14 DAY TRIAL // Ever since the rebooted SimCity was announced, the development team working on the game has emphasized the multiple city play concept behind the new incarnation and recent comments suggest that players will be unable to fully develop a city without the help of others.
Jason Haber, a producer working at Maxis, tells VG247 that, “Once you start playing multi-city, gamers are not going to want to do that.”
He has also started focusing on just one of his creations, trying to support it with the smaller settlements in the same region, but has since then shifted to a pattern of fully developing one area before moving on to another.
Haber has also detailed how the new Glassbox engine deals with the new complexity level, adding, “Whether you own one city in a region or 20 in a region, only one is running and using the full engine at once; the other ones are sort of in this stasis. The regional simulation starts taking care of where that sharing is going. Once you’ve loaded into another city, those other cities will not change from what they were when you left them.”
It’s unclear how this mechanic will deal with the need to share resources and with movements of the Sims.
The new SimCity is designed with a new philosophy in mind, with players encouraged to draw the outlines of their settlements and making sure that an entire region has all the resources needed to develop.
Cities can work together in order to put up a number of high-profile projects, including airports and casinos, that benefit all of them.
The various settlements also influence each other in more subtle ways, with crime moving from one to another and civil services able to work together in order to stop fires or other disasters.
The new SimCity will be launched exclusively on the PC in early March.