this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
156 points (100.0% liked)
Gaming
1495 readers
1 users here now
From video gaming to card games and stuff in between, if it's gaming you can probably discuss it here!
See also Gaming's sister community Tabletop Gaming.
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
There is definitely something to be said about the game tending towards being car centric. One factor for this not even directly related to transport that I've noticed myself a lot is the lack of proper mixed zoning, which can be a valuable tool of creating more walkable and public transport friendly cities.
I do like the idea of a city growing somewhat more organically over the years. I think it would also make it easier to not have one specific approach to transport being the objective best, because your earlier decisions would probably have some influence on that. It does sound rather hard to me though to find the right balance of how hard to deal with those historical restrictions should be.
On the one hand, if somebody wants to Haussmanize their Paris I'd say more power to you, the bulldozer tool is in the menu. On the other hand, some mechanic like Transport Tycoon's where local councils stop letting you build around them if you get too aggressive remodeling their town could be interesting too.
At the end of the day, though, I wouldn't want to take to much power or of the player's hands. Will Wright described those classic Maxis games as "software toys," and the freedom to mess around and see what happens is both part of the appeal and how games like SimCity came to seen as educational.
I remember those classics.
SimAnt, SimEarth, SimTower, SimCopter, Streets of SimCity. Those last two were particularly cool because you could import your SimCity 2000 city into them and fly or drive around in the city you made. I thought that was the coolest thing.
SimAnt has a warm, weird place in my heart, not least of which for the massive doorstop of a manual that it came bundled with, full of all kinds of science trivia about ants, including something like a very long term paper or a small textbook about them at the back! What a different era that was.