Greetings, and welcome to an unscripted video here revisiting SimCity 2013,
since it's been about one year since I reviewed the game very much in detail.
And if you have not seen it, well, go ahead and click this little thing to do that if you'd like.
What it all came down to is, at the end of it, I said, "as it is right now, SimCity sucks",
and it did. The game had constantly online DRM, a bunch of server issues, bunch of problems with the AI,
very tiny cities, lots of bugs, I mean, it was just a mess!
But now that has been a year, and a ton of you have been sending me messages over that past year,
asking me what my opinion is of the game now since it's been patched a total of nine times,
as well as been given an expansion pack, let's just go ahead and address the game once again, and at this point,
I am happy to say that there are no server issues, at least none that I have run across. I've put about another
twenty to thirty hours into the game in the past couple of weeks, but yeah,
it seems to be fine now, at least as far as the server stuff goes. Update 10 is coming out supposedly soon.
They announced in January 2014 where an offline mode is coming for single-player gaming.
That means there's still going to be DRM as far as I know, because, you know, it's still going to require Origin.
It's not gonna be, like, completely DRM free or anything,
but that does mean you could at least play the game without having to connect to the internet,
or if you lose the connection to the server or something, then you can still play, and you can also save your games locally.
That's coming soon, as well as mod support for the game, which is exciting.
However, there are a lot of restrictions on what kind of mods you can actually do,
at least to be considered for some sort of official modding thing by EA. I guess if you're doing it without
any kind of blessing by EA whatsoever, you can do whatever you want to it. Again, that's not out yet,
so I can't really comment on that. What I can comment on is some other changes that they've made to the game.
There's a bunch of new regions now, and some of the new cities that they've been adding in these regions,
they actually allow you to start your city from a multiple location,
since originally, all you could do was make cities that started from wherever that one main
highway entrance was on your map, some of these new ones have multiple entrances, which is cool.
There is also still the issue of a lot of just unused space going on, which is a problem since the city sizes are so small.
But they have changed this a little bit, where that now buildings will actually generate underneath roads, and that's pretty cool.
It'll pretty much just scale the buildings that can be built underneath the road to whatever height is allowed there.
And you can also adjust the heights of the roads on-the-fly as you're laying them,
so you can actually make bridges and really interesting road designs just by pressing the [m] and [n] keys on your keyboard.
There's also been a ton of bug fixes. Most of the random junk that I was running across in the main game is no longer there,
things like objects that are un-deletable, and weird textures and graphical glitches,
UI problems and time stopping and stuff like that.
Oh, yeah, that the full speed of the game is now restored too, which is great. They actually disabled that for a while.
There's also quite a few improvements in the way RCI is handled, those, you know residential, commercial, and industrial zoning.
It seems to be a little bit more responsive to the balance of everything, which is good, because
before, you could just make a big, giant residential city and it would be self-sustaining. That made no sense.
You can still do that to a degree, but it doesn't seem to be quite as easy. Maybe that's just me.
There's also a lot of adjustments to the way agents work,
which is good, because my word they were stupid, especially things like services,
you know, garbage trucks, fire trucks, police and whatnot. That stuff was crap.
They would always get stuck, and I have not noticed that anymore at all. The traffic is also hugely improved, which is great.
It actually will divert in the proper ways that you would think it would now. And then there's the issue of the city sizes.
They're just still too freakin small and constricting! I hate this!
There have been some kind of mods to sort of adjust that, I think, I haven't messed with any of them.
But I know there have been some that allow people like place roads outside of the city limits.
Maybe when the modding tool kit or SDK or whatever it is is coming out, maybe it'll allow that,
I don't know. I doubt it, but maybe somebody will figure something out, but as it is right now,
the cities are just still too small. I know what they were trying to do. I really do!
I understand the whole "cities relying on each other" thing, and that especially made sense with the forced multiplayer aspect,
But especially now that they're going single-player, I don't see a reason for them to keep these tiny city sizes.
It gets really cumbersome having to develop one city, and then it just runs out of space within, like, 20 minutes or something.
You don't have the resources you need, and you have to rely on a bunch of other tiny little cities and a big network in order to progress.
Again, I know that's the design of it, but it's just not a design that I'm very keen on, and I just still get annoyed and kind of bored with the game because of that.
Also, there's still a lack of subways and things like city ordinances and a bunch of other little things that would be very nice to have,
they're just not here. There was some DLC for the game, which was ridiculously overpriced.
A bunch of objects and junk costing, like, five to ten dollars each and things like that.
It adds a variety of the aesthetic and a little bit of gameplay even, but, you know, what in the world.
There's also a bunch of free branded Crap thrown into the game, like Progressive insurance buildings and the Nissan Leaf charging station,
and, okay, I mean
it's kind of cool that the progressive insurance will give you a little bit of a payout when a disaster happens in your city,
but it's just really ham-fisted and kind of rubs me the wrong way. Whatever, this happens in The Sims as well,
so it's not too surprising.
So, the base game of SimCity. Yes, it has improved, in fact, it's improved quite a lot.
It's still frickin boring though. For me, after, you know, a good couple hours of playing through a region,
I just don't feel the desire to anymore, even when working towards things like arcologies and stuff,
it's just such a slogging grind and feel like you're completely
artificially limited when there's tons of extra space you could be using just right outside your city limits,
and yet you can't. Still, I would say it is worth grabbing when it's on sale, and yeah,
you can find the game for, like, 20 bucks all over the place now.
But just don't expect a really deep city building experience, and don't expect real cities either.
You get these really interesting neighborhoods and downtown areas,
but sprawling metropolises, no, it's just gonna happen. Now, one more thing to touch on here,
and that is the Cities of Tomorrow expansion pack which was launched in November of 2013,
and this gives you the ability to build futuristic cities. Yeah, that's not exactly what I thought
they would do for an expansion pack to this game. In fact, it really didn't need this.
What I would like is an expansion of the game that I paid $60 for back in March of 2013.
Like expanding the city sizes and the scope of the actual, okay, nevermind, I'm getting off that soapbox.
Anyway, Cities of Tomorrow. It allows you to make futuristic cities, and holy crap these are awesome!
Seriously, I like these a lot! The futuristic aesthetic is superb. The look of this is just spot-on.
You know, you've got stuff pulled from Blade Runner and Judge Dredd.
Maybe a little bit of Ghost in the Shell, and just all sorts of other stuff just kind of thrown into this really cool
futuristic Sci-Fi thing going on. It's not fully dystopian, not fully utopian,
it's actually a pretty realistic idea of what could happen. And while I don't always want to play with this kind of stuff,
you know, sometimes I just want the early 21st century, it's all completely optional which is great.
Basically, what you get are a bunch of buildings that you can place anywhere in your city,
to quote unquote "futurize it", and that's good because it doesn't change the entire game over into this thing.
When you do use it, you get access to a whole bunch of new, uhh, abilities and futuristic tech.
Even a couple new resources, which is it's pretty much just future juice. Some of it you can make from, like, oil and raw ore,
The other stuff is more of like an educational tech based kind of Wi-Fi system.
Anyway, there's certain buildings that generate this stuff, and they're useful for making these mega industries,
as well as, like, mega technology centers.
And really, the whole idea of this is fixing some of the population problems brought about by the tiny map sizes of the game,
by shoehorning in these new buildings that allow for artificially higher populations.
So with the industrial ones, you have this Omega Corporation which makes these mega industries.
They basically convert over the existing industrial buildings into industrial buildings that output a ton more stuff,
which in turn support these giant buildings.
They're pretty much the city blocks from Judge Dredd, and they look freakin awesome, and it's really cool.
You have kind of an element of Sim Tower in there. You place, uhh, like a lobby base or whatever,
and then you can place like office floors, residential floors, park floors, and recycling centers,
and eventually they can become, like, self-sustaining little cities on their own.
And of course they affect everything around them too.
And then of course with the whole futurization aspect of it, you can make your entire city just look really, really impressive
I was honestly surprised at how much I enjoyed the Cities of Tomorrow expansion for what it was.
I don't want to play with this all the time. But when I do want to mess around with a little bit of fantasy city building, this is sweet.
The $30 asking price is decent. I would preferably just wait for some kind of sale, in fact I got it for like $10,
and while it doesn't turn SimCity 2013 into the entire game that I was really hoping for,
it does something different and a little bit unexpected in a way that just looks awesome, and my goodness, it sounds awesome, too.
I love the new futuristic sounds and sound effects and ambience going on,
not to mention the soundtrack, it's superb. If the original SimCity Soundtrack was inspired by Philip Glass type of stuff,
this one is very much inspired by Vangelis and other artists like that from Noir-ish futuristic movies and whatnot, it's really cool.
So, there you go, you have my refreshed thoughts on SimCity 5, SimCity Reboot,
SimCity 2013, whatever the frick you want to call it SimCity. This is still not the game SimCity fans were looking for, even with all these changes.
So just keep this in mind when you're checking out the game and seeing it for a decent price.
Make sure you know what you're getting into, and rest assured things like the online
requirement will soon be lifted, and a vast majority of the little niggles and bugs and things like that have been improved significantly.
And if you'd like some more videos where I talk with my voice, you can watch them.
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I wish. What decade am I in? I don't even know. Thank you for watching.