![]() ![]() ![]() User created content and expansion packs were crucial to the success of The Sims, and users rightfully complained about being nickel and dimed by a long series of expansion packs. ![]() (And now here we are with free-to-play games with in-app purchases, alas.) But in general, the users were strongly against it, because they said they wanted to buy the whole game up front, and didn't want to feel like they were being nickel and dimed to get the entire experience. (I don't remember how they framed it, whether they mentioned "downloadable" or "add-on packs" or "user created content"). Maxis (before EA bought them) held some user focus groups while developing SimCity 2000, and asked SimCity users what they thought about additional "plug-in" content. What Cities: Skylines really got right was user modding and extensibility! Which makes it even more tragic and frustrating that SimCity limits you to such a small lot size, because one of the best things about earlier versions of SimCity was backing way up and looking across vast urban sprawls, every road and building which you created with your own hands! I agree! I believe a large part of the nostalgic "charm" of SimCity was thanks to the excellent art direction of Ocean Quigley, who's worked on SimCity and The Sims artwork from the early days.īoth of them are beautiful, but I think SimCity really is more polished, visually coherent, and better balanced than Cities: Skyline. Simcity 4 definitely feels much deeper of a game to me than skylines, perhaps simply because it's complicated and I get a sense of joy figuring out the unintuitive parts. And you can get the cheapest most effective form of public transportation (buses) to work without any modding or special planning aside from placing them at the right density (every 6-7 tiles).Īn advanced city where most jobs are Co$$ and Co$$$ can actually be designed to have very little transportation needs at all because you can zone the high wealth commercial and residential buildings close to each other. One of the best ways to force or heavily encourage public transportation/highway usage is to use a tree-pattern transportation network which purposefully creates bottlenecks that are alleviated by high capacity roads or public transportation shortcuts. Basically sims always take the shortest path regardless of traffic, they are randomly matched 1:1 between residential wealth level and the distribution of jobs from each job-producing building, and sims of certain income categories have restrictions on which types of public transportation they will take (e.g. You can definitely get un-modded simcity 4's public transportation and highways to function without a mod, you just need to know a decent amount about the game. ![]() That made it feel more like a simulation. Might just be me, but I never felt like I could fail at C:S whereas in SimCity you could make a few stupid decisions or expand too fast and start losing money, and all you could do is watch the city degenerate into a wasteland that can't be gotten out of (without cheating anyways). The SimCity games felt more like they were a challenge needing to balance the budget and build a sustainable city all while being resilient to events like disasters. But that's what I'd consider sandbox: using your own creativity on a blank canvas with almost no chance of entering a complete failure mode you can't recover from. You could maybe invent your own goals, like creating a specific look to your city or building the most density possible while maintaing efficient transportation. To me it didn't feel like there were many challenges or ways you could irreparable damage your city in City Skylines. I don't think that's quite what the OP meant by sandbox vs. ![]()
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