Early this morning, Producer Jason Haber stopped by to chat about the game in the Simcity Live Chat. We’ve also acquired several new screenshots that were released yesterday that show off some of the new things revealed at Gamescom.
If you purchase the Digital Deluxe version you get access to 3 city sets that can visually transform your city with unique things. For example if you have the British City Set, you can have Double Decker buses driving around your city.
Simcity includes other forms of transportation too, in the center lane you can see a glimpse of the light rail system. Switching to a transportation focused data layer will strip back the graphics to allow you to see a visual representation of how far your Sims will have to travel to reach their destination.
You can even have streets, curvy roads, and avenues. In the interview the producer was asked if they were going to implement roundabouts but they were unsure whether they were going to add it or not.
Curvy roads are a new feature to Simcity, and since they know people will want to optimize space, they will have guidelines to help you with road placement. The development team had a bit of fun with this feature creating road patterns in the shape of robots, a guitar, and even creative director Ocean Quigley’s face.
Throughout the game players can participate in challenges not only against each other, but from region to region, and even the global world. One such challenge could be asking the entire world who will be first in creating the most jobs. Another challenge could pit region against region seeing who can create 1 million Sims.
Players can influence the global market and take advantage of price changes as they see fit. For example, when you select a region, certain locations can have more of a type of resource than others. If your city needs coal, but doesn’t have any natural resources within its limits, you can either try to obtain it from your neighbors or purchase it from the global market.
Ploppable buildings include extra modules that expand the functionality of the building. These modules were inspired by Spore in that you can place them down and attach them to your main building in whatever way you like. For example, the modules for the Casino lets you build additional rooms. You can increase the number of students living in dorms just by plopping down additional dorm rooms. Some modules can have negative effects like increasing the rate of pollution.
One interesting question brought up in the Gamescom interview was whether the lights in the building reflected each Sim living there. The producer states that the lights represent the capacity the building currently has. So the more lights, the more people living in or making use of that building.
salutations de France :*