Try to be more literal...

I was thinking that it was a very odd trailer.. I mean to have shown a planet like in Spore but the game doesn't feature a planet like in Spore where you're literally building cities that connect to each other in real time. :(

i had that problem to the first time. Just go back and try again. In the second or third time it will work :) Fingers crossed that we soon can play :D

Make sure your not using chrome. It does work just sometimes the Dxdiag file isn't liked so try using firefox that's what i used and that worked after a few try's.

Finally, someone with sense. We can't say this game will be bad until we've tried it. It looks great, different, yet still has the core of SimCity - zoning etc. Can't wait!

Yea dude tell em also if you look at the world trailer the nr 1 in the leaderboard of population have 3 452 110 people in his/her city and evry single one of them is simulated
Awesome right :D

Hi there,

My name is FerryV and i just came back from GamesCom 2012! The first thing I did was running to hall 6 were half of the hall was build up by EA. And wow what a amazing stands. My favorite: SimCity off course. So I went in line and waited 2 hours. This was the longest I waited for a game at GamesCom. I was amazed how popular SimCity is. In line I watched all the trailers and studied the whole stand with the amazing art. Finely it was my change to experience SimCity and I can tell you the following:
Guys and girls. Its going to be a great game!!! We played the alpha version (not beta) with a basic prebuild city. Off course there was a lot wrong with the city (no power, no water, no fire stations, not enough housing etc.) so I had 20min to rebuild the whole city and watched it got destroyed in the end by an meteor shower :) Because it was an alpha version a lot of building/mass transit etc wasn’t available. This is more than logic but still Maxis gave me a real good feeling were the game is going to. This is what I discovered/experienced in that 20 minutes:

- building road (and bus stations)
The first thing I had to do is connect my city with the regional highway. I had 2 options to build my connections: Straight road or Curvy road. There was also an 3th option showing but not available. That looked like an zone function. I think it’s going to be the same function as SC4 automatic roads when zoning. I have to be honest that the curvy road system wasn’t flawless. But giving it’s a Alpha version completely logical. But the roads worked pretty good and looked pretty fine. I also build 3 bus stations and upgraded the bus stations with extra capacity. Because I build this more in the end I didn’t had enough time to really explore all the possibility’s (sorry for that one)

- Zoning
Yes zoning! No plopables! (only government buildings) And I was amazed by it. Here the glassbox revealed itself. If you build a plain road and then go to the option zoning you will get automatic zoning on the road. So even when your roads are curvy and makes no sence the zoning will figure it out. The best part about this was that I didn’t had to figure out exactly how the zoning will fit within the curvy road and I didn’t had any empty space! (like Cities XL) It was such a joy seeing the housing, commercials and smelly industry growing. My residential neighborhood was with a lot of gardens and green. But the houses closer to the commercial zone were more dense and were as my commercial area more of concrete. It was beautiful. Not like you see on the trailer with high skyscrapers and a grass garden around it. Now I must say I didn’t had really skyscrapers yet because the city wasn’t big enough yet. And for the people that want to control their own zoning completely. I could bulldoze everything pretty easy. And not all the zoning possibilities where available.

- Popable (with upgrades)
This is the best part I think. You can transform all your plopable building and transform them as you dement them to. I build the following: Coal Plant, Windmill Farm, Fire station, Bus station. All of the building had unique add-ons. Some of them you could plant around your building (see also trailer were they build a school and putt dorms around it) In my case I build a fire station, put a bell tower on it. Build an extra garage on the other side of the street and put a nice flag pole next to it J With the windmill I made 2 classic windmills (not the hypermodern you’ve seen on some screenshot from Maxis) and I build a nice sign that it was a windmill park in front of the building. Next I made dirt road from the office to the windmills for the maintenance truck. At this point I realized the game is going to be deep enough for SimCity builders.

- Water tower (and groundwater)
When I build my water tower I got the water table of the map. I build it on a splash of dark blue water instead of light blue water. This off course the get a higher output of the tower. Right away I seen the water run down the city. Finely not wasting my time on water pipes anymore! J At this stage I got also involved in the next item:

- Graphs
In the older SimCity I used my graphs a lot in combinations with the famous minimap. In this version Maxis does it different. The whole map interact in what you want to see. So I click on fire risk and seen that one house was burned down and was now rubbish and that there were some warnings at some local factories. Next I switched to density and the whole city went white (buildings) and circle towers in different colors where shooting out of my city. I could see right away were all the people work, sleep, shop etc. It was very clear and much better than before. Than by accident I clicked on a car that was driving over the street. Guess what happened:

- Cars, citizens, agents and routes etc.
When you click a car it give you information about that car. Who is driving it. Were that person lives and were he is going to! It was so cool to see that the agent system from glassbox really is there. This gives an extra deep dimension to control your city and its transport system (if you want to micromanagement) But luckily the agents found their way also by themselves. So one of the cars that I followed didn’t took the shortest route (through my nice green residential zone) but was driving a bit around it on my bigger avenue. Soon my avenue got some bad traffic jam at the big intersection with the commercial zone. Suddenly I seen some care (not all) sneak around it through my nice neighborhood. I don’t want that off course, so I build even an even bigger avenue (the one with the light rail in the middle) now the traffic was getting this as preferred road.I didn’t figure out a way to upgrade the road, but then again I didn’t put much effort in it (had nice empty space) and I could not work with the light rail because at this point my time was up. I also think that the light rail didn’t work yet in this version.

- Graphics
OMG it was already beautiful. And I cant wait till the final result. For the first time in SimCity I really love the night time. I build my power plant by accident in the evening and blink blink blink.. all the lights in the city were turned on. It was amazing to see. And because not all are burning and some go off or on it really looks realistic. Well maybe realistic isn’t the right word because as you know SimCity works wilt tilt-shift. My brother found it looks like a bit cartoony because of the tilt-shirt. That its looked a bit more like sims and not like SC4. But still disagree with him. I feld like I could really see every detail in my city and still see everything that’s going on. But then again I love good tilt-shift movies. How suddenly a real life big environment still keeps all its details but looks like you can play with it like Lego.

- Disasters (meteor shower)
I’m not a big fan of disasters. Why would I destroy a perfect city?! But I guess it’s a part of SimCity and a lot of people like it. Well the meteor shower was a nice ending and it looked pretty amazing. Maxis/Dr Vu destroyed all recently build cities in one click. Maybe it was better this way because I really wanted to take the city home with me. Now it was destroyed it was easier to go outside of the stand.

- 20minutes and feedback
Because I only had 20 minutes I tried as many things as possible in that period of time. But every SimCity player knows how fast time goes away with that game. The thing I regret the most is also the time shortage I had. I really hope the beta comes out soon and hopefully (fingers crossed, wink to Maxis) I will be selected as a beta user. In this story I described my experience as accurate as possible. If you still have questions for me about my experience please ask. I will try to answer them as good and quick as I can. But remember I only played 20 minutes (way to short Maxis!!) So I only experienced a tip of the iceberg.

As last: The computers were SimCity was running on was behind closed doors. Cameras were not allowed and they were made sure nobody was filming anything. I think they did that just to tease everybody that was not there. So im sorry I dont have any nice vids/screens. Also I didn’t talk to anybody from Maxis. So I had no change to ask my questions / give my feedback to them. If maxis still want my feedback they know how to contact me. But for now: Thanks Maxis, you did a really great job. Thanks everybody for reading my story and please give me feedback.

Greetings,

FerryV (origin/simtropolis accountname)

Ps. My native language is not English as you can see and I am dyslectic. So sorry for the mistakes and please read over them. If you don’t understand a part please also leave feedback,
Pss. Just reminds me: I did no terraforming / nor did i seen the option
Psss. I build one beautiful park out of 4 options i had. I didnt check if that was upgradable :(

I'm with you 100%. People love to whine and complain - but I don't see them creating a world class simulation game. Everything about this game looks stellar so far, and if it turns out there's some shortcomings, it'll be nothing that can't be fixed with some patches, expansions or mods.

Have fun in Cologne!

You can still build metropoles of several millions people, in the video the leaderboard shows cities of over 4M. That's not small to me. Not sure why people are supposing cities will be small. Demo is demo. Let us pros worry about how many people we can cram in there. And yes it's not all about population, there will be tons of stuff to do I suppose. If only getting simoleons, etc. I'm just watching the trailer and almost posing the image to see every details. And there seems to be some neat stuff.

That must have been it... worked finally :) Also make sure you don't do the 64-bit DxDiag... it gives you a file too large error.

beta is pc only, im rly sry for you