I don’t think “Sim” means what they think it means.
on April 3, 2013 at 11:09 AM
Via the new-ish “DieCast” podcast comes yet another Simcity study in video game failure. The image to the left is just a part of what the game seems to think the optimized city should be.
It reminds me a bit of Kowloon, the Walled City, except a complete lack of services (water, sewer, fire, trash, police) and nothing but residential areas somehow results in maximum happiness. As the podcast above asks, if this is the game’s “win” state and so much else about it is broken or not accurate to the simulation of a city, what exactly is this “game” for? Even if one uses it like a city construction playset, you still have nonsensical behavior (and griping) from your population because their alleged AI isn’t up to the task of picking an alternate route if there’s congestion ahead.
I think if one of the largest game companies in the world can’t make a sequel to a popular simulation series that can’t even match the decade-old previous game for the mechanics’ performance, there might be a “too big to succeed” state in the industry. I sometimes wonder if we’re not in a situation where we’re expecting an organization that got rich buying and selling art to somehow be able to produce amazing masterpieces via the business model of maximizing profit above all else?
At least I still have my NPC villages in Minecraft to work on, though the citizens there are none too bright, either.
The “Milleniare” minecraft mod introduces more complicated villages and NPC inhabitants. They’ll trade with you for resources needed to build more structures, which in turn gives you more trade options with them.
The last version I played had rough edges (pathfinding lag got terrible for villages above a certain size, and pathfinding failed once my cities got too big), but that was over a year ago now, so it’s definitely worth a look if you’re interested in that sort of thing.