Simcity Details at E3: Gather Resources, Play Offline Briefly…

As today’s E3 comes to a close, videogame news sites have started releasing their impressions and interviews. Here at Simcitizens we’d rather cut out all the fluff and jump straight into the juicy details:

• You can have multiple regions with multiple cities within them.
• Cities can not be reloaded to a previous save to do-over mistakes you’ve made. 
• There will be a cheat mode that allows you to quickly build up cities. Achievements will be disabled though.
• Simcity features “cause and effect” gameplay. For example, industry pollutes the water supply leading to sick Sims.
• The simulator causes every activity in the city, from opening and closing doors, to smoke stacks triggering pollution in the city.
• The simulator decides whether an action can take place. A Sim who’s very poor will not suddenly decide to go shopping on a whim. However, if they are broke, they could decide on finding a job.
• The game keeps track of what you do and how you are playing then reflects this upon the city. You may even see challenges pop up because of it.
• If you are disconnected from the internet, you won’t be kicked out of the game right away, it will allow you to play “offline” for a few minutes until you reconnect.
• You can now build curved roads. The lots themselves can even point towards the direction of the sidewalk.
• There’s a rendering technique known as “interior mapping,” this creates the illusion as if you can see inside a building.
• There’s even a rendering technique that allows them to create thousands of Sims, it’s somewhat related to this “interior mapping” but details are unknown.
• Like in Simcity4, a fire truck must actually drive to a burning building to extinguish a fire.
• An arsonist will also set fires just for the hell of it.
• You can gather resources like wood, oil, trees, and fish and export manufactured products from them. You can sell them to the global market or trade them with neighboring cities.
• Each city starts with a few pre-existing resources. You can manufacture these resources to something else to increase their value. For example, you can combine resources to create engines, or combine them with other resources to create cars.
• Combining these resources adds to the complexity of the supply chain, There’s even a risk of failure that could be detrimental to the city if you are manufacturing expensive products.

Reactions

The online-only component is again causing a flurry of negative reactions. The news of not being able to reload a previous version of your city is troubling many potential buyers. Now, some players think the game is too restrictive compared to the sandbox style of previous Simcity titles.

[via gamespy, pcgamer, kotaku]