The Cities game sounds cool, especially after that Sim City disaster. I really don't understand why it is so hard to give old Sim City fans (Sim City 3 and prior) what they REALLY wanted:

1). The ability to build a huge sprawling city
2). Very little fuss while doing so
3). Some actual logical complexity/mechanics so you're not just dumping buildings anywhere
4). No over-complicated Micro-Management.

Sim City 4 failed on all four points: the Cities were MUCH smaller and it was awkward/difficult to get them to actually grow beyond poverty shacks and grocery stores (Point #1), there were no ways to turn disasters off and the game crashed _constantly_ and you had advisers constantly bugging you, and you were replacing buildings constantly (#2), and while it had #3, it had too much of #3 and it had way too much complication and micro-management.

I'm not even going to talk about that Mess that is the most Recent Sim City with its always-online DRM.

There's Cities XL, and I tried that, but it was missing that 'something', can't put my finger on what exactly it was missing. I don't have real good memories of it (only played it a couple hours), but I think what they did with Cities XL, if I remember correctly is it is somewhere between Sim City 2003 and Sim City 4.

That said, I just wanna build a city and have just minor mechanics working in the background to make sure the city functions in some logical way. Sim City 2000 did this fairly nicely, though obviously the graphics, sounds, etc show their age. Sim City 3 was better on the graphics and sound part, but the having to replace buildings every 50 years got annoying, especially once you filled in 50%+ of the map and you'd get this newspaper article about an aging power plant and you look at your city... you probably have 30+ power plants in your city. Or worse, water pumps. Okay, I have 200+ of those. Which one(s) again are aging?

I don't see why the game couldn't have automatically replaced those buildings for you and just deduct the money, OR, have the buildings last infinitely, BUT, have a "Maintenance Fee" every year equal to 1/50th of the original buying price of the building. What's the difference between buying a $50k power plant once per 50 years, or paying $1k a year to keep it from going bad?

I'd have to say Sim City 2003 was pretty dang close to the mark of the most awesome City Simulator game, but it had a few annoying flaws (building replacement being one, total removal of arcologies instead of just nerfing or limiting them being another).

In the end, I just want to make a huge horking city with millions of people, the next New York City or something like that.

Sim City is going the route of "everybody makes lots of small towns", they should just call it Sim Town by this point. Or maybe Sim Suburbia. Or, maybe Sim Townhall because you end up doing more micro-management than building (they keep wanting to put Auto-Building algorithms in the game.. I don't want the game to build the residential block for me, I wanna build it Myself!).

EDIT: When I say Auto-building algorithms, I mean how the game places the roads and shaded zone squares automatically, causing freaky-shaped blocks because nothing wants to line up with blocks you already had there.

Anyways, hopefully this game will give us people who enjoy such things new hope for an actual good City Simulator.

As to the other game...

It sounds like it has promise; a heavy story-based games where you can (to some extent?) go back in time and re-do your decisions to see how they affect the outcome (and the outcome itself being affected by your actions) sounds awesome. I hate games whose endings don't matter on your actions. Dragon Age 2 was lousy for this, as was Mass Effect 3.

Edited, Aug 20th 2014 12:01pm by Lyrailis