The Maxis team will satisfy as many of their requests as possible

Nov 14, 2012 01:41 GMT  ·  By

George Pigula, an associate producer working on the new SimCity, says that the community has persuaded the development team at Maxis to introduce many of the changes that are part of the new vision for the venerable city builder.

The developer tells VG247 that, “We’re always listening to our community, always on the forums, and always on Facebook. Many of the innovations we’ve done in this game have been made in response to us following the community that has grown over the years.”

Of course, the ideas of the community can only work after the Maxis team adds a lot of research and Pigula has talked about how members of the team have become, over the course of SimCity development, experts in areas like city planning.

The developer also says the new SimCity is designed to appeal to a number of player categories.

He adds, “you start one city, it’s fairly simple. When you get to a small-sized town things are fairly forgiving. The population’s small and if you fall down to much you can recover fairly quickly. But it’s really as you start advancing, and you decide to take on a new city or take on a specialization, that you start learning those additional steps, and growing with them.”

Ever since the rebooted SimCity was announced, the studio has talked about how it will integrate multiplayer into the simulation for the first time.

The solution Maxis has come up is to put the player near another in an overland map, allowing them to compete and to trade but also to put together resources in order to create grand construction projects that can benefit the entire area.

SimCity will use a new Glassbox engine, which introduces more realism to the creation of the city and allows each citizen to have a distinct personality, with clear needs and goals.