SimCity to get city size expansions
SimCity will eventually get larger city sizes, as PC power increases so more mainstream users can access it, according to creative director Ocean Quigley.
SimCity has been put through its paces with two rounds of beta testing, which means that by now you might have tried it for yourself. If you found the cities too small for your liking, rest easy. Creative director Ocean Quigley says cities will get bigger as computing power increases.
"That is just a performance decision," Quigley told IncGamers. "Given that was the performance constraint we decided to work under, we built a larger region environment and a bunch of the multiplay to work with 2km cities. At some point in the future, especially with mainstream computers become more capable, we could certainly make the city sizes larger."
He said that as a mainstream game, it needs to run on "your dad's PC" as well as yours. But as PCs get more capable, he claims the update will come at some point. "We'll eventually get around to expanding the city size but I can’t make any promises as to when."
-
Shacknews
replySteve Watts posted a new article, SimCity to get city size expansions.
SimCity will eventually get larger city sizes, as PC power increases so more mainstream users can access it, according to creative director Ocean Quigley.-
for $29.99
-
-
-
I doubt it'll be on Steam...
-
-
So never, then? :D
-
-
-
-
-
Is this a joke? I guess I don't get it. I didn't realize that Sim City was capable of stressing CPUs on "mainstream" computers to the point where they made major design decisions over that.
-
They are simulating a pretty huge amount of stuff in this game.
http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/17aqln/city_size_limitation_perspective_of_a/ -
SC4 had absolutely brutal performance on large sized cities on a good PC when it came out and for quite awhile afterwards.
-
That's actually why I never got into sc4.
-
-
-
Hey customers and pirates we totally stand by our decision to nickel and dime you later for incremental increases to plot sizes but some crazy naysayer who is fired anyway once this turkey ships is concerned that people might not buy our game if we don't promise to do something about this completely valid design decision that was in no way motivated by greed and is in fact a limitation created by you the Pee See Customer with shitty rigs.
Btw guys if you don't buy our game and I'm talking to several of you then we won't do anything at all cept turn off some servers and blame pirates.
WAIT I've got it!
The reason we released the game as Sim Hamlet was indeed an anti-piracy method!-
Its pretty cool that I can see the exact moment that a blood vessel burst inside your brain.
-
-
[deleted]
-
EA has a chance to earn back some good will by making any future city size expansions free. It'll be interesting to see what they do.
-
Good sir, I highly doubt anything EA will do will be free.
-
Well I didn't say I actually thought it'd happen. :)
-
-
Do you want to increase your city size? Please ad $1.50 in EA cash to complete the transaction.
-
[deleted]
-
[deleted]
-
-
If they didn't force the online component on us this would really be a non-issue. Those with better machines should be able to be able to create cities of the size they can handle. Considering the social aspects and cities belong in a larger Sim Nation this pretty much places hard limits that don't really need to be there to begin with.
-
creative director said that? not a technical developer? so what are the tests showing on dual core machines? are they maxed out?
what does EA say about the steam hardware survey? is the mean/median machine incapable of larger maps?
do we need 16 core WOPR + MCP grade machines to run bigger maps ????-
Its crazy I have been choosing different graphics options on my various rigs for several years as an entitled PC gamer. They even have have this science option where the computer actually configures the visual fidelity based upon the capabilities of your machine. MADNESS. I've played some simulations in my time and you can "toggle" various options on an off to tweak performance, detail, complexity the very demands and constraints of the simulation.
EA why do you hate freedom? Is it because its free?-
[deleted]
-
I'm sure you are well versed in the performance demands of the various subsystems in SimCity. Obviously graphics are the primary stress point in a full city simulation and all the systemic simulations underlying the gameplay are highly orthogonal so you can easily toggle them on and off and not utterly break the way the game works.
Wait...
what I mean to say is Maxis' developers are obviously incompetent and/or liars and only care about nickel and dining us.
Wait...
-
-
[deleted]
-
-
-
I cannot tell you how shocked I am.
They probably didn't break up their simulation/AI processing in a way that scales to multiple threads. Instead of a number of threads spreading out the processing of the individual Sims and other simulation components, I'd guess it's a giant monolithic loop handling each component in sequence.
Alternatively, the internal architecture might support it being spread among multiple cores, they just don't have that behavior turned on for whatever reason.
Either way, it sucks, and IMO shows a lack of forethought.
-
-
-
Are there any deals on the new SimCity?
-
[deleted]
-
