SimCity Societies
Preview
Not your daddy's Sim City
by Sergio Brinkhuis
previewed on PC
Finding Dan Alioto
EA's demo area was located in an unassuming corner of their otherwise hip looking press area. At the back of the narrow but cozy room sat a large screen that was displaying a colorful yet somewhat gloomy city. Dan Alioto, the assistant producer of Sim City Societies, was sitting in front of the screen and was obviously excited to show us what the game was about. It is always a good sign when someone who has been working on a game for so long can still be enthusiastic about his work. With Sim City Societies, he has every reason to.
Sim City Societies is not being developed at Maxis, which may feel a little strange to fans of the series. When asked how the development of the game ended up at Tilted Mill, Dan told us that the game's concept had been floating around for a while but that Maxis has been putting all their resources into Will Wright's latest brainchild Spore. As a result, EA went looking for another developer for Societies. They found the perfect match in Tilted Mill. With titles like Caesar IV and Children of the Nile, the company has a lot of experience developing city builders.
Building your own kind of society
As mentioned before, Dan had already created a city and explained to us why it was so gloomy. The game responds to how you treat your population and on what sort of buildings you place in the city. In this example, he had chosen to create a very productive city and wished for his citizens to be obedient, no matter what the cost. He went on to describe how he gave form to his original vision for this society. Unlike in previous Sim City games, workplaces directly affect your income. When Sims go to work, their productivity is translated directly into Simolians and the trick is to get people to work for you. Unhappy Sims don't work. They may be pining away at home, get distracted by entertainers on the way to their workplace or a number of other valid but annoying reasons.
In Dan's city, people playing hooky are dealt with firmly. Secret Police and Men in Black are patrolling the city and - when they're not simply dragging people back to work - will put unproductive members of your society into Cryogenic Prisons or other correctional facilities. In these places 'things' are being done to make these people content after which they are being put back into society to be productive again. Happy workers will work harder and produce more money but content workers will at least show up at their workplace and that is good enough, right?
Venues
But even in an oppressive society such as this, people can find happiness. This is where venues come in. Venues are buildings that directly influence people's happiness in their immediate area. Venues can be very positive or very negative in nature, and still make people happy. Some of the funnest things in life can be quite bad for you right? It is the same way in Societies. Every building you place will contribute or consume 'social energies' and these act pretty much the same way as resources in other strategy games. Universities add Knowledge energy, Cryogenic Prisons add to Obedience and there are buildings that add to the Industry, Wealth, Creativity and Devotion resources as well.
The city will reflect the areas in which it is the most successful. Focusing on knowledge, for instance, will cause your city to slowly start looking more and more futuristic. In most cases you will be mixing and matching different energies and there is no telling what the city will look like when you shift your efforts into a new direction. Buildings can also spawn special Sims such as the Men in Black and Secret Police I mentioned earlier and these further aid your quest to achieve a particular goal with your city. Buildings can be upgraded to produce more of these special Sims or just to increase their special ability or societal influence.
Not a sequel
Dan pointed out that Sim City Societies is more a spin-off than a sequel. The game will not be positioned as Sim City 5 or even Sim City 4.5. To me, that was good news as Societies just doesn't feel like a Sim City game and I would love to see a proper Sim City sequel sometime soon. That doesn't mean that I didn't like what I saw. Sim City Societies simply offers a whole different take on the familiar concept of creating a blossoming city from scratch. In fact, what we were shown is perhaps more a social engineering game than it is a city builder. If you consider that the genre has been performing the same old tricks over and over again for the last decade, this is a welcome change indeed.
