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My understanding is that SCO was designed and balanced around player-player interaction between cities, to the point that a single free-standing city couldn't r

by lmkg 13y ago

My understanding is that SCO was designed and balanced around player-player interaction between cities, to the point that a single free-standing city couldn't really be "complete." Cities functioned better when they were specialized and interacting with neighbors, than when they tried to be self-sufficient. I didn't play the thing myself, but that's how the devs seemed to portray things. Given that (and other ways in which the online-ness was pervasive in game design), this seems like the epitome of a band-aid fix on a bullet wound. Just inserting an offline mode won't make the game better, because the game design was based around online play from a very fundamental level, and it's not a feature that can be removed simply. I.e., 'you can take SCO offline, but you can't take the online out of SCO.'

mratzloff 13y ago
Given that you can play solo regions, I assume you could simply create several specialized cities (I haven't played the game).
- wmf 13y ago
  You can, although when I do this I end up switching between cities constantly to keep resources flowing and each switch takes about a minute so it's kind of un-fun.
bane 13y ago
That's partially true. But the online plays was screwed from the start since you simply couldn't delete cities. So that city you built when you were screwing around with the build tools and made a giant happy face out of the roads and didn't really have any intention of making it self-sustaining or part of a larger region play? It's there forever. SC4k also had region play, cities weren't really as effective until they were part of a region. The mechanic should have been to let you and some friends start a region, each pick a zone or two and start cooperatively developing them over time. Enhance things like cross-city usage fees (so I can recoup cost for putting up a huge airport in my city that my friends use) and it would have completely satisfied the multi-player requirement. What you ended up with was a bunch of half-asses cities that nobody wanted to play with in regions that nobody wanted to be multi-players in, that the only benefit was regional construction projects that never really worked right and had cryptic requirements in order to construct. Coupled with impossibly small city sizes and broken AI and the game is fundamentally broken in ways that no amount of patching or fixing is ever going to solve. Time to deep six this failed experiment and move on to Sim City 2.
- kisielk 13y ago
  Hey, that actually sounds a lot like regional planning in real life :)
SimHacker 13y ago
I think SimCity is essentially a game that you can approach and play many different ways. Some of those ways work just fine offline, and some of them don't.

by lmkg 13y ago

mratzloff 13y ago

Given that you can play solo regions, I assume you could simply create several specialized cities (I haven't played the game).

wmf 13y ago
You can, although when I do this I end up switching between cities constantly to keep resources flowing and each switch takes about a minute so it's kind of un-fun.

bane 13y ago

That's partially true. But the online plays was screwed from the start since you simply couldn't delete cities. So that city you built when you were screwing around with the build tools and made a giant happy face out of the roads and didn't really have any intention of making it self-sustaining or part of a larger region play? It's there forever. SC4k also had region play, cities weren't really as effective until they were part of a region. The mechanic should have been to let you and some friends start a region, each pick a zone or two and start cooperatively developing them over time. Enhance things like cross-city usage fees (so I can recoup cost for putting up a huge airport in my city that my friends use) and it would have completely satisfied the multi-player requirement. What you ended up with was a bunch of half-asses cities that nobody wanted to play with in regions that nobody wanted to be multi-players in, that the only benefit was regional construction projects that never really worked right and had cryptic requirements in order to construct. Coupled with impossibly small city sizes and broken AI and the game is fundamentally broken in ways that no amount of patching or fixing is ever going to solve. Time to deep six this failed experiment and move on to Sim City 2.

kisielk 13y ago
Hey, that actually sounds a lot like regional planning in real life :)

SimHacker 13y ago

I think SimCity is essentially a game that you can approach and play many different ways. Some of those ways work just fine offline, and some of them don't.