IGN对于模拟城市5的评价

maoyufeng

原链接：http://uk.ign.com/articles/2013/03/04/simcity-review-in-progress?page=1
SimCity Review in ProgressOur impressions as we continue to play for review.
by Dan Stapleton

Update: Unfortunately I can't recommend buying SimCity until these crippling server issues are fixed. Please don't purchase it until there's a reasonable expectation that you'll be able to actually play.
Here's a look at what you're in for if you try to log in, and what's being done about it on EA's side.



If you already bought SimCity and are looking for a refund, it may depend on where you live... or how loud you are. We've compiled all the latest information here.
I'm posting the latest impressions on the second page of this article to prevent excessive scrolling. There's lots to say about SimCity.
Because EA is selling this new SimCity as an online game, we're not quite ready to give you an official score until we've spent some serious time with it after its long-awaited launch tomorrow. But I can tell you right now what I think of the couple of dozen hours I've spent playing on the review version, both by myself and with others: so far what we have here is a gorgeous and incredibly detailed city simulation that occasionally trips over its own staggering complexity.

First off, an unfortunate dealbreaker for thousands of PC gamers: you're going to need a permanent internet connection in order to play SimCity. Even though it doesn't need moment-to-moment updates from Maxis' servers (so lag isn't an issue), it does need to phone home in order to save, even when playing single-player. Maxis insists that requirement isn't simply for DRM purposes, but who're they kidding? Of course it is. Also, EA's Origin client is required and must be installed in order to play. In fairness, it's been pretty well-behaved for me, other than a couple of loading issues that EA promises won't happen with the live version. I'll keep you posted on that.
I know those restrictions are big problems for some of you, and it's a damn shame that they're even something we have to worry about here. Because this SimCity is, in many ways, magnificently ambitious and an enormous improvement over the last real SimCity game from 10 years ago. For example, just watching one of these cities run and knowing that each and every one of its tens or even hundreds of thousands of Sim citizens is individually tracked, and can be followed from home to work or school to the store to parks or shows or other activities and then back home again, is genuinely impressive when you think about it.


What kind of stalker-ish creepy mayor are you?

While they generally number fewer than the denizens of old-school SimCitys, those games are effectively just guessing about which Sims are where using some fuzzy math. This one knows. You can click on one person in a crowd of hundreds on a busy city street, and that person has a name and things that he wants and things that have recently made him happy or angry. It's completely insane. So are they, sometimes, like why my citizens felt the need to protest in front of City Hall when I had an 83% approval rating, or a bus driver fails to enter a school parking lot and shuts down traffic for blocks, but on the whole it's really cool to watch.
On top of the simulation, SimCity is super-dense with rich art and style. It starts with the elegant, mostly intuitive interface, and extends to graphical nuances like sunlight reflecting off solar panels and the unique ambient sounds that play every time you select a building like a police station. The music that accompanies everything is delightful, a cheerily optimistic and industrious tune that shifts enough to avoid becoming monotonous. It all made my first hours after founding a city a constant stream of astonishments at the level of attention Maxis has slathered over every inch of this thing.


Welcome to SimBurbia.

City specializations – a somewhat strange concept of mayor-run businesses – add both further visual differences and some welcome changed-up gameplay. One map I played on had a motherload of oil underneath it, and when I plopped down a field of pumping oil wells and a trade depot to automatically export black gold to the global market, the amount of cash it brought in felt almost like a cheat code. (A more advanced city could refine that crude into even pricier gasoline, but I'm not there yet.) Other specializations, such as casinos and tourism, are about attracting out-of-town Sim tourists – a process that, like several of SimCity's late-game concepts, isn't explained terribly well. You can get by on tax revenue alone if you don't care to bother with that stuff, though.
For all its technical ambition, however, there's one place SimCity really doesn't push hard enough. Maxis says it named this game engine GlassBox because it shows off the inner workings of the simulation machine, but it took on another meaning entirely when, far sooner than I'd expected, an invisible wall prevented me from continuing to expand my city. Just as I felt like my economy was picking up the momentum I'd need to really grow this thing, space to plop down large buildings like community colleges and recycling facilities became hard to come by. The route to further growth is to increase the density of the city, not the area, and that feels a bit constraining. EA says there may be larger maps in the future, but there's no word on when or whether they'll cost extra. To be fair, my biggest 100,000-population city never could manage to slow down my PC, which is running a three-year-old Core i7 and a GeForce GTX 570.

Given the limited city sizes, I appreciate how the second city I built in the same region, Dan Jose, could mooch off the technology and excess resources of my first (Dan Francisco). For example, when I founded Dan Jose I didn't have to build a power plant at all because Dan Francisco had a nuclear reactor, and I could simply buy whatever wasn't being used. The same goes for unlocks – if a City Hall add-on exists in Dan Francisco that allows a hospital to be built, Dan Jose gets all the benefits too (and vice versa). That system both saves precious building space and ensures that starting each new town isn't the same monotonous procedure of putting down exactly the same electricity, water, sewage, trash, police, fire, medical, and education structures every time.
That kind of inter-city cooperation is also the foundational idea of multiplayer, where you can share a region with up to 15 other mayors. It does work, and with lots of coordination it can work well, but in the multiplayer sessions I've played so far it had nearly as many drawbacks as advantages. While it's excellent to be able to ask a friend to build a City Hall upgrade you need but don't have a slot open for, or to send you a shipment of refined alloy so you can get your highly profitable computer chip factory operational, it's a pain when I suddenly find the power or water supply I was relying on has dried up because the player I was buying it from expanded his city without also increasing capacity. It's a problem that's avoidable with enough communication, but this isn't Left 4 Dead – you probably aren't all going to be on voice chat the entire time calling out for second-to-second needs. I won't, anyway.


Maxis wants us to be team players, like these guys.

I'm going to go ahead and predict that, much like Blizzard found with Diablo 3, Maxis will soon discover that the majority of SimCity players will want to play by themselves most of the time. The good news is that it's a totally valid way to play, and no significant options I've seen are closed off to those of us who play in private regions and single-handedly run all the cities therein. Progress is a little slower because you have to switch between cities, but it's definitely doable. It's very much like playing The Sims 2, which allows you to control multiple households, but in order to switch between them you have to go through a loading screen.
Solo players might have a tough time managing a Great Work -- regional projects like a major airport or power plant that benefits all the cities in a region. They're so ambitious that I've yet to even get one off the ground after more than 25 hours played. I'm sure you could build one in that time if you know what you're doing, but so far that's proved too ambitious for me as a new player.
I'll get there soon enough though, because so far SimCity is the kind of game that makes me wish it had a real-world clock displayed on the screen so I know when to stop to eat. When I get engrossed fine-tuning the inner workings of my public transportation system it devours time like nobody's business.
Remember to check back here at IGN for ongoing impressions as the week goes on, and if you want to see it in action on launch day, be sure to watch Greg Miller's epic nine-hour SimCity livestream tomorrow!

maoyufeng

Launch Day

Who could possibly have predicted that SimCity would experience launch day problems due to its online requirement? Right: everyone. Everyone predicted that. And EA's Origin servers did not disappoint them, delivering slow download speeds, spotty connections, and log-in queues upward of a half hour. It's definitely not a disaster on the scale of Diablo 3's Error 37 fiasco, as I was able to get in and play within a half hour of the official launch, but far from smooth. This morning I woke to reports of problems deleting regions and Origin not allowing friend invites, so it hasn't yet been sorted out. I just fired up Origin myself and was greeted by a "Slow network: your games library could not be loaded at this time" message for a few moments before I was even shown my list of games. Attempting to download it failed outright - fortunately I have a disc to install off of. Pretty sure that problem wasn't on my end.
One thing's for sure: the specter of always-online DRM has once again failed to chase off enough interested people that the servers weren't overwhelmed. Even though we all know what's coming, we just can't resist the urge to try to log in during those first moments, like a horde of Black Friday shoppers beating down the Walmart doors and trampling each other in the process.
But in spite of it all I got in several hours' worth of play last night, and other than the Origin social side, things worked fairly well. Right now Greg Miller is livestreaming a full nine hours worth of SimCity gameplay, and that's working too. (No, he's not playing on some magic journalist-only server.)

I had to start over since the review version ran on a private server, but I've already got a pretty good thing going. I'd built it on a plot of land with coal deposits, which, once I'd built the coal mine and trade depot, funneled a steady stream of $4,100 payments into my account at regular intervals. That's enough to allow a city to grow extremely quickly, and get free coal resources for a coal power plant (which provides much more juice than a eco-friendly wind farm). To counteract my dirty coal economy, I focused on education so that my industrial buildings wouldn't pump out even more pollution.
As I built, I noticed several minor improvements in the way roads are drawn that happened between the review version and the release - they're welcome changes, and they make drawing a curved road or snapping to the guidelines which help you draw roads an appropriate distance apart feel snappier and more accurate, but they still haven't eliminated all of the frustrations that come from roads sometimes glitching out and being unable to build where they look like they definitely should. Because SimCity has no undo button, having to change plans can be very expensive.
Everything went really well until I got up to 120,000 citizens. That's when a zombie outbreak hit my medical clinic, wiping out about a third of my population - and apparently most of my educated workforce. Not only did I lose the tax revenue from 40,000 wealthy Sims, I lost the businesses they'd run, too. All at once they complained of a lack of an educated workforce and closed up shop, leaving my once-proud city a husk of empty buildings that, when moused over, gave me messages about how they'd either shut down or were "devoured by zombies." Thus began my struggle to rebuild... and it wasn't pretty.
For one thing, this education system. Despite having two fully-upgraded elementary schools, a high school, a community college, a university, and even a public library, people just didn't seem interested in going to school anymore. Desks sat empty while businesses complained of an uneducated work force, and there was nothing I could do short of yelling "Stay in school, kids!" PSAs at the screen. Meanwhile, crime and fires ran rampant. Buildings were being abandoned and reduced to rubble faster than I could bulldoze the ruins, and even more were shutting down because of too much crime. Tax revenue declined, and even with the huge influx of cash that my recycling center brought me (who'd have thought that could be more profitable than coal?) I was in a downward spiral. I was forced to shut down most of my education system - which, to be fair, wasn't being used anyone - and take out $150,000 worth of bonds just to stay afloat. It was a downward spiral.
I should mention, by the way, that I've got the Limited Edition package that comes with the superhero Maxis Man. When you build his headquarters you can pay him $500 to go heal some sick people; after a $40,000 garage upgrade you can pay him $1,000 to go catch some criminals every few minutes. That's not very heroic... more like a mercenary for hire. Batman doesn't charge Gotham every time he goes out on patrol! Also, Batman is actually effective at catching criminals. I paid this idiot a small fortune thinking he could do a better job than my overstretched police force at collaring crooks, but the results were terrible. I eventually just shut off the power to his lair and saved myself the $900/hour upkeep fees. I'd have to handle this one myself.
What did save me was the Police Precinct building, which I finally managed to scrape together the hefty sum to set up. The real heroes of SimCity allowed me to get back on my feet for a bit, and my population climbed back up over 100,000. That's when things started going weird, and very possibly broken.
People started complaining about sewage. Which was odd, because I had a huge sewage treatment plant that should've had ample capacity to handle my city's needs. But it wasn't working, citing a lack of water. Which was odd, because my water pumps were also more than enough. Clicking on those, they said they couldn't run because of lack of electricity - which makes no sense. I had a coal plant and a finite but still healthy supply of fuel still being extracted from the ground, so in theory I was good for power for the foreseeable future. And yet when I clicked on the plant it reported it was running out of coal, and power output had been cut in half. Checking on my coal mines and storage facility, they were both full to capacity. So for some reason, the delivery trucks had simply stopped running, and building additional delivery trucks didn't solve it. Some glitch had apparently caused the drivers to go on an unofficial strike, and it was crippling my city from top to bottom.
I tried everything I could think of. I turned facilities off and on again (which fires and then rehires workers, and sometimes frees things that have gotten stuck somewhere), I bulldozed some roads and improved my traffic as best I could with the limited resources I had to clear the roads for the truck drivers, but nothing worked. Eventually I quit out and reloaded, and that seems to have reminded them they're being paid to move coal around.
This isn't the first time an inexplicable sequence of events has ground life in my cities to a halt. Some of them, I'm sure, are a result of me just not fully understanding the way this incredibly complex virtual machine operates. Much of it, I'm sure, will be answered as the community sorts things out and tells us how to run them in SimCity Wikis, but Maxis hasn't done a fantastic job of making it clear. I'm actually really disappointed by the lack of documentation here - the "manual" that pops up when you push the "Game Manual" button on the Options UI isn't even working right now, but when it is it's just a two-page PDF of default keybindings. The Help Center button, right now, is doing nothing at all, but earlier it just took me to the forums.
On a technical note, at least, I'm impressed: SimCity has yet to crash on me, it's run at a steady framerate even under heavy load, and it alt-tabs to and fro (and runs in a Window) like a pro.
Again, I want to make it clear that overall my experience with SimCity has been rocky, but I'm still absolutely fascinated by its complexity and its beauty. It's one of those intricate games that I'm willing to put up with a lot to tinker with. If your threshhold for this kind of frustrating shenanigans is low, though, you definitely want to wait at least a few days before you join in. Let us early adopters figure it out first.

9PM on Launch Day

If my review takes longer than expected, this is why:

If only it were just 10 minutes.

This, by the way, is the third time around this 20-minute clock. Each time I think I'm getting close to playing, I'm booted back again. And this is after EA added a second server to both the US West and US East regions, both of which are at least as full as this one. If you held off and waited on this purchase, give yourself a pat on the back. If you didn't, I advise thinking twice next time. Remember: if you really want to make a game publisher sweat, tell them (over Twitter - believe me, they're listening) you're not preordering because you're concerned about launch issues. They're all about that these days.
Now that it's been 24 hours since launch, EA is quickly running out my very generous grace period.

March 6

I was finally able to get into the US West 1 server at around 11pm last night - if you're counting, that's after three hours of trying. Even then, Origin's social features weren't working. People who'd added me to their friends list in the client couldn't see me online, and I never received invites that were sent by people that I could see. So yes, it's a bit on the broken side at the moment, but I was finally able to to play in my own private region without issue. Once again it kept me going until 3:30am, because whatever else is wrong with it, SimCity is addictive, and it's the latest in a long line of monkeys on my back.
So, some thoughts on last night's play - again, prefaced with a statement that I am still having quite a good time due to all of the things I praised in my initial impressions, as those are mostly still in full effect. While I was able to build up a fairly impressive (if not terribly creative) 130,000-population stand-alone city from scratch last night, I became less enamored of the resource economy. It does work as intended: you pull stuff out of the ground and either sell it, use it to fuel your power plants, or refine it and either sell that refined product or use it for a Great Works project. But when I laid down a coal mine and an ore mine in my city and directed them to sell everything they extracted on the global market through a trade depot, they brought in far more money than my puny taxes ever could. I ended up turning the tax rates down to 6% and relied almost entirely on the sales of trade goods for income, which basically meant I was playing a resource trading sim and not a city sim. Not really in the spirit of things, is it?
It was also annoying that even though the in-depth economy screen showed how much I was bringing in, the income display on the main UI screen didn't factor in my massive trade sales. It showed I was running an hourly deficit of several thousand dollars, yet nearly every hour the total would increase instead. I realize why it doesn't factor irregular mining rates and traffic-affected truck deliveries into my total, but the result is a UI that is giving me effectively incorrect information.
I'm also baffled by the tourism system. My theory is running a consistently profitable casino or tourist town his highly dependent on having thriving neighboring cities to send you Sims with fat wallets. That'd make sense, except that sometimes it's totally not true. In one of the first cities I started I plopped down a basic casino, and it was initially very profitable, bringing in several thousand per day. Until, that is, until it stopped. I don't know why, and I don't know how, but despite my city growing rapidly the money simply dried up, and nothing I tried (zoning more commercial, adding more train stations, ferries, and even an airport) would bring it back. No matter what I did, that profitable casino turned into a $30,000 per day hole.
Here's Greg Miller talking a bit about his experiences with stadiums:

The third point of annoyance I've run into is in education. I've built every education building - an elementary school (two, actually), a high school, public libraries (three of them), a community college (with an expansion wing), and a university. Their presence has allowed the industry in my town to upgrade to high tech businesses, which generates less pollution. Great, except that those businesses are all closing every few minutes and creating vacant fire hazards because they keep complaining there aren't enough educated workers to run them. Yet each and every one of my education buildings has open spaces going unused, just draining my money in upkeep and giving nothing in return. No matter how many school buses I built, I couldn't get enough people consistently using those buildings to max them out, or to produce enough of an educated workforce to keep my businesses open.
There could very well be a logical reason for this, and I'm sure someone out there will figure it out and put it all on the wikis, but SimCity makes no effort to educate me about why I'm failing, and that's frustrating as hell. Not as frustrating as a three-hour login queue, but close.

More Server Woes

Let the record show that even though I've been able to log in to my server of choice (US West 1) without a wait tonight during peak hours (it's now 9pm Pacific time), I am unable to load the cities in my saved region. So I might as well be locked out.

A Wasted Day

At this rate I'm going to have to change the title of this post to "SimCity Review Without Progress." On the plus side, I never saw a log-in queue, but what I did get was even worse: it let me log in, but I couldn't load a city. I'd either be told it was unavailable at this time or simply hang on the loading screen until I Alt+F4'd out. I did manage to get in for a grand total of about 5 minutes last night, but everything was so broken (social features weren't working at all) that I decided sleep was probably a better use of my time. When I attempted to load my biggest city, here's the choice I was given:


Not much of a choice, is it? Either lose an unspecified amount of progress, or lose all progress. So I picked roll back and braced for the worst... but nothing happened. I couldn't even do that much. Then I tried to load another city, and hung on the loading screen again. All I could do was claim a new city in my region, and I didn't feel like starting from scratch again, especially knowing that my progress would likely be lost.
I still have to recommend that you stay away from SimCity for the time being. The latest word is that "non essential services" are being disabled to lighten the load on servers (I can't imagine the leaderboards and achievements were getting a lot of use anyway when many people can't even play), so we'll see how that shakes out today and tomorrow.
Update: Holy smokes, EA and I have very different definitions of "non-essential services." Even if I could get in right now – which I can't, because I'm stuck in yet another loading queue – I don't think I even want to play without Cheetah Speed, the fastest time acceleration. There's already quite a bit of waiting around before you can gather enough cash to buy something like your first $30,000 police station or a coal mine, but this will tip the balance of the pacing drastically in favor of tedium. It's now basically futile to play. Also, Amazon.com has pulled SimCity from its download store. To any Europeans reading: just stay away. Save yourself the frustration.
Who'd have thought things would get worse before they got better?

The Beginning of a Recovery?

At last, I'm able to connect, load a saved city, and play without waiting or other annoyance. I'm still not at all happy about the lack of Cheetah speed, though. That's going to majorly cramp my style. I'll have more updates for you tomorrow!

Another day, another problem

Sorry for the lack of updates today. I've been a bit busy ranting about always-online DRM in general, marveling at EA withdrawing all marketing promotion for SimCity, that sort of thing. Anyway, I'm planning to get my final review up by Tuesday – a week after release. With a game this complex (and this unstable) I feel like that's a reasonable amount of time to play around with it and allow the dust to settle before settling on a score.
It won't be an easy number to decide on, because at this point it seems clear the server issues aren't going to magically clear up overnight. Last night, for example, I was able to get in and play without any server queuing at all, and all of my cities loaded fine. However, they weren't able to share any resources at all, or even use the benefits of each others' City Hall add-ons, which effectively (and ironically) killed any sort of multiplayer capability. Also, as previously complained about, Cheetah Speed remained disabled, which drastically increases the amount of time spent sitting around tapping fingers on the desk waiting for tax income to roll in. I mean, I like sightseeing in my cities and all, but I'd prefer if I weren't doing it out of necessity.

Ever get that "alone in a crowd" feeling?

As a result of both of those issues, my progress last night was virtually nonexistent. I've reached a stage where I need to collaborate between cities – not necessarily with other people, but with other cities – to really get any further. At least the basic single-player experience seems to be functional now, but as Maxis itself has been keen to remind us this entire time, that's not what this SimCity is really about. It's about building a network of interdependent, specialized cities to build a region greater than any one of them alone. I hope I get to play that game soon.
Update: As of 7:45pm on March 8th, Maxis has just announced it's added extra servers and is giving away a free EA game (which one, or which ones you'll get to choose from, isn't specified) to everyone who activates their copy on Origin by March 18th. Still no word on Cheetah mode.

Five Days In

Last night I was finally able to log in with no waiting queue, start a region and load saved cities, and share resources with a neighboring city. I was able to build a city with no power plant, no water pumps, and no sewage outlet. Progress is being made! We're not quite there yet, though. I'm still annoyed I can't speed up time as fast as I used to – I ran SimCity in windowed mode so that I could keep a browser open and do some reading while I was waiting for enough money to roll in that I could actually build some stuff, which isn't great if you're a fan of instant gratification. And I still had a lot of issues with the stats on my neighbor's city updating in a timely manner. A lot of our exchanges went like this:
Me: Hey, can you build some more water towers? Looks like I'm about to run out.
Her: Ok, give me a few minutes to save up.
[10 minutes pass]
Me: Built those water towers yet? Starting to get parched over here...
Her: Yup, about five minutes ago.
Me: It still says you're only offering 11.5k gallons. One of you is a liar.
Her: Says the guy who claims to have sent me police coverage an hour ago.
Me: Forget it, I'll just build my own water towers.
Her: WTF, so I just saved up and built a bunch of water I don't need for nothing?
Me: Yup. So, what free EA game are you gonna get?

(有真英语帝看的懂的告诉我）

fzpqchlr

我就是出来打酱油路过的，：）