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SimCity (2013 video game)

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SimCity
SimCity: Limited Edition cover art
Developer(s)Maxis
Publisher(s)Electronic Arts
Producer(s)Kip Katsarelis
Designer(s)Ocean Quigley
Stone Librande
Composer(s)Chris Tilton
SeriesSimCity
EngineGlassBox[5]
Platform(s)OS X,[6] Microsoft Windows[7][8]
ReleaseWindows
Mac
Q1/Q2 2013[4]
Genre(s)Construction and management simulation, city-building
Mode(s)Single-player, multiplayer[5]

SimCity is an upcoming city-building/urban planning simulation video game in development by Maxis, a subsidiary of Electronic Arts. It is the sixth major release of the SimCity series.[9][10][11] It is set to be officially released on March 5, 2013 in North America, March 7, 2013 in Europe and March 8, 2013 in the UK on Microsoft Windows and eventually to OS X.[1][12]

Gameplay

A user-built city in SimCity that specializes in education.

Along with many of the cosmetic changes (such as up-to-date 3D graphics), SimCity uses the new GlassBox engine. "We try to build what you would expect to see, and that's the game," explains system architect Andrew Willmott, meaning that visual effects such as traffic, economic troubles, and pollution will be more obvious. Two other new features are a multiplayer component and finite resources.[13]

Unlike previous games in the series, the game will have non-orthogonal and curved roads and zoning areas that can conform to different road types.[14] Types of zones will include residential, commercial and industrial.[15] The density will be driven by the types of roads built around these zones.[16]

Cities in a region are connected to each other via predefined regional networks such as highways, railways, and waterways. Elements such as traffic and air pollution will be visible flowing between cities.[17]

  • Terraforming – Creative Director Ocean Quigley stated that all of the terraforming in the game is going to be at the civil engineering scale, and will be the natural consequences of laying out roads, developing zones, and placing buildings.[17]
  • Transportation options – There are a number of options that are included, such as boats, buses, trams, and planes.[18]
  • Customization – Maxis has indicated that the game will support modding, but will not do so at launch like previous versions.[19]

Modules in SimCity are attachable structures that can add functionality to existing user-placeable buildings. One example is the extra garage for fire stations, which can provide additional fire trucks for increased protection coverage.[20][21]

Inspired by Google Maps and infographics,[22] data in the game is shown to the player in a more understandable form than in previous versions.[23] Animations and color-coded visual cues that represent how efficiently a city functions are only presented when needed at any given moment.[15][23] [24] For instance, opening up the water tower instantly changes the landscape to a clear world where the density of water is recognizable.[15] Or clicking on the sewage tab will immediately show how the waste of the citizens is flowing, and where the system is over capacity.[23][24] Some of the other visualized data include air pollution,[25] power distribution,[15] police coverage,[23] and zones.[24]

Many resources in the game are finite. Some are renewable, such as ground water. Lead gameplay engineer Dan Moskowitz stated, "If you've built up an entire city on the economic basis of extracting a certain resource, when that resource runs out your economy will collapse."[26]

Different from previous Simcity titles, each type of zone (residential, commercial, and industrial) is not divided into density categories. Instead the density of the roads next to them determines the type of buildings that will be created there. This means that there is only one of each zone type, and density of the buildings are determined by the density of the roads. [27]

Roads in Simcity are one of the most fundamental elements of the mechanics. Unlike previous SimCity games, roads carry water, power, and sewage. There are also many new tools for drawing roads. They include a straight line tool, one for making rectangular road squares, one for making sweeping arcs, one for making circles, and one for making free-form roads. There is also a more diverse range of roads to choose from. Starting at dirt roads and going up to six lane avenues with street car tracks, the density of the roads determines the density of the buildings next to them. So dirt roads will only ever develop low density buildings. There are two different categories of roads, streets and avenues. Streets are 24 meters wide and avenues are 48 meters wide. Since all streets are the same width, a dirt road can be upgraded to a high density street. In order to upgrade a street to an avenue you need to fully demolish the old street and replace it with a larger avenue. When high and low capacity roads intersect, the higher density roads have the right-of-way and so stop lights and stop signs will be automatically placed. In order to space the roads so there will be enough room for buildings to develop, road guides are shown when you hover over an existing road.[27] The act of road building creates a spline on which the SimCity Glassbox interacts with the simulation. When these splines intersect it becomes a reticulated spline which develops the underlying spline network.[28]

Players will be able to specialize cities on certain industries, such as manufacturing, tourism, education, or others. Each have distinct appearances, simulation behavior, and economic strategies.[29][30] Players have the option to heavily specialize on one or build multiple specializations in any given city for diversity.[17] The game will feature a simulated global economy. Prices of key resources like oil or food will fluctuate depending on the game world's supply and demand.[31] In particular, if players all over the world are predominantly selling drilled oil from within their game onto the global market, this will drive the price for this resource down. Conversely, a resource that has experienced very little exposure on the world market will be a scarce resource, driving the price up.[32]

Multiplayer

This version of SimCity will be the first to feature full online play since Maxis's SimCity 2000 Network Edition,[5] allowing for regions to house multiple cities from different players. Regions can alternatively be set to private for solo play.[29] SimCity will require players to be logged into EA's Origin service to play the game, including when playing single player. An active internet connection will be required every time the game is launched and must be maintained throughout gameplay.[33] The connection is asynchronous,[33] so any brief network disturbance will not interrupt the gameplay[20] though outages of longer than three minutes will cause loss of gamestate.[34]

  • Collaboration – Cities in a region can share or sell resources, and work together to build “Great Works”,[29] such as an Arcology.[18]

Development

System requirements
Minimum Recommended
Windows[35]
Operating system Windows XP/Vista/7Windows 7
CPU AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core 4000+ or better, Intel Core 2 Duo Processor 2.0GHz or betterIntel Core i5 or faster
Memory 2GB4GB
Free space 12GB
Graphics hardware ATI Radeon HD 2x00 or better nVidia 7800 or better. Intel Series 4 integrated graphics or better. Minimum of 256MB of on-board RAM and Shader 3.0 or better supportnVidia GTX 275 or better, or ATI 5850 or Better
Network Minimum 256 kbps download, 64 kbps upload
Mac OS X[35]
Operating system Snow Leopard 10.6.4
CPU Intel Core 2 Duo Processor 2.0GHz or better
Memory 4GB
Graphics hardware NVIDIA 9400M/ Intel HD3000

Prior to its announcement, the German magazine GameStar leaked concept art. Soon thereafter, a pre-rendered trailer was leaked. The official announcement took place on March 6, 2012 at the Game Developers Conference. Initially it was revealed that the game would be available for the Windows platform,[8] and a later OS X edition was confirmed.[6] EA showcased two new trailers for the game at the Electronic Entertainment Expo 2012, showcasing in-game graphics for the first time.

Engine

EA/Maxis is developing the game using a new simulation engine called GlassBox, which takes a different approach from previous simulation games. Those games first simulated high-level statistics and then created graphic animations to represent that data. The GlassBox Engine replaces those statistics with agents, simulation units that represent objects like water, power, and workers; each graphic animation is directly linked to an agent's activity.[36] For example, rather than simply displaying a traffic jam animation to represent a simulated traffic flow problem, traffic jams are instead produced dynamically by masses of Sim agents that simulate travel to and from work.[37] A four-part video has been released featuring Dan Moskowitz, the lead gameplay engineer, talking about the engine simulation behavior.[38]

Audio

The game’s audio is bound to the pulse of the simulation. When a building is running a simulation rule like generating power for example, it is driving music and sound effects that are synchronized to the overall beat of the simulation. The audio is telling the player what the simulation is doing.[13] Audio Director Kent Jolly stated that cars in the game are tracked individually. When a car leaves an intersection, the simulator plays a sound of a car pulling away. The sound also changes based on the speed of the game. As cars go faster, the audio is matched to what the player sees, while remaining true to the actual traffic.[39]

Chris Tilton is the composer of the game's orchestral score. The music subtly adjusts to the player's experience based on various game states. An example of this is when the view is zoomed out, the player will hear a fuller version of the score. When zoomed in, certain elements of the tracks are taken away. This is done to help make room for all the activity going on in the player's city. The music tracks are also written with population in mind, and the game exposes the full playlist as the player's city develops and grows.[39]

Release

Initially, the game will be sold in various editions: Limited Edition (available in both physical and digital forms), Collectors Edition (Amazon-exclusive Steelbook Edition with German City Set in Germany, GAME-exclusive Steelbook Edition with British City Set in the UK) and Digital Deluxe Edition. The latter includes the French City Set, German City Set, and British City Set.[35]

EA announced on October 29, 2012 that SimCity will be available for Microsoft Windows in North America on March 5, 2013.[40] It will be available in stores and for digital download online. The game will be available for Windows in Europe on March 7[citation needed] and Australia for Windows on March 7.[3] Registration for a closed beta started August 14, 2012, by signing up at the official website.[41] The beta took place between January 25-28, 2013 and was re-playable in one hour sessions following an initial tutorial. A second beta was run on February 16 allowing Maxis to test their server capacity and had similar one hour limitations as the previous beta. A final major stress test is scheduled for Wednesday, February 27 in a four-hour test window. According to the beta test email, "We have condensed the amount of time in this test to encourage as many players as possible to log in and push our servers as hard as possible.[42] " Unlike the previous beta tests, the final stress test will not have feature limitations.

On 19 November 2012, a graphics engineer at Maxis using the name "MaxisSixAM" commented on the SimCity.com forum confirming that while a purchase of SimCity through the Origin platform will entitle access to a Mac version of the game, there was currently no indication of a Mac release date and that Mac users may be unable to play the game until a later date.[43]

On 15 January 2013, SimCity Creative Director Ocean Quigley confirmed via his Twitter feed that the Mac version was still being worked on by Maxis and that its release will be "a little later" than the Windows release on 5 March.[12] On 28 January 2013 an FAQ for the Mac release was posted to the Simcity.com Blog.[4] This reconfirmed, as already mentioned by Ocean Quigley on Twitter that the Mac version would not be released at the same time as the Windows release and instead would come in ' Spring.' [4] This translates to first or second quarter of 2013.

Closed beta

EA and Maxis held a beta from January 25 9AM PST to Monday January 28 12:01AM PST. Applicants were randomly chosen to play a 1 hour demo version of the game. Lead Producer Kip Katsarelis commented on the beta:

The Closed Beta is an important step for us as we approach our launch date for SimCity. We’ve crafted a one hour replayable experience that will let you enjoy the magic of the game and allow us to test critical features. Everyone will go through our “Getting Started Scenario”, which takes you through the basics of how to play the game and gives you a sneak peak at some late game content. After that, you’re free to start your own city and play for one hour. We’ve given you all the tools to build up a medium density city, given access to the Casino Big Business, all of the basic services, loads of public transportation options, and several options on how you can power your city. You can start up as many cities as you like during the 3 Day event. We encourage you to try to build different types of cities, explore the leaderboards and try to beat the Global Challenge! By putting these features through a rigorous test, you’re doing us a huge service. Your feedback will go directly to the Development Team and make an impact on future updates. By playing the game you’ll be testing our online servers, helping ensure a smooth launch.[44]

In February, Maxis announced a 2nd closed beta to be scheduled from Saturday February 16 6AM PST to Sunday February 17 6AM PST. The beta was mainly for, “the primary purpose of testing our servers. We have added more capacity to our servers in order to accommodate the flow of players. This beta will help us stress test them.”[45]

A 3rd closed beta occurred Wednesday February 27th 5PM to 9PM PST with the following note: "We have condensed the amount of time in this test to encourage as many players as possible to log in and push our servers as hard as possible."

Reception

Pre-release

On December 14, 2012, the SimCity development team ran a questions and answers session on the internet community Reddit where they received criticism for the game's DRM-mechanisms, which require the user to be permanently connected to Electronic Arts' servers in order to be able to play the game.[46][47] The video games-focused blog Kotaku also voiced concern over the issue, worrying that Electronic Arts could one day shut down their servers, rendering the game unplayable.[47]

This prompted a blog response from Lucy Bradshaw, Maxis Senior Vice President, in which she defended the always-online component with the comment that "real cities do not exist in a bubble; they share a region and affect one another." She goes on to say that increased connectivity to neighboring cities allows for a better experience, allowing for better trade and wider scale effects such as crime and pollution to keep synchronized across the region.[48] Bradshaw also noted the performance benefit due to the engine utilizing EA's server hardware to assist in gameplay calculations:

GlassBox is the engine that drives the entire game -- the buildings, the economics, trading, and also the overall simulation that can track data for up to 100,000 individual Sims inside each city. There is a massive amount of computing that goes into all of this, and GlassBox works by attributing portions of the computing to EA servers (the cloud) and some on the player's local computer.

— Lucy Bradshaw, SVP Maxis[48]

Beta test

After the first beta, EA Management staff discussed Q4 2012 results during which Peter Moore commented on the success of the beta, “SimCity, a completely new version of the treasured classic, includes deep online features. More than 100,000 people played the SimCity beta last weekend,... and the critical reception is shaping up well.”[49]

Awards

At E3 2012 in June 2012, SimCity won 8 awards out of 24 nominations.[50]

On August 23, 2012, SimCity won gamescom's "Best PC Game" award. The gamescom jury described the video game as having "fantastic graphics" and "struck the right balance between retaining the trademarks of the old parts and making it interesting for beginners".[51]

References

  1. ^ a b Phillips, Tom (October 24, 2012). "SimCity release date set in stone • News • Eurogamer.net". eurogamer.net. Retrieved October 24, 2012.
  2. ^ "4Gamer.net エレクトロニック・アーツ，日本語版「シムシティ」を，2013年3月7日に発売。初回特典の内容も明らかに". 4Gamer.net. 16 November 2012. Retrieved 24 January 2013.
  3. ^ a b "BigPond GameArena - News - SimCity's official Aussie release date - March 7th 2013". Gamearena.com.au. Retrieved 2013-01-29.
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  9. ^ Mallory, Jordan (2012-06-01). "SimCity building into your personal life February 2013". Joystiq. Retrieved 2012-08-26.
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  50. ^ "E3 Redux". Maxis. Retrieved 2012-12-05.
  51. ^ "gamescom awards 2012: The winners are ..." Retrieved 2012-08-24.


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