SimCity: Cities of the Future expansion announced

Like many my age, I want to play at living in a dystopian cityscape of towering arcologies as respite from my life in a dystopian cityscape of moderate towerblocks. SimCity finally has my attention with its Cities of the Future expansion, which turns your cities into, well, you know.

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Like many my age, I want to play at living in a dystopian cityscape of towering arcologies as respite from my life in a dystopian cityscape of moderate towerblocks. SimCity finally has my attention with its Cities of the Future expansion, which turns your cities into, well, you know.

Cities of the Future goes 50-75 years into the future, with maglev trains, emergency service drones, a megacorp, modular megatowers, skybridges, wave power generators, and neon lights.

Megatowers are an interesting addition, able to contain up to 8 modules split between residential, commercial, industrial and whatnot as you please, and giving bonuses to buildings around them. Players can choose whether they're gleaming utopian spires or grim dystopian tombstones too.

The megacorp is also more than a simple new type of industry. OmegaCorp processes oil and ore into Omega, a mysterious substance which insidiously takes over your sims and city, so you'll need to keep up demand if you don't want everything to come crashing down.

SimCity: Cities of the Future is due on November 12. EA hasn't announced a price yet, and frustratingly all we know is from this exclusive IGN video preview:

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  • reply
    September 19, 2013 8:30 AM

    Alice O'Connor posted a new article, SimCity: Cities of the Future expansion announced.

    Like many my age, I want to play at living in a dystopian cityscape of towering arcologies as respite from my life in a dystopian cityscape of moderate towerblocks. SimCity finally has my attention with its Cities of the Future expansion, which turns your cities into, well, you know.

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      September 19, 2013 8:43 AM

      This does actually look cool. But then i said the same thing about simcity. Which I havent touched since the first week it came out.

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        September 19, 2013 9:11 AM

        Wasn't the Design Lead on SimCity previously a Lead Art Director? This would explain why the game looks beautiful but has such poorly designed gameplay systems.

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          September 19, 2013 9:35 AM

          Origin has that 24-hour satisfaction guarantee this time around, so they better not make this expansion something that gets boring after 6 hours.

          Also, if they're still running on the same backend code, and haven't provisioned up for launch, they're going to have a sequel to the Great SimCity Outage of March 2013. That event could be used as the answer to any exec who facetiously asks, "Why would we stand up servers or cloud provisioning that we're just going to shut down two weeks after launch?"

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      September 19, 2013 8:44 AM

      [deleted]

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      September 19, 2013 8:51 AM

      fool me twice...NOPE.

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      September 19, 2013 9:11 AM

      The development and continued development of this game is such a joke. It's one thing after another. Are they living in a friggen bubble or absolutely ignoring the non-stop criticism?

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      September 19, 2013 9:42 AM

      Oh look, more news about that shitty game I hate. *grumble*

      We need a new city builder that's good, and not in any way involved with EA/Maxis.

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      September 19, 2013 9:45 AM

      not that there's anything wrong with this approach, but given the slew of problems SC has it's somewhat surprising they didn't follow the lead of Rush Hour and do an expansion that fixes and expands upon the core product (you know, the part they bought the original game for).

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        September 19, 2013 10:23 AM

        They already did, you know, for free.

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          September 19, 2013 10:43 AM

          [deleted]

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          September 19, 2013 12:16 PM

          as far as I can tell they delivered free patches to get the game into what many companies would consider a v1 state ready to ship and charge money for. Let's not pretend like there's been some unprecedented benevolent post ship dev process with crazy support above and beyond what's entirely the norm these days. When you ship a broken game you're expected to fix it, especially if you intend to ship more paid content on top of it.

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          September 19, 2013 2:05 PM

          Oh, I must have missed the patches that increased city size, or at least made it so that the city didn't look like total ass when you zoom out.

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      September 19, 2013 10:38 AM

      Place up to seven buildings in your Village of the Future.

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      September 19, 2013 10:44 AM

      [deleted]

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        September 19, 2013 10:56 AM

        They probably had this in the development pipeline as far back as a year prior to release, if not 2011. That's lesson one of EA Maxis Product Management 101: make a retail expansion pack. Yes, now one can say "that's an antiquated idea", but try telling that to 2010-era John Riccitiello or Frank Gibeau.

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      September 19, 2013 11:41 AM

      So take me down to the cities of the future everybody's happy and I feel at home

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      September 19, 2013 12:05 PM

      Are the cities of the future bigger?

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      September 19, 2013 12:12 PM

      This is free to everyone that bought it at launch, yes?

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        September 20, 2013 9:14 AM

        tiny, packed, and perfectly square. No left turns.

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      September 19, 2013 12:15 PM

      Lol.. this looks like such a money grab. I haven't played this since it was released. Until they offer bigger maps I'm just not interested. The small map sizes just were horrible, you could fill them up in a few hours of game time easily.

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      September 19, 2013 12:57 PM

      If this makes citys bigger I might finally purchase it....MIGHT!

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      September 19, 2013 1:02 PM

      they'll have to pull a blizzard/D3 and completely overhaul things

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      September 19, 2013 1:45 PM

      [deleted]

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      September 19, 2013 1:57 PM

      Yawn, more shovel ware from EA.

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      September 19, 2013 2:25 PM

      LOL they paid people to work on this while knowing how shitty the main game is. It's not just shitty, it's galactic-class shitty, they still haven't fixed most of the issues, but BUY MORE FROM US!

      good fucking god, the gall.

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      September 20, 2013 5:36 AM

      Offline mode and larger maps or no care.

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