+YumLemmingKebabs Unfortunately, good as Cities Skylines is, it doesn't provide the multiple concurrently running and interacting cities that would have been a selling point for SimCity if they worked in anything like a compelling way.
+YumLemmingKebabs Cities: Skylines definitely does the general simulation better, but I find myself becoming bored of it because there's no lee-way for cities to be anything less than perfect. That is, the consequences for trouble are very extreme. I can't have a gang-ridden suburb even if I want to, because everyone will just leave. I wish Cities: Skylines would get some of the interesting things about the SimCity series added to it (disasters, terrain morphing, the ability to create multiple interconnected cities in a region, etc.)
***** Ah, but see, they're a small developer who rely on the good will of their fans to continue existing more than accessibility and limitless marketing budgets. They have much more of a reason to actually do what you want them to than EA does. Although admittedly they can't afford to do as much as EA, but at least they'll do a lot more of everything they possibly can.
I stepped out of the capsule and breathed the oxygen flooding my helmet. Surveying the pure white of the comment section I couldn't help but think of the devastation that would be wrought here. Soon discussions would curdle into arguments as users clamored over each other to make vapid points that nobody cared about in the first place. But for now, it was pure, only the "No comments to display" statement to be seen. "First", I said to nobody in particular. "First."
hey baby I saw this comment on a new video so I googled it thinking it might be a copypasta. You're the oldest instance of this comment I could find and I would like to ask if you are the original author? If so, thank you! I like it a lot. And if you never see this, know this: imma use it
I'm still bummed that this Sim City never worked out. Mechanics aside, the art and music is an absolute joy and feels utterly wasted here. Thank goodness for Cities Skylines though for carrying on the torch.
+OV3RK1LL3R65 After it got cheaper AND it stopped being so pedantic about requiring online I tried the new one and yes it is.. more modern? But it isn't as good as Simcity 4.
There is two things i like about this game. 1. The building upgrades are pretty cool (The idea of extending a building instead of adding a new one) 2. How some of the style and ideas has influenced other games.
what do you think about cities skyline's take on things? i think they nailed everything simcity 2013 failed to deliver and in many ways its the modern city building game that was promised by ea but it took pdx for it to be delivered
I've played the SimCity games since the SNES and Amiga versions of the original were around. SimCity 2000 was always my favourite. They all worked real well and were compelling to play. This one felt like it was made by people who had seen SimCity, had a little experience with it, but didn't really understand how all the systems worked. You nailed its issues on the head. It's a bunch of not entirely functional systems failing to produce a fully functioning whole. When they released this and it all went wrong EA offered a free game to early buyers. I downloaded SimCity 4.
+Mellow Gaming To be honest, it seems more like a game made by a committee in a large corporation, since it has numerous conflicting goals it couldn't settle upon, and was forced to include multiplayer in spite of its incompatibility with the genre because some airheaded executive of said giant corporation that eats better companies and ruins their franchises declared all games should be multiplayer. It reaffirms my decision not to ever buy another Ubisoft, Activision, or EA game again.
Agents are so unbelievably simplistic that whatever the reason for limited city sizes it was not performance, at best they chose not to invest in the simulation over some other part of its unfocused development. As a result, the most emergent behavior I've seen from ages was in a gambling city, where everyone came in on public transport, but chose to leave in taxis. Income was dependent (and thus the city optimized around) getting an infinite stream of taxis out of the city.
7 years later, and “SimCity! Now with online multiplayer!” still sounds like something Game Informer would cook up for their goofy annual April Fools segment.
Oh yes, please do another part on this. Very interesting, even though (or maybe especially because) I've never played it; only it's much more well received counter part, Cities: Skylines. The "traffic takes weird routes to its goals" problem was present in that title as well, although it was relatively swiftly addressed. Maybe you can incorporate a comparison in a possible next part?
Pharaoh and the Ceasar series also take this approach of "actors" walking through the city, but its kept very simple, and it works very well. I don't think there is a traffic limit for instance, its all about connecting things together the best you can, thinking about where your resources come from, etc. You also have a simple "roadblock" tool you can use to direct the actors walking around and make sure they don't get lost, or to simply split a city into districts with their own separate sets of actors. Its also an example of a city building game with specific goals: either getting a certain population count, or certain levels of prosperity etc. In the early missions, those goals serve more to act as tutorials, but they quickly become actual challenges that affect how you build your city. You may have great monuments to build, which require a lot of resources and trade, or might require you dedicate half of your city's size for their construction. The monument building is really fun by itself too, its in elaborate phases where you see the workers go to the construction spot and do the job, it makes for a fun thing to look at while you tweak your city in its later phase, checking off the last requirements of a mission. Even though its not "interactive" by itself, seeing a great pyramid being built over several years as you tweak your city is really satisfying. And since those constructions require a lot of work and resources to manage and obtain, they feel like a proper achievement. The game is structured like an RTS game campaign, with specific challenges for every mission. One mission might have very little food, so you need to focus more on trade, others might have war, so you need to build an army. Some missions place you along the Nile, giving you access to plenty of farmland, others might be around an oasis in the desert and require a different approach to trade, food and supplies. When you complete a mission, you have the option to continue to rule for a number of years if you want to keep building the city for a bit, but you really feel like moving on to the next one. Pharaoh is one of my favorite games, I recommend anyone to try it. Its a very different approach to a city building game if you are more used to the Sim City-like take on it.
This is why if I want to play a Tycoon game with someone else, I play OpenTTD. You run a transport company that plays a very large part in developing cities. When you have real, human competition, it gets seriously tense. You can fund roadworks to screw up traffic flow in cities and cut down the profit margin for your rival, getting you closer to buying them out and winning. You can truly influence how things grow and shrink, such as growing a town of 100 to 100,000.
"A bit of a mess" he says. I once had my entire city backed up by Septic trucks spawned from a broken sewer pipe. Theres a lot of mess here. nyk nyk nyk,
+Decaying Reverie I'd add Noah Caldwell Gervais to the list, at least once he's able to support himself. Poor guy had *just* gone full time with his videos and someone slashed his car engine and forced him to take a part time job again.
Haha, that bleep was so random. Good analysis by the way. As someone who's never played SimCity, do you recommend I play SimCity 1? Or skip to SimCity 4? I usually like to play the first of a series to see how it has progressed over the years (as the history nerd I am).
I find it funny that cities skylines with a small amount of staff was able to make something better in every way (although sim city's ost has more of a presence but in a city sim that's more a minor point than a major factor)
Cities: Skylines largely uses the same agents approach, but makes it work for much larger cities. I guess part of the failure of Sim City is just plain technical incompetence.
+celeron55 Indeed. I'm still confused as to just how much of Cities Skylines is actual agents, and how much of it is just clever abstraction. Like, just because the game shows that a person is driving to work in the morning doesn't mean that the underlying economic simulation is actually dependent on that person getting to work and doing their job. I also don't know if Skylines implemented utilities as agents. I know garbage trucks seem to be agents, but I don't know if electricity and water are. That, by itself, probably spares the simulation from hundreds or thousands of active agents and frees up the CPU for more important things like traffic and people.
Sim City 2013 had some really cool ideas, and if they made this game again but fixed the problems, added a single player mode, and let you play with specific people (otherwise known as your friends) then I would totally buy the game.
I used to really love the genre, but nowadays, I can't play much besides Dwarf Fortress or other games like it, where it all but completely throws the concept of trying to be a city out the window. At least the Sierra City builders, as formulaic as they were, had a "walker" system that was rational and understandable, even if it was counter-intuitive to see people get their water based upon the choices of a well-worker, rather than going to the well, themselves. The game could at least be summed up as mastery of the walker system to ensure that you built a road system that had so few choices that every house could be visited in about 4 passes. Still, there was a finite limit on the number of times I could build basically the exact same city, and Emperor really pushed that limit with the Feng Shui system basically mandating your city layout straight from the start, since you only could build your housing cluster in the single "wood elemental" chunk on the map. "Are you a skilled enough player to follow our connect-the-dots layout for how we pre-planned your city for you?" Tropico falls into a somewhat similar trap. At least there's some choice in what kind of industry you focus on or whether you go for tourism, but it's still a matter of achieving easy goals you're lead by the nose towards, and the dictator elections are a joke because it's so easy to please everyone.
For me, Sim City 2000 was the perfect balance of function and detail, with enjoyable exploits like how you never had to pay upkeep for hydro or wind power (meaning the most long-term effective way of powering a city was to build it alongside a massive waterfall, or exploiting the glitches with running cables over water,bulldozing and rebuilding them to be able to create a hydro plant on each side) and that you could reliably calculate how far away from your roads sims could build (6 tile wide city blocks everywhere for maximum efficiency) I really, REALLY wish the game could work properly on modern PCs. The most functional version I have will run and whatnot but crashes the moment you try to save or load a city. I tried Sim City 4 eventually and I just did not care for all the new stuff like sewage management, the new terrain setup, the much more complicated transit systems, etc. I've had Cities Skylines in my steam list for a long time but can never commit to buying it because I feel certain I'll be disappointed. I like my city builder sims to be less realistic. Banished is about as close as I like to get, and I find that one frustrating because to produce all the goods I want to means that I am always just drowning in surplus food and praying I can trade most of it away for wool, leather and new seed types.
excellent video, looking forward to part 2. You talk about the inclusion of great works as a win state for the game do you feel like the arcologies in Simcity 2000 served a similar purpose?
I totally agree, path-agent simulation doesn't relate to a real purpose, in other words, people and transport aren't just objects moving on a path, in reality people move for a reason, go to somewhere, in this case should be to work and back to home (to keep the simulation not too complicated) and the transport system should be a consequense of that, and should correspond to the output city behavior.
Personally, I prefer analysis of more mainstream games - and especially strategy and tycoon games - instead of experimental independent games or "games about games". Thanks for the upload! Looking forward for part 2.
Very good video, but I really can't say I agree. I loved SimCity. I loved the multiplayer, being forced to design a city a certain way. I loved the way resources moved around with few exceptions (firetruck traffic jam anyone?). I loved the diverse ways you could build cities and how different you could get them to look. The problem wasn't necessarily the design, it was the amount of content. You could experience 99% of what the game has to offer in about 8 hours. For those 8 hours, I remember loving the game. But, it came crashing down after, not just with the atrocious servers that would constantly kick you out of the game and, in extreme cases, roll your city back, but also when you realized that the game was just too easy. This game punishes you for absolutely nothing. You could build the most unlivable city there is, and you're STILL gonna do well. To me, that was the game breaker. There was nothing to keep me engaged.
I would love to hear what you have to say on Cities Skylines. Cities is nothing earth changing but sometimes things don't need to be. The time just melts away playing it.
I hope your next video tackles how weird it was to directly control businesses as the mayor in this Sim City. It felt like a completely separate game disjointed from all of the indirect control the genre is famous for.
Brilliant examination and criticism of the problems of SimCity; until now I hadn't really understood the deeper glaring problems of the game (aside from the standard online/city limit issues). It's sad that they really didn't put enough thought into the design of their game; I feel like there was a lot of potential that could have been realised, instead they created an abomination.
They actually designed it to require online, in a really stupid way, but they did. The marketing spin that online was essential wasn't total BS, only 99% BS. My head is still spinning at that revelation.
The agents, for the love of God, the agents! I still can't quite fathom how those happened. Not only are they a painfully bad design decision but also, as you mentioned, ridiculously expensive in terms of performance and thus possibly the main reason why the plots are so small. The agents may very well be solely responsible for most of the game's biggest flaws. I simply don't understand how this could happen in a AAA game. I mean, it's not the kind of flaw that is hard to spot due to a project's massive scope, it's a kind of error that should become obvious while still on paper or even the very moment the idea is first brought up. How this system could possibly be greenlit will remain a mystery to me.
Cities Skylines still doesn't deliver on the system complexity and aesthetic of earlier simcity games. It really scratched my itch for a sandbox city builder that allows me to really build out my metropolis, and the modding community that allows you to really detail the game to the last trash bin and tire mark in the city has kept me playing that game for hundreds of hours
Well, this agent model _is_ really neat and elegant. Too bad it doesn't work. It's also not clear to me why things like the congestion stuff happen; a multi-agent system should be perfect to get around this, if the agents were designed appropriately.
I've always said SC2013 tried to be everything to everyone, and thus included a lot of disjointed and half-ass systems instead of the few good ones that would make a really good game -- and it trying to please everyone let to pleasing very few.. The agents things really is both silly in its inefficiency. Most of these things could have been (and previously had been) with things like radius effect or similar. The agents do make since for the actual sims, but not much else -- and then only if make a sims focused game similar to Societies. In some ways even that is an example of trying to please everyone: those who wanted detail were disappointed with what they saw when they looked (like dumb as rocks sims with no consistent home or job or real identity), while those who wanted big, expansive, grandiose (or simply diversified) cities couldn't have those either because of the sized constraints that came with too much detail.
I don't know that I would consider Act Raiser a sim exactly, more of a god game with some role-playing and some action platforming (but then where is the line between god games and sims drawn, right?). I remember playing and liking that game but also that it was incredibly easy (it shows you how to win, for crying out loud), and beyond its relative uniqueness, I don't really understand how its legend has persisted so. Was it some kind of landmark release, or was it just that it was a launch title for the Super Nintendo? Or something else?
I got the impression that EA wanted to use the online model to hang a lot of IAP and other money earning things off (hence the massive fib about offline being impossible when people found that very little was actually being done on remote servers and it could have been a offline game after all) but all of that went away when the launch became a total nightmare and poisoned the micro-payment well. Plus having only-online is great for EA because once they sunset the on-line servers people will be forced to upgrade to latest Simcity 20XX or buy a subscription pass thus keeping users on a frequent payers treadmill if they want to keep their on-line creations alive. In hindsight, it's probably a good thing that games like Simcity, Dungeon Keeper Mobile and Dead Space 3 failed miserably. It sent EA a clear message that screwing over their customers will not be tolerated given an intelligent and informed gaming audience that no longer suckles on the teat of industry-supported media outfits..!
The point of using agents instead of models if to make the animations in your city more meaningful. Unfortunately, this fails once agents start acting like dumb tracers instead of making (at the very least) pathing decisions.
I think SimCity does have one central idea, and that central idea is DLC, and that when you think of that in the context of what you've explained here, that just goes to show how designing a game without the user experience of the game being the primary consideration results in a hodgepodge of unfocused systems that would have worked better had they been coordinated in achieving the singular goal of a good player experience. Instead everything was cartoony and flat so that new content could be easily created and seamlessly slotted into the game without conflict.
+VN1X I'm always torn on this. I don't disagree that just me talking over game footage for 10+ minutes is super boring, but at the same time I'm always worried about copyright hits against the music. That stuff happens for indies and AAA alike, mostly due to third parties responsible for selling/"protecting" the music from infringement, so I'm never sure when or if it's safe other than the intro/extro snippets. I also think I tend to edit clips really quick to the point where game noise might be distracting? I'll maybe mess with it in the next video and see if it isn't too irritating.
+Errant Signal I think the current presentation of your videos works just fine, especially since your videos are supposed to have a more analytical style and you don't want to risk inappropriate music distracting from what you're saying. However if you do feel you need music you could purchase royalty free music from sites like stockmusic.net or musicloops.com.
+Errant Signal Thanks for the reply and fair enough I suppose! There's royalty free music on the web which is perfectly serviceable (as posted by LittleJimmy). For a horror review something ominous playing in the background only enhances the presentation I think and wouldn't take anything away from the actual review. Just my two cents! Looking forward to your next review.
+Errant Signal Prefer it without music. I find music underneath spoken analysis extremely distracting. MrBtongue does it, or used to, and although I enjoy the videos a lot, I found his choice of music extremely overbearing. Maybe in your videos some music here and there? Kind of like transitional music for ideas and subjects? That might be nice. :-)
+Errant Signal I am curious to see your try on using some sound in your videos, that beeing said i think its perfectly fine like it is now. Listening to an interesting analysis of yours is enough for me i am glad to say my attention span is still long enough.
The core of SimCity was one thing and one thing only: shit over all the fans and rip off all the stupid people that bought it. I was one of these idiots and I regret it to this day.
I was done with this game after those 2 free trial hours EA was giving on Origin. Great way to make people not to buy it :-D I filled almost the whole area and didn't know what to do next.
Sim City, a great insult to the saga and this genre, now Cities Skylines did what EA didn't do (all while consuming the original Maxis), for half the price, and hopefully the expansion will be pretty good since it kinda fells like DLC.
tsartomato The walker system basically means the it's the services and business that is "moving around" So, people don't really go to the dentist, a walker-dentist will go knocking on everyone's door. Obvious this is an abstraction, and later will be mostly replaced by the aura system, where the "walker-dentist" wont even show up, and that people live in a radius to the dentistry will all get tooth-care, e.g. Caesar 4. Classic Simcity. In Simcity 2013, Children of the Nile, Tropico, it's a real *agent system*, costumers actually needs to go to the place of business Cities Skylines eploys a mixture of the Aura and the Agent system
+Will Ferrous Impressions Games used an agents system, but only the basics. Their service walkers like tax collectors wouldn't actually try to smartly cover area; rather, they'd just take random turns at intersections. Thus, a tax office on a corner might never have a tax collector visit a house on the opposite corner, just because of randomness. Another important factor is that SimCity agents have both destinations and collision. Simulating traffic is hard only because of two factors: (1) people have somewhere to get to and (2) people can't pass through other people. Impressions Games ignored the second because all their roads were single-lane. Many early SimCity types ignored the first, because you usually didn't track individual cars, just watched them move; it didn't matter to players if a car left a business and circled the city for 6 in-game days, only to end in another business.
anyone else stop buying EA games after that cluster fuck. The game could have been good if it actually worked. It seemed ever feature broke another feature. Its 2013 has it gotten better. Errant Signal mentioned the cars path finding bug, as I remember it this was one of the first things they "fixed". All they did was actually weight the paths based on traffic(something they should have done before.
So I doubt you take game requests but there it goes anyway. A review on Star Wars: the old republic? Because I feel there's still a few things about that game that haven't been talked about. Also to tie this comment to the video I'll add this. I find it funny how both Sim City and SWTOR have features based on multiplayer that end up being underdeveloped. The big difference being that SWTOR's multiplayer content wasn't it's main focus perhaps to a fault.
My one edit? Don't label your model as 'Totally Made Up'. I paused and looked at it seriously, and if I hadn't seen the title the 'Gremlins Running Food Factories' would have been much funnier :P.
![BOWKYLION - วิงวอน (ex-change) [Official MV]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/cLdnZWDaO-w/mqdefault.jpg)
Excellent analysis, man. This game still saddens me.
+Lazy Game Reviews And then you remember it's why Cities Skylines exists.
+Lazy Game Reviews Hi LGR!
+YumLemmingKebabs Unfortunately, good as Cities Skylines is, it doesn't provide the multiple concurrently running and interacting cities that would have been a selling point for SimCity if they worked in anything like a compelling way.
+YumLemmingKebabs Cities: Skylines definitely does the general simulation better, but I find myself becoming bored of it because there's no lee-way for cities to be anything less than perfect. That is, the consequences for trouble are very extreme. I can't have a gang-ridden suburb even if I want to, because everyone will just leave. I wish Cities: Skylines would get some of the interesting things about the SimCity series added to it (disasters, terrain morphing, the ability to create multiple interconnected cities in a region, etc.)
***** Ah, but see, they're a small developer who rely on the good will of their fans to continue existing more than accessibility and limitless marketing budgets. They have much more of a reason to actually do what you want them to than EA does. Although admittedly they can't afford to do as much as EA, but at least they'll do a lot more of everything they possibly can.
I stepped out of the capsule and breathed the oxygen flooding my helmet. Surveying the pure white of the comment section I couldn't help but think of the devastation that would be wrought here. Soon discussions would curdle into arguments as users clamored over each other to make vapid points that nobody cared about in the first place. But for now, it was pure, only the "No comments to display" statement to be seen.
"First", I said to nobody in particular. "First."
+HolidayKirk sniff, sniff.... that was beautiful
+HolidayKirk Almost had it.
+HolidayKirk Ground control to Major Tom....
Your circuit's dead, there's something wrong
Can you hear me Major Tom?
Heeeeeere am I floating in a tin can
far above the moon
hey baby I saw this comment on a new video so I googled it thinking it might be a copypasta. You're the oldest instance of this comment I could find and I would like to ask if you are the original author?
If so, thank you! I like it a lot.
And if you never see this, know this:
imma use it
I'm still bummed that this Sim City never worked out. Mechanics aside, the art and music is an absolute joy and feels utterly wasted here.
Thank goodness for Cities Skylines though for carrying on the torch.
+OV3RK1LL3R65
After it got cheaper AND it stopped being so pedantic about requiring online I tried the new one and yes it is.. more modern? But it isn't as good as Simcity 4.
+Chris90483 Funny you'd mentioned that. Apparently the recent CS expansion added a ton of tourism related content.
There is two things i like about this game.
1. The building upgrades are pretty cool (The idea of extending a building instead of adding a new one)
2. How some of the style and ideas has influenced other games.
Can you do an in-depth analysis, like this one, of Cities Skylines?
what do you think about cities skyline's take on things? i think they nailed everything simcity 2013 failed to deliver and in many ways its the modern city building game that was promised by ea but it took pdx for it to be delivered
+Andrew Harper I think Skylines will probably make an appearance in the next part as a point of comparison!
i was thinking just that haha
+Errant Signal oh mah gawd yes, all my yes, yes yes yes.
+Errant Signal You are the proverbial "man".
It was great, but didn't surpass SimCity 4.
I've played the SimCity games since the SNES and Amiga versions of the original were around. SimCity 2000 was always my favourite. They all worked real well and were compelling to play. This one felt like it was made by people who had seen SimCity, had a little experience with it, but didn't really understand how all the systems worked. You nailed its issues on the head. It's a bunch of not entirely functional systems failing to produce a fully functioning whole. When they released this and it all went wrong EA offered a free game to early buyers. I downloaded SimCity 4.
+Mellow Gaming To be honest, it seems more like a game made by a committee in a large corporation, since it has numerous conflicting goals it couldn't settle upon, and was forced to include multiplayer in spite of its incompatibility with the genre because some airheaded executive of said giant corporation that eats better companies and ruins their franchises declared all games should be multiplayer.
It reaffirms my decision not to ever buy another Ubisoft, Activision, or EA game again.
Agents are so unbelievably simplistic that whatever the reason for limited city sizes it was not performance, at best they chose not to invest in the simulation over some other part of its unfocused development.
As a result, the most emergent behavior I've seen from ages was in a gambling city, where everyone came in on public transport, but chose to leave in taxis. Income was dependent (and thus the city optimized around) getting an infinite stream of taxis out of the city.
Design by committee at its finest.
7 years later, and “SimCity! Now with online multiplayer!” still sounds like something Game Informer would cook up for their goofy annual April Fools segment.
errant signal is a rare treat, but a good one.
Will the second part include a comparison of Sim City to Cities Skylines?
+LeopardInTheMist Asked the same thing, should have checked the comments. Mia Culpa, Signal.
+Daniel O'Dette I'm pretty sure he didn't want to sift through 140+ comments just to see if somebody already asked.
Always love these videos, you deserve way more attention for how sharp your analysis is.
What do you mean? HW intensive? But... but our power of the cloooooud! :P
Oh yes, please do another part on this. Very interesting, even though (or maybe especially because) I've never played it; only it's much more well received counter part, Cities: Skylines. The "traffic takes weird routes to its goals" problem was present in that title as well, although it was relatively swiftly addressed. Maybe you can incorporate a comparison in a possible next part?
Pharaoh and the Ceasar series also take this approach of "actors" walking through the city, but its kept very simple, and it works very well. I don't think there is a traffic limit for instance, its all about connecting things together the best you can, thinking about where your resources come from, etc. You also have a simple "roadblock" tool you can use to direct the actors walking around and make sure they don't get lost, or to simply split a city into districts with their own separate sets of actors.
Its also an example of a city building game with specific goals: either getting a certain population count, or certain levels of prosperity etc. In the early missions, those goals serve more to act as tutorials, but they quickly become actual challenges that affect how you build your city. You may have great monuments to build, which require a lot of resources and trade, or might require you dedicate half of your city's size for their construction. The monument building is really fun by itself too, its in elaborate phases where you see the workers go to the construction spot and do the job, it makes for a fun thing to look at while you tweak your city in its later phase, checking off the last requirements of a mission. Even though its not "interactive" by itself, seeing a great pyramid being built over several years as you tweak your city is really satisfying. And since those constructions require a lot of work and resources to manage and obtain, they feel like a proper achievement.
The game is structured like an RTS game campaign, with specific challenges for every mission. One mission might have very little food, so you need to focus more on trade, others might have war, so you need to build an army. Some missions place you along the Nile, giving you access to plenty of farmland, others might be around an oasis in the desert and require a different approach to trade, food and supplies. When you complete a mission, you have the option to continue to rule for a number of years if you want to keep building the city for a bit, but you really feel like moving on to the next one.
Pharaoh is one of my favorite games, I recommend anyone to try it. Its a very different approach to a city building game if you are more used to the Sim City-like take on it.
The end of this video reminded me of the Simcity2000 Transit advisor:
YOU CAN'T CUT THIS VIDEO INTO TWO PARTS! YOU WILL REGRET THIS!
Really good, dude! Looking foward to the second part.
i hate that it failed, but i love that City skylines was born out of this failure
This is why if I want to play a Tycoon game with someone else, I play OpenTTD. You run a transport company that plays a very large part in developing cities. When you have real, human competition, it gets seriously tense. You can fund roadworks to screw up traffic flow in cities and cut down the profit margin for your rival, getting you closer to buying them out and winning. You can truly influence how things grow and shrink, such as growing a town of 100 to 100,000.
I love that you mentioned Afterlife. That's a game I would kill to see a developer bring back in some form or another.
I'll return as a subscriber. Just remembered about this channel, and checked if you still have comments disabled. Glad you came to your senses.
"A bit of a mess" he says.
I once had my entire city backed up by Septic trucks spawned from a broken sewer pipe. Theres a lot of mess here. nyk nyk nyk,
Holy crap, a new stu video, AND a new errant signal?
+Vernon682 Thus begins a golden age for the intellectual gamer who watches TH-cam videos.
+Vernon682 who's stu? I never heard of them and kinda want to watch their stuff now
+Decaying Reverie
I'd add Noah Caldwell Gervais to the list, at least once he's able to support himself. Poor guy had *just* gone full time with his videos and someone slashed his car engine and forced him to take a part time job again.
stu?
***** ***** xboxahoy, he hasn't uploaded for months.
Do you think you'll make a comparison between Sim City 2013 and the recent City: Skylines?
Looking forward to part two if you do it :D
Haha, that bleep was so random. Good analysis by the way. As someone who's never played SimCity, do you recommend I play SimCity 1? Or skip to SimCity 4? I usually like to play the first of a series to see how it has progressed over the years (as the history nerd I am).
Thumbs up for the end music. That music. Is seared into my mind forever... do they sell the album?
I find it funny that cities skylines with a small amount of staff was able to make something better in every way (although sim city's ost has more of a presence but in a city sim that's more a minor point than a major factor)
Cities: Skylines largely uses the same agents approach, but makes it work for much larger cities. I guess part of the failure of Sim City is just plain technical incompetence.
+celeron55
Indeed. I'm still confused as to just how much of Cities Skylines is actual agents, and how much of it is just clever abstraction. Like, just because the game shows that a person is driving to work in the morning doesn't mean that the underlying economic simulation is actually dependent on that person getting to work and doing their job. I also don't know if Skylines implemented utilities as agents. I know garbage trucks seem to be agents, but I don't know if electricity and water are. That, by itself, probably spares the simulation from hundreds or thousands of active agents and frees up the CPU for more important things like traffic and people.
I like how you break down the game machanics. I would love the see more of these :)
Sim City 2013 had some really cool ideas, and if they made this game again but fixed the problems, added a single player mode, and let you play with specific people (otherwise known as your friends) then I would totally buy the game.
Well now I know whos videos I'm slowly going to watch over the next week :P
Great video as always man, by the way are you planning to do a video about the Game Story of SOMA?
Very interesting analysis. Second part? Yes, please!
looking forward to part 2.
always appreciate your quality of research. game design is a real topic, seriously under-explored.
Could you please please please do a video on why SimCity 4 was great but also look at it's flaws?
I used to really love the genre, but nowadays, I can't play much besides Dwarf Fortress or other games like it, where it all but completely throws the concept of trying to be a city out the window.
At least the Sierra City builders, as formulaic as they were, had a "walker" system that was rational and understandable, even if it was counter-intuitive to see people get their water based upon the choices of a well-worker, rather than going to the well, themselves. The game could at least be summed up as mastery of the walker system to ensure that you built a road system that had so few choices that every house could be visited in about 4 passes.
Still, there was a finite limit on the number of times I could build basically the exact same city, and Emperor really pushed that limit with the Feng Shui system basically mandating your city layout straight from the start, since you only could build your housing cluster in the single "wood elemental" chunk on the map. "Are you a skilled enough player to follow our connect-the-dots layout for how we pre-planned your city for you?"
Tropico falls into a somewhat similar trap. At least there's some choice in what kind of industry you focus on or whether you go for tourism, but it's still a matter of achieving easy goals you're lead by the nose towards, and the dictator elections are a joke because it's so easy to please everyone.
For me, Sim City 2000 was the perfect balance of function and detail, with enjoyable exploits like how you never had to pay upkeep for hydro or wind power (meaning the most long-term effective way of powering a city was to build it alongside a massive waterfall, or exploiting the glitches with running cables over water,bulldozing and rebuilding them to be able to create a hydro plant on each side) and that you could reliably calculate how far away from your roads sims could build (6 tile wide city blocks everywhere for maximum efficiency) I really, REALLY wish the game could work properly on modern PCs. The most functional version I have will run and whatnot but crashes the moment you try to save or load a city.
I tried Sim City 4 eventually and I just did not care for all the new stuff like sewage management, the new terrain setup, the much more complicated transit systems, etc. I've had Cities Skylines in my steam list for a long time but can never commit to buying it because I feel certain I'll be disappointed. I like my city builder sims to be less realistic. Banished is about as close as I like to get, and I find that one frustrating because to produce all the goods I want to means that I am always just drowning in surplus food and praying I can trade most of it away for wool, leather and new seed types.
excellent video, looking forward to part 2. You talk about the inclusion of great works as a win state for the game do you feel like the arcologies in Simcity 2000 served a similar purpose?
I totally agree, path-agent simulation doesn't relate to a real purpose, in other words, people and transport aren't just objects moving on a path, in reality people move for a reason, go to somewhere, in this case should be to work and back to home (to keep the simulation not too complicated) and the transport system should be a consequense of that, and should correspond to the output city behavior.
I never even considered putting houses next to power plants. Is it just me?
Personally, I prefer analysis of more mainstream games - and especially strategy and tycoon games - instead of experimental independent games or "games about games". Thanks for the upload! Looking forward for part 2.
Would be great to see a comparison to Cities: Skylines.
I would pay good money for a city sim where you have to deal with intermittent godzilla attacks.
hoping for a part 2
I got an ad for Cities: Skylines on this video.
sooo.... have you played Cities: Skylines?
A new expansion just came out ;)
Yout should continue this theme in more videos, also make more comparison with other city management games/simulators. Thanks!
Very good video, but I really can't say I agree.
I loved SimCity. I loved the multiplayer, being forced to design a city a certain way. I loved the way resources moved around with few exceptions (firetruck traffic jam anyone?). I loved the diverse ways you could build cities and how different you could get them to look.
The problem wasn't necessarily the design, it was the amount of content. You could experience 99% of what the game has to offer in about 8 hours. For those 8 hours, I remember loving the game. But, it came crashing down after, not just with the atrocious servers that would constantly kick you out of the game and, in extreme cases, roll your city back, but also when you realized that the game was just too easy. This game punishes you for absolutely nothing. You could build the most unlivable city there is, and you're STILL gonna do well.
To me, that was the game breaker. There was nothing to keep me engaged.
I would love to hear what you have to say on Cities Skylines. Cities is nothing earth changing but sometimes things don't need to be. The time just melts away playing it.
Nice work!
Maybe you can also cover Cities: Skylines afterwards and the differences between SimCity 2013 and it.
Got the mobile version ad before the video XD
I hope your next video tackles how weird it was to directly control businesses as the mayor in this Sim City. It felt like a completely separate game disjointed from all of the indirect control the genre is famous for.
Gee, I'd love to see you analyze Cities:Skylines that way.
Wow. I did not realize SimCity 2013 tried to use ABM. I guess they did not bother talking to anyone in the field.....
Brilliant examination and criticism of the problems of SimCity; until now I hadn't really understood the deeper glaring problems of the game (aside from the standard online/city limit issues). It's sad that they really didn't put enough thought into the design of their game; I feel like there was a lot of potential that could have been realised, instead they created an abomination.
Errant Signal, will there be a future video on Undertale? I'm really curious what you'll have to say about it?
Always such a treat!
Very interesting and smartly written.
They actually designed it to require online, in a really stupid way, but they did. The marketing spin that online was essential wasn't total BS, only 99% BS. My head is still spinning at that revelation.
Pretty late to the game on this one, but that's OK because I still need reminders to NOT pick it up on sale.
The agents, for the love of God, the agents! I still can't quite fathom how those happened. Not only are they a painfully bad design decision but also, as you mentioned, ridiculously expensive in terms of performance and thus possibly the main reason why the plots are so small. The agents may very well be solely responsible for most of the game's biggest flaws. I simply don't understand how this could happen in a AAA game. I mean, it's not the kind of flaw that is hard to spot due to a project's massive scope, it's a kind of error that should become obvious while still on paper or even the very moment the idea is first brought up. How this system could possibly be greenlit will remain a mystery to me.
SimCity 2013 was using the same engine known to be maxed out in SimCity 2000 -> SimCity 4. That was a major error there.
Thank god for Cities Skylines!
Cities Skylines still doesn't deliver on the system complexity and aesthetic of earlier simcity games. It really scratched my itch for a sandbox city builder that allows me to really build out my metropolis, and the modding community that allows you to really detail the game to the last trash bin and tire mark in the city has kept me playing that game for hundreds of hours
Well, this agent model _is_ really neat and elegant. Too bad it doesn't work. It's also not clear to me why things like the congestion stuff happen; a multi-agent system should be perfect to get around this, if the agents were designed appropriately.
They should have called this game "Sim Town".
11:00 - Ahh... so close to 1,337 inhabitants...
Great video. Can you cover Fallout 3 or New Vegas before Fallout 4 comes out?! Please !?
The beginners guide episode. Make it.
I've always said SC2013 tried to be everything to everyone, and thus included a lot of disjointed and half-ass systems instead of the few good ones that would make a really good game -- and it trying to please everyone let to pleasing very few..
The agents things really is both silly in its inefficiency. Most of these things could have been (and previously had been) with things like radius effect or similar. The agents do make since for the actual sims, but not much else -- and then only if make a sims focused game similar to Societies. In some ways even that is an example of trying to please everyone: those who wanted detail were disappointed with what they saw when they looked (like dumb as rocks sims with no consistent home or job or real identity), while those who wanted big, expansive, grandiose (or simply diversified) cities couldn't have those either because of the sized constraints that came with too much detail.
Hi! I'm new to your channel. Is that really your voice or are you doing some post processing effect?
I don't know that I would consider Act Raiser a sim exactly, more of a god game with some role-playing and some action platforming (but then where is the line between god games and sims drawn, right?).
I remember playing and liking that game but also that it was incredibly easy (it shows you how to win, for crying out loud), and beyond its relative uniqueness, I don't really understand how its legend has persisted so. Was it some kind of landmark release, or was it just that it was a launch title for the Super Nintendo? Or something else?
I got the impression that EA wanted to use the online model to hang a lot of IAP and other money earning things off (hence the massive fib about offline being impossible when people found that very little was actually being done on remote servers and it could have been a offline game after all) but all of that went away when the launch became a total nightmare and poisoned the micro-payment well.
Plus having only-online is great for EA because once they sunset the on-line servers people will be forced to upgrade to latest Simcity 20XX or buy a subscription pass thus keeping users on a frequent payers treadmill if they want to keep their on-line creations alive.
In hindsight, it's probably a good thing that games like Simcity, Dungeon Keeper Mobile and Dead Space 3 failed miserably. It sent EA a clear message that screwing over their customers will not be tolerated given an intelligent and informed gaming audience that no longer suckles on the teat of industry-supported media outfits..!
The point of using agents instead of models if to make the animations in your city more meaningful. Unfortunately, this fails once agents start acting like dumb tracers instead of making (at the very least) pathing decisions.
I think SimCity does have one central idea, and that central idea is DLC, and that when you think of that in the context of what you've explained here, that just goes to show how designing a game without the user experience of the game being the primary consideration results in a hodgepodge of unfocused systems that would have worked better had they been coordinated in achieving the singular goal of a good player experience. Instead everything was cartoony and flat so that new content could be easily created and seamlessly slotted into the game without conflict.
Could do with some background music or game sound? Just a friendly presentation tip.
+VN1X I'm always torn on this. I don't disagree that just me talking over game footage for 10+ minutes is super boring, but at the same time I'm always worried about copyright hits against the music. That stuff happens for indies and AAA alike, mostly due to third parties responsible for selling/"protecting" the music from infringement, so I'm never sure when or if it's safe other than the intro/extro snippets. I also think I tend to edit clips really quick to the point where game noise might be distracting? I'll maybe mess with it in the next video and see if it isn't too irritating.
+Errant Signal I think the current presentation of your videos works just fine, especially since your videos are supposed to have a more analytical style and you don't want to risk inappropriate music distracting from what you're saying.
However if you do feel you need music you could purchase royalty free music from sites like stockmusic.net or musicloops.com.
+Errant Signal Thanks for the reply and fair enough I suppose!
There's royalty free music on the web which is perfectly serviceable (as posted by LittleJimmy). For a horror review something ominous playing in the background only enhances the presentation I think and wouldn't take anything away from the actual review. Just my two cents!
Looking forward to your next review.
+Errant Signal Prefer it without music. I find music underneath spoken analysis extremely distracting. MrBtongue does it, or used to, and although I enjoy the videos a lot, I found his choice of music extremely overbearing. Maybe in your videos some music here and there? Kind of like transitional music for ideas and subjects? That might be nice.
:-)
+Errant Signal I am curious to see your try on using some sound in your videos, that beeing said i think its perfectly fine like it is now. Listening to an interesting analysis of yours is enough for me i am glad to say my attention span is still long enough.
The core of SimCity was one thing and one thing only: shit over all the fans and rip off all the stupid people that bought it. I was one of these idiots and I regret it to this day.
The More i play Cities Skylines the more i think is basicly Sim City done right.
I would love to see a comparison to cities skylines...
sim is a husk now go play city skyline
Review the witcher 3?
I was done with this game after those 2 free trial hours EA was giving on Origin. Great way to make people not to buy it :-D I filled almost the whole area and didn't know what to do next.
Please do an analysis of Goat Simulator!!!
What do you think about cities skylines?
Long videos are ok, 20mins, no problem :)
Sim City, a great insult to the saga and this genre, now Cities Skylines did what EA didn't do (all while consuming the original Maxis), for half the price, and hopefully the expansion will be pretty good since it kinda fells like DLC.
9:50 so they basically invented impressions\tilted mill?
+tsartomato no, those are walker system.
+Will Ferrous what does that mean?
tsartomato
The walker system basically means the it's the services and business that is "moving around"
So, people don't really go to the dentist, a walker-dentist will go knocking on everyone's door.
Obvious this is an abstraction, and later will be mostly replaced by the aura system, where the "walker-dentist" wont even show up, and that people live in a radius to the dentistry will all get tooth-care, e.g. Caesar 4. Classic Simcity.
In Simcity 2013, Children of the Nile, Tropico, it's a real *agent system*, costumers actually needs to go to the place of business
Cities Skylines eploys a mixture of the Aura and the Agent system
+Will Ferrous something like in russia empire?
+Will Ferrous Impressions Games used an agents system, but only the basics. Their service walkers like tax collectors wouldn't actually try to smartly cover area; rather, they'd just take random turns at intersections. Thus, a tax office on a corner might never have a tax collector visit a house on the opposite corner, just because of randomness.
Another important factor is that SimCity agents have both destinations and collision. Simulating traffic is hard only because of two factors: (1) people have somewhere to get to and (2) people can't pass through other people. Impressions Games ignored the second because all their roads were single-lane. Many early SimCity types ignored the first, because you usually didn't track individual cars, just watched them move; it didn't matter to players if a car left a business and circled the city for 6 in-game days, only to end in another business.
Fantastic! The analysis of course, what a way to waste this game... waiting for the Cities:Skylines dissection.
I think you meant to call this Sim Shitty.
Yay, Tropico! :3
anyone else stop buying EA games after that cluster fuck. The game could have been good if it actually worked. It seemed ever feature broke another feature. Its 2013 has it gotten better. Errant Signal mentioned the cars path finding bug, as I remember it this was one of the first things they "fixed". All they did was actually weight the paths based on traffic(something they should have done before.
So I doubt you take game requests but there it goes anyway. A review on Star Wars: the old republic? Because I feel there's still a few things about that game that haven't been talked about.
Also to tie this comment to the video I'll add this. I find it funny how both Sim City and SWTOR have features based on multiplayer that end up being underdeveloped. The big difference being that SWTOR's multiplayer content wasn't it's main focus perhaps to a fault.
Horrible SimCity news of the week: here's why it was horrible!
wew lad
My one edit? Don't label your model as 'Totally Made Up'. I paused and looked at it seriously, and if I hadn't seen the title the 'Gremlins Running Food Factories' would have been much funnier :P.
Are you the Slavoj Zizek of game theory?
Well, there’s a poo map...
Actually the reason everyone hates this game and was such a mess is because NOBODY COULD PLAY IT FOR HALF A YEAR!