SimCity is back, gaming is dead, RIP gaming.

[HaemishM]

It can be run like an actual business instead of a bunch of sweaty manchildren who didn't want to get a real job.

You forgot "... and the bloodsuckers in suits who take advantage of them." 

[Sky]

Most people are never going to track the movement of individual sims, even though the fact that each sim is supposedly an intelligent, autonomous agent is meant to be a key feature. That fact that this feature doesn't really work is hidden because most people don't care about it anyway.

Isn't that kind of a big red flag, too? When nobody gives a shit about one of the key features of a product?

[palmer_eldritch]

Most people are never going to track the movement of individual sims, even though the fact that each sim is supposedly an intelligent, autonomous agent is meant to be a key feature. That fact that this feature doesn't really work is hidden because most people don't care about it anyway.

Isn't that kind of a big red flag, too? When nobody gives a shit about one of the key features of a product?

Yes. I'm not putting the case for the defence, although I understand if it seems that way. I'm trying to explain how it can be that some people play the game and like it.

[Morat20]

In theory, autonomous agents should deliver a better, more interesting product. (As noted upthread, it's how a lot of simulations are being done these days -- and for good reason). It's just, you know, you can't...one fifth ass it. What they've got is way less than half-assed.

Done properly, individual agents with their own houses/work places/preferred leisure activities should create organic and realistic traffic patterns, demand for schooling or better police, entertainment needs -- and move around the city. Heck, depending on how buying/selling houses really works you could probably see actual changes in property values that look a lot like 'perfect neighborhoods' (good schools, proximity to good jobs, etc) you get in the real world.

Done improperly, and well...you get something you have to paper over and looks like shit when you take a close look.

Spore -- I could forgive a lot with Spore. A lot of what they were doing was pretty damn new. There wasn't a lot of broken ground, you know? But this? SimCity's been around for decades. They know EXACTLY what customers want. And autonomous agent simulations? The ground is papered in literature about how they work, how they break, and how to -- and how not to -- do them.

[UnSub]

What I believe is that the gaming industry is accelerating beyond it's ability to measure or control costs, and many people that are involved with the actual process of making a game have fuckall for business knowledge.

I think the pen and paper industry is also instructive. Self-publishing, Kickstarter, and rethinking how rules hook into fiction have really altered the landscape. We're living in a second golden age for the hobby, with amazing stuff being put out. And it's all coupled with nobody making a living at it anymore, outside Paizo, WotC, and FFG.

I agree with your points. I think we are on the way to another industry shake-up and while it might be EA that falls, I could see another mid-tier publisher or two collapsing first. AAA game development is stupidly expensive while sales shrink leading to any single underperformance has the chance to kill a studio dead. Publishers make one or two bad calls - for THQ it was the uDraw and investing a rumoured US$50m into that Warhammer 40K MMO - and they drag everyone down with them.

Reducing game development costs are a big issue, which sees a lot of devs go down the mobile / social path. However, that means a lot of social / mobile games fighting to get noticed and little ability for individual projects to become profitable if they aren't noticed very early on after launch.

[Paelos]

I think a lot of development wasted costs could be avoided if there was adequate planning and due diligence involved in the process.

You have a game idea and here's what it is. That's great. How do you implement it? What are the hardline goals? What are your processes? Has it been done before? Did it work? Why or why not? What's your timeline cost model? What's your six month proforma? 12 months? 2 years? What are your targets for personnel and overhead? What's your operating and management structure look like? How many current assets and employees do you have in house? What kind of personal equity do you have in the project?

If you don't have a working plan and a working model of what you want, you end up with wild promises on undeliverable features, and inevitably wasted resources.

[Morat20]

It's not just that -- I mean, I'm used to a more agile process -- we go back and forth with customers with prototypes and design elements and get feedback as we progress. Sure we waste time, but all the actual stakeholders are involved. The only times we deliver a product 'nobody wanted' is when it's a stepping stone to something they do want, or it's an internal tool we're making available to the few who might use it (since we already had it) or in very rare, and very debated cases -- something we think they'll start using once it's there.

But in games -- you don't have customer feedback until alpha. Until then, it's all feedback either from people heavily invested in the project (the team building it) or people completely unconnected to the game (upper management who are rarely gamers, and even more rarely game in the genre of the actual product in question) which means it's really, really, really easy to lose sight of the goal.

People wanted a modernized Sim City. The autonomous agents was a great way to deepen the game without -- theoretically -- changing it. The problems started when they started adding in internet bullshit (management) and when autonomous agents weren't working properly and they hacked solutions without checking it against actual gameplay and what their customer wanted.

Not NGE levels of "ignore the fuck out of what our players wanted", more...tone deafness.

[Sjofn]

This might be an interesting read for some people? Maybe?

http://game-wisdom.com/guest/of-walkers-and-men-city-building-by-design

It's by the lead designer dude at Tilted Mill.

[Sky]

It's not just that -- I mean, I'm used to a more agile process -- we go back and forth with customers with prototypes and design elements and get feedback as we progress.

But then you have stuff like the new Ultima, where half the vocal minority wants a return to Ultima 7 and the other half wants open pvp original UO. It seems like a lot of projects who have listened closely to 'the customer' have been led astray by 'the rabid fringe who has time to dick around with being involved with something like this'.

[Yegolev]

People are stupid.

[Morat20]

It's not just that -- I mean, I'm used to a more agile process -- we go back and forth with customers with prototypes and design elements and get feedback as we progress.

But then you have stuff like the new Ultima, where half the vocal minority wants a return to Ultima 7 and the other half wants open pvp original UO. It seems like a lot of projects who have listened closely to 'the customer' have been led astray by 'the rabid fringe who has time to dick around with being involved with something like this'.

There's that, but...it's a City Simulator. It's not exactly some nebulous concept, some subtle interplay between various genres.

And it's not like Sim City 4 was massively different than Sim City 3 -- it was just step-wise progress. I'm sure the autonomous agents were part "better simulation" and part "more like the Sims" (even though, you  know, crossover appeal there is pretty nil) and were supposed to be progress. Except it failed utterly. And extra fail was added in. And nobody bothered to ask "Is this a better simulation of a city?"

Well, no. Not when you have to jump through hoops to play a traditionally single player game by yourself. Not when zoning has suddenly become subject to the whims of agents who don't even roughly simulate human behavior, but instead act like some sort of weird disconnected drone setup.

Other things like pretty good -- I've heard some good things about information display, about the ability to actually see and understand complex interactions more intuitively -- which is great. Simulators have tons of information you need to grasp, so the easier the better.

But they fucked up the core concept -- the simulator is busted. It's a worse simulator than what it replaced. A step backwards -- a big one.

[Sky]

There's that, but...it's a City Simulator. It's not exactly some nebulous concept, some subtle interplay between various genres.

And yet they made it just that.

[Soln]

64!

[Paelos]

People wanted a modernized Sim City. The autonomous agents was a great way to deepen the game without -- theoretically -- changing it. The problems started when they started adding in internet bullshit (management) and when autonomous agents weren't working properly and they hacked solutions without checking it against actual gameplay and what their customer wanted.

That's what I mean. They had an idea, but the planning was a complete mess. Granted, the publisher wanted to shoehorn in a DRM system because they don't understand the uselessness of such things in a digital world.

Perhaps an even bigger point is that the idea should have been fleshed out in the planning stage, and perhaps seen as completely unfeasible well before they dumped millions into sunk costs. If you have progressive goals and checkpoints, you can know if a project is going to hit a bailout point before it gets out of hand.

[Hutch]

This might be an interesting read for some people? Maybe?

http://game-wisdom.com/guest/of-walkers-and-men-city-building-by-design

It's by the lead designer dude at Tilted Mill.

Don't you mean, Tilted Mill?

I had forgotten about those guys. It looks like they've got a new game on the way!

[Ingmar]

She said Tilted Mill right in the quote? 

[tgr]

I haven't looked at their older games, except sim city societies ... which wasn't exactly what I'd call great. So what's the chance Medieval Mayor'll be a dog as well?

[Sjofn]

If you didn't play Children of the Nile, you missed out (it's $8 on Steam!). SimCity Societies, I feel was generally underrated, in part because it had the name "SimCity" slapped on it and it wasn't a particularly SIMCITY game. Caesar IV was the most blah of their city-builder efforts, imo. Calling any of them a "dog," I disagree with pretty strongly, though. 

[Rendakor]

Does CotN still hold up pretty well? I missed the Tropico sale and am debating CotN for my city-builder fix.

[Sjofn]

I haven't played it in quite a while, so I don't really know! It's not like trying to go back and play, say, Pharaoh and remembering how to deal with those derpy-ass walkers or anything, though.

[Soln]

Love to know how Tropico4 is doing.  I'll be picking it up on Steam tonight.  All that energy to play SimCity spent on another game!

[Sjofn]

It is pretty funny seeing all the people playing Tropico 4 on my Steam friends list. 

[Khaldun]

This might be an interesting read for some people? Maybe?

http://game-wisdom.com/guest/of-walkers-and-men-city-building-by-design

It's by the lead designer dude at Tilted Mill.

Thanks for this. It's a very interesting piece.

[Morat20]

Love to know how Tropico4 is doing.  I'll be picking it up on Steam tonight.  All that energy to play SimCity spent on another game!

It's fun. :)

[Paelos]

I like the Modern Times upgrades so far, although they almost make the game too easy.

[Morat20]

I like the Modern Times upgrades so far, although they almost make the game too easy.

I haven't tried that -- still doing the original campaign. What's it add?

[Hutch]

She said Tilted Mill right in the quote? 

She did. I might have put a url tag around it.

[Outlawedprod]

To be honest all Simcity needs is some competition.  Well and maybe for one of their devs to post something like fuck that loser =p

[tgr]

Does CotN still hold up pretty well? I missed the Tropico sale and am debating CotN for my city-builder fix.

If a laggy gaming experience pisses you off, then CotN doesn't seem to hold up well. I tried anything from full quality at 2560x1600 to 800x600 at the lowest quality, and moving around, twisting the view etc was at something low like 1-2fps. Fraps claimed I had well over 500 fps on the redraw, and the menus etc themselves seemed responsive enough, but moving around was just annoyingly laggy.

[Ingmar]

http://www.wsgf.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=64&t=25045

Sounds like this might be your issue.

I think Sjofn plays in windowed mode, that might also fix it.

[Outlawedprod]

EA's customer care phone number censored from forum posts?!
https://pay.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/1adofo/simcity_forum_censors_ea_customer_care_phone/

[Gets]

$15 for a harbour plug-in! Double yew-tee-eff the year of our lord two thousand and thirteen.



Edit: while I'm at it

[calapine]

http://clien.net/cs2/data/file/park/1363411951_NEBsDVwu_25L9AZ3.jpg[/img]

403 forbidden image

[tgr]

That link gave me a 403, but a quick google for the filename yielded this link:
http://www.playwares.com/xe/index.php?document_srl=28634100&mid=game&cpage=1

But to be fair, that's just to be expected at this point, isn't it?

[tmp]

Does CotN still hold up pretty well? I missed the Tropico sale and am debating CotN for my city-builder fix.

My first experience with CotN was 1-2 years ago I think, and there wasn't anything age-based about it that'd turn me off. Tone-wise it's somewhat more 'serious' city builder than Tropico, for what's worth.