New Terrain

SimCity (2013), Electronic Arts promotional screenshot

After ten years there's a new SimCity out (Societies doesn't count), but this is not an outright review of that game. At the start of March my internet connection died for several prolonged hours. After repeatedly trying to view several websites out of habit before realising they'd never load, I looked for something else to do. I hadn't played SimCity 3000 in nearly two years so I fired that up. What a good thing it is that always-online DRM hadn't been invented in 1999 because I would have been screwed as the new game even saves your cities in "the cloud". Since I last seriously played it, my city was populated by over a million sims and it had expanded almost to the limits without becoming one of those highly efficient cities designed by a player who has brutally calculated the placement of every building. My ideas about what a large city should look like are still firmly rooted in the skyline of Manhattan, hence I've kept the default building style in SC3K Unlimited. Only recently has London started racing for the clouds.

I haven't played the new SimCity, though I have kept an eye on it by watching a few livestreams and Let's Plays. I was never going to buy it, frankly. Grand Theft Auto IV is the only major title PC game I've bought in years and the main obstacle to getting it to run after the lengthy installation was the DRM - I had to track down a patch. That kind of treatment of paying customers as well as EA's increasingly atrocious reputation were major turn offs. In a multi-media world there's plenty of entertainment out there and when faced such DRM-generated problems I'll go find some low-hanging fruit instead. What has struck me in seeing the new SimCity is how much the expansiveness of the series has been drawn back and fenced-in in order to push the online element of gameplay. Fenced-in being an apt phrase as cities are now quite literally allotments delineated by broken white lines. I feel like chasing Peter Rabbit out of the vegetable patch should have been an easter egg. I'm well aware there has always been a limit to the space in which to build a city but these little squares really are little. These must be the size of the smallest terrain in 3000 - my city was built on the maximum size which is roughly four times larger and it took somewhere in the range of two hundred in-game years to urbanise most of that. I've seen six million stated as a record high population in 3000 and my own city recently hit one and a quarter million. In contrast I believe the highest anyone has achieved in the new game is two hundred thousand or so. Certainly not more than a third of a million. The main problem, even after multiple patches it seems, is the traffic which brings the city to a halt and prevents population density from continuing to increase - as there's nowhere to expand and drive population once you hit that boundary.

The traffic problem has two causes. The first is again a product of the game being forced into this online paradigm. The cities interact with each other (though not in real time even if the servers worked) through lines of communication - primarily road with some rail and small airports (which have always been scaled down and now look really out of place in these tiny plots of land). The roads between cities are out of the player's sandbox so the dismal capacity of the on and off-ramps cause massive tailbacks. In times of substantial redevelopment the roads leading into the city will be clogged by house moving trucks, especially because most cities have a single access road though which everything is forced. The second cause of problems is how those trucks go about finding their destination. The pedestrian AI also suffers from the same programming that bears no semblance of reality - the water and sewage too. I know the series was never a true simulation of reality, as if that's possible, yet it was a cheap solution that the moving bodies all flock toward a vacant spot (be it a citizen to a place of employment or waste to a sewage processing centre with spare capacity). And when that place no longer has vacancies? Then a massive procession of pedestrians will all walk in a line to the next nearest factory or shop until it too fills up and then all moving on to the next ad infinitum. This is the jug of water method - filling one cup after the next. It looks ridiculous and breaks the fourth wall to see virtual people doing that. What's really needed is a grade-separated mass transit system, but of course the underground layer was removed in this latest edition. I found in my city in 3000 that the very limited terrain model was easily exploitable to create rail and road and highway tunnels that could approximate that separation and more importantly free up land for development.

Finally, however, about fifteen years after it was first promised we have 3D graphics rather than the old pseudo-isometric view. Funny thing is, all the Let's Plays I've seen have been played almost exclusively in the same orientation from the start. The only times I've seen the view rotated is in order to see around terrain or after high-rise buildings start to appear and block an object behind it. I imagine that's a habit many players have fallen into with previous games. I only use two orientations in my city because that's how I saw it expand and how I recognise it. Watching other people play hasn't been as frustrating or boring as people imagine when they think of LPs. It's actually shown me what I was always doing wrong when I played SimCity and couldn't get a city started until I struck lucky five years ago. My habit is always pausing out of a desire to stay on top of every development. With the game paused I would go into a spending spree and very quickly bankrupt myself. The trick is to let time flow and zone as appropriate. As the zones develop and become populated they build a tax base which brings in the revenue to continue the process of expansion. It's like a tunnel boring machine - as the front of the machine forges ahead the rear lays the concrete to build the structure.

Anyway, I had promised three years ago to give a tour of the city whenever I could think up names for the various areas. I did, and you must now prepare yourself for a thrilling presentation on the history of urban planning in my Lego City. I mean SimCity. Look, I'll try and balance it out with something heavily political soon.

Written 6th of March and 25th of May
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