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The Evolution Of Sim City
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this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2024
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Video Game Art
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The one common thread should be an eye for the aesthetic. This is not a place to discuss mechanics or stats, but to show off simply the artistic, expressed through the video game medium.
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The graphics from Simcity 4 (even Simcity 3000) hold up very well today.
I think it's the mixture of a high quality creative direction and immense detail.
Yeah. The one thing I miss is being able to build more walkable, less car-based cities. It's doable in moded Cities: Skylines, but that tends to go unstable on me. Kinda doable in Vanilla C:S2, but that's already unstable before you mod it.
If you want walkable cities, try Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic. It’s janky and complex as hell, but citizens don’t even have cars by default (unless you explicitly build parking lots and buy cars for them), and they rely entirely on walking and public transit to get around. Buildings can receive emergency services via pedestrian paths too (unless they’re something like a grocery store that has parking spaces)
Nice, I'll probably try that.
C:S2 does city services via walking paths too, and even though it's mostly car based, you can get pretty high public transport adoption rates with proper planing. It's even relatively easy to fund free public transport (because the economy is too easy in general, but still). It's just frustrating that it's still full of tech issues this long after launch.
Anyways, I'll stop ranting, and thanks for the reccomendation.
Honestly, the SimCity series was a series where I didn't care much about elaborate graphics. I mean, okay, I guess it's frosting on top of the game, but I also had fun with the original Lincity, and that's got even less glitz than the original SimCity.
If someone came out with a new, interesting game with the look of the original, I'd happily get it.
And Cities: Skylines 2 got its development into serious trouble over its graphics, of all things. I mean, okay, it's pretty, but I'm not getting the game to generate and stare at cityscapes. I'm getting it because it's got lots of levers to pull that interact in interesting ways. I remember reading reviews from people . They weren't upset about its lack of graphical detail, but about its primitive economic model.
I feel that a number of strategy-oriented series -- even games I like -- have kind of gone overboard on assets.
Like, Civilization 5 is pretty, but it's also sometimes unresponsive and it can't run on a phone, whereas Unciv, which is the same game, does just fine on both counts.
Stellaris is pretty, but I'm just never zoomed in to look at the graphics. I'm zoomed way out and mostly looking at icons on the map.
And this is true of a number of war games that have a lot of scale. Eugen's Wargame and Steel Division series are another good example. They could have omitted all of the 3d graphics and just used unit icons and from my standpoint, it would have pretty much been the same game, because that's pretty much what I'm actually looking at during the course of the game.
There are games that I really do feel benefit from snazzy 3D graphics. I remember being impressed with how cinematic Fallout 4 felt when running around in Call to Arms in ArcJet Systems, walking down steel catwalks and having godrays filtering through the gratings shine down.
But there are a number of games where I just feel like I get very little good out of all the money being spent on asset development. And city simulators are just pretty high on that list for me.