The devs should be talking to Sim City 4 modders?

[barcasam7]

Every time I go onto Simtropolis there is always new mods for Sim City 4 and the quality is outstanding. After 10+ years plus there is still a community as active as ever. If I was the devs; I would be asking the modders on Sim City 4 what it will take for them to play Cities Skylines. Of course, they don't have to, but there will be some underlying issue why they're not playing Cities Skylines. Sim City 4 had a solid game, but the community is the reason the game flourished in my opinion.

P.s. the community here is great and there is great content too. But the more the merrier!

 

[Builder1337]

I completely agree. I think maybe they did have some communication with the SC4 modders back before the vanilla game was released though. I'm not sure however.

 

[akeela84]

I’m sure that CO did take a good look at Sim City 4 before they even started to create Cities:Skylines (CS). When Sim City 4 started back in 2003, it started as a non-moddable game and it took Maxis/EA several months, if not even years, before they even released some kind of tools to do modding. From this point, it also took ages before anyone came with some proper mods for the game.
Those people still playing Sim City 4 have spent far too much time creating their own content, meaning for them it might be difficult to move away from a game like SC4.

To be honest CS is having some really good modders, like boformer, BloodyPenguin, Katalyst6, PropaneDargon and several others.

CS is doing great and I don't think it will change that soon.

 

[stiiknafuulia]

When you've built yourself a house of brick and furnished it inside and out, it can be hard to move to a bare house made of marble. I'm sure some of them will make the transition though, either when modern computers cease supporting SC4 or when C:SL is polished enough that it's too alluring not to make the switch.

Many people swear by the superior mechanics and difficulty of SC4 though; to them, C:SL focuses too much on the eye candy to be a viable replacement. Lack of region play seems to be a killer for some folks as well. But mostly it's inertia / emotional attachment from having learned SC4 inside and out and built dozens of cities with hundreds or assets in them... Hard to abandon it in such a case. But hey, there are also people who play (and mod, I guess) both games depending on their mood, so it's not like it's necessarily an either/or choice.

 

[fefenc]

As a former Simcity 4 player, I can say that what makes us avoid Cities: Skylines is the lack of realism, lack of depth in the simulation and lack of challenge. Cities: Skylines is exactly an overhyped Simcity 2013 with bigger maps (just like Dragon Ball Super is an overhyped Dragon Ball GT), the map size is the most noticeable difference between the two games since both games are aimed for casuals kids and lacks realism in their gameplay, but I give C:S some props because it didn't came with the idea of enforcing OVNIS on our cities with tiny buildings.

Why would we leave a mature city simulator such as SC4 in exchange of a boring city painter made in 2015 that provides no challenge at all and treats us like we have some sort of mental ill? The way C:S grab our hands in the gameplay is offensive against every mature player. Leave that joke for an easy mode (vanilla) so casuals won't ruin our fun.

I'll put here the gamebreaking issues that prevents mature hardcore Simcity 4 players from playing this game:

• 4x4 unrealistic gamebreaking issue (this is by far the worst issue in the game since it's almost the same as 1x1 SC4 buildings);
• oversaturated cartoonish graphics;
• The soundtracks are too childish and similar to Simcity 2013, I'd rather leave them muted and play the SC4 mature sountracks in the background, at least it gives me the illusion I'm playing a serious game;
• locked buildings and roads at very early game in order to grab our hands and don't let us ruin our cities;
• that money when we are about to bankrupt a city and that money when we lvl the city up. Both are spit on our faces;
• no zoneable landfill;
• tiny power plants;
• no region gameplay as the guy above stated;
  
• lack of depth in building simulation. Simcity 4 buildings gets dilapidated when we cut some fundings off or when we remove some services from said area, it get abandoned only in extreme cases. C:S, by the other hand, in the same situation, it either keep buildings in the certain level to above or it gets instantly abandoned, it never get dilapidated;
• no slums or poverty in C:S, only rich houses;
• citizens don't need to reach their job in order "to reach their jobs";
• vanishing cars;
• tourism issue;
• no upraisings or another disaster beyond fire;
• it's impossible to build a true skyline without resorting on mods;
• lack of difference between sunny and rainy weathers, day and night cycles if not pure aesthetic;
• lack of consequences for lowering the budgets (no floods when it's raining in a city with low road budget);
• lack of micromanagement in C:S. In Simcity 4, we can raise/lower the budget of the civic buildings separately, while in C:S is one slider for every building of said department. Again, this is not even needed in the current game because the game provides no challenge at all due to the wrapped vision of devs/paradox that the Simcity 4 players are casual kids;
• Lack of depth in the simulation;
• updates focused in useless cosmectic cash-grab expansions that breaks the game even further, which bugs aren't patched before releasing another useless update;
• devs leaving the hard work of making this city painter a city simulator and bug fixes for modders... only to break all their great work in the next useless update;

Face it, there are several mods in the workshop that are worthy the prices CO charges to break them with some sort of useless random cosmetic update which I wouldn't pay a single cent for them.. This game has been advertised for frustrated Simcity 4 players who got disappointed with SC13 and CO acknowledged that this genre was starving for a good game, but I don't understand the reason that CO devs came to the conclusion that the Simcity 4 playerbase would leave their mature game to play a mere city painter aimed for casual 9 years old kids.

I already pointed out all the issues that prevents the SC4 playerbase from touching this game, but I'm absolutely sure that none of these gamebreaking issues will get patched because CO cares much more about keeping the inferior casuals accomodated with the lack of depth than praising their hardcore fanbase who is willing to support them everytime if they do things right. If there is a group of inferior insects to blame for ruining something that should be awesome, they are the casual wasps, they are always ruining everything that hardcore players makes famous.

 

[Michael Matthews]

It's good to see a list of things you wanted (or did not want). Note that I'm not disagreeing with a lot of them. There are things I'd like to see done differently, too.

4x4 unrealistic gamebreaking issue (this is by far the worst issue in the game since it's almost the same as 1x1 SC4 buildings);

no zoneable landfill;

It's very artificial. From what I've seen, SC4 had very limited RC zoning but it had farms that could stretch way beyond that. SC13 had more flexible I zoning where large factories could spawn. I wish both were in CSL. Having larger RC buildings spawn would be nice - malls and such - but the emphasis here seems to be on custom assets.

oversaturated cartoonish graphics;

This is mostly due to colored lights at night. It's nowhere near as bad as SC13's futuristic buildings. On the other hand, SC4's graphics all look dated and grainy to me; most positive thing I could say about them is they're retro and that there are people who like that sort of thing. I respect that but don't care for it myself.

The soundtracks are too childish and similar to Simcity 2013, I'd rather leave them muted and play the SC4 mature sountracks in the background, at least it gives me the illusion I'm playing a serious game;

I think the music is not terrible, but it's a bit..."cutesy"...for my taste. And the winter music is way too loud!

locked buildings and roads at very early game in order to grab our hands and don't let us ruin our cities;

Start with the everything unlocked mod? It's built into the game.

that money when we are about to bankrupt a city and that money when we lvl the city up. Both are spit on our faces;

Hyperbole aside, seems to me some issues related to difficulty could be resolved with a hardcore mode.

tiny power plants;

They may be small, but you'll need a lot of them to support a large city. I usually end up building a dedicated service/supply area for the whole map, to simulate a big power plant (and big water, sewage, etc. processing facilities), so I guess I'd want larger service buildings, too.

no region gameplay as the guy above stated;

I like to build my cities as sparse or as dense as I wish at the time, over the full 25 tiles. I wouldn't play this game if it switched to a dumbed-down, cities-you-are-not-in-function-indefinitely, region system like in SC13. (also the graphics were really poor) Not sure how it worked in SC4.

no slums or poverty in C:S, only rich houses;

You can build slums with low land value buildings. The only practical reason for doing so is to support specialized industry compactly or very near the town proper (e.g. high density residential); otherwise, worker shortages appear as educated cims move into high-wealth residential buildings. Parks, upgraded roads, and some policies raise land value.

tourism issue;

Are you referring to what was fixed in the recent update, or something else?

no upraisings or another disaster beyond fire;

Sadly, the only real "disaster" in this game is pop loss, due to mismanagement of the city. However, in SC disasters are usually (or always?) optional and off by default. I would like to see this added (as an option)...

it's impossible to build a true skyline without resorting on mods;

There are a lot of unique buildings/monuments, but they have...very weird...prerequisites to say the least. I don't like that at all. I've heard SC4 without mods is rather spartan.

...a mere city painter aimed for casual 9 years old kids...

...CO cares much more about keeping the inferior casuals accomodated with the lack of depth...

...If there is a group of inferior insects to blame for ruining something that should be awesome, they are the casual wasps, they are always ruining everything that hardcore players makes famous.

So you want your opinions respected, but you don't respect others' opinions?

 

[MarkJohnson]

I don't see modders coming here until after the game is finished and no more patch releases.

The reason SC4 was a success was because it was a failure. It was abandoned quickly after release mainly because the game was deemed too complicated and PC requirements too high to play. This makes it very easy to mod now as you don't have to worry about patches breaking your mods all of the time. PC requirements become lower as years pass to where now even a tablet could play it.

So real modding an't happen until this game closes. By then, no one will be playing it as they will have moved on, likely to CSL 2.

SC4 had two more failed releases (Simcity: Societies and Simcity reboot) and no one else to make a replacement to SC4, so SC4 had a good decade of modding to be what it is today.

So, in short, to get more hard core modders CSL has to move on to the next project and then hard core fans will mod and no one release a better city builder in the mean time.

 

[Turjan]

The reason SC4 was a success was because it was a failure.

That's the most important sentence to keep in mind here. SC4 hardly worked at release. Rush Hour made it usable, but still not popular. When I look at the list up there, I have to think that most of that was solved via mods, years after game release. Compared to C:S's traffic, SC4's original traffic AI is a complete disaster.

Also, talking about a "cartoonish look" just shows how little the poster keeps up with C:S. This is also C:S:

Looks completely cartoonish... Right.

Admittedly, my own cities tend to look a bit cartoonish, as I like it colorful.

Sue me.

 

[MarkJohnson]

@Micheal Mathews.

fefnc's post is kind of moot. The OP wants views of SC4 modders, not players. All of fefnc's views are why modder would come to CSL, so they could fix those issues. Don't let him derail you into responding to his thread.

His post really has no bearing to this thread.

 

[Soduka]

Don't need to ask SimCity modders - they've already got modders of their own game putting out higher quality content for $0 in comparison to their decorative DLC for nearly half the price of the entire base game. CO can ask them. They refuse to because they know best.

Apparently their 'best' knowledge involves getting the worst reviews, both professional and customer, for Snowfall of anything they've ever made and precipitously dropping sales rates less than one week after release. Point this out though and you're the bad guy with half a dozen tumblr words thrown in your direction as if that wins the argument.

Reason for me that Snowfall was the final straw was that it was acceptable, not great but acceptable reasoning that After Dark was about finishing up several loose features that were in development for the base game but didn't make the cut due to time issues. Fine, I can see that.

Snowfal on the other hand is 100% post-release development time focused on absolutely nothing of substance and now shows a pattern of behavior on their part, now confirmed in interviews as their intention.

 

[zulu354]

That's the most important sentence to keep in mind here. SC4 hardly worked at release. Rush Hour made it usable, but still not popular. When I look at the list up there, I have to think that most of that was solved via mods, years after game release. Compared to C:S's traffic, SC4's original traffic AI is a complete disaster.

Also, talking about a "cartoonish look" just shows how little the poster keeps up with C:S. This is also C:S:

Looks completely cartoonish... Right.

Admittedly, my own cities tend to look a bit cartoonish, as I like it colorful.

Sue me.

Sorry for going OT, but your first pic looks really impressive. Wich assets are you using for it?

The second pic also looks nice. Especially the kay. Wich asset is this?

Since I didn't played Skylines since the update and release of snowfall, did you use the second dlc? Not sure to buy it...hoping for a Steam Easter sale though. :-D

Edit:
How did you got these small roads in the first pic, without parking lane and without green strip?

 

[Turjan]

Sorry for going OT, but your first pic looks really impressive. Wich assets are you using for it?

Sorry, I hoped to be clear, but the first pic is not from one my own cities, but it's Simulanten's Boston 2.0, a recreation of Boston, as far as that's possible with C:S. Just follow the link for details. I think he used some American road texture mod, and most assets on the pic are by Feindbold/Feindbild, mostly his Brooklyn set.

I also use similar assets in my own cities, but as the topic was also cartoonish colors and I like to use more colorful LUTs, I didn't post anything from my city, like this:

The second pic also looks nice. Especially the kay. Wich asset is this?

That's from my current city, and it's indeed a leisure/tourism asset from the AD DLC.

 

[Mr Maison]

What MarkJohnson said!! I am a player of SC4 since 2003 also. It's a great game yes. King of city builders but it not only have the advantage of no official updates to break mods for over a decade, but the 3D assets are pre-rendered requiring less calculation on 3D objects in 4 Iso views and limited zoom levels. Many game changing mods did not appear until years later after launch The fact that CSL is fully 3D and comes pretty close to fulfilling many things we desired is an awesome feat.

For example:
Fully 3D.....we can swing the camera...1st person camera mod which can stick to anything that moves is icing on the cake.
An environment that effects the cities with dynamic water at any height and now temperature and weather.
Flexible network systems
Cims don't only go to work and back home...they actually hang out, go to the stores and study in various places.
Easy Modding to get 3D assets into the game and not as much of a chore to find updates and keep up with dependencies.

What I like about SC4 regional play is you can make a huge region almost the size of a medium sized country with it. But, it's also refreshing to not have to wait for cities to load when making regional connections with infrastructure going back and forth. Ideas about making larger maps already started.

On the modding side, in less than 1 year the amount of mods to enhance the game is massive......we just got ferry and airport lines which means we can make ferries and regional airports for commuters. Too many to list here. I'm surprised at how many do not notice and use many of the game changing mods available. (make sure to subscribe to Isolated Failures BTW for smoother update times)

fefenc- To list game breaking issues including mostly to argue that this game relies heavily on mods and compare this game to sc4 is hypocritical. SC4 Vanilla is unplayable without the decade of mods. I almost stopped playing it in my first few months. The cartoonish look is easily fixable as you see in the image Turjan posted. Vanishing cars? really? lets see which game's cars will vanish quicker. Yes there are some things to be worked out on the simulation side but we are in communication with CO and many issues are being addressed from modders and CO. If a mod is needed to address a desired feature, that does not reflect failure on CO part. That's exactly what's holding up SC4 as it is a "community" game with a broken base hosted by EA.

 

[LogOutGames]

What MarkJohnson said!! I am a player of SC4 since 2003 also. It's a great game yes. King of city builders but it not only have the advantage of no official updates to break mods for over a decade, but the 3D assets are pre-rendered requiring less calculation on 3D objects in 4 Iso views and limited zoom levels. Many game changing mods did not appear until years later after launch The fact that CSL is fully 3D and comes pretty close to fulfilling many things we desired is an awesome feat.

For example:
Fully 3D.....we can swing the camera...1st person camera mod which can stick to anything that moves is icing on the cake.
An environment that effects the cities with dynamic water at any height and now temperature and weather.
Flexible network systems
Cims don't only go to work and back home...they actually hang out, go to the stores and study in various places.
Easy Modding to get 3D assets into the game and not as much of a chore to find updates and keep up with dependencies.

What I like about SC4 regional play is you can make a huge region almost the size of a medium sized country with it. But, it's also refreshing to not have to wait for cities to load when making regional connections with infrastructure going back and forth. Ideas about making larger maps already started.

On the modding side, in less than 1 year the amount of mods to enhance the game is massive......we just got ferry and airport lines which means we can make ferries and regional airports for commuters. Too many to list here. I'm surprised at how many do not notice and use many of the game changing mods available. (make sure to subscribe to Isolated Failures BTW for smoother update times)

fefenc- To list game breaking issues including mostly to argue that this game relies heavily on mods and compare this game to sc4 is hypocritical. SC4 Vanilla is unplayable without the decade of mods. I almost stopped playing it in my first few months. The cartoonish look is easily fixable as you see in the image Turjan posted. Vanishing cars? really? lets see which game's cars will vanish quicker. Yes there are some things to be worked out on the simulation side but we are in communication with CO and many issues are being addressed from modders and CO. If a mod is needed to address a desired feature, that does not reflect failure on CO part. That's exactly what's holding up SC4 as it is a "community" game with a broken base hosted by EA.

After seeing "I am a player of SC4 since 2003..." I expected to read how shit C:S is. Like that "SC4 modder". Also I wanted to ask you: Do you prefer SC4 or CS?

 

[Soduka]

Yes there are some things to be worked out on the simulation side but we are in communication with CO and many issues are being addressed from modders and CO. If a mod is needed to address a desired feature, that does not reflect failure on CO part. That's exactly what's holding up SC4 as it is a "community" game with a broken base hosted by EA.

I see nearly everyone trying to point out the trash heap have left and all that's left is the hugbox. You tell blatant lies and get nothing but agrees while I post facts and get disagrees. Where are we in communication with CO? The part where they only reply to threads when someone kisses their rump? The part where they think it's appropriate to participate more heavily on reddit than their own forum? Or the part where they have stated we aren't getting any further simulation enhancements due to system requirements?

Once again, I don't care that CO thinks Snowfall is the way forward. Their customer base have turned it back. To continue on their path is arrogance and I hope business failure. Of course that would require committing more resources than an intern and a guy painting hats on his 3.5 hour Scandinavian mandated lunch breaks on his 2.5 day work week.

 

[Azurespecter]

Lots of SC4 modders have switched to Cities: Skylines. Not sure why you think otherwise. I know some haven't, but this isn't so odd if you think about it. A lot of the SC4 community are people who have been working on a region or project for years, it's hard to leave something like that behind. In marketing we call it the "late majority".

And that's okay! We'll keep doing our best to improve Cities: Skylines and make it open for modding (the #1 requested feature!), and some of those SC4 modders will come when they're ready (or in many cases, have a new computer! haha)

 

[Mr Maison]

After seeing "I am a player of SC4 since 2003..." I expected to read how shit C:S is. Like that "SC4 modder". Also I wanted to ask you: Do you prefer SC4 or CS?

They are both great games. I have not played SC4 in about a year since CSL came out and that's a big thing for me. Usually with every city builder that came after, I needed to go back to SC4 for a fix as I was starved of creative choices. I still love sc4 and have my original disks which are not going anywhere. Simulation wise, sc4 have deeper enjoyment at the moment. But we must understand limitations and be patient. They are 2 different animals. Right now with CSL, I treat it as a creative outlet. And have fun doing things I always dreamed of doing in sc4 like make a city and take a ride through it in first person view. It's also good to be a part of a very talented community that I believe will continue to evolve CSL. I have absolutely nothing bad to say about sc4 just because I'm playing CSL at the moment. It's not as if I have to hate sc4 in order to play CSL and vice-versa. In fact I still have a region I started back in 2007 that I'm still working on and will one day return to it every now and then. My world building goes beyond these 2 games. I also have Banished and make 3D renders of environments. I have a planet I work on in my spare time for years now. So for me, this is another world building outlet.

I would like to see more consequences in CSL. But for now, I enjoy making worlds and immersing myself in them. With the style I play, it's mostly in the imagination, not what the game gives out the box. Better simulation will only enhance that experience.


The funny thing I observe is how we who are a part of the sc4 community been begging for a successor for years and suffered heartbreak after heartbreak and felt like no one cared about this niche crowd. Then when we get something we can work with, there's a sense of loss. I think Azurespecter hit on something. It is hard to let go of something we been in love with for so long....but why let go?? It's really not about the individual experience but the numbers who participate that may be less in the future. I been through that with a few PC games like Unreal Tournament Gold and 2004. But the good thing about sc4 is that I can always play it with or without interacting with anyone.

So Logoutgames, to answer your question, it's a bit complicated. I like CSL but the fact that modding is supported in such an open way is the real draw for me. In that sense, I like both because of the creativity. Not one over the other. But CSL is like that new computer or smartphone.

 

[klyte45]

Isn't the first time I say it in this forum, but CS tends to replace SC4 in 5 or 6 years. This is the time needed to the guys of SC4 see an advantage in play CS instead SC4. One year of them has already past (completes this week).
The SC4 modders will come gradually. I know some of them that dislike the optimized 3D modeling needed to create stuffs for CS. I got some of their models and they had more than 200k verts!!!! They didn't care about the optimization in SC4 because it's stuff are prerendered (as someone said before). So, don't matter how much vertices a model have before its render, they don't will get more than 20MB of size.
Some of them aren't professional modelers. Some of them don't have idea of what is a Normal Map or a Illumination Map. In SC4 moddeling, you don't need to know these skills to do a model. In CS it's essencial.

The main advantage in CS is the open API and the reversible code, which allow us (modders) to make detours and make things we don't think we could do (if we was talking about SC4), like the ship and airplane lines. The guy what done the first version of RHW got it only at least 5 years after the SC4 was released. The first mod made for skylines with the built-in API was made BEFORE the official game launch. The first mod using code out of the official game API comes few weeks after the game release.

In abstract: just take your time, it's already happening.

 

[Agnitio Ex Mach]

As a fellow SC4 fan, I share some of fenfec's sentiment about the comparison between SC4 and C:S. I strongly disagree with what I believe to be elitism on his part. This is especially considering how SC3K was absolutely cartoonish; the advisors and constituents themselves were cartoons, after all! Although he may feel that C:S is designed to pander to a lower common denominator, he should consider that it's been over 10 years since SC4 and the Sim Cities and other city building games in between SC4 and C:S were commercial failures. I like the idea of reintroducing old city building fans and introducing a new generation to the joys of building a city in Skylines. At some point, I would like to see more realism in a future update myself, but only if it would be profitable to do so.

 

[CtMurphy]

Whilst I would love to see some extra challange implimented into the game, I also feel like it's quite unfair to slander a game based purely on it's cosmetic appeal. It's cartoonish, but so what? Dozens of games are made looking cartoonish and have been hailed as brilliant success; such as Sins of a Solar Empire. and others that have a much more 'adult' feel to them that were cast out as complete failures. I'm sure you're capable of remembering those for yourself.

I enjoy playing Cities Skylines overall and I think it's a pritty well rounded game. It does lack in a few areas, but to call it childish based on graphical content alone is really only showing your own level of maturity.