new "real" Sim City in 2013

[xannepan]

For me SC4 is more a hobby then a game. That will be something difficult to replace, so I don't expect SC5 will be able to do that.

No matter what SC5 will bring, we still will have SC4 :-)

[Chrisim]

I did not believe a word when a new user "Caesarchen" registered at www.simforum.de on 25 February, postet the announcement about the Sim City (2013) Gamestar article, and never logged in again. He claimed to have access to the digital version as "premium member Gamestar".

Why should an American game be announced by a German journal? But why not, Gamestar is a credible journal, has been around for 15 years and they have a good network with game producers.

I bought the Gamestar issue a few minutes ago, and now I believe it. The article looks promising and credible. The English Google translations in the internet are horrible. I am lucky that I am German. Custom Content is not mentioned in the article. It states that according to Maxis, it will take more than a year until Sim City will be ready. I hope they will take the time they need to get a good product.

In the meantime, we shall create and publish further new great products for Sim City 4. The SFBT remains alive.

[Lowkee33]

I would be very surprised if a new Sim City didn't offer any custom content ability, Maxis has always been good with this.  We might even be able able to import 3ds.  My guess would be that there would be an LE and perhaps a PIM.  Another thing might be a "make a building" just like we make creatures in Spore.

Edit:  Actually, "make a building" in the context of Spore could be very interesting (to me).  Something like, when your city gets 1,000 people you unlock a brick building piece.

Another thing to remember is that Maxis did not make Reader (or anything other than LE/PIM/BAT).  Where would we be if we didn't know what a FSH was?  I don't expect them to release something and then say "and here is all of our file types decoded, have fun".

My main hope is that cities/regions/worlds/whatever will take as much time to complete as they do for SC4.  If I'm done with a city in one sitting that isn't much entertainment.  My other hope is that the game barely functions on even the newest of computers.  I forget the name of the game that we used to talk about, but it would be neat if the new phrase was "but can it play SC5 full specs?".

It's exciting none the less.  Nice to see the old names still working on computer games.  Will Wright is probably beyond computer games at this point, but I don't think it is too much to say that he is more about social applications than staring at a screen (Though I hear he is making a tv show).

[WC_EEND]

I forget the name of the game that we used to talk about, but it would be neat if the new phrase was "but can it play SC5 full specs?".

That would be Crysis

[Tarkus]

Courtesy of Ocean Quigley:

Curious to see the (secret!) project we've been building at Maxis?

If you're at the Game Developer's Conference, come to "Inside the GlassBox" at 11:00 on Wednesday to find out.
Andrew Willmott, Dan Moskowitz and I will show you what our new simulation engine can do. It's pretty much the coolest thing I've ever worked on.

Hope to see you there!

Dan Moskowitz has also commented.

Inside the GlassBox
I'm excited to share the news that Ocean Quigley, Andrew Willmott, and I will be presenting "Inside the GlassBox" on March 7th at 11am during GDC 2012.  It's been roughly two years that we've remained quiet about this simulation engine and the work we've been doing at Maxis, so we're thrilled to be able to present and share knowledge with the rest of the game development community.  Looking forward to it, hope to see you there.

When Ocean says it's the "coolest thing" he's ever worked on, that sounds pretty promising.

-Alex

[gn_leugim]

So I see all points to be true, SC5 (or SCV) is coming. Actually I don't know if I go  or  .

On one hand I love SC4 and what all the community has done so far made it an incredible game, and an hobby. So much was passed and done on it, leaving it (in some extend only ofcourse) leaves a nostalgic felling. More, What will be lost from SC4 to SC5?? so many custom content. If only the plugin system would be similar, in such way you would only have to take older models on Max and render it again the the new rendering system for instance.

On the other hand, new game, with new functionalities and simulation engine promises a lot, which leaves people excited I think. Also, there is the point of the improved graphics, which is always good, to some extend in my opinion, as I like to feel I am playing a game, not directing a movie lol. This also leads to the specs of the game, the requirements. I believe it will be pretty much as SC4 for his days, very state of the art, so I don't think most of the current players will be able to run the game in good performance/graphics and will be limited on the size of the cities (pretty much as I was on the beginning with SC4 lol)

anyway, I'll wait to see what comes up from this.

[Haljackey]

New leak of Simcity 5:

http://www.youtube.com/v/BoKT25S2yJU

http://youtu.be/BoKT25S2yJU

[mike3775]

That trailer makes me go "meh" honestly. 

[gn_leugim]

just concept art pictures so.. really "meh"

[Buzzit]

i hope you can create bigger maps than shown in the trailer..

further more i love the graphics... looks pretty promising..
i also hope its pretty editable so i can continue my projects in this new one.
but thats for the future to deside.

[jdenm8]

It's a Pre-Vis trailer. As the video's description at ST states, it's basically a storyboard for the first trailer and has about as much bearing on the game as those concept images shown earlier. The proper trailer with the missing frames (If it's finished), will probably be revealed at the Game Changers event tomorrow or maybe at the GDC.

[Haljackey]

Simcity section on Reddit these days:



http://www.reddit.com/r/simcity

Without a doubt, the entire community is exploding with news of a sequel. It's been a long time coming. 

[Kitsune]

The only sad thing is that sc4 has had 9 years of content development that a lot of it is going to go poof when sc5 comes out.

[Girafe]

The only sad thing is that SC4 has had 9 years of content development that a lot of it is going to go poof when SC5 comes out.

Indeed, if the development of SC5 is clearly announced, I fear that it will accelerate the decline of SC4. EA has to think about integration of custom content on its future SC.

Personally I anticipated this and saved all my work as .3ds (most common 3D format). Not sure that one day, I could use again all this work...

For these reasons, I am not so confident with this announce 

[Haljackey]

Agreed, I do admit it'll be hard to switch over with all of great custom contact from simtropolis/sc4devotion that helped make SC4 what it is today.

But change is good... Most of the time

[mike3775]

Agreed, I do admit it'll be hard to switch over with all of great custom contact from simtropolis/sc4devotion that helped make SC4 what it is today.

But change is good... Most of the time

I agree with you IF the stuff that has been done with SC4(NAM, STR, NWM, RHW) is included in 5, yes it will be a good version of change, but if it is like what happened with SC3000 from SC2000 on the Sega Saturn, its a downgrade.

[girlfromverona]

I'll wait to see more before offering an opinion. Remember the abomination that was Sim City Societies?

Seriously, though, it's actually the community that has made SC4 what it is. If the game hadn't been moddable, I doubt I would have played it for very long.

[dedgren]

I hadn't intended, other than a brief comment or two when the news first surfaced, to get involved a third time around in the excitement (for some)/upset (for others) dating from the initial announcement of a "successor" to SC4.  In the light of 20/20 hindsight my initial take on both SimCity: Societies and CitiesXL seems to have held up pretty well, but in each instance I recall the year or so between initial announcement of each game and their release as being full of ridiculous amounts of wasted time thinking that somehow I or anyone in the community could really bring anyone at Tilted Mill or Monte Cristo around to my/our point of view.  Both of those development efforts, in the end, proved to have been undertaken in an "echo chamber" kind of environment where each company made a big show of seeking community involvement and input, then went ahead and built the game more or less exactly the way that was intended in the first place.

I'm just not going to do that again.

In a couple of days we'll have more info about what EA is up to, and then a year plus to wait for release.  I would tend to agree with Alex (Tarkus) and others who speculate that this time around we will see the real deal- a game that builds upon a SC4 foundation and takes things we are happy with and updates them to take advantage of today's computer hardware.  Assuming that the new game is released in mid- to late-2013, that means we have anywhere from just over a year to just short of two years where nothing will change at all- a time during which SC4 remains the only game in town.  In a short attention span world, either end of that is a long time, and particularly if you are simply a person who just plays SC4 and delights in all the custom content that others are willing to put the time into and create.  That, btw, is a perfectly honorable way to be involved in this community.  I would think that most of the enjoyment custom content creators get out of the work they do is from knowing that hundreds or, in some cases, thousands of people will put it to good use.  That has always been a win-win outcome, and it makes for a great community.

If you are a creator of custom content, though, the possibility that EA is working on a legitimate successor to SC4 presents at best a dilemma and at worst a catastrophe.  The NAM Team, in particular, is working on the first stages of projects right now that will not see the light of day until some time in 2013, and perhaps even the following year.  Most of these projects are incredibly time-intensive.  I can tell you from working on triple track rail (TTR), a project with a far closer release date, that a single puzzle piece out of the 50 or so that I am creating can take an entire eight hour day to complete.  Some take far less time, but over the course of the entire project- well, you get the picture.  If the new game turns out to be everything the community is waiting for and as a result it moves en masse to playing it by the end of 2013, there will be lot of folks here who probably picture the future as one where suddenly they find themselves with a lot of time on their hands, and creations that, however well they might be conceived or amazing an addition they might make to the game, will do nothing but gather electronic dust on the abandoned LEXs and STEXs of the SC4 world.

My take on EA's mindset right now in conceiving a SC4 successor has been articulated in connection with, in particular, Monte Cristo's demonstrated approach to the CitiesXL "business model," if you will.  That is, in brief, "don't give away anything that you can sell."  It is pretty well settled, in fact, that the demise of Monte Cristo came about because the folks who would have played CitiesXL quickly soured on the notion that they weren't actually buying the game at all, they were simply renting it by the month through the Planet Offer.  In 2003, EA gave us, probably unwittingly, the keys to the kingdom in the form of the BAT tool and the Lot Editor, and by making many of the internal file formats of the SC4 program non-proprietary code-wise.  This allowed the community to develop its own tools, notably Ilive's Reader.  Our custom content creators, given nine years to play with these things, did the rest.  This time around, though, it is likely to be very different.  Think of things like SC4 tunnels, which are hard-coded in the game's EXE, and really have proved impossible to mod.  I believe that the game that is coming, whatever it looks like, will have much, much more of the game coded in proprietary and likely encrypted form.  It may be, as a result, that there will be no way, unless the new game gives you the controls to do it, to do things like modify terrain parameters or make mayor mode ploppables.  I would guess, along these lines, that the ability to lot- i.e., to group buildings, props and textures into a discrete unit- might also be severely curtailed, if not eliminated.  Why would EA impose now these limitations when, as one commenter here has noted, it has a long tradition of providing tools to do these things in the past to the community?  I think the answer can be found in what happened with SC4 versus what happened with The SIMs.  EA, fortunately, left us alone.  Purchasers of The SIMs, though, in order to stay up with the current state of game development and play had to buy frequent and expensive expansion packs and "upgrades" to the game, some of which broke, apparently purposefully, such custom content as had been created to that point.  The bottom line- I would bet my last dollar that the community's experience with SC4 starting in 2003 will not be repeated again.  Sort of a devil's bargain- we get many of the shiny, flashy SimCity things that we have been wishing for over the almost a decade since SC4's release, but we trade away in return our autonomy and an incredible degree of insight into and control over how the game works.

This has been the longest post I've written here in quite a while.  I'll wrap it up by making a few last predictions and giving you a tentative answer to where I think this is all headed.  I think we can take as a given that:

1.  There will be no backward compatibility between the new game and SC4.  To some degree a business decision, but in the main because of a different rendering engine, probably full or limited 3D versus fixed perspective.  Some of this will actually be a good thing, as computers have come a long way from, heh... the turn of the century.  As a result, though, folks will be presented with a stark choice.  If the new game, on the whole, is seen to have good aspects that outweigh the drawbacks and limitations, the folks who just play the game, versus the custom content creators, will almost certainly not play both.  The current community will certainly shrink, and perhaps hugely.

2.  EA will not "give" us SC4, nor will it become abandonware.  To think otherwise is to just delude yourself in light of EA's history with the series.  It is not going to happen.

3.  EA will not solicit open community involvement in the development of the new game.  To some degree, we brought that on ourselves, but I do not see that as necessarily being any sort of badge of shame.  Both Tilted Mill and Monte Cristo engaged in a sham process of "involvement" probably by and large thought up by their respective marketing departments.  In each case it backfired and, in the case of CitiesXL, community backlash and revulsion over being "had" probably had a lot to do with the demise of the company.  EA already knows, because it hires people who can presumably read, exactly what we want and, through sites like this, what we think SC:Next should look like.  There will, I'm fairly sure, be a lucky few among us who may hear from EA and get sent a confidentiality agreement, but don't expect to be reading about that in any of the community's forums.

4.  SC4, whatever the new game looks like, will not die.  If the new game, again, is overall viewed as a worthy successor, the community may shrink to a group of, dare I say it, very devoted followers, probably, to the extent what I have said about the limited ability to BAT and MOD and lot turns out to be so, including many of today's custom content creators.  I don't see the current generation of these folks, many of whom have been playing and working to improve SC4 from almost day one, starting all over again.  Some will get discouraged- we've already seen some attrition over the past few years as talented folks have simply moved on- but that's to be expected.  This is, after all, a hobby- recreation if you will- and not a calling or a vocation.  A large enough group will remain, though, to allow a reasonably robust development environment, perhaps more oriented toward fine-tuning and perfecting what we already have as opposed to launching the huge new projects we have seen over the past five years.  I could see SC4D looking like it did during the early days, when several hundred core members being actively involved made for a great site, and one that I today count myself very lucky to have been a part of.  All that said, if the new game is more of the same dreck as the last two times around, you can count on our community to be merciless in its judgment, and (imho) appropriately so.  I do not view in any way the opinions expressed here and other places about SC:Societies and CitiesXL as being, as some would suggest, just nitpicking by people who you can't please, no matter what you do as a game developer.  We know what we want, and we'll know SC:Next when we see it.

The bottom line: I'm looking forward pretty confidently to being here with many or perhaps most of you playing SC4 and continuing to expand that game's possibilites in 2014.  I wish EA the best of luck in developing the new game, though, and I'm always open to the possibility that miracles can occur, as one did in 2003, and we have all been blessed by it ever since.


David

[Lowkee33]

@David:  I hear you.  At this point I know one thing, my computer can not play SC5 

@Tarkus:  Better than if he had said "I'm pretty sure there are better ones out there".   

[jigsaw]

i already think that some of the 'big guns' of the community are possibly already involved... there's been a notable absence of a lot of creators in the  'top 100' the last 12 months or so.