The new SimCity seems to be built with multiplayer in mind, giving you the ability to participate in asynchronous multiplayer with your friends. By linking your city with others, you’ll be able to import workers, electrical power and share many other pieces of gameplay, though you’ll also inherit dangerous elements as well.
If a neighboring city happens to have a high crime rate, for instance, it could spill into your metropolis. The effects will be visible in-game, instead of limited to figures in a spreadsheet. You may see a sports car drive into your town with rock music blasting from the windows. It’ll drive off the roads and pull up onto the curb, and its passengers will get out and actually run into a building to rob it. The cops may then show up with sirens flashing and get into a gunfight. You’ll actually see the police offers firing at the criminals.
This type of thing isn’t just for show. According to Maxis, vehicles driving along roads have actual destinations and functions. For instance, a delivery truck carrying alloy to a construction site won’t actually make the delivery until it arrives at the proper location. If there’s a lot of traffic or some other disaster, the alloy will never be received by those that need it.
Similarly, when you set up new residential zones, you’ll see trucks pull into the lots to build the structures, and later moving vans roll up to unload homeowners. The residents will even cart things back and forth between the house and moving truck before the vehicle drives away.
As you lay out your town, building houses and commercial and industrial zones, you’ll also be able to lay down customizable curved roads. So if you really want to design a road system that looks like a dinosaur, you can do that, even if it leads to traffic congestion and zoning issues. With structures on the ground, you’ll also be able to further modify them, adding on additional functionality to factories or purely cosmetic alterations. You’ll see the changes in the live game, and the add-ons will be visible on the in-game model, complete with unique animations.
On the topic of animations, it appears like a lot of work has been put into giving even the most mundane elements of gameplay a sense of personality. While you’re determining where to place a structure, for instance, the building will sway around your mouse pointer as though it had weight. Then when you finally decide where to set it down, the building hits the ground with a firm impact, sending clouds of dust out from beneath its walls. When you set up power lines, the wires give off a cartoon-like rubber stretching sound effect to indicate you’re trying to place them too far apart. Little touches like this helps your city feel more like a real place, and less like an ever-churning tumbler of calculations.
With the multiplayer element, you’ll be able to achieve bigger things by combining resources with those building cities around you, such as international airports, where one city may need to send building materials and another workers. Managing these types of projects seems to be pretty simple, as you’ll receive notifications about specifically what materials are needed for a major construction’s progress to continue. This ease of project management applies to other areas of the game as well – managing the power grid is a simple matter of toggling a color-coded overlay so you know where power is being routed and where it’s needed.
With really pretty visuals, what sounds like plenty of gameplay depth and some interesting multiplayer features, SimCity sounds great so far. It’s currently scheduled to launch in February of 2012.
Source : ign[dot]com
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