IGN - More than Your Borders

Maxis Software's ultimate goal for the SimCity franchise has always been to make you think about game ideas in the real world. From dealing with natural disasters like earthquakes, to making sure city-funded services such as garbage and electricity are provided, the simulation should be fun and also develop your mind so you reflect on what you see going on around you every day. After more than a decade the studio that started it all is returning to the series, bringing back the beloved PC franchise with a new game simply titled SimCity. The ultimate goal is still the same, but new advances in tech and design, as well as living in a world with increased globalization, have reshaped the way Maxis approached its design.

At its most basic level SimCity gameplay remains largely untouched. You take control of an area and build it into the type of city you want. You manage the many needs of the city such as water, power and maintenance, making a bustling metropolis or a sleepy little town. You can respond to the wants and needs of your people or simply ignore them, making your populace as happy or miserable as you desire.

Many core gameplay concepts remain untouched, but how you get the information you need to make decisions has been entirely reworked. Kip Katsarelis, SimCity's Lead Producer acknowledges that the previous games were really dense, and the wealth of information given to the player was hard to consume. To combat this Maxis has completely reworked how you get pertinent information. Yes, you still can view charts and graphs, but a lot of the data is conveyed in ways that take advantage of a player's innate knowledge. For instance when you're trying to figure out if your city has power, you can click a small power button on the screen and there's an immediate graphical change. Instead of seeing your city with an array of symbols, you see through an intuitive colored lens, painting areas that aren't getting power red and the ones that are green. You can quickly drag and drop in new power plants or connect areas to the grid with lines, watching how the colors rapidly alter to reflect your changes.

On an even more basic level, though, you can see how the changes you're making are affecting your city by simply looking at it. Previous SimCity games were largely spreadsheets given life, with graphics that, while impressive for the time, didn't necessarily represent the underlying simulation. But the new SimCity's GlassBox engine allows Maxis to accurately represent what's going on in real time. If portions of your city are off the power grid you won't see lights in the structures as night falls, and if your garbage disposal system isn't up to snuff the trash will start to pile up on the streets. Whether or not you regularly check on the needs of your people you should be able to tell what they need based on what you see. Even small things like traffic jams are actually given life, with actual citizens in actual cars jamming up an area. This gives the players tangible signals that they need to step in and re-evaluate their transit system.

The new engine not only should make your city look the best it's ever been, but also offers up new options for how you lay it out. For starters you can now make curved roads, just clicking where you want to start and dragging to the point you want the road to end. The result are cities whose basic design feels much more organic, and that can adapt to something like the curve of a river or mountain the way you might expect in real life. You can also quickly zone areas for industrial, residential or commercial development with a quick mouse drag, watching as a host of workers come in and erect the buildings. And the new visual engine allows for modular buildings, allowing you to tell what sort of additions your city's structures have at a glance. For instance you might have a coal plant, but if you mod the coal plant with a refinery you'll actually see it working. The point is that you don't just upgrade buildings and see a few numbers on a spreadsheet change, you actually get to see your additions reflected in the world you've created.

The increased focus on easy-to-understand visuals cues and the new engine will no doubt change how people play SimCity, but the online functionality could be what reinvents the franchise. SimCity has multiplayer and requires an internet connection to play, regardless of whether you open your borders to other players or not. You might be the demigod of your little city, but every SimCity player is a part of a larger game world. You can't jump in and modify other player's towns, but no one's actions occur in a vacuum.

Groups of players are divided into regions. Players in a region directly influence the other cities around them. For instance if a neighbor's city is super industrial and, say, very focused on coal production, they will cause a lot of pollution. They might be dealing with that within their own city by focusing on keeping things like ground water clean, but the smoke overflow could drift into your town and cause citizens to get sick. Suddenly you need to take measures to clean up the air, perhaps even building more hospitals to take care of the increased healthcare needs. You could try and convince the other player to go green, you and the other players could even remove them from the region (the system for that is still being worked on), or you could come to a compromise. That other player may dig up a ton of coal and cause an abundance of pollution, but if they provide you with your energy you could then dismantle those facilities on your own land and focus on producing something else. Suddenly something that was previously an annoyance becomes a boon, allowing you to supply that other player with raw goods or maybe clean water that might not be readily accessible to them.

Cities within a region that are connected via roadways can also exchange citizens. In one situation we had a rich, largely clean and suburban town with a high level of education living next to a poorer, industrial city. The poorer, less-educated city relied on educated workers to travel to them, serving as management in their factories. Maxis acknowledged that this interchange of labor could result in situations where two players in a disagreement could withhold labor from one another if they desired, using it as a bargaining chip.

How you choose to focus your city will also affect every other SimCity player in the world. Going back to our coal-producing player again, imagine that they become the single biggest producer of coal in the world; they have the best refineries and richest natural resources. They can sell off their excess coal to neighbors or the world at large, helping determine the global price via a supply vs. demand model. Imagine, then, that they're suddenly struck by something horrific like an earthquake or tornado, dropping their production to near zero. With a shortage in supply, the price could spike, allowing other players to capitalize on the unfortunate turn of events for the world's biggest coal baron.

Capitalizing on strengths is something Maxis is counting on, too, including leaderboards that can track just about everything. They plan on taking into account which players produce the most goods, as well as noting the cities with the highest levels of happiness and sadness. For the morbid among us, they can even put in leaderboards to track which cities have the highest death rates.

Maxis has obviously put a lot of work into overcoming the intimidating barrage of information in older SimCity games, but online play could make the new one even deeper than what's come before. The sheer number of possibilities of how players can interact and influence one another presents a host of design challenges. But this is Maxis we're talking about, the same studio that created SimCity, The Sims and Spore. If anyone can bring SimCity back in a big way, it's the team that started it all in the first place.