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[Toady One]

I removed a couple of the latest posts that were degenerating, but overall the thread still has a problem and I'm not sure how long it'll remain open.  I'd appreciate it if people would control themselves a bit.

[lordcooper]

There's also the ethicality of cracking a game.

Fixed that for you, because, as we all know, the game is going to be pirated shortly thereafter the release nonetheless.

Just like Diablo 3 was?

[pilgrimboy]

Speaking of Diablo 3. Did you see that it sold 12 million copies. I'm going with it being a vocal minority that is against always on DRM.

[forsaken1111]

Speaking of Diablo 3. Did you see that it sold 12 million copies. I'm going with it being a vocal minority that is against always on DRM.

But but they dumbed it down and it ruined the whole series of games and always on drm is teh debil.

[Telgin]

Speaking of Diablo 3. Did you see that it sold 12 million copies. I'm going with it being a vocal minority that is against always on DRM.

After the inevitable launch day problems, I imagine the always on DRM didn't bother most people.  After all, I suspect a substantial proportion (if not the majority) of the current Diablo II players are playing on Battle.net anyway.  I always played Diablo II offline, but the DRM didn't bother me in Diablo III.  I had other issues with the game...

It's a similar thing with Simcity 5 (or whatever they're calling it now).  The DRM doesn't bother me much, but being pigeon holed into smaller cities does.  As does simplification of game features.  I doubt it's a bad game, but it just doesn't cater to me, from the sounds of things.

[MarcAFK]

I don't particularly mind smaller 'city' sizes as long as you can join them together into regions like sim city 4 had.
But i know the kind of scale that existed in sim city 4 just wouldn't be possible in this new version.
I found an interesting thread with a few images that illustrated the actual size of the 2x2 km 'city' in real world geography.
http://community.simtropolis.com/topic/48300-simcity-city-tile-size/
Specifically : "
Now, to prove how small 2x2 km actually is, take for example my home city Zoetermeer (the Netherlands). Population is 121,580 (a medium sized city to dutch terms) and it's build in one of the most densest populated countries in Europe. Most people here live in row homes, which makes this city smaller than an American city of the same population size. If you look at the city in Google Maps and you divide the city in squares, you'll get this."

"As you can see, even with not a really big city, you have to use 16 medium city tiles to re-create this city! With large city tiles, you only need 4 and the complete city will fit in one 8x8 tile.

So what does actually fit in one medium city tile? I've looked further on Google Maps but most cities and towns were bigger than that. The closest I could get is Weesp (Pop. 17,529), but it's not much and it even goes a bit off the map"

Looking at my own city Brisbane which has a population of 2 million, the densest urban sprawl is located in a roughly 20x20 kilometer box, each suburb is roughly a 2x2 kilometer area, even the Central business district is a little bigger than this.
Just resizing google maps untill the scale shows 2 km and dragging the map around the ruler is showing me some interesting things, i can see a few parks and a multitude of golf courses 1x0.5 kilometers and a few that are 1x1 km. In fact i see a couple of 2x2 km parks near my own suburb of albany creek, which i should mention will fit into a 2x2km block and has a population of 16,000.
Finally our moderately large international airport with 2 terminals, 1 large runway and one smaller runway is roughly 2km by 8 km.
Even if you wanted to ignore the noise and pollution and put houses right upto the runway you would still need at least a 200 meter wide taxiway just to squeeze 2 jumbo's past each other, and a 100 meter wide runway at least 4 kilometers long, now going by a medium SC4 area you've used at least 10% of the width of your city just on the taxiway and your runway needs to be contained within 2 continuious 'cities'.
Sim city 4 is sometimes criticized by how unrealistically 'dense' your cities can become, a little gaming the system and you can put 200,000-300,000 into the 2x2km area that real life could only fit perhaps 25,000, however if one avoids the densest zones you should get a somewhat realistic representation of a 'city'.
I think the point I'm trying to make is that the actual size of your city doesn't really matter since it's basically just a suburb, whereas the region is your true city, and the truely positive or negative aspect of the new game is the community aspect where you share that region with other city builders to create something unique and hopefully entertaining.
But i like to sandbox by myself and create something intricately controlled to my own exacting specifications, so what i'm seeing of this new game doesn't particularly interest me.
Also on another note, less hate and stuff please

[DoomOnion]

*cough cough*

Hey, look, a hands on article at RPS http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/02/07/hands-on-simcity/
I'm deffinitly going to give this game a try, I always have 3000/4 if that's what I wan't to play anyway.

Mm, that's a nice article. I like how... colourful the writing is.
It does point out both pros and cons of the game, and like the author is saying, a lot of us is clearly very worried about EA suddenly shutting the game servers down.
But then again, Spore servers aare still alive
But then again, Spore is only 5 or 6 years old and games like Mercs 2 got their servers taken away to make room for shiney new games.

To be honest, I don't know if a lot of you will agree or not, sim city 4 was also not really a 'masterpiece'. It just... didn't have any competent competitors or successors. Hell, citiesXL botched the coding so bad that ALL their titles (citiesXL 2011/2012/platinum) suffers from inexorable memory leak that leads to a crash every 30 minutes. Sim City 4 was REAAAALLY sandboxy though. I mean, that's the point of the game, but really sandboxy. What the game is offering as a game mechanic is bare structures and bones and is hardly any improvement since simcity 2000, just look at the traffic and how you can specialize but by no means have any reasons to specialize. (Freighters not doing anything and cities are barely connected together takes a huge part in this). I think Maxis knew this problem all along, and that is perhaps why they are limiting the mapsize to a relatively small area, so that you have limited space and resources and absolutely, positively have to specialize if you intend to make a flourishing region. One city manufacturing stuff for your sims, one city with lots of casinos, a city full of educational opportunity, and so on.

I still can't help but to feel that this game is ... on the other extreme of Sim City 4. It would be nice if CitiesXL actually fixed the atrocious bugs and became a median of some sort, but we all know that is not going to happen.

[Rose]

Guys, I have an idea.

Let's make an open source city builder game.

This will solve all of our problems.

[MarcAFK]

Guys, I have an idea.

Let's make an open source city builder game.

This will solve all of our problems.

Micropolis is open source, we could fork it and add bazillions of additional bugs features.

[Djohaal]

Guys, I have an idea.

Let's make an open source city builder game.

This will solve all of our problems.

This has been tried about some six times so far, all the projects eventually died...

[Aseaheru]

LETS DO IT A SECONDSEVENTH TIME THEN.

[Rose]

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=122710.new#new

There, done.

[dragonshardz]

Guys, I have an idea.

Let's make an open source city builder game.

This will solve all of our problems.

I actually have a city builder concept simmering in the back of my head. Voxel-based city sim. Custom buildings, anyone? Truly flexible transit systems? Realistic, easy terraforming? How about realistic scale and shape - no square cities shat out onto curvy land or cramming 2 million people into 4km^2. Or optional multiplayer on an effectively infinite region?

Big plans. Big, big plans.

[pilgrimboy]

FYI, you can sign up for the next closed beta if you are interested. I will be out of the country or I would have loved trying it.

[pilgrimboy]

And one other tidbit of info that I found fascinating.

While looking at Amazon today, I noticed that Sim City 4 Deluxe Edition is currently the 7th bestselling game for download. At least the new SimCity is helping sales on the old one.