I prefer SimCity 2000. I feel like it hit a pretty good sweet spot between simulation and fun (which is to say, not even a vague gesturing at anything remotely realistic). Realistic simulation in games is almost universally less fun than simple, predictable game logic. Probably the most extreme example of this is chess: way more enjoyable than real warfare.
Back on topic though. My beef with SimCity 4 is that it added a bunch of details that make it less fun, like micromanagement of the funding of individual hospitals and police stations. The added complexity didn’t bring any new profound shifts in thinking or strategy, it just created more busywork for the player.
SimCity 2000 has almost none of that. It’s just a really solid and super fun game. It’s quite balanced (when you resist the temptation to use cheats) without being overly hard. So you can sit back (with a cold beverage of your choice) and enjoy a nice relaxing time playing mayor and seeing your little city develop before your eyes!
I thought 3000 was the best showing, though perhaps that's looking at it back later when performance is not as much of a concern. It felt like an upgraded SimCity 2000, rather than a big change in game mechanics that 4 was.
Age of Empires 2, Sim City 3000, Diablo2 and Red Alert 2. Released in the span of 3 years. What an incredible era. Can’t shake off the feeling that 3D took away as much as it gave gaming. Also can’t believe it’s just my age-based selection bias.
It's not an age-based bias. These games couldn't expand on graphics, so they expanded on the logic of the game. That made them interesting.
Very few games do that today (EU4, a favorite of mine, for example) but the trend now is to confuse the user with graphics while giving really little in term of content.
High content, big budget, games still exist, e.g. Elden Ring + Zelda (as someone mentioned) are two recent releases.
There's also plenty of sim games in the indie market, Factorio, Banished, Frostpunk. Then things that are close to the market like They Are Billions, Kenshi, etc. to name a few I've personally had time to play. Kenshi is a bit rough around the edges, but absolutely brilliant in terms of sandbox play.
There's also the Endless series from Amplitutde studios, Endless Legend, Endless Space 1 + 2, that are of a vein of Civ games, plus they've recently brought out Humandkind (though to mixed reviews unfortunately).
The popular sim genre in recent times has been more 3rd person building mixed with exploration, there was the wave of multiplayer ones like Minecraft, Rust, Arc Evolved, etc. And then single player ones like Subnautica, etc.
So there's stuff out there if you want it, it's just not a very popular genre at the moment.
The difference with sim/4X/any genre that's fallen outside of the general "popular games" trend is that they ended up becoming overly specialized and inaccessible to newcomers.
Yes, technically you can still play a bunch of cool 4X games, but most people still making them (with the exception of like, CAs Total War, which also notably defocused the 4X part in favor of RTS combat) is copying the Paradox approach and Paradox is largely known for its absurd depth and mechanics... which unfortunately translates to the games devolving into spreadsheet simulators with fancy graphics.
Civilization was the right mix between "flavorful civilizations", "fun endgoals" and "reasonable to achieve victory against the computer". Most 4X games, because they copied the Paradox approach, kinda suffer from the fact that they pretty much demand immediate mastery of the systems if you want to succeed, unless you're playing with friends (in which case you have more control over each other's bumbling and one person can just hyperfocus on learning one system, while the other can focus on another.)
Its the difference between SimCity and Cities: Skylines. SimCity (before the final game) is a sandbox toy that lets you build a super dysfunctional city but y'know, as long as the taxes don't go in the red, you're doing fine! Cities: Skylines otoh has way harsher feedback tools if you don't build a highly functional city. That's fine if you're already tuned in on SimCity as a game and crave a higher challenge, but if you're new to these kinds of games, Cities: Skylines is just too much.
I would love if Total War games had more complex strategic layer... The battles itself are great enough, maybe besides dumb AI sometimes and balance. On the other hand I had a lot of fun before campaign map economy became just balancing income and happiness. On the other hand, I never thought having armies a discrete entities on the map Heroes 3 style actually added any depth to the game.
Sim City 3000 was my most favorite sim game, while the sims (one) and zoo tycoon (one) follow close. That is until I tried Factorio, man that game got the title Cracktorio for a reason and elevated sim games to a new level. Since then I don't have any courage to try Rimworld, don't want my addiction to relapse.
The others help your point but Cities Skylines is memed because it's graphics over substance as it's basically a city painting game with shallow mechanics that most people use to make little city dioramas which is still fun but not deep gameplay.
The transportation mechanics in Skylines are quite complex and fun. The player can trace individual trips, and some of them matter quite a lot: the businesses need to get and ship their raw materials and finished goods, and the shops need customers.
The budget mechanics are a joke, before long the player has practically endless money.
I'm afraid I must disagree here. I enjoy C:S. But its mechanics are shallow compared to many other titles.
One rather unknown point that, while not directly related, highlights this is how in C:S your income depends on your current budget. I.e. you magically receive less income if you have 10 million in the bank, and receive more if you're in debt. That point alone makes objectively comparing and strategizing unnecessarily hard, and it feels like the game really does not want you to work with numbers instead of paint buckets.
The core of the game clearly is urban planning - properly designing your city to avoid traffic jam and allow the ressource to flow where they need to go - not budgeting. The game doesn't want you to heavily work with numbers because, well, that's not very fun. The budget is mostly there to set the pace.
It has deeper micromanagement than, say, Planet Coaster, but it is not on the level of gameplay loop micromanagement as the like of SimCity or Roller Coaster Tycoon
My issue with the Paradox games is that they have gotten too complicated for their AI, which suuucks. Hearts of Iron's AI has no understanding of its own military strategies, and I don't know how I could have a multiplayer game lasting 80 hours with multiple friends.
But everything is relative. I started gaming in the early 1980s and so those 1990s/early 2000s games had incredible graphics compared to what I was used to. And I'm sure people who grew up earlier on things like 1970s Pong would think my 1980s games had amazing graphics. The argument "Games back then cared about gameplay rather than graphics" ignores that every era has tried to make graphics as good as possible; I'm sure the future will look at our nearly-photorealistic graphics of current games and find them quaint compared to their holographic graphics or whatever.
What amazes the audience might be relative, but there are objective components to different styles of graphics.
Take clarity in communication. Pong is maximally clear: the background is black, an interactive object is white. Every white object is integral to the game. The further you move away from this ideal towards photorealism, the less clear this distinction becomes. You must add more UI elements on top to compensate for the loss of clarity, creating mounting tension between the functional and the ornate.
Playing witcher 3, I don't think it'll be enjoyable for me without the witcher senses. It really emphasis the interact-able things over the environment.
It's why "just make everything have a billion polygons" is actually terrible game development. Scenes are so goddamn noisy nowadays that it's really hard to parse them.
> ... These games couldn't expand on graphics, so they expanded on the logic of the game. That made them interesting.
>
> Very few games do that today ...
The big new Zelda that just came out does exactly this. They took the shell of the last game and spent six years just making things to flesh out the game much further.
> but the trend now is to confuse the user with graphics while giving really little in term of content.
You'll be surprised, but gaming magazines used to say the same thing(s) even in the 80s. It's a platitude.
Fun thing: A famous game developer of that time, but can't remember which one, once said that "the name of game companies aren't creative enough". /shrug
Red Alert 2. That was such a fun game. One thing that has been majorly lost in games now is the ability to create levels too. I loved the creation part
Creating a competent and usable level editor that you can publicly release is a lot of work, and unless you can somehow turn it into a major selling point for the game, you will be hard pressed to afford it. Dev time for games is expensive and if you're hacking together levels using a bunch of disparate tools including some third-party ones it might not really be worth it to make a tool that you can release.
Level editing tools are created to build the levels by the devs. They just don't want to give them to players because they want to sell you additional content.
Talking specifically about the usual suspects but hell, even some indie games are doing it now, in indie games it seems more popular to release a new game entirely which is basically 1.0 with new maps but thankfully there are tons of passion projects that get new content for years and years who really deserve more support.
> Level editing tools are created to build the levels by the devs. They just don't want to give them to players because they want to sell you additional content.
This is probably true as well, but the internet editor map editors use are often very different than what they would offer the community, requiring a lot of polish compared to what's used internally (and we all know that the 20% last polish takes 80% of the time) Although there are some games that offer the very same experience, like what Crysis had (with the CryEngine Editor) and ARMA series.
I don't disagree with your assessment and if anything it really opens the door for someone else to step in and offer these tools because if Skyrim, Minecraft, Gary's mod etc have shown us anything it's that these tools can create vast communities that will keep growing and supporting your work and any future releases.
Just a shame to see so many companies prioritise profits over gameplay / replayability and community these days.
There's a world of difference between making a new map/level and making a new game. The effort required for the former is measured in years, whereas the latter is mostly weeks to months (ignoring open world games where the level spans the whole game universe).
I think Age of Empires 2 will always be in my top 10 list of favorite games. It's in a similar vein of just upgrading graphics, but I also really enjoyed the spin-offs built on the same game engine: Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds and Age of Mythology.
It's especially exciting that it's more popular now than it's ever been. With the 2019 re-release, it's pretty consistently been around #50 in top active players on Steam at any given time. And they keep updating it still. It's been a blast to get back into it and try to actually get decent at it. And the pro scene keeps getting bigger and bigger tournaments too.
That is also just a few years before World of Warcraft came out, which drove everyone to focus more on multiplayer games. Not that we didn't all do multiplayer at LAN parties, but that is when it really switched to being done across the internet.
FWIW, I have a pet theory that WoW took over at that point not because of the MMO concept (which already existed), but because their UX was so smooth. That was the first MMO that "just worked" to understand what you were trying to click. The others at that time would take multiple tries to click an object correctly.
In any case, the success of WoW is what changed the direction of gaming a few years after all those games came out, so I'm agreeing with you that it was an incredible era.
You're right on the UX. But not just the UX, eeeeverything was polished with little details put into place around every turn. Nothing else was like it at that scale.
85-88 is unrivaled. I am willing to fudge the 3 year span a bit because games were still released at significantly times in different countries, though you could sheer off either end and still have an extremely impressive list.
Super Mario Bros 3
Zelda II
Mega Man
John Madden Football
Battle Chess
Tetris
Contra
Double Dragon
Street Fighter
Castlevania
Metal Gear
Metroid
Mike Tyson's Punch Out
Final Fantasy
The Legend of Zelda
Dragon Quest
Super Mario Bros
Adventure Island
Paper Boy
Gauntlet
You're definitely onto something and it's not just an age bias. I can think of a few 2D games released in the previous decade that continued this trend: Terraria, Stardew Valley, Factorio, Rimworld, Celeste, Hades.
The "best (according to me)" games are still 2D or 2.5D:
Roguelikes
Dwarf Fortress
Factorio
EU4
My theory is that deep gameplay and AAA 3D graphics are mutually exclusive because deep gameplay fundamentally requires "tile grids" of some kind, which don't lend themselves to AAA 3D graphics.
(Diablo 1 and 2 kind of railed against this by taking the approach, "Hey, what if we took a tile-based roguelike and rendered it in isometric 3Dsortof?" At the time, that isometric 3Dsortof was state of the art, I guess.)
I have very similar opinion. Presenting things in perspective projection (where things closer to you are taking up more space on screen, and are potentially obscuring things farther from you) is a very peculiar approach, applicable only to FPS and TPS games, where seeing things from the eye of the camera is actually the main gimmick. For some reason they are immensely popular, but they're only a tiny minority of available genres. For everything but FPS/TPS, an orthographic projection creates a much better view of what the heck is actually going on in the game, and thus leads to better gameplay.
I tried RDR2 for an hour but I was completely bored the whole time. It felt like I was watching a movie that occasionally made me hit some buttons. Did not feel like a game to me at all.
When I talk to people older than me they think some of the NES games were the best ever released. But I look at the graphics and I just can’t get over it.
All game generations have their 'best of' games. Of the 1700+ NES games maybe 50 or so are actually classics and worth your time. Then you have the band of 'nostalgia and tough', only play if you are in for a challenges, or it is a game you grew up with. Then 'do not bother' which is the majority of the games.
The same is true for MSDOS games, Genesis, 2600, MSX, PS1/2/3/4, XBox, GB, GC etc etc etc. The majority of games out there are just not good or have aged poorly on the graphic/playability front. I personally would recommend only a very small handful of games on the NES. Also one issue with some of these older systems is they were meant to be played on a 15-20 inch PAL/NTSC screen with interlacing. You splat that across a 65 inch OLED they tend to look bad. Your brain is good at making up the detail.
I grew up with the NES and loved the hell out of it at the time. But today, there's not a single game I want to go back to. I'd rather play the SNES versions of many of the best series. Also emulation with CRT shaders is the best way to visually play older games these days. This includes PS1/2 games.
Tetris, snake rattle and roll, Mario 3, conquest of the crystal palace, legend of Zelda, Castlevania 3 - there are still some NES classics worth revisiting via emulator, especially with the benefit of modern usb controllers, and save states.
Anyone growing up in that era should have fond memories of arcade games that were far better than most NES games — there were still real arcades while the NES was current.
However, try playing the first level of Super Mario Bros on original NES hardware. The game mechanics basically still hold up.
All Atari 2600 games were worse than NES games, and primitive as anything. But try Breakout with paddles on an original 2600; again, the mechanics are good and it’s fun, at least briefly.
I don't know how to call this but the ratio of magic versus graphics resolution fascinates me. 8bit games were often very crude, but you got the essential for a gamer's mind to rejoin for hours.
This is super valid. I grew up with these games, and I have heavy nostalgia for them, but they were heavily limited by the hardware of the time. I think some series have had really good modern translations, like the New Super Mario Bros series which has a play-style very akin to the originals, but in a modern format and graphics. I would also consider Mario Maker an example of this as well. But these examples are generally rare and more often there has been a full shift to 3D gaming (Mario Galaxy/Odyssey etc) and side-scrolling is a thing of the past, because a lot of those traditional NES game styles are kind of limited and garbage compared to modern games. I still have my NES, and it still works, but I don't exactly find myself breaking it out all the time to play as opposed to playing a modern game in a modern format.
When these games came out, the PC game market was smaller with less competition. Programmers and game makers drew from what they grew up with which was table top board games. That's why the instruction manuals were thick (like a DnD manual), the rules were incredibly complex, and the learning curves were steep.
These games were a product of their time and you definitely do have an age based selection bias!
There was definitely a manual, I remember that. I don't think it was huge though, but I remember reading it through on a car ride home (something like ~3 hours) so probably was around 100 pages.
Same here— SimCity 3000’s the one that really hit the right spot gameplay-wise for me. Prettier and deeper and more polished than 2000 without departing too far from 2000’s core mechanics or simulation approach.
>without departing too far from 2000’s core mechanics or simulation approach
SC3K is similar enough in structure to SC2K that it can actually load SC2K city save files directly; SC3K being a relatively strict superset of SC2K in terms of available elements and their sizes certainly doesn't hinder that backwards-compatibility at all.
The only things that would actively break when you did this were related to maximum terrain steepness for underground elements (metro, water pipes), 90-degree rail connections would sever (at least, graphically), and hydroelectric power generators as they're the only power building not implemented.
The arcologies were also dropped from SC3K, but to be fair those were mostly just designed to be population boosters in SC2K- something that wasn't necessary in SC3K now that the simulator was allowed to keep track of more than 250 buildings (or at least, so the manual and the query tool say).
I misremembered; it's a 150-buiding microsimulator limit. The buildings still function, but if you query them you get the generic popup rather than the detailed one.
Earlier versions of SimCity 2000 are more limited in this regard as arcologies after the first 150 special buildings don't count towards the population count; the later versions do, however.
Bought but almost never played 4. Simcity 2000 was pretty clunky and 3000 was the right amount of updated graphics and mechanics while maintaining the original fun. It seems impossible to get my original Simcity 3000 CD working on modern hardware...
3000 was just a modernised and polished expansion of 2000. Maxis had plans to do a successor to 2k that was fully 3D but they kept hitting frustrations and setbacks. So they just stuck to what they knew and made a faithful successor.
>My beef with SimCity 4 is that it added a bunch of details that make it less fun, like micromanagement of the funding of individual hospitals and police stations. The added complexity didn’t bring any new profound shifts in thinking or strategy, it just created more busywork for the player.
You don't have to do that. Leaving the sliders at defaults work just fine. You only need to tweak them if you wanted to micro-optimize spending, which rarely needed given how easy it is to make a profitable city to start with.
And it downloads AND installs in less time than it would take to insert the CD into the drive, not to mention finding the thing... Modern wonders :-) Gonna play some tonight!
I agree that 2000 was a cleaner overall design. Adding realism for the sake of it is a dead end.
That said, there are a lot of games where the details of the simulation compound on themselves in interesting ways (Dwarf Fortress, Dominions, DC:Barbarossa, Shadow Empire, Paradox games). I enjoy those sorts of games, more minimalism and abstraction isn't always more fun.
Take that one step further. Start with a virgin earth. With sufficient, but finite, number of players, and a modelled global population, you build cities that effectively compete with each other for population.
In other words an alternate history of population and human development.
We already have OpenTTD and OpenRCT. Maybe someone somewhere is creating an C++ remake of our favourite isometric city simulator, with multiplayer support!
But to do it right, I'd want it to be the scale of a moderately large nation like the USA. You'd buy plots of land one square mile as you expand. The game world would be seeded with a major highway and railroad system that you could not remove, just add connections to.
I'd want traffic to be simulated in the same depth as Cities: Skylines, and have freight have to move over a thousand miles to reach destinations.
But most importantly, I'd want the entire game world to be seamless. You should be able to pan from one side of the country to the other.
But such an ambitious game would require immense processing power. I don't know how I would scale it.
How the multiplayer mode would look like? Do you think about competing against the other real player? Or maybe collaborating with some friend?
I am asking, because I think I haven't seen the multiplayer support in any railroad/transport-tycoon game. I remember in Railroad Tycoon 2 and then in Sid Meier's Railroads [0] we could play against NPC. Same as us, NPC is establishing a company and we may buy all his stocks to win.
In OpenTTD, each player controls a rival transport firm and you compete against each other on the same map. AFAIK you can also arrange a buyout of your rival, similar to Railroads.
In OpenRTC, each player gets full control over managing the same park from a shared pool of funds. Mayhem may ensure if you set your game to public and don't configure permissions carefully.
In my mind, such an OpenSC2K's multiplayer would work like the latter. Each player managing the same city. Though if they removed game engine restrictions, it would be nifty if each player could manage his own city on one big shared map, similar to OpenRTC.
The problem with city building games is that they are far too gamified. In reality construction takes years, even decades for many infrastructure projects. Because of that, the challenge of solving the problems of 25 years in the future is not well represented in many such games.
They also make a lot of assumptions about how cities are designed. The first thing I noticed when I started up Simcity 4 again this week for the first time in 20 years is that it's all single-use zoning. The rest of the world outside the US says hello.
Try Workers & Resources, it's more about managing a whole supply chain and being self sufficient than spending money. You can tackle it at different levels but at the most complex you're making the cement then trucking it to the building site.
Absolutely! SimCity 2000 was a masterpiece, striking the perfect balance between the immediate grokability and comprehensible simplicity of the original SimCity "Classic", plus the judicious addition of rich immersive CD-ROM quality graphics and sound.
SimCity 2000, much like Hunter S. Thompson's description of mid-sixties San Francisco, represented a harmonic convergence of factors that established a high-water mark of game design.
It was a time when the energy of a whole generation of computer hardware and game developers came to a head in a round shiny disc, for reasons that were hard to fully grasp at the time and even harder to explain in retrospect.
Just as Thompson describes the sense of being alive in that corner of time and the world, there was a similar sense of knowing that you were part of something special when playing SimCity 2000, a testament to constructive expression and augmented imagination, instead of pre-scripted storytelling and showboating special effects.
It marked a technological zenith, fruitfully applying the latest technology in a way that later versions fell short. It was an inflection point in simulation game design and immersive production values, having reached a point where any further elaboration would only lead to diminishing returns. It struck the ideal balance of complexity by remaining true to the original SimCity Classic, while learning from the oversimplification of SimAnt and the overcomplication of SimEarth.
And just like the high-water mark described by Thompson, the peak of SimCity 2000's game design was a place where the wave finally broke and rolled back. Subsequent versions, despite their technological advancements, could not recapture the magic of that moment. They were like the Las Vegas of today, where with the right kind of eyes, you can almost see the high-water mark of game design that was SimCity 2000.
In a 1996 talk, Will Wright dove into how the designs of SimAnt and SimEarth both influenced SimCity 2000. During a Q&A session, a student asked what he was making next, so he also gave a sneak peek into his current project, Dollhouse, which was later renamed The Sims.
Will Wright - Maxis - Interfacing to Microworlds - 1996-4-26
Video of Will Wright's talk about "Interfacing to Microworlds" presented to Terry Winograd's user interface class at Stanford University, April 26, 1996.
He demonstrates and gives postmortems for SimEarth, SimAnt, and SimCity 2000, then previews an extremely early pre-release prototype version of Dollhouse (which eventually became The Sims), describing how the AI models personalities and behavior, and is distributed throughout extensible plug-in programmable objects in the environment, and he thoughtfully answers many interesting questions from the audience.
This is the lecture described in "Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996)": A summary of Will Wright’s talk to Terry Winograd’s User Interface Class at Stanford, written in 1996 by Don Hopkins, before they worked together on The Sims at Maxis.
Use and reproduction:
The materials are open for research use and may be used freely for non-commercial purposes with an attribution. For commercial permission requests, please contact the Stanford University Archives (universityarchives@stanford.edu).
Agreed. A lot of simulation/strategy games seem to increase their fidelity over time, at the cost of fun. I’ve bought every Football Manager game for almost 30 years but these days it feels too much like an actual job. I’m intrigued what the best alternative is - I personally enjoy Paradox games, which generally expand with numerous DLCs so you can opt in to additional complexity on an incremental basis.
For me it's SimCity4. 3000 has a place in my heart always, but 4 wins out in replayability--even today--because of its dept and the neighboring cities. Making a thriving gigantic region of interconnected cities is forever satisfying.
The ability to import a SimCity 2000 map in to SimCopter was amazing for the time, imo. I remember flying around cities I had worked really hard on thinking how the cross over between the two games was really cool.
Absolutely! I remember adding a bunch of rail to my cities just so I could do more train rescues or catching robbers on the trains. It was huge fun at the time…
Back on topic though. My beef with SimCity 4 is that it added a bunch of details that make it less fun, like micromanagement of the funding of individual hospitals and police stations. The added complexity didn’t bring any new profound shifts in thinking or strategy, it just created more busywork for the player.
SimCity 2000 has almost none of that. It’s just a really solid and super fun game. It’s quite balanced (when you resist the temptation to use cheats) without being overly hard. So you can sit back (with a cold beverage of your choice) and enjoy a nice relaxing time playing mayor and seeing your little city develop before your eyes!