{"id":735,"date":"2007-08-20T11:05:17","date_gmt":"2007-08-20T15:05:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2007\/08\/20\/simcity-societies-preview\/"},"modified":"2008-01-29T16:11:36","modified_gmt":"2008-01-29T20:11:36","slug":"simcity-societies-preview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2007\/08\/20\/simcity-societies-preview\/","title":{"rendered":"SimCity: Societies Preview"},"content":{"rendered":"

The fruit of my brief trip to EA Headquarters ten days ago can be found now on Gameshark<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A lot of people will not like this game. Societies<\/em> turns its back on so many SimCity<\/em> assumptions that the hardcore city building audience will be astonished. Not that this is a bad thing. I agree with Rod Humble and Will Wright that the SimCity franchise had strayed too far from its toybox city roots.<\/p>\n

I have other concerns. At this point, it’s not clear how strong the NIMBY effect will be. In the alpha build, I can stick a county prison by an elementary school and no one cares. Your people don’t make specific demands of you, something that I think would help in the whole “goal creation” problem that I experienced in the freeform play.<\/p>\n

On the plus side, lots of terrain types and a nice range of buildings to draw from.<\/p>\n

This was an alpha build, of course, and the Tilted Mill design team wasn’t on hand to answer any questions. (They were doing prep for Leipzig<\/a>.) Maybe I’ll try to get them for an interview on the blog.<\/p>\n

I’m proud of myself that I didn’t ask Rachel Bernstein for an autograph. The name might not mean a lot to you, but she was an Executive Producer, Designer and Programmer on Imperialism<\/em>. She doesn’t have the longest CV<\/a>, but anyone associated with that tiny piece of brilliance has a special place in my heart.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The fruit of my brief trip to EA Headquarters ten days ago can be found now on Gameshark. A lot of people will not like this game. Societies turns its back on so many SimCity assumptions that the hardcore city building audience will be astonished. Not that this is a bad thing. I agree with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[33,40,108,2,32],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-bR","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/735"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=735"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/735\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=735"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=735"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=735"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}