I've been waiting almost a decade for EA to make a Sim City with online features like this. Glad to see someone finally stepped up to the plate. The possibilities of having to build your city and strategize based on other people's cities and play, extend building cities and dealing with issues to a much higher level than simply playing alone. Sweeeet.

Gam3r

Ive always imagined a SimWikiCity game.

One where more than one person can work on recreating real life cities in an online world.

glitched

@solar_tf: Wait, huh? Zoning is still in use in every major city that I personally know of, and even most minor ones. (My "village", for example, is 100% zoned.)

My big beef with SimCity is that while they started off on the right track with the series, once it started actually getting somewhat realistic, they began dumbing it down and making it more of a Sims game than a City game. I don't really care about seeing individual sims as they live their lives - if I want that, I'll play The Sims. When I buy a city building sim, I want to get down to the nitty gritty of building and running a city - including transportation (which was never handled well in any SC game), infrastructure, neighborhood development, and all the problems inherent in a big city. I even want to see politics simulated somehow... I shouldn't be able to just bulldoze an area in the middle of my city and plop down a stadium. There would be massive opposition to that in real life and that should be simulated in the game. (It wouldn't even be that hard - an established neighborhood that has existed for a set number of years would develop an X variable that would represent opposition to dramatic change.)

I also want to see stuff like developers coming to me asking for new zoning laws or development rights on city-owned land. One thing that bothers me about the screenshots above is that here you have a beachfront city... and the beach is completely undeveloped! That would never happen in real life. That's the most expensive, exclusive property in any city, and developers would be all over it well before they started building stuff on the other side of the city.

They could even add a couple Donald Trumps or Leona Helmsleys to the game to give it some personality.

badasscat

I would love if you could negotiate neighbor deals with other players, so that you could actually, you know, hassle.

Not like those NPC - Sim City - money hungry - mayor bastards. (although not sure if they were technically a NPC...at least they had a picture).

Now you can negotiate with Human - Sim City - money hungry - mayor bastards.

Herodito

@Tubatic: you're delusional

Haven't played any of the City Life games but this looks good. I might have to chekc it out

MasterDex

This looks like something that will feed my need for perfection. I wonder if they will have limitless cities on one big 'ol planet, or a solar system? It would be ridiculously awesome to be the first one with a city on a new planet.

SapphireC

Amazing.

Now, forget Sims; Spore should have followed this route.

Fyren

Being a veteran simcity player, and possessing a degree in urban planning, myself, I'm glad to see this game seems to allow free tracing of roads. One of my major gripes about simcity since back when I started playing it, is that we're forced to build either orthogonal or 45 degree roads, which might work for Chicago, maybe, but is totally unacceptable as a representation for most other cities in the world. I hope this one also breaks free from the "zoning" system found in simcity games... again, it might fit american planning doctrine for the early 20th century, but it's not very useful nowadays.

solar_tf

Yeah, no need to be online.

But wowzer, does this look nice or what? Hopefully it'll have that seamless zooming like in Sins of a Solar Empire so you can go from a very wide view of the city to a street corner effortlessly.

Sundermania

So does this mean EA will be buying them.

jigglypoofs

@Zegridathes: I like how you think.

So maybe a an EA buyout of TakeTwo wouldn't be so bad after all? :D

Tubatic

After this and the post about DLC for GTAIV from, I started thinking... Imagine if you could combine the two?

And then go a step further and have those elements like y police per x people actually affect how easy/difficult it was to get away with crimes in someones city.

It's a ridiculous scope (planets full of persistent cities), but I think it would be cool nonetheless.

Zegridathes

I don't need the next step of Sim City/ City building in general to be online. I really don't. What I want is a more detailed, smarter simulation. I don't need exacting realistic parameters, but I want my city to really react to my planning decisions. If that means I want SimCity 4-2, so be it.

While it sounds like they're putting beautiful details into this game and it looks very crisp, I don't want to share my city sim experiences with other people. Its no one's city but my own.

Tubatic

As a long time fan of SimCity, this looks glorious. I know they are just high res stills but still. Even if they only get most of what they want in to it, it would still be an awesome game.

Rupan

If they throw in some light resource transport issues, this could be absolutely glorious. The only bitch I've ever had about SimCity is that there's not a lot of thinking that goes into why stuff goes where it does. Sure, you need x police stations per y people and so on, but I'm envisioning inter-city trade routes and highways designed to take advantage of that from city to city, and if the price/profit on some stuff changes, seeing what effects that has on the size of the towns that wheel and deal the resources.

Okay, I'm rambling, but I'm very psyched about this.

TheBrianIsAstonishing

I agree that the Sim City franchise disappointed all, they who consider themselves pioneers and visionaries should have thought about that. Anyway, this looks pretty interesting - i'm sure i can convince most of my colleagues and neighbours to join in.

Let's wait for more detailed info before hurraying, though.

Yaven

It would be awesome if PlayStation home looks something liked this!

RonMaverick

Combine this with the ability to customize your character and drive vehicles and you'll have a winner.

HfAsianInvasion

That looks really quite tasty. A crisp, clean world, to be sure.

pylon_trooper

This is just magnificent.

Reading this just made me more angry towards stupid EA for deciding to fuck up with the wonderful SimCity series and release that THING called Societies. No real SC fan liked that and now comes a different company that is actually trying to move the simulation forward and of course will take the thunder out of SC.

Good EA, you just f'ed up a 20 yrs old series :o(

Btw, soooooo cool about this, will def get it.

valhum

Could this be everything us SimCity fans have wanted from the genre?? Going to be keeping close tabs on this.

AceKicker

I liked Societies...

KirbySS

i love this already.

xbulletholes

Seems like if Monte Christo did a good job with this, they'd have a ton of meticulously created and developed city settings on just about any scale a licensing developer could want. It would be really interesting if they started farming out their players' work and making money on it that way. I'm sure it's allowed in their EUA, just in case.

swarmster

If this is remotely good, I will buy it. This is what I had dreamed the next Simcity would be like before we got Simcity for 5 year olds (societies). Hopefully EA will take note.

NitrousO

Competing cities ftw. I can already picture scrolling around to other cities and seeing how they have this brand new cool badass skyscraper, me being jealous, then jacking my city's taxes.

Stop your crying citizens! MOVE if you don't like the 300% increase in tax or I'll cut off power to your buildings! Don't you want awesome skyscrapers!?

amazinglarry

Darn right this is the direction Sim City should have taken. Its so obvious, its no surprise to see someone else fill the vacuum EA left sitting there.

BStu

Fahey, we prefer to not acknowledge that SimCity Societies existed at all.

Rebochan

Blending a Sim game and a MMO? Damn, that sounds addictive.

But didn't the previous CityLife have some sort of vile copy protection on it?

Slatz_Grobnik

@Slatz_Grobnik: Yes, it used Starforce, the worst copy protection scheme ever. It was known to cause BSODs, as well as occasionally make your optical drives disappear. I probably would have bought CityLife if it wasn't for the fact it that it used Starforce.

This game looks really cool. I hope they got smart and changed copy protection. As much as I hate DRM that involves installing "middle-man" disk drivers, even Tages would be preferable to the crap that was on CityLife.

Generico

@badasscat: As long as I can exercise my right to eminent domain and take whatever land I want from private citizens I'll be happy!

Adam In Texas

lol

valhum

@phatmik3:

lol, of course I spell Kotaku wrong at the end

phatmik3

This really has nothing to do with the post, but rather with how all the Kotaku articles keep referring to a single company as plural. Like the beginning of this article "Monte Christo have". I am no where near being an authority on grammar, but I cringe every time I see something like "Microsoft are" in one of these articles. Is it just me? Is this a cool internet/leet/kotaku speak thing that I am not in on, like all your grammar are belong to us? I don't think it is a mistake because companies consistently get this treatment in the articles.

And by the way, Monte Christo gets treated as both singular and plural in the very first sentence. It is labeled "creator" and not "creators". What gives Kataku?

Has this already been addressed somwhere?

phatmik3

I remember when I used to play those empire-building browser games, where you could attack other people and stuff, thinking "this would make such a cool game if they combined the MMO elements with SimCity style building."

I beat you by like 5 years, Monte Christo.

Heartwork

I hope they pull it off, this looks really cool. They completely screwed up the SimCity series with Societies, despite the patches. (And, really, all they had to do was make SC4 with a 3D engine and a few new bells & whistles and it would have been amazing.)

Strangelove

You know what would really be cool for all the real hardcore city building people.... designing your own buildings from scratch with a built in editor, and having thier architecture affect parts of the city. I would so do a whole city like Frank Gehry's buildings (Bilbao Guggenheim,Experience music project, Stata center, etc). Mix the "socieites" thing with this and make it SIM EVERYTHING!

timeywimey

Holy fuck. Looks like it's about time that I defect from Maxis and SimCity.

Americo

@phatmik3: Two points. First, yes, Kotaku is not well known for its leet grammar skilz. It is something you must just accept. They do a wonderful job outside of it.

Second, the "corporate plural" is about as ubiquitous as the third person plural pronoun acting as the genderless third person singular one. So it has the vague sheen of acceptance, even if it remains technically wrong.

Slatz_Grobnik