14 DAY TRIAL // Despite the focus on real-world mechanics, SimCity never aims to deliver political speech, and gamers are free to use their own ideas and ideologies in order to shape their experience and create a city that conforms to their own concepts.
Ocean Quigley, the creative director working on SimCity, has told Gamasutra during a wide ranging interview that, “I think that the intent is to make a simulation with enough internal integrity to it that the player can explore those sorts of choices and see what happens.
“As far as I'm concerned, the goal is to make something that's robust enough that you can push it in all these different directions and get plausible outcomes from it.”
He further explained that, “It's absolutely not to make an ideologically channeled experience where you have to get all pious and make the right environmental choices to win because that would be, frankly, absurd, as a gameplay experience. That becomes an exercise in propaganda, as opposed to giving you a simulation to explore.”
Some of the decisions gamers will make in SimCity will be easily linked to real-world political parties and ideologies, but Quigley says that the goal of the game is to make gamers think about the inner working of cities from an administrative standpoint rather than simply from a political one.
The rebooted SimCity uses a new engine, called Glassbox, which is specifically designed to allow each citizen from a city to have his own goals and be autonomous, with the player guiding the high-level decisions and then having to watch how they affect his inhabitants.
For the first time in the series, SimCity will have constant interaction between players, with each city influencing the ones around it and players able to work together in order to create municipal projects that benefit them all.
SimCity launches on the PC during 2013.