Previews: SimCity Hands-on Preview (part 3)

Multiplayer

So far we've covered the basic gameplay of SimCity as well as some of the regional aspects. This is all single player. However, an important part of the game are the new online features. For the first time since the SimCity 2000 Network Edition, multiple players can join in a single game of the simulator.

Multiplayer Region

The main part of this is probably the region play. Each city in the region has to be claimed to build on it. If you play alone that'll be just you claiming all the towns one by one. In multiplayer mode, other players may claim some of the cities. When you start up a region, you can choose whether you want to play it alone, with invitees or if you want the region to be public. If set to invite only, only friends you invite to the region may join in and claim cities (which have not already been claimed). A public region allows anyone to join in and build - or break - a city.

The gameplay of a mostly the same as when you play multiple cities (in a region) on your own - except that if you play at the same time, cities may develop simultaneously. Normally if you play, other (unplayed) cities are essentially paused and will not develop. At best a few global transactions will take place e.g. because you volunteered some vehicles, but even that's limited. In other words, if you don't play for a month your city won't be bankrupt or extremely wealthy when you start it up again.

Care for a... Challenge?

To enrich the online experience, several features found in many games these days are also available. First of all there will be periodic (weekly?) challenges. These are global challenges that you can participate in. One example of such a challenge is to extract as much money (in the form of taxes) as possible from wealthy sims in the region. Get those million dollars as quickly as possible and you may be awarded with an achievement or other reward.

That's right: achievements. Especially as you just start the game, you'll get many notifications of basic achievements that were just awarded to you. I'm not sure if there's a way outside the game to view them, but at the least you can view them in the game. You'll also receive mentions if friends get awards while you play.

Just like you sometimes need buildings in a region or city to unlock others, some special items may require you to have unlocked an achievement. This is especially true for disasters. You won't be able to use them until you get a slightly related award. For example, I was able to unlock the Big Lizard disaster by setting up a very dirty industrial town. Other disasters include (at least) meteorites, U.F.O's, earthquakes and tornados. I'm not sure if disasters are triggered automatically or if you can only trigger them yourselves.

More Online

Completing challenges also means you'll get a place on leaderboards for that challenge. But there are many more leaderboards available for various aspects of towns. This includes budget, population, crime levels, pollution and more. You can view your place amongst friends or globally. That means cheats are also normally disabled. Fortunately for those who prefer to cheat: a sandbox mode allows you to use cheats, but those regions won't count towards your leaderboard statistics.

The final big part of the online aspect is the continuous cloud save. If the game crashes you will be able to resume (almost) where you left off. Unfortunately this also means there's no going back at any time: in previous games you could destroy a town completely - just for fun - exit without saving, and next time you could continue building it from where you left off. This is no longer possible as the game is always saved on the EA servers. The only advantage is that you can continue your game on another PC. Jason gave the example of being able to continue the cities he built at work at his home PC. And while this is useful, I have to question how many people really use multiple PCs to play the game.

As expected - and rightly so - this has lead to a lot of criticism, as this means you always have to be online when you play the game. The game can take a bit of downtime of the servers or your internet connection - that is, if you've loaded a city it'll let you continue to play until the connection is re-established. You won't be able to load other cities whatsoever though. And while the online connectivity may be useful for stuff like multiplayer regions and the global economy, the lack of an offline version does simply mean you cannot play this game without an active connection.

EA's excuse that the region simulation would cost too much processing power for a regular PC is utterly ridiculous, as that would mean the server costs would have to be be disproportionate to the sales price of the game. The game now has, by definition, a more limited lifetime than previous iterations, simply because EA will not keep those servers up and running forever. I sincerely hope that when the time comes, an offline patch - or the server software - will be released so at least single player functionality can be maintained. Especially SimCity 4 has shown that the franchise is timeless and fans are able to keep much of it alive even a decade after launch. It would be very unfortunate if the new SimCity will not be able to follow in its footsteps because of the always online decision.

Other Features

Back to the game as it is then... Besides all the online stuff, many of the usual SimCity features still exist in the game. They include the various speeds (turtle, llama, cheetah) and screen/video capturing. Graphically the game looks nice, albeit slightly cartoonish sometimes, and the tilt-shift lets you get really close to your Sims.

Various graphic filters are available, much like those made famous by Instagram. When applied they allow you to make screenshots in various tones, such as gray and orange (for those gloomy screens), vintage, sepia or bleached. There are even a few colorblind optimized filters available. A nice touch, especially for people who like to share their creations through videos or screenshots.

A final important part is customization. Every SimCity has allowed terrain editing and SimCity 2000 - for example - had SCURK to change the looks of your cities. Right now Maxis is focussed entirely on shipping the base game. The GlassBox engine supposedly supports mods, but to what extent is unknown. As I already mentioned, I hope that at least a terrain/region editor will be made available after launch so the game can be made as challenging as players want it to be.

Preliminary Conclusions

SimCity is back, and it's big. I was skeptical before the preview, but I left with much more positive thoughts about it. There should be plenty of challenges ahead, although from what we've seen so far it's hard to judge about the actual difficulty of the game. The bit we played seemed quite easy, but different regions should provide more difficult scenarios. I sincerely hope Maxis will allow players to create regions - as their own puzzles and challenges - not too late after the release.

The simulation is very in-depth, and while this may have led to smaller city sizes, it's really all about the regional play - with or without friends. It's not SimCity 4 - even though I compared them several times in this preview. It's a new version with a more accessible approach. This may put off some of the fans of SimCity 4, but probably appeals to a wider audience - and there's nothing wrong with that.

We'll be checking out the full game after release and post a full review in the weeks after.

I want to thank EA for the invitation to the event, Jason Haber for showing the game and answering our questions, and Rosana from this site for both being lovely and letting me attend the event instead of herself.

Now, bring on March 5th!