against the player on some level (e.g. higher crime/fraud, causing less taxes, protests, people leaving, etc) Almost like city-state on some level, but less about the political compass and more about city government interacting with the local population.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    The problem with these city simulators is that they're relatively simplistic, and it's easy to work out a "formula" that lets you get basically infinite money and do whatever you want (the "city painter" mode). Which can be terribly fun, but it's not so much a game as more of an open-world building toy.
    - ThunderSizzle 4y ago
      This is the problem with most strategy games too, like EU4. It's all about min-maxing against the stats. As frustrating as it can be sometimes, I prefer playing with fuzzier logic based on randomness. There's a great breakdown on EU3 vs EU4 that highlights this. In CS, it'd be like if the economy went up and down randomly, affecting taxes or expenses, or if citizens randomly changed behavior patterns (e.g. started driving more when previously walked or vice versa). I've been enjoying Workers and Resources because of some of this fuzziness is introduced by construction taking time and resources.
shp0ngle 4y ago
Wait it’s 10 years already? Time really does fly faster when you’re older.
wdb 4y ago
Can still remember I bought a book about SimCity 2000. I think it explained how you could rebuild real-life cities in SimCity. Pretty cool
Felminor 4y ago
Loved the visual style. Not sure why they just didn't build a second one
alkonaut 4y ago
How can a company be as bad as EA at managing computer game production? It’s absolutely mind blowing. You think they’d have learned by now, but this story has been repeated for the decade since Sim City. As an EA shareholder I’d be absolutely fuming if some EA exec believed that shipping an unfinished game on an arbitrary deadline would be more important than shipping a good game.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  It's even more mind-blowing when you remember what EA was at the start. It was a breakaway company that showcased and honored game developers as artists and game development as art, and for a while produced some of the best games on the market. Then it turned into everything it was opposed to at the start.
Razengan 4y ago
Can't we still play older SimCity versions?
amrb 4y ago
And while EA plummeted the franchise city skylines is getting a sequal https://kotaku.com/cities-skylines-2-paradox-lamplighters-xcom-ck3-pc-new-1850194992 https://kotaku.com/cities-skylines-2-paradox-lamplighters-xc...

277 points by acdanger 4y ago

seszett 4y ago

SimCity 2013 is missing in the title, otherwise it makes little sense.

bearmode 4y ago
The name of the game was SimCity.
- jcranmer 4y ago
  Strictly speaking, it's true, but when multiple games with the same name are released, it's convention to use the year for the newer one. (It's also generally convention to not use the year for the original one when the newer one is a remake of the older). So SimCity (2013) would be the most expected way to refer to the game.
  - tarotuser 4y ago
    I'm imagining the "Well akshually" guy as the person you're responding to. Sure the name was "SimCity". But this is about the 2013 game, not the 1990s game. Clarity is preferred over 'Wellakshually Correctness'.
    - bearmode 4y ago
      Normal people can infer context. Nobody thinks the original game came out in 2013. Everyone knows it was not a disaster.
      - fwlr 4y ago
        I actually clicked on it thinking it meant the original SimCity which I adored, not realizing that was many decades ago, and expecting it to be some interesting argument that SimCity was somehow so good that it proactively ruined every city sim game that would come after it.
      - tarotuser 4y ago
        So it's "Wellakshually" and now the rest of us are 'not normal'? How many other hot takes do you have to share?
- chitowneats 4y ago
  Yes, and the original SimCity was a wild success.
  - bearmode 4y ago
    Yes. So it's easy to tell which the title is referring to.
    - jtbayly 4y ago
      No, actually, it’s not. Because I have no idea there even was a 2013 version. The title makes absolutely no sense to me. It’s flat out wrong. SimCity obviously wasn’t released a decade ago.
      - joemi 4y ago
        This is my feeling too. The title as it stands without a date clarifying that it was the SimCity from 2013 makes no sense. If I knew there was a 2013 version, it would probably make sense, but before clicking into the article and reading a little, I had no idea. And the only reason I clicked and read was because I thought "surely there's a mistake in this title".
- JKCalhoun 4y ago
  So too was the 1989 (and original) version though.
  - bearmode 4y ago
    And which one launched a decade ago? How about we combine the three bits of info and see what we think we have... name = "SimCity", launch = 2013, reception = disasterous. Only one of those matches the '89 game, so it's clear which one is being referred to.
    - JKCalhoun 4y ago
      With the frequency with which older articles are posted to HN, it's easy to imagine this was an older article (re)posted. I'm old enough that I remember the original and SimCity "2000" and had no idea there ever was a 2013 version.
Rebelgecko 4y ago
Maybe "Simcity (2013)" to be extra clear. After all, SimCity 2000 came out in like 1994. OTOH the ambiguous naming was intentional by EA. They faced the consequences for all the other bad decisions made around the game, so any confusion about the rebooted name is on them IMO. But I'm more of a Cities:Skyline fan anyways-I'm glad the Maxis devs aren't too sour grapes about the competitor.
dfxm12 4y ago
FWIW, the game is called simply SimCity, and the HN title is the same as the title on the article, so, no, not really. HN also tends to put dates on articles that aren't from the current year. If you're totally unfamiliar with the series, it doesn't matter. If you're a little familiar with the series (like me), then you know that the original was released more than a decade ago and pretty much defined the genre, so you know this isn't talking about the original game titled SimCity. If you're familiar with the series, then you know exactly what's being talked about.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- hanoz 4y ago
  Yes really, the title in the article makes little sense in isolation, as even its own subtitle demonstrates.
  - dfxm12 4y ago
    Before reading the 2nd sentence of the article, you seem to have been mixed up about if this article is about the SimCity that came out in 2013 or the one that came out in 1989. I find it hard to believe that you're aware of the original SimCity game and think that this could be an article from 1999 that could be about it being a disaster for the series (and I'm glad you read further to learn more about the series!). But, even in that case, in isolation, you know that 2013 was a decade ago (and not 1989).
    - joemi 4y ago
      > I find it hard to believe that you're aware of the original SimCity game and think that this could be an article from 1999 that could be about it being a disaster for the series This almost exactly describes what I thought before I started reading the article. (And the whole reason I started reading was because of this confusion.) Except I didn't think "1999" because I don't know what year the original SimCity came out, I just know that it was more than a decade ago.
zymhan 4y ago
Anyone familiar with the first SimCity would be well aware that it both launched decades ago, and was not a disaster.
- slowhand09 4y ago
  +1 here. I purchased the original SimCity and soon after the original SimEarth. Loads of fun with both.
- joemi 4y ago
  That's what I _thought_ but the article title had me doubting it, so I clicked it and only then realized that there was another game in the series with the same name and it came out in 2013. Kind of felt like I was tricked by a clickbait title.
pdntspa 4y ago
Gotta love that stupid marketing trend of overwriting history with product names

rcstank 4y ago

The title makes it sound like the SimCity franchise, which started in what, 1989?

smlacy 4y ago

What a bizarre title. Obviously, SimCity has been around for a lot longer than a decade. The original Maxis SimCity launched in 1989.

yuliyp 4y ago
I think that's part of the confusion. The title of the game released in 2013 was also "SimCity", not "Simcity 5" or "SimCity 2013"
- slackdog 4y ago
  Usually when game or movie publishers do this kind of crap, everybody slaps the year onto the title anyway. "Prey (2017)", "Dune (2021)", etc.

ocimbote 4y ago

I'm all in to blame corporate any time, but the narrative here is a bit too much on a "good people, bad corp" slope, even for me.

toyg 4y ago
The alternative would have been "good developers, bad project managers", which would have been too brutal. Someone had to figure out the infra requirements, and it could only be someone with knowledge of the volume of preorders. That's not going to be developers, but rather someone in the corporate hierarchy. I think the article is extremely charitable. They could have named every exec who made the call on the key features that brought about disaster (forcefully turning a solo game into a multiplayer one, underestimating requirements, etc etc) and instead they just said "EA", effectively absolving everyone but "the man".

brookst 4y ago

> EA was looking to justify the time and money it had already spent on Quigley and Willmot's experiment If true (the whole article is unsourced), that is a classic failure of undergrad business 101.

tomca32 4y ago

Yeah this was bad. The main problem was that the actual simulation was being done on the servers, rather than on the client…for a single player game. I’m sure the development team knew everybody was going to hate that so it couldn’t have been a surprise.

deleted 4y ago
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toyg 4y ago
> for a single player game But that's the problem: it was really a multiplayer game, sold to a crowd who wanted a predominantly single-player experience. So users were effectively angry from day 1 simply because they were being sold something they didn't want; the fact that this also precluded them from salvaging a bit of entertainment from it (since you'd be booted out even if you had little or no intention to ever interact with other players), was a further slap in the face.
josefx 4y ago
> The main problem was that the actual simulation was being done on the servers While that was the marketing line "simulation so complex it can't run on your PC", I remember there being an offline crack shortly after release and later one of the official patches even enabled it officially.
- delusional 4y ago
  Yeah, the part that were simulated online was the trade between the cities, a task so trivial it demanded nothing of the servers. The server side simulation was a joke. It was mostly an excuse for why the game performed poorly and the cities were so small.
  - antifa 4y ago
    Yeah there was basically no evidence that the game did anything more intense than the original SimCity (1989) but they loved claiming otherwise.

zzixp 4y ago

I would love for Cities Skylines to implement some kind of multiplayer or online collaborative option.

petepete 4y ago

I'd been looking forward to SC2013 for years and it was beyond disappointing. I know I'm probably not a typical gamer in EA's eyes, but SC4 was such a solid release. It just needed playable regions (build multiple cities, join them together) and some more graphical polish. I'd buy that game in an instant.

ascagnel_ 4y ago
SC4 (which I still fire up on occasion) has playable regions; in fact, that was the top-line new feature for that installment. Graphical polish would have been nice, but what the game really needs today is an engine upgrade -- it arrived just before the broad adoption of x64 and multi-core consumer CPUs, so it can't take full advantage of modern systems.
- petepete 4y ago
  Yeah I meant a continuous playable region, not lots of separate cities next to each other (ie huge cities please)

bromuro 4y ago

I play SimCities since v1 and I awaited long this release. It was indeed beautifully designed and the gameplay was very fun and addictive. Finally EA pushed the project too far and it imploded. Too bad, because Maxis didn’t reserve it. I play sometimes Cities Skyline but - to me - CS misses the vibe of SimCity.

_fat_santa 4y ago

I think if SimCity wasn't such a complete disaster, City Skylines wouldn't have taken off how it did. The big misstep I think they made is hinging the gameplay around multiplayer. While SimCity thought that collaboration would be done through "neighborhoods" and "resource sharing", City Skylines took the opposite approach and introduced collaboration through Steam Workshop. The developers of SimCity should have realized that people don't play sim building games to play with others, it's a very much a solo game. City Skylines navigated this beutifully by letting players still play the game alone but also letting them collaborate through assets rather than through gameplay.

delusional 4y ago
I personally believe that the SImCity version of multiplayer could have been impressively successful had it not supplanted everything else in the game. I like the idea of building cities that somehow interact with the cities my friends build, or whatever everyone else is doing. I like the idea of a game that asynchronously "breaks the meta". It just has to be a good SimCity game first and then have that stuff layered on top. SimCity 2013 was never a good SimCity game to begin with.
- JKCalhoun 4y ago
  Definitely could be cool to have an intermodal aspect. Trains/trucks coming and going with excess resources from your and other's cities. Large warehouse zones on the city periphery... Any "open" SimCity-like game?
  - SteveNuts 4y ago
    OpenTTD fits the bill. But for me, Sim City/Cities Skylines isn’t about resource generation as much as it is about just… building and expanding a thriving city. I like the way CS approached this and made it a thing you can do to earn extra money, but it’s not strictly necessary (your industrial areas will auto-import everything they need).
    - 4y ago

YellowTech 4y ago

Upon launch, I was of course disappointed with the state of the server and the online only nature of it. But the larger problem for why this game was a failure was the simple problem of way to little space to build a city. The whole concept of a few 1km x 1km city patches in a shared world to build in was flawed from the start. I want to build gigantic cities with elaborate public infrastructure and rivers full of sewage. Cities: Skylines simply was a much better fit for what makes the city building genre appealing. I find it a bit shortsighted to center the blame for a boring game on its launch date debacle. Many other games with similar problems at launch became hits.

jeffwask 4y ago

Another victim of the EA acquisition graveyard.

vadansky 4y ago

Speaking on Sim City, is there a chance anyone has a collection of Japanese Sim City 4 bat files? I saved a bunch of bookmarks but link rot has destroyed most of them, hoping someone collected them all.

CoolGuySteve 4y ago

> "Every time they would unblock one pinch point, then they would just discover the next one," says Librande. "You were unblocking the dam and then the flood goes and hits the next dam. Then everybody scrambles, tears that one apart, ok, but it keeps going". Apple hit this problem a lot too in the early days of the iTunes and App stores. Marketing wants a huge midnight release with all the hype but the scale just isn't there. The only way to go imo for this sort of thing is a staggered release, an invite system, or an open beta. And it also sucks that stupid management and marketing decisions killed such an important franchise in gaming history.

deleted 4y ago

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antifa 4y ago

> When SimCity launched on March 6, it required players to maintain an active online connection to the game's servers. If that connection dropped, they'd be booted from the game. SimCity, at it's core, is an offline single player game. EA really fucked this one up. Also EA already had the reputation of ruining every franchise they bought. The series lives on through Theotown and City Skylines.

slackdog 4y ago
Some single player games in the same broad genre as Sim City have successfully been adapted to multiplayer, so the premise of doing so wasn't poorly conceived. Transport Tycoon to OpenTTD in particular. The problem in this case was they botched the execution (which was no surprise given EA's abysmal reputation, as you mention.)
- Jensson 4y ago
  OpenTTD supports singleplayer, being forced into multiplayer was the problem.
  - slackdog 4y ago
    My impression was that the 2013 SimCity was effectively single player if you didn't connect the game to any of your friends, but that it had always-online DRM which they tried to excuse as something other than DRM.
    - JohnFen 4y ago
      You could certainly play it single-player, but it wasn't good as a single-player game. It sacrificed far too much. It was meant to be a multiplayer game, and it showed.
      - speeder 4y ago
        I remember seeing a review of a guy playing online, upset that EA wouldn't boot a group of trolls that built cities all around his city, and made their cities to be extreme pollution generators, and then they never played again. Seemly this happened to multiple people, trolls were all too happy to ruin serious players cities by spamming pollution near them.

5350-uiop-1130 4y ago

this felt like the apex of the post facebook/zynga monetise everything always online era ea have always ridden trends mercilessly. and ms with its bungled launch of always online xbox. the hubris of those executives is a staggering in hindsight.

hudsonjr 4y ago
I never thought about it, but that is so true. It also seemed like it was roughly the peak of bad DRM as well as trying to curtail resale of console games.

mablopoule 4y ago

I played SimCity 2013 a few months after launch, and I quite liked it, especially the gorgeous visuals. I've read TFA, and honestly they also failed to mention maybe the worse issue of SimCity 2013: how limited it was compared to the previous instalments. The playable area was tiny, so you quickly felt constrained by the border of your playable area. The fact that you could build multiple cities in the same region alleviated it a bit, but it really felt limiting compared to it's predecessors. Another point, which I feel is a good representation of an 'EA'-fied game: I was a bit miffed to discover that you couldn't create a subway system, you were limited to roads (I don't even remember if you could create a bus system). A few months in, I see that there was a 'Subway' content pack, which got my hopes up... until I realized it was to add 'Subway' sandwich shop in your city. Same, they had a cross-promotion with Nissan, so your Sims would feel happy when they recharged their electric car, and the charging station has the effect of a park in your neighborhood. Add to that the server issues, the fact that they said it was because so much computation was offloaded to their servers (which was quickly disproved, and felt bogus to being with), and the whole affair had a vibe of "Don't piss on my shoes and tell me it's raining". It was particularly sad, because it really still is an enjoyable game. EDIT: After a bit of fact -checking, I realize that I've mis-remembered the "Subway" DLC story. It was instead the "Metro" content pack (metro is french for subway), which was for a newspaper distributed for free near French subway entrances. There is also a Subway sandwich mod, but for SC4 only.

weard_beard 4y ago
City skylines has more than filled this gap imho. Great community. You should check it out if you haven’t yet.
- mablopoule 4y ago
  It's on my bucket list since, but I was afraid of falling down the rabbit hole, same as Anno, Civilisation and other cool games. I'm so glad City Skyline had such a success, because I feel that other Paradox Interactive games wouldn't have existed otherwise. As an avid player of Stellaris, and as someone eyeing the Crusader Kings series or Europa Universalis, I'm feel that Paradox games have DLCs done right. They are clearly on the expensive side, but they are contentfull, and feel less shameless than EA counterpart (especially with the Sims who has the same DLCs over and over again). On a side note, there is also Caesar III (& Pharaoh) on Gog, and it's still a gem.

weatherlight 4y ago

But it's death allowed for "Cities: Skylines" to come into existence and the world is better for it. https://www.paradoxinteractive.com/games/cities-skylines/about https://www.paradoxinteractive.com/games/cities-skylines/abo...

freitzkriesler2 4y ago
CS is a poor replacement for the otherwise incredible game that is sim city 4. The issue being that the traffic and population simulation engine in CS isnt very good. There are still modders and a very active community for SC4 for that reason alone. Reminds me, I need to install some city again
- etempleton 4y ago
  I find that CS does a good job with road construction and design and I think the traffic simulation is largely on par with Sim City 4. Other parts of the simulation are weaker and the game really doesn't have much challenge as a city management game. It is a better sandbox though.
  - ekidd 4y ago
    I might go so far as to say C:S is a traffic and transportation simulator. The city building parts are all there, and they're reasonably fun. But the ultimate limiting factor with my cities was transportation. No matter how much I worked on mass transit, I couldn't get more than 80-90% of my citizens to use it, and the remaining cars eventually choked even fancy road systems into tailbacks and gridlock. To be fair, this is a problem with real cities, too.
    - distances 4y ago
      My solution was to remove all roads to outside world. Only railway links allowed, and for those a strict separation of passenger and cargo tracks. Not very realistic, but it's an utopia roughly matching what I would prefer so works well for my cities.

jhoelzel 4y ago

Sim city is a phone game. I want to build cool cities full stop. I think what was more the problem is that a LOT of studios realized that a sim city clone works better on mobile hardware, because that's where the target audience is at. Since then they did realize it and I was playing it with my fiance for hours and hours on end. With the multiplayer with multiple cities. Graphics and disasters where not so much the problem in 2013 but they more or less screwed the game by liming it so miuch

ascagnel_ 4y ago
Check out Pocket City, it's the best realization of a SimCity title (especially SC2000) I've seen on mobile devices. https://pocketcitygame.com https://pocketcitygame.com
- 88840-8855 4y ago
  I can recommend TheoTown, available for all major platforms, even on Android and iOS, completely for free. It has a plug-in system, tons of decorative objects. Controls are good, too. Plus, it has some endgame content that makes it quite fun. https://hi.theotown.com/ https://hi.theotown.com/
  - sundarurfriend 4y ago
    > On Android and iOS we use the freemium model while you can get the full game for a fixed price on Steam. That's not exactly free. (Not saying it should be free, but just don't claim it is when it isn't.)
    - mcv 4y ago
      If there's a limited free mode and for a single fixed price you can unlock the full game, that would be the perfect price model for me. The description doesn't make it clear whether that's indeed the case and what that price would be, though.
      - 4y ago

kuon 4y ago

I moved to city skylines, which I like, but I miss something from SimCity. First CS forces roads everywhere, this is the biggest con to me, I would love to experiment with biking only neighborhood with mass transit. The other problem is that it's too easy. I love the constraint of having no money and struggling with public opinion. Like "You want to build a train line here? You will have major unhappiness from it". Skylines is good in sandbox mode, but misses a lot in "rogue like" mode. I would also like more terrain diversity.

bromuk 4y ago

Such a shame, I was very excited for this game and though hated it I did enjoy the graphic style, it looked great. (What a palava with the "online" simulation that was found out to be faked) Cities Skylines really put a nail in the coffin of SimCity for me, the huge playable area, no faux online requirement, realistic cim routines and the amazing mod support (I've only used the steam workshop) Now Colossal Order just need to make a sequel with more in depth mechanics akin to some of the mod tools made available (traffic management, I'm looking at you), also I don't know much about the Unity Engine but making the sequel more efficient on multicore CPU's is a must.

kasajian 4y ago

When I saw this title, I had to ask.. a decade ago? I swear I saw SimCity 30 years ago.

bmitc 4y ago
There are several versions: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimCity https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimCity

agentultra 4y ago

I remember following every update to this game prior to launch. I hated that it required an Origins account and all that but I signed up regardless just to play this game. And I recall having a good time with this game... for a while. Unfortunately EA's lack of support for the game was definitely felt by us consumers. It started off well enough but instead of becoming a better game they turned it into a brand-tie-in DLC-fest. It's hard working at an organization on such a long, ambitious project that the leadership wasn't prepared to support and didn't really believe in to begin with. As a developer I've been on such projects and I recall being invested in the work itself, the project, and our users: but getting management on-board to give it the funding and direction it needed was always a struggle.

jdlyga 4y ago

It's the classic small, passionate development team gets acquired by large company, and becomes highly bureaucratic and profit driven instead.

mysterydip 4y ago

> We had already begged and pleaded to have more time, and at some point, as a public company, they have certain obligations to their shareholders. One of them was that SimCity would be shipping that quarter. I get that games have to release at some point or else some devs will be perfecting forever. But I can't count the amount of times a game was a flop at launch (and never recovered) because they needed to hit an arbitrary date and it wasn't fully baked. Wouldn't the best interests of the shareholders be having a financially successful game?

jcranmer 4y ago
If the release date keeps getting pushed back, then that suggests that the problem isn't that the game needs more time to get fully baked, but rather there's some more fundamental issues in project management or project development that's hampering it. Continuing to push the release date back at that point is unlikely to improve matters, and pushing the result out as-is is actually likely to maximize revenue (the reviews won't get better, and you don't have to maintain marketing buzz for as long) while minimizing the losses from extra developer time.

racl101 4y ago

Sim City 4 needs a spiritual successor.

dwringer 4y ago
I guess people might argue this all day but I think Cities: Skylines is mostly that, with the rather large caveat that you can't start separate games on the same large map at the same time. You can still get mods (easily, from the steam workshop) which open up the entire terrain, and then use one of several different approaches to build multiple towns on the same map. I'm sure I'm forgetting other stuff that's missing, but they both scratch the same itch for me.

ianhawes 4y ago

I recall playing on launch day and being shocked to discover that, aside from the internet connectivity requirement, the entire UI was written in HTML using WebKit [0]. [0] https://twitter.com/MaxisScott/status/310835756107177984 https://twitter.com/MaxisScott/status/310835756107177984

doublerabbit 4y ago
And that the original SimCity were written in TCL and TK https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/SimCity https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/SimCity
- fredoralive 4y ago
  Well, for its Unix version anyway, which was a port a few years after the early releases.

spiffytech 4y ago

Related: "When SimCity got serious: the story of Maxis Business Simulations and SimRefinery" https://obscuritory.com/sim/when-simcity-got-serious/ https://obscuritory.com/sim/when-simcity-got-serious/

JohnFen 4y ago

That release certainly marked the end of the SimCity line for me. Making it require the use of their servers when you only wanted to play it single-player was intolerable, but it was an inferior single-player game (compared to its predecessors) anyway. I just keep playing the older versions instead.

cush 4y ago

This site is so full of ads it crashes iOS Safari...

HighChaparral 4y ago
I gave up after reloading it for the third time to see if the next chunk of invisible text would suddenly appear. (iPhone/iOS, Safari, Content Blockers off)
aendruk 4y ago
I noped out when the auto playing video started following me down the page.

proactivesvcs 4y ago

One of the final statements is rather telling of modern corporate culture: "We had already begged and pleaded to have more time, and at some point, as a public company, they have certain obligations to their shareholders. One of them was that SimCity would be shipping that quarter." Torpedoed by one bad business decision after another, despite being a promising game.

stuaxo 4y ago

"EA closed the principal Maxis studio in March 2015," does EA do anything but close game studios ?

JohnFen 4y ago
It also abuses any goodwill and fond feelings people may have for a game studio first, to make sure they squeeze it for every penny possible.

orwin 4y ago

They contacted video games influencers/youtubers (in 2013, always ahead of their time in marketing, that's the only thing EA is good at), invited them to play the game at their HQ. At least one of them confessed he was threatened to not publish the video after sending them the script and refused to change major parts. He wasn't paid the thousand dollars either (at the time influencers were cheaper :))

mcv 4y ago

Nowadays SimCity seems wholly replaced by City Skylines. I had to look up when that was released, but it turns out the release of City Skylines was directly caused by the failure of SimCity: From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cities:_Skylines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cities:_Skylines : > "While the developers felt they had the technical expertise to expand to a full city simulation game, their publisher Paradox held off on the idea, fearing the market dominance of SimCity. After the critical failure of the 2013 SimCity game, however, Paradox greenlit the title."

tripdout 4y ago

I still play SimCity 2013 today, and despite its flaws, I much prefer it over Cities Skylines. SimCity feels alive, with a great soundtrack, good looking visuals even today, and I love the futuristic expansion pack. Skylines feels less like a game I want to play in my free time and more like a city planner tool. The graphics style also somehow feels much colder and more outdated in comparison. I honestly think SimCity 6 with bigger cities and updated graphics would be a massive hit without changing much else - the multiplayer aspect of sharing resources, contributing to pollution, workers and students, etc is really unique and should be kept.

brnt 4y ago
Is there any way to get it on Steam Deck? There's no record for it on Protondb.
bombcar 4y ago
SimCity 2013 was fine, and the real killer was just how small it was. Everyone coming from Simcity 4 was like "what the @#%@ is this" and went back. Even Skylines is too small unless you get the mods that let you bust out all the adjacent land areas.

FfejL 4y ago

"SimCity should step outside the single-player bubble and embrace the fad of the moment—multiplayer" Found the problem!

Lutzb 4y ago

All I want is Sim City 2000 for mobile. I know it will not happen. Without microtransactions there is no way it will ever get green lighted by EA.

roytam87 4y ago
It does. There was SimCity 2000 for PocketPC by ZioSoft.

everyone 4y ago

KSP2 seems like it might be like that.. It seems quite star-citizeny with final AAA graphics and audio, but the core mechanics and UX rather fucked. I reckon it could take them years to fix it if they do. Fixing the core core stuff in a game with final assets already done is like repairing an engine thats running. There was so much dodgy slimy stuff going on with the publisher also, https://wccftech.com/kerbal-space-program-2-dev-fired-employees-poached-take-two/ https://wccftech.com/kerbal-space-program-2-dev-fired-employ... the fact that they kept development closed for years, then release garbage into early access and charge €50.. I think they might have no intention of fixing it and are just making a cash grab now while there is still so much goodwill floating around from KSP1. Imo there is an opportunity here for a smart small indie team to scoop them and make the real successor to KSP faster than the KSP2 team can fix their crap.

slackdog 4y ago
I'm hoping that KSP1 gets an open source engine re-implementation, ideally with optional physics fixes. Performance and physics jank were the two problems with KSP1 and it sounds like KSP2 didn't address those at all. I mean, adding trees to a rocket game? Who asked for that? All they really seem to have done is make the game require a more expensive GPU for no good reason.
- everyone 4y ago
  I was thinking it would be cool to make the real KSP2 using the rigs of rods engine (same one used in beamNG drive more or less) rather then awkwardly simulating intra-vehicle forces by having the vehicle made of an arbitary amount of seperate rigidbodes, instead make it from one mesh but with soft body phsyics. Note: Juno new origins is sort of a KSP sucessor. Its rock solid, but the ships are 100% rigid which definitely affects gameplay and decreases the challenge and fun perhaps.

ch4s3 4y ago

Good news, Cities Skylines 2 was just announced today.

mike503 4y ago

It had so much promise. It was rocky to start for sure. The playable area was so annoyingly small and I felt like I wind up in the same pattern every time. I did play it again a few months ago. It has so much promise, still, as a base for the next level. Ultimately it feels like you have to graduate to using megatowers as the cities pretty much could only advance if you included them... and they were limited by count and eventually those would become stagnant. If they could make the maps larger and improve things like homeless/park issues (I've placed parks like crazy, increase the property values and density, etc) but always wind up having to bulldoze and deal with homeless people which seems like it shouldn't happen based on my understanding. Go the no man's sky route and give us an infinite world to build on.

dragonwriter 4y ago

One thing I think the article leaves out, that is critical, is the damage done to the franchise image by SimCity Societies (2007), SimCity 2013 was the second bad miss in a row for the franchise (and a big part of Societies problems—on top of radical and not well recieved changes to the basic concept—were performance/reliability problems, which IIRC, included a persistent connection requirement even though it was single player.)

nottorp 4y ago

Tbh this would be a good time for a remembrance of the companies/franchises ruined by EA and Ubisoft. Maxis / SimCity BioWare / need i say what? Bullfrog / Populous, Dungeon Keeper -- Blue Byte / Settlers, Battle Isle New World Computing / Might and Magic and Heroes of... And that's just what I remember off the top of my head.

sniglom 4y ago
Black Box / Skate series, a number of NFS Games. DICE / Battlefield series Westwood / Command & Conquer series

hapless 4y ago

The interview snippets make it clear that SimCity 2013 was hopelessly compromised from minute one If nothing else, consider the mandates from EA: 1. Make it "unpirateable" even if it compromises gameplay 2. Make it depend on EA's online service, b/c we need to sell that even more than we need the game to succeed 3. Make sure it can handle a steady trickle of "expansions" like The Sims If you are going to implement those mandates, you are gonna end up with something bad. Even if SimCity 2013 had not been otherwise brain-damaged or screwed up, just EA's goals for the product were damning. (Of course, it is not JUST the mandates -- the game was screwed up in many other ways as well. But the mandates alone would have been bad.)

prox 4y ago
Looks like they first asked “how can we suck the money out of customers?” instead of asking how to make a milestone game. They repeated that a few more times as I recall. Not sure how they do it now.

vmilner 4y ago

In these days of 100GB games I’m still in awe of how much fun I had from a game stored in 128KB (SimCity on the ZX Spectrum in 1990). And it was perfectly playable in 48KB.

cwkoss 4y ago

Maxis had a really cool integration ecosystem for a period. I remember flying my sim copter in my sim city. Driving cars around Streets of Sim City - in my city. SimCity was the worldbuilder and they let you play in that world in a variety of ways. I must have spent hundreds of hours playing these as a child: these were basically my Minecraft. What happened to their vision? Was the EA acquisition the beginning of the end, or did the magic start disappearing earlier?

denton-scratch 4y ago

Title should say "SimCity 2013".

Traubenfuchs 4y ago

The lead designer was heartbroken? He should have been ashamed of his dastardly creation. I was heartbroken when I saw how they massacred and desecrated the Sim City franchise. It was one of the early online-only cloud microtransaction trash games, like Diablo 3.

bromuk 4y ago

Funny how Cities: Skylines 2 got announced after I’d commented on this earlier

spagoop 4y ago

I grew up playing Sim City 2k and 3k (never got around to the latest one, but wasn't really interested after reading reviews). I'd like to see the entire city builder genre challenged by changing the perspective from city planner/god-mayor, to those whom they serve. Imagine, instead of a birds eye view, you could only build from the perspective of a pedestrian. Maybe in certain instances you'd have to see a wider swath of land for planning purposes (transit as an example), but it would be interesting to see how the forms of cities created by users change from this new perspective.

ThunderSizzle 4y ago
I think I'd prefer something more similar to a Factorio setting (e.g. still top-down, but the camera actions/limited to your area as the "pedestrian"). However, I'd also like the insertion of balance against the "god" part too - like eminent domain costing goodwill or stability points. Too unstable or not enough goodwill, and the citizens start acting antagonist against the player on some level (e.g. higher crime/fraud, causing less taxes, protests, people leaving, etc) Almost like city-state on some level, but less about the political compass and more about city government interacting with the local population.
- bombcar 4y ago
  The problem with these city simulators is that they're relatively simplistic, and it's easy to work out a "formula" that lets you get basically infinite money and do whatever you want (the "city painter" mode). Which can be terribly fun, but it's not so much a game as more of an open-world building toy.
  - ThunderSizzle 4y ago
    This is the problem with most strategy games too, like EU4. It's all about min-maxing against the stats. As frustrating as it can be sometimes, I prefer playing with fuzzier logic based on randomness. There's a great breakdown on EU3 vs EU4 that highlights this. In CS, it'd be like if the economy went up and down randomly, affecting taxes or expenses, or if citizens randomly changed behavior patterns (e.g. started driving more when previously walked or vice versa). I've been enjoying Workers and Resources because of some of this fuzziness is introduced by construction taking time and resources.

shp0ngle 4y ago

Wait it’s 10 years already? Time really does fly faster when you’re older.

wdb 4y ago

Can still remember I bought a book about SimCity 2000. I think it explained how you could rebuild real-life cities in SimCity. Pretty cool

Felminor 4y ago

Loved the visual style. Not sure why they just didn't build a second one

alkonaut 4y ago

How can a company be as bad as EA at managing computer game production? It’s absolutely mind blowing. You think they’d have learned by now, but this story has been repeated for the decade since Sim City. As an EA shareholder I’d be absolutely fuming if some EA exec believed that shipping an unfinished game on an arbitrary deadline would be more important than shipping a good game.

JohnFen 4y ago
It's even more mind-blowing when you remember what EA was at the start. It was a breakaway company that showcased and honored game developers as artists and game development as art, and for a while produced some of the best games on the market. Then it turned into everything it was opposed to at the start.

Razengan 4y ago

Can't we still play older SimCity versions?

amrb 4y ago

And while EA plummeted the franchise city skylines is getting a sequal https://kotaku.com/cities-skylines-2-paradox-lamplighters-xcom-ck3-pc-new-1850194992 https://kotaku.com/cities-skylines-2-paradox-lamplighters-xc...