I’ve had some time to play with the new Sim City update and I have a few things to say about it. Two things. Two words: It’s awesome.
Of course, having somewhat ameliorated the issues with traffic, and with the promise of one way roads sometime in the future, Sim City players are left stuck with their tiny cities. And that really is the problem. You see, even though it’s now possible to move traffic from one side of your city to the other with the use of a handy sub terranean tunnel that runs underground, the fact of the matter is, cities run out of room almost as soon as they start getting good.
I’ve also recently noticed that Sim City has a huge problem with scale. Roading can take up what seems like half of a city, and fixing traffic issues by adding underpasses and overpasses only causes you to run out of space faster. Let’s check out this interchange built by redditor inn0vat3:
Sweet interchange, right? Now check out where those white dotted lines are. They’re darned near sandwhiching the interchange completely. Sure you can probably fit a few clusters of industry or shopping in there, but the fact of the matter remains that this single interchange, built relatively compactly, is still taking up a good 1/4 or maybe 1/5 of the map. That’s too much.
If Sim City won’t make maps bigger, they need to scale the size of roads and buildings down so we can actually fit more than one Nordstrom’s and a budget backpackers into the map. Of course, the given reason for tiny map sizes (processing power, because Sim City is designed to run on a potato) wouldn’t be helped by smaller maps.
You know what Sim City is? It’s the Lego Duplo of city simulators. The real reason the maps are so small and the buildings and roads are so large is so we won’t choke when we shove them into our mouths.
Thanks, Sim City!
