Sim City *Limited* Edition

[friznit]

Still waiting on Anno 2070 to become less monies and I will buy. Quite interested in giving the coop MP thing a go

[Grimmie]

So I pre-ordered a while back now. The gameplay videos have had me spluffing videogame happiness into my proverbial pants quite frankly. The limited edition's pretty much just the "pre-order" edition that you can get on Amazon for a fairly normal price (£37.99) and the Digital Deluxe is an Origin exclusive and just has what I suspect will be DLC shortly after launch, some extra skins for stuff to make them look more British or German or whatever. Snore.

Videos.

Gameplay
[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YceL2C4TW4Q[/media]

Developer Diary
[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aluNM_2G-cc[/media]

More: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=UU ... ature=plcp

[Grimmie]

Still waiting on Anno 2070 to become less monies and I will buy. Quite interested in giving the coop MP thing a go

Anno 2070's like £10-£12 now, by the by.

[friznit]

Bought it in steam sale ages ago. Played for a while, got repetition rage. Keep meaning to go back but haven't found a good enough reason to. I think I made a mistake getting the futuristic one, and probably would enjoy the Venice one more. Meh.

Simcity Next - I can't decide whether it'll be an awesome addition to the genre or a dumbed down console piss take like Cities XL, which is just rage inducing (and it failed to save my game, so I gave up trying)

Edit: awesome tache

[FatherJack]

I certainly played 1701, 1404 and 1404 Venice a lot more than 2070, in which I seem to get stuck a lot in unwinnable situations. I've put about the same time into the similar three Guild 2 releases as all of them combined, though.

SimCity looks to be pretty good. One thing I always liked doing when they introduced neighbourhoods in Sims2 was to populate the other houses of my friend's town with social reprobates and fuckups so that they would always visit my friend's Sims house and cause chaos - that was on the same computer, but now it can be done on the internet.

CitiesXL I enjoy, but the vast, varied cities in the preview videos are a far cry from what I end up with, which are boring repeated tiles as I slowly expand doing the same things over and over while balancing population and unemployemnt. A bit slow and tedious. The world map promises interaction between your towns, but in practise it's a very basic resource-for-points-trading system.

Cities in Motion have the DLC for various cities around the world thing, but it works a little better than a mere cosmetic change, as in that the cities are prebuilt and you just run the transport systems. While pretty it doesn't have the depth of the Transport Tycoon games, as it only deals with passenger travel, not freight.

Tropico's my current favourite place to build cities, although I'm finding the Modern Times DLC bastardly hard. This new SimCity looks to incorporate a few of things from all three, the connection between cities, cities that look nicely designed and the quirky playfulness - like when the things plop down as you build them.

Hopefully more entertaining than their Facebook or mobile phone moneygrab games, where you can only do about three things per day and two of those are to buy more credits from the store.

[friznit]

Sad to say the two games in the genre I keep going back to are Simcity 5 Rushhour and OTTD. Nothing else quite hits the balance between infrastructure design and enough "fuzzy rules" to prevent it turning into a Cities XL style equation balancing exercise. Nearly every other city builder, from Rome to Anno XXXX, it takes one game to understand the rules and thereafter it's just an exercise in plonking stuff that is just an irritatingly not-quite-balanced formula 1+1.1 = 1.9+1 = 1+n....

The Guild 2 was a lovely game though - completely different to anything I'd played and thoroughly enjoyable. I played Renaissance a lot and am actually considering buying the other one (Guild 2 and the Pirates thing) just because.

[shot2bits]

The Guild 2 was a lovely game though - completely different to anything I'd played and thoroughly enjoyable. I played Renaissance a lot and am actually considering buying the other one (Guild 2 and the Pirates thing) just because.

So much this, i just wish they weren't so broken. I'm really hoping the dev's new game in development Kontor has a bit more spit n shine to it.

[Grimmie]

Anno 2070 Multispaz some time, anyone?

[tandino]

I'd be up for that Mr Grimbles

[Grimmie]

Amazon sent me a beta key for this weekend's beta for pre-ordering.

Anyone else get one?

[Taraniis]

No beta key for me, I refuse to pre-order games. Well, except Borderlands because, Borderlands.

I will be getting it though if only for the multiplayer aspect of it, a few friends of mine who are really casual gamers and want a gentle builder type that we could all play about on. However none of them will play Anno 2070 with me any more after I lost the plot and nuked one of them while sending my navy out to cripple the rest.

[Dog Pants]

Reviewers' experience of the game so far:



That's your enhanced single player experience by the way.

[friznit]

They're also saying the small city sizes really are very, very small. And of course EA has suggested that qbigger city areas will be released as optional DLC, which completely fucking belies the dev claim that it was a performance issue.

[Thompy]

I'm going to play devil's advocate here and point out an argument that most people use in defense of MMOs on launch and after major patches. They will have the required server capacity to deal with everyone under normal play, just not when there's a hugely inflated population due to it being launch. This is a reasonable cost adjustment, and probably explains why this is happening.

But of course it's not reasonable because it's not a fucking MMO

[Dog Pants]

They're also saying the small city sizes really are very, very small. And of course EA has suggested that qbigger city areas will be released as optional DLC, which completely fucking belies the dev claim that it was a performance issue.

The same performance issue they used as justification for doing half the processing server side?

[spoodie]

Well, if you buy something from EA what do you expect? And if you really want to play it I'm sure it'll be fine soon enough. The Diablo 3 issues were massive hyperbole. Annoying, but they didn't last long.

[Dog Pants]

Pfft, I didn't buy it. Don't get me wrong, it looks like basically a good game, but there are too many nasties putting me off. Like that. I'm sure some people will buy it anyway and won't mind, and I'm sure it will calm down in a week or so, but for those who aren't sure but might buy it thinking the DRM won't affect them this might save them some money. I also have my own issues with DRM and compromise for DLC as I'm sure everyone knows (and so I won't repeat), but if this was only about that I'd put it in a different thread like I did with Diablo 3 pre-release.

[Joose]

I'm less concerned by the DRM/logging in issues and more concerned by the reports of it being a bit of a inscrutable buggy mess at the moment. Things like being told you have mass unemployment and not enough workers at the same time, for example.

[Dog Pants]

That's a shame, but everything can be fixed. As proven by the people touting Anno 2070 as a less DRM affected alternative. Oh, how soon they forget.

Ooh, maybe they're all just lazy! Maybe it is like The Sims City after all.

[buzzmong]

Pfft.
A "You're in a queue to log in" on what's essentially a single player game can get to fuck.

I really want to play a new city builder, but not like that. A complete no purchase for me this'll be.