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It's the foundation the cornerstone, the franchise player of maxis. Forget about all the profits and all the add-ons and all the popuulatriy of The Sims - without SimCity there is no maxis. Simple as that. It's the game that built the company, but in all the Sims maina, it has been forgotten by everyone.
Well, not everyone. Not maxis. Not the passionately dedicated team who's been silently toiling away for more than a year reinventing the maxis flagship. It's the biggest, the deepest, the most accessible SimCity yet, a game so huge that Maxis just couldn' t keep the secert until the planned unveiling at E3.
And once we got in the loop, we had to share the news about one of the truly legendary franchises in PC gaming and where it's headed.
So much of what is being put into SimCity 4 is direct result of lessons learned from the enormous success of the Sims. No, you won' t have to manage the bladder emergenciess of an enntire city. Instead of minutiae, it's the big picture that's being influenced by what is arguabnly the ultimate "small picture" game.
First and foremost are story elements. People have always mentally filled in the blanks to tell the story of their SimCity cities, the same way players glued the disparate events of their Sim's lives into a narrative. SimCity 4 addresses the easy part of this: The game will ship with a Sims - style photo album feature and will let players share the album online. But how do you replicate the Sims - type emotional attachment that prods players into playing for hours on end? How do you get players to make asintense a connection to an artificial city as they do to artificial people?
The design team of SimCity 4 feels this is accom-plished by recognizing the driving force of players' personal goals and giving them the opportunity and tools to create their own experience. So out go the traditional strategy game scenarios, and in comes a whole bushel of imaginary carrots dangling at the end of a metaphoric stick to lead gamers further and further into what is a remarkably sophisticated simulation.
Instead of charging players with, say, trying to recover from a natural disaster in X years, SimCity 4 puts us in pursuit of more tangible rewards. Want to see your citizens sing your praises and hold a parade in your honor? Then set that as a goal an drun your mayor avatar on PR junkets while setting policy that will drive up your popularity. Want to see unique structures and animations of the state fair in your city instead? Then fallow your advisors' input and try to draw the attration to your fair burg.
The game uses a Sims style of coding, so the structures actually carry behavior code with them. Getting one of the unique buildings will unlesh new behaviors and actions in your achive your prizes on much grander scale.
The activity of the Sims in your city is not a goal in inself but part and pacel of the city as a whole. Where buildings were the star in SimCity 3000, the new game spoltlights city life and prvides immediate visual feedback on city conditions with the great bonus side effects of reduced chart reading and (even better) a vibrant, bustling metropolis. Or not. While the goal in SimCity 3000 was to create an enormous New York City - caliber metropolis, SimCity 4 wants you to create whatever you kind of city you want.
You'll need to think globally and act locally to achieve the type of city you set as your goal.You'll have to big tools - like the return of the SimCity 2000 tax engine for nurturing or discouraging specific industries-in order to create your dream/nightmare city. But you'll also have to manage SimCity 4 on a neighborhood level. The look and activity of a particular neighborhood is determind largely by demographics.
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