Having spoken to the lead designer, this gave me the impression of the SimCity I used to know, albeit with some more features like policies and districts.
Oh boy, I hadn't seen this before. This is wonderful.
Paradox is known for making very complicated, somewhat buggy, but lofty and (in my opinion) very fun titles.
I swear their approach to games is "So they say 'a game is a series of interesting decisions,' lets see how many decisions we can pack into this one!"
The Hearts of Iron series is basically SimCity for World War 2. You pick any country and a starting year and just go. Decide on major events, pick your cabinet, how you allocate resources (industrial and brainpower), who you spy on, what you research, elections, and of course the whole war thing. Just everything. The game is huge fun if you like to sit down and plan things and I totally recommend it to anyone who loved the sim cities of old.
While Colossal Order is not a Paradox studio (besides Paradox Development Studio, they also have Paradox North, Paradox Arctic and Paradox South), it has very close ties to Paradox Interactive. Colossal Order was present at Paradox's Fan Gathering at Gamescon in Cologne this August for instance.
Despite their titles, Cities XL (developed by French developer Monte Carlo) and Cities: Skylines (developed by Finnish developer Colossal Order) have no relation. Colossal Order have already stated that they will avoid some of the design decisions made by Cities XL (such as specifying where which class of people lives).
If you've got about an hour and a half to spend, and you enjoyed this article, I'd like to recommend a lecture given by Will Wright in 2003.
He covers his background, early computer games, the origins of Sim City, the Sims, as well as more abstract/high-level discussion of game design and simulation.
Some high level themes of the talk: using the computer as a modeling tool, simulation design, Will Wright's game design principles and philosophy, programming for two dynamic processes "the software" and "the player's model of the system", and traversal of possibility spaces in game design and simulation.
Will's talks and interviews are all fascinating and well worth watching, taking notes, and studying. It's interesting to see how the projects he was talking about at the time turned out years later. I'll also link to an excellent interview with Chris Trottier, one of the designers on The Sims, who is an absolutely brilliant designer who worked Will on The Sims and Spore, who according to Will can manipulate the very fabric to Time and Space, and is a pretty good designer, for a girl: https://web.archive.org/web/20131117041434/http://pickleodeo...
A summary of Will Wright's talk to Terry Winnograd's User Interface Class at Stanford, in 1996.
Written by Don Hopkins.
Will Wright, the designer of SimCity, SimEarth, SimAnt, and other popular games from Maxis, gave a talk at Terry Winnograd's user interface class at Stanford, in 1996 (before the release of The Sims in 2000). At the end of the talk, he demonstrated an early version of The Sims, called Dollhouse at the time. I attended the talk and took notes, on which this article elaborates. I was fascinated by Dollhouse, and subsequently went to work with Will Wright at Maxis for three years. We finally released it as The Sims in 2000, after several name changes: TDS (Tactical Domestic Simulator), Project-X (everybody has one of those), Jefferson (after the president, not the sitcom), happy fun house (or some other forgetable Japanese placism).
At the talk, he reflected on the design of simulators and user interfaces in SimCity, SimEarth, and SimAnt. He demonstrated several of his games, including his current project, Dollhouse.
Here are some important points Will Wright made, at this and other talks. I've elaborated on some of his ideas with my own comments, based on my experiences playing lots of SimCity, talking with Will, studying the source code and porting it to Unix, reworking the user interface, and adding multi player support.
The Future of Content - Will Wright's Spore Demo at GDC 3/11/2005
What I learned about content from the Sims.
...and why it's driven me to procedural methods.
...And what I now plan to do with them.
Will Wright
Game Developers Conference
3/11/2005
Notes taken by Don Hopkins at the talk, and from other discussions with Will Wright.
Sims Designer Chris Trottier on Tuned Emergence and Design by Accretion
The Armchair Empire interviewed Chris Trottier, one of the designers of The Sims and The Sims Online. She touches on some important ideas, including "Tuned Emergence" and "Design by Accretion".
Chris' honest analysis of how and why "the gameplay didn't come together until the months before the ship" is right on the mark, and that's the secret to the success of games like The Sims and SimCity.
The essential element that was missing until the last minute was tuning: The approach to game design that Maxis brought to the table is called "Tuned Emergence" and "Design by Accretion". Before it was tuned, The Sims wasn't missing any structure or content, but it just wasn't balanced yet. But it's OK, because that's how it's supposed to work!
In justifying their approach to The Sims, Maxis had to explain to EA that SimCity 2000 was not fun until 6 weeks before it shipped. But EA was not comfortable with that approach, which went against every rule in their play book. It required Will Wright's tremendous stamina to convince EA not to cancel The Sims, because according to EA's formula, it would never work.
If a game isn't tuned, it's a drag, and you can't stand to play it for an hour. The Sims and SimCity were "designed by accretion": incrementally assembled together out of "a mass of separate components", like a planet forming out of a cloud of dust orbiting around star. They had to reach critical mass first, before they could even start down the road towards "Tuned Emergence", like life finally taking hold on the planet surface. Even then, they weren't fun until they were carefully tuned just before they shipped, like the renaissance of civilization suddenly developing science and technology. Before it was properly tuned, The Sims was called "the toilet game", for the obvious reason that there wasn't much else to do!
SimCity 2000 for Win95 is my personal favorite SimCity game (sadly a 16 bit EXE). It's a sandbox style game, with no real end goal. SimCity 1 started as a map editor for a helicopter game, that was more fun than the actual game. It would be great to see a new triple A reboots of SimCity (and real time strategy) games, but without any casual or free2play or DLC flavours - just straight old school games game mechanics with modern 2D/3D graphics.
The entire re-form is sponsored by BMW, I honestly don't get your point. It's a really interesting section of Medium, try looking for the other articles.
Thanks, I had no idea about that. I would never actively browse Medium as it has burned a "many big words with shallow baity content" warning in my brain in the past.
The piece itself has nothing to do with BMW and there's nothing BMW being sold under the pretence of a journalistic piece (that I could see), there's an article, and BMW sponsors the series so here's their logo.
Well there was Streets of Sim City[0] where you could take any of your Sim City 2000 cities, and turn it into a vehicular racing and combat playground. Way fun at the time!
I loved the in-game radio and the enormous number of goofy/awful commercials. It was a huge amount of fun to build a city in SC2K or SCURK, fly through it running missions, and then burn it to the ground with an Apache "fighting crime" (aka clearing traffic jams the easy way).
Loved that game, it was for me like a light hearted version of GTA without all the dark overtones. That's really what would make SimCity a game I would have kept upgrading to; that and support for Linux. Their main page says PC/Mac. So PC means Personal Computer, wonder if my PC running Ubuntu counts? I'm guessing no. I'd have kept upgrading the BattleField games too but EA seems to not be interested in this.
Have you tried Stronghold? It's like SimCity in a medieval setting, though with much finer-grained control on what you build where (placing specific buildings and laying out walls, rather than allocating general "zones"), and in most scenarios you need to build troops to defend against periodic attacks from enemy armies.
Take a look at Factorio. It's not perfectly what you're looking for, but the state of mind that it puts me in is right in between starcraft and sim city.
Great game, this brought up lots of fond memories. I don't really understand why a modified Gotye song reference was used for the article title as it doesn't really make sense in this context. Has the SimCity concept changed such that we don't recognize it anymore? The article itself doesn't seem to be saying anything to that effect.
Well, there was a lot of criticism about the recent SimCity, around how the underlying simulation was broken. That's probably enough to get a breakup-song reference going.
The community around SimCity 4 has really transformed the game with Mods and Addons. If you want to have a go at SimCity, I cannot recommand SimCity 4 with some Addons highly enough. I'd suggest you start with the Network Addon Mod [0] (not sure if this is the official site), which
is a mod improving and expanding upon the functionality of the game's transit networks (I'm not affiliated with that project in any way, just had a lot of fun with it).
It’s one thing to edit Wikipedia; it’s another thing altogether to make that edit stick. Now that Will Wright has been cited in an article published by a third party, an editor has already started the process of changing it via the article’s talk page. Creatives have had a very big problem self-correcting the site, since the official editors have a distrust of uncited sources.
Is there a startup opportunity in providing a way for creatives to quickly create a cite of themselves or otherwise fix this problem? After all, if you are the actual authority on the release date, some journalist getting it wrong in an article shouldn't trump what you say.
I think this would be a good example of something that a team of smart devs could whip up in a short period of time.
I've been playing SimCity in some variation for 25 years, according to this. That... humbles me for some reason. And makes me want to play it.
Edit: Since we're all vying for the games we wish we had: I want a game that is half Simcity, half OpenTTD. Some players manage cities, some players manage companies, and you all have the goal to grow cities. And not all companies would have to be transport companies, it'd be neat to play as the OpenTTD industries too.
I used to spend hours and hours playing Utopia, which is incredibly similar to Sim City, but came out in 1981 for the intellivision. I don't know if it's just nostalgia, but I still enjoy playing it sometimes. I suggest checking it out if you can.
I played countless hours of that with my little brother, who was about 9 at the time. Decades later he still claims that he figured out the system for fairly accurately predicting where rebels would be placed. He did seem to hit my hospitals with alarming accuracy, so I'm inclined to believe him, although I could never figure it out myself and he never would tell.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxfeBpagvQw
https://www.paradoxplaza.com/cities-skylines
Having spoken to the lead designer, this gave me the impression of the SimCity I used to know, albeit with some more features like policies and districts.