Sim City – I’m the mayor of Traffic Town

I’ve always liked the SimCity series. It’s been a pleasantly rewarding franchise for the better part of my youth, allowing me to bank a few hours building huge skyrise condos without worrying about a swarm of zerglings swingin’ through and headbutting my creations to dust. So when I heard that Maxis had a new game coming out, I was understandably stoked! I finally had the chance to get back into a game that calms me down, rather than one that makes me rage and question the merits of humanity’s continued existence (cough cough League of Legends cough). I threw down the 60-some bucks to get the Limited Edition pre-order, and with quivering anticipation, sat down to build my world-spanning megalopolis.

…Only, the servers were down. For two days.

“Servers?”, you might ask, “Why does SimCity have servers?”

I asked myself that very same thing numerous times over the past two weeks, on those sleepless nights where I’ve nothing for company except my knitting. And the answer to that question, my friends, lies at the heart of the problem with this game. Allow me to explain, starting with some brief history.

The latest SimCity is entirely online. You play your little corner of the world with 2-16 people, each building in a certain section of a chosen region. These cities work together, sharing goods and services, building the occasional Great Work, and (eventually) competing to meet Challenges set forth by the Maxis/EA crew every few weeks. And in theory, this would be a cool idea. But in practice, this has resulted in SimCity being always online, meaning it does not have a single player version. Maxis has recited a whole litany of paper-thin reasons why this is a good idea, but essentially, it comes down to Digital Rights Management, or DRM. Basically, SimCity is always online in order to keep the game from being pirated, since you have to authenticate your version with the host servers at all times.

Because of this requirement to be connected at all times, the Maxis servers were completely swamped as people downloaded the game and attempted to play it. This was exacerbated by the fact that there was no pre-loading of the game; typically, companies let people download their product before the release date, to ease the strain on the servers when the big day comes. Maxis/EA did not do this, for no more stated reason than “We wanted to, but it didn’t happen. Sorry.”

There are more problems (both in-game and out) currently known by the playerbase (if not acknowledged by tech support) than I’d care to list, but I’m going to focus on two. These are the game creation lobby , and traffic; and then I will focus on a positive.

Game Creation Lobby

Upon trying to join a game, you’re shown a screen full of maps. These maps are all full of people. You can click Load More Results, which yields another couple maps- all of which are also full. True fact, as of my writing this (March 17th), it took me clicking the Load More Results button sixteen times before I even started seeing games with a single spot open. Why is this the case? Because there is no method to filter which games you join. Not by player population, map size, whether or not your friends are there- nothing. You just get to see the first games that were created, and scroll down a couple minutes to find one where there are spaces available.

This means that if you decide to create your own game, you’ll get pick of the litter as far as city sites go… but odds are you’re gonna be rocking your Forever Alone face. Best of luck to you.

Traffic

If the Sim-habitents of my city want to hyperbolize the size of their manhood, they compare their member to the traffic column. If a Sim Singer wants to explain how endless their love is, they compare it to the gridlock. The distance between the sun and the Sim Earth in this game isn’t measured in astronomical units, it’s measured in traffic units. I’d say there is a metric asston of traffic in this game,
but that does not properly explain the scale of this issue. There is a metric trafficton of traffic in this game.

Beautiful city! Almost distracts from the MOUNTAINS OF TRAFFIC behind those buildings.

Much of this problem is caused by the fact that cars do not drive logically, often taking non-optimized routes just because one exit comes before another. Imagine every driver heeding the advice of a GPS voiced by a passive-aggressive Alan Rickman, and there’s your traffic problems. “Oh, you wish to return home, do you? Best take the first exit, lest you prove too incompetent to respond in time for the next.”

And this isn’t just an intellectual exercise of “oh, there’s a lot of cars here”. Because of the way trade works, you need constant supplies of imports and exports to make money, if you’re an industrial town. Even if you’re tourist-based, you still need people to be able to move. And your city will absolutely burn to the ground if your emergency vehicles can’t respond. So, these problems quickly become
irredeemable, unmanageable, and un-fun.

Something Positive

I could continue by talking about other issues – but that would approach straight-out bitching, and that’s not what I’m here to do. So, here’s some of what’s right with it.

First of all, it’s beautiful. Rendered in entirely 3D, you can zoom out from a bird’s eye view or sweep into a street-level perspective, traveling up and down each individual street in your town. With the game’s addition of trade resources, you can specialize your city into an industrial powerhouse. Also available to you is the option to take a more scenic approach and turn your city into a tourist trap, complete with iconic buildings from around the world and gambling supercenters. Not your schitck? Make your hamlet a college town and focus on high-tech industry.

All it’s flaws, it’s still pretty, it’s Sim City, and i’m still playing it.

To avoid the risk of rambling, I’ll end with this summary: SimCiy is a game that is still HEAVILY glitched, but has a lot of potential down the road. Besides, despite all the aforementioned problems, I’m still playing the game. I want it to succeed, to be awesome, to have killer DLC and a competitive player base.

So, I would give SimCity a rating of 3 out of 5 Battlestar Galacticas with the potential for a side order of Sara Bareilles; at the moment, it gets shittier as it gets closer to the end, but it could turn out to be something really beautiful.

PS- If Sara Bareilles is reading this, hey gurrrrrrrl.