Sim City V

[Nehkara]

Originally Posted by photon

That's good, addresses one of my complaints.

I still don't like the idea of an "always on" city, I mean not everyone can play a game constantly.. If I save my city then I can come back in 3 months and keep playing. This way I'll come back in 3 months and it'll be abandoned, or at least not anything close to the way I left it.

Cmon Maxis, sandbox mode is half way there, I realize load/save could break the integrity of leaderboards and stuff so do the same thing, give us a load/save that applies the same way as sandbox mode.

Of course then it'd just be a small step to complete offline mode.

Originally Posted by oilers_fan

I didn't realize this was a possibility. So if you don't play for X amount of time, your city is going to be completely different? As in time still passes by in the game even if you're away?

As far as I understand it, this is not entirely the case. Your city will continue when you are gone. You will continue to have income and your city's interactions with other cities will continue but as I understand it, this is not at a normal rate. Your income will be much slower as will resource loss.

That said, Maxis has said they are still tuning this, so we will have to wait and see what it is like on release.

[Nehkara]

Ocean is answering TONS of questions on twitter right now so I asked him a bit more about the above issue. I'll let you know if he answers.

[Nehkara]

Here it is:

Nehkara ‏@Nehkara
@oceanquigley If I am offline for a month or two, what will happen to my cities? Will they lose all resources/go abandoned/pile up $$$?

Ocean Quigley ‏@oceanquigley
@Nehkara No, they will just hum along, providing services to the region up to their capacity.

[photon]

That's ok I guess, the devil's in the details...

[Nehkara]

Just a tidbit I picked up from Ocean's twitter, you will be able to play with anyone worldwide cross-platform (PC + Mac).

[cDnStealth]

I just checked out some screen-shots of people's cities from the beta and wow... they are so small. This is more like SimTown than SimCity. Lets be real for a moment. The system requirements for this game are a joke. Falling on the "performance" issue for justification on city size seems like a cop-out when 6 year old games have more demanding system requirements. I don't care about seeing Joe go to work or Mary and her family go shopping. I want to make cities that have millions of people and deal with the challenges that arise in a city of that size.

The more I think about it the more I realize that city specialization is the focus of game because of how small these "cities" really are. It's sad just how quickly this game went from "shut and take my money!" to maybe when it's on sale. Perhaps I'll just have to wait until they release the SimCity: Big Cities expansion.

[metallicat]

I think cities will be larger when people have more than one hour to grow them.

[cDnStealth]

Originally Posted by oilers_fan

I think cities will be larger when people have more than one hour to grow them.

There is a big difference between density and land size.

[Muffins]

I agree on the region size. It seems like you could build a city to the max area in a couple hours.
What would be cool is if you could annex land outside your region in order to expand. All that space in between cities just seems kinda wasted otherwise.

[Nehkara]

Originally Posted by cDnStealth

I just checked out some screen-shots of people's cities from the beta and wow... they are so small. This is more like SimTown than SimCity. Lets be real for a moment. The system requirements for this game are a joke. Falling on the "performance" issue for justification on city size seems like a cop-out when 6 year old games have more demanding system requirements. I don't care about seeing Joe go to work or Mary and her family go shopping. I want to make cities that have millions of people and deal with the challenges that arise in a city of that size.

The more I think about it the more I realize that city specialization is the focus of game because of how small these "cities" really are. It's sad just how quickly this game went from "shut and take my money!" to maybe when it's on sale. Perhaps I'll just have to wait until they release the SimCity: Big Cities expansion.

Well, I guess it depends what you are looking at. If you want low/minimum requirements that is true. They tried to make the game at least run on a LOT of computers.

However, if you want the game to run WELL on MAX settings (which most gamers do), you have to have a pretty good system.

Again, I can't say too much as I would rather not break the NDA but it didn't bother me in game.

That said, you can't please everyone.

I know it angers some people but if you think about it, I don't think that Maxis did this just to anger their fans, that seems a little counter productive.

I know you don't care about the integrity of the simulation but I do and I think it is the most amazing thing about this game. I can live without big cities for awhile, the simulation had to come first.

Plus, I know I will be just fine if I run a 16-city region by myself, that is plenty of space for me. For now.

[Rathji]

Given than the beta is over, is the NDA still in effect? or are you in some other top secret beta?

[Nehkara]

Originally Posted by Rathji

Given than the beta is over, is the NDA still in effect? or are you in some other top secret beta?

As far as I understand it, you're not supposed to talk about the beta even afterwards. A lot of people are but I guess I just don't want to play with fire.

No, I'm not in the very limited Dev beta which is still going on (they are playing the full game with no restrictions right up to release).

[Rathji]

Originally Posted by Nehkara

As far as I understand it, you're not supposed to talk about the beta even afterwards. A lot of people are but I guess I just don't want to play with fire.

No, I'm not in the very limited Dev beta which is still going on (they are playing the full game with no restrictions right up to release).

I guess it could be, I didn't read it all that closely.

The second point kind of worries me actually. If they are relying on an extremely limited Beta for Simcity, which at this point is heavily reliant upon server infrastructure, how can they really have a good handle on what issues will be faced.

Kind of screams launch week catastrophe to me, and normally I am not one to be worried about those kinds of things.

[Rathji]

Originally Posted by Nehkara

As far as I understand it, you're not supposed to talk about the beta even afterwards. A lot of people are but I guess I just don't want to play with fire.

No, I'm not in the very limited Dev beta which is still going on (they are playing the full game with no restrictions right up to release).

I guess it could be, I didn't read it all that closely.

The second point kind of worries me actually. If they are relying on an extremely limited Beta for Simcity, which at this point is heavily reliant upon server infrastructure, how can they really have a good handle on what issues will be faced.

Kind of screams launch week catastrophe to me, and normally I am not one to be worried about those kinds of things.

[photon]

Originally Posted by Rathji

The second point kind of worries me actually. If they are relying on an extremely limited Beta for Simcity, which at this point is heavily reliant upon server infrastructure, how can they really have a good handle on what issues will be faced.

Kind of screams launch week catastrophe to me, and normally I am not one to be worried about those kinds of things.

There are ways to load-test server infrastructure beyond just getting people to hammer it, and if you base your load tests on a real-world snapshot (say a weekend beta) even better.

Not saying they will do that, or that the assumptions they make will make the test valid if they do (i.e. if they plan for 1 million concurrent and get 5 million or something), but it's not impossible to do.

I'd wager on opening week hell though if I had to put my money down.

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by photon

I'd wager on opening week hell though if I had to put my money down.

We'll let you PC people public beta test it for us Mac users

[Nehkara]

Yeah unfortunately most online reliant games seem to have rough opening weeks. I doubt SimCity will be any different. I mean, Blizzard must have been prepared for millions of users for Diablo III and it still was a very rough release.

[sketchyt]

Anyone come across news for a Mac release date? Or is it still 'whenever it's ready'?

[psicodude]

Originally Posted by sketchyt

Anyone come across news for a Mac release date? Or is it still 'whenever it's ready'?

I posted a link a page or two back, but just this week they said "Spring of 2013", so....end of June at the worst?

[HOOT]

Just looking at getting a new computer built and wondering if what I got will run this thing when it comes out.

- Intel Core i5 3570 Quad Core Processor LGA1155 3.4GHZ Ivy Bridge 6MB
- Corsair Vengeance Blue CMZ8GX3M2A1600C9B 8GB 2X4GB DDR3-1600
- Seagate Barracuda ST31000524AS 7200.12 1TB SATA 32MB
- XFX Radeon HD 7870 Core Ed. 1000MHZ 2GB 4.8GHZ GDDR5 DVI HDMI 2XMINIDP PCI-E Video Card

Since I haven't ordered any parts yet should I be looking to upgrade the video card or will this set up run without any issues?