Maxis have announced that SimCity 5 will be released in 2013, marking their return to the franchise they invented, and making it official that the awful (non-Maxis developed) SimCity Societies should not be thought of as the fifth instalment in the series. The trailer is below, and there’s some good information at the official website. A good article on the underlying game engine is here.
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I’ve said my piece on the qualities of SimCity, and its importance to the urban planning profession, here. I genuinely feel its important that one or more good city builder games are out there, although I should add that this view has in the past had me labelled a “drooling, mouth-breathing moron.”
You can get a good feel for the concerns of fans surrounding the project from this Reddit thread, where there’s a base level of anxiety about whether the game will be excessively dumbed down. The Maxis people respond with assurances that they will balance accessibility and depth, but that could mean anything (and they don’t help by the way they talk as if the extraordinary SimCity 4 was a misstep) . We won’t really know how they’ve struck that balance until the game appears.
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