I don't mind always needing to online for a game, especially if they advertise it in advance and they do something interesting with it. My main issue is if it kicks you off if your internet connection drops out. My connection likes to die for 30 seconds every hour or so
I don't remember where, but in some interview one of the designers states that they've got an asynchronous model for how your city interacts with the region/global economy. He even deliberately states something along the lines of "if you unplug your internet for a few seconds, things aren't going to come crashing down."
Ugh, last thing I need is another CitiesXL...hopefully it's not too much to ask that I manage cities by myself if I chose to (which I will).
Well, we'll see.
You should check out the Reddit AMA that was linked earlier. There were a ton of people who told them they didn't want it to be like Societies or CitiesXL (neither of which I actually played...)
The overwhelming response from the dev team was "Yeah, neither do we." They continually emphasized that a game like SimCity is only going to be as good as the depth of the modeling engine under the hood, which is why they've been pimping Glassbox so much.
I don't mind always needing to online for a game, especially if they advertise it in advance and they do something interesting with it. My main issue is if it kicks you off if your internet connection drops out. My connection likes to die for 30 seconds every hour or so
I don't mind always needing to online for a game, especially if they advertise it in advance and they do something interesting with it. My main issue is if it kicks you off if your internet connection drops out. My connection likes to die for 30 seconds every hour or so
That's exactly what it means
The developer interview that mr_mich referenced four posts up says that this is not the case.
I don't mind always needing to online for a game, especially if they advertise it in advance and they do something interesting with it. My main issue is if it kicks you off if your internet connection drops out. My connection likes to die for 30 seconds every hour or so
That's exactly what it means
The developer interview that mr_mich referenced four posts up says that this is not the case.
I can't find the quote on Joystiq, but here it is from Aussie Gamespy:
EA has confirmed that you will not be kicked out if your connection is interrupted.
...
Maxis has come up with an interesting asynchronous multiplayer system that doesn't require you and your fellow players to be online at the same time to play together (which is great, because otherwise no one would ever finish one of those games), so it shouldn't have a traumatic effect on your city if your friend goes AWOL.
Just saw this on Escapist re: Mods. Not sure if this was expected, though I got the impression the ability to mod was definite... Now, I'm not so sure. I hope this is just a miscommunication or something, though nothing EA does surprises me these days.
EA Maxis Creative Director Ocean Quigley also revealed that SimCity won't support mods at launch, although it's a possibility in the future. "After we ship, we'll make decisions about how we can and when exactly we'll support mods. But it's worth pointing out that the reason people are still playing SimCity 4 almost ten years later is because the modding community essentially re-created it and filled it with new content and fixed bugs and made it as much of a hobby as it is a game," he said. "We're very cognizant of that - we're not idiots."
The second part gives me hope that they actually do, though I question the idiots part since they've apparently decided to not support it out of the box.... As a huge mod user and sometimes modder of SC4, this is sadly a deal-breaker for me. I really wanted a new SimCity too.
I bet this is because of the multiplayer focus too, seeing as the mods for SC4 at least were sometimes cheats/game-changing. Bah.
milath on
"No.. I was wrong. This must be what going mad feels like."
I don't know why people get up in arms about this. SC4 didn't have mod support out of the box. It's a brand new engine, and they've described how SimCity is just one context within a GlassBox instance. The whole thing is meant for modularity, but first they have to get the game working and released before they can worry about letting modders into it.
Most games now don't have mod support on Day 1, even things like Skyrim, which have the Nexus and a whole modding community, need time to stabilize before they can support mods.
I don't know why people get up in arms about this. SC4 didn't have mod support out of the box. It's a brand new engine, and they've described how SimCity is just one context within a GlassBox instance. The whole thing is meant for modularity, but first they have to get the game working and released before they can worry about letting modders into it.
Most games now don't have mod support on Day 1, even things like Skyrim, which have the Nexus and a whole modding community, need time to stabilize before they can support mods.
Ok, no.
I think a good comparison would be Civilization 5. That game had mod support on Day 1. Hell they even released the mod stuff early to some modders so they had actual mods on Day 1. That's the way to do things, imo. That said, fine, it doesn't have to be Day 1. But this actually says it's still up in the air that it will get mod support at all. Ever.
So make excuses if you want, but it seems to me if they really wanted to support modding out of the box they could. The fact that they aren't says volumes to me about what they really consider important in the game. You would think considering they KNOW that modding kept the previous game fresh for more than a decade would make them be a little more clear about if there will be an ability to mod the damn thing and not 'we'll analyze the situation once the game is released and people have already given us their money for it'. Humph.
"No.. I was wrong. This must be what going mad feels like."
Well, I was a staunch defender of Blizzard's choice for Diablo 3, but I can't defend this decision. A single player sandbox game that requires online? That's just disappointing. I'm willing to bet that this was EA's decision, and not Maxis.
I don't know why people get up in arms about this. SC4 didn't have mod support out of the box. It's a brand new engine, and they've described how SimCity is just one context within a GlassBox instance. The whole thing is meant for modularity, but first they have to get the game working and released before they can worry about letting modders into it.
Most games now don't have mod support on Day 1, even things like Skyrim, which have the Nexus and a whole modding community, need time to stabilize before they can support mods.
Ok, no.
I think a good comparison would be Civilization 5. That game had mod support on Day 1. Hell they even released the mod stuff early to some modders so they had actual mods on Day 1. That's the way to do things, imo. That said, fine, it doesn't have to be Day 1. But this actually says it's still up in the air that it will get mod support at all. Ever.
So make excuses if you want, but it seems to me if they really wanted to support modding out of the box they could. The fact that they aren't says volumes to me about what they really consider important in the game. You would think considering they KNOW that modding kept the previous game fresh for more than a decade would make them be a little more clear about if there will be an ability to mod the damn thing and not 'we'll analyze the situation once the game is released and people have already given us their money for it'. Humph.
Here's a better comparison than Civ5: SimCity 4. It didn't have it out of the box. They're not even at the point where they can show us graphics for this game yet, how the hell do we expect them to say that they can support mods at this point?
They've designed the engine with mod support in mind, and have said that they acknowledge that mods are the only reason people still play their game 10 years after release. He even said "we're not idiots" in regards to their stance on mods. It would be downright foolish to promise mod support at this point, especially if it meant delaying the game a year from now or releasing it in crappy shape.
I don't mean to be white knighting Maxis here, but I feel like we need to focus our concerns on things that are...concerning. Even though the DRM isn't actually always-on, it blows that I can't play SimCity on a laptop on a plane or something. One of the biggest draws of the game to me is that I can use it to kill time, when I can't do better internety stuff. It seems ridiculous that I can't make my own region totally isolated from their global economy.
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Dusdais ashamed of this postSLC, UTRegistered Userregular
I don't know why people get up in arms about this. SC4 didn't have mod support out of the box. It's a brand new engine, and they've described how SimCity is just one context within a GlassBox instance. The whole thing is meant for modularity, but first they have to get the game working and released before they can worry about letting modders into it.
Most games now don't have mod support on Day 1, even things like Skyrim, which have the Nexus and a whole modding community, need time to stabilize before they can support mods.
Ok, no.
I think a good comparison would be Civilization 5. That game had mod support on Day 1. Hell they even released the mod stuff early to some modders so they had actual mods on Day 1. That's the way to do things, imo. That said, fine, it doesn't have to be Day 1. But this actually says it's still up in the air that it will get mod support at all. Ever.
So make excuses if you want, but it seems to me if they really wanted to support modding out of the box they could. The fact that they aren't says volumes to me about what they really consider important in the game. You would think considering they KNOW that modding kept the previous game fresh for more than a decade would make them be a little more clear about if there will be an ability to mod the damn thing and not 'we'll analyze the situation once the game is released and people have already given us their money for it'. Humph.
I think you're reading into it too much.
Mod support is a tricky business. Civ 5 has it day 1 is because Civ 5 is a glorified SQLite state machine. The way it is built has more in common with your average business application than a game engine (it's also a big part of why Civ 5 is so goddamn slow and crunchy between turns). Because the whole thing just runs on top of a SQL db, modifying game rules is pretty straightforward, even if they didn't bother to make mods a first class feature.
With SimCity 5, they are using a heavily custom in-house engine, with some unknown method of storage. Whatever techniques they're using, the ability to support mods has to be carefully considered and implemented. GlassBox seems to have these concerns in mind already, though, so I'm not really worried about it. Just don't take them being careful about commenting on mod support as a sign that they don't want it; they've been very measured in their discussions about the game in general, not just this.
Plus, one of the interviews states that they're doing a ton of Javascript/HTML UI stuff so that it's easily customizable. They even applaud WoW's choice to go with LUA because it's so extensible.
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Dusdais ashamed of this postSLC, UTRegistered Userregular
Plus, one of the interviews states that they're doing a ton of Javascript/HTML UI stuff so that it's easily customizable. They even applaud WoW's choice to go with LUA because it's so extensible.
Oh really? That's pretty awesome; I was pretty happy about Battlefield 3's Battlelog for the same reasons; it's why we got stuff like the auto-retry button someone patched in, before DICE updated the UI to do it.
Yeah, again it's too early for anything official, but I believe it's in the Reddit AMA:
Yeah, this is exactly the kind of stuff we've been thinking about! We've even moved our UI system to being mostly html and javascript based, so we can more seamlessly integrate the game with the general internets and drop this kind of stuff in. (Also, so it's easier for people to customise, a la WoW's lua approach.)
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HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
I'm not even sure how the UI in a game like this would need to be customized. I've never run that deep in playing city building games.
I think the (admittedly optimistic) idea is that they can easily use the same forms/screens in case they wanted to allow input/output through a website. It'd be neat to have a portal at work where I can see if Coal prices are up for the day, or how my region's doing. It'd be crazy sweet if I could actually adjust policies or something and actually provide input through the web.
I think the (admittedly optimistic) idea is that they can easily use the same forms/screens in case they wanted to allow input/output through a website. It'd be neat to have a portal at work where I can see if Coal prices are up for the day, or how my region's doing. It'd be crazy sweet if I could actually adjust policies or something and actually provide input through the web.
Don't get my hopes up like that!
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Dusdais ashamed of this postSLC, UTRegistered Userregular
I'm not even sure how the UI in a game like this would need to be customized. I've never run that deep in playing city building games.
Part of it is skill set, I'm sure. If you're game's UI has the same dependencies/techniques as your average website, its easier to find someone to work on it.
A lot of games have used Flash tech to build their UI for years, so they could hire Flash developers to work on UI. The trend on the web now is moving more heavily toward native Html/Js/Css, since the HTML5 spec is being adopted and more people are using common frameworks to get around browser compatibility problems and the like. Also IE6 is down to 7.1% usage worldwide (a third of which is in China, btw), and 0.8% in the US.
You also get portability if you want to release apps that tie into the game; pretty easy to make a Facebook or mobile app using the same JS/Html assets. Also the advantages of the ecosystem, since anything that benefits the web could be applicable to your game's UI, like JsViews or Knockout.
HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
Oh okay, I should've read the thread a little more carefully - so this is about statistics and information gathering. And since there's an online component that will be important.
Yeah, again it's too early for anything official, but I believe it's in the Reddit AMA:
Yeah, this is exactly the kind of stuff we've been thinking about! We've even moved our UI system to being mostly html and javascript based, so we can more seamlessly integrate the game with the general internets and drop this kind of stuff in. (Also, so it's easier for people to customise, a la WoW's lua approach.)
Ok fine. Civ 5 is a terrible example, etc. I was just bringing up an example of Day 1 mod support when you said earlier that hardly any games do that. Civ 5 stood out in my mind as a game that is very supportive of the modding community.
Coming back to SC5 though, my question becomes why are they saying one thing on that AMA thing, but saying something completely different in the article? If it's too early for something official how can they say it's not going to be supported out of the box? They've obviously put some thought into it. Maybe EA decided against it. Maybe Maxis themselves decided to take a step back and 'focus on the game' or whatever, but the fact remains that the quote in that article pretty clearly says 3 things:
a) No mods out of the box.
b) We're going to think about how and when we can support modding.
c) We're not idiots we know fans love mods.
Now C makes me hope like I said in my original post, that this is some kind of communication error. But the facts of A and B really bother me as someone who wants to mod the game when it comes out and is now beginning to worry that maybe EA/Maxis is going to pull a 'we can't figure out how to make it work w/ multiplayer oh well thanks for your money.'
In other words, I'm worried as a fan of the series. But I guess no one else is. My mistake.
"No.. I was wrong. This must be what going mad feels like."
Ok fine. Civ 5 is a terrible example, etc. I was just bringing up an example of Day 1 mod support when you said earlier that hardly any games do that. Civ 5 stood out in my mind as a game that is very supportive of the modding community.
If you want to disprove that claim, you need to bring more than one counter-example. If you can only manage one counter-example, that kind of just proves the original point there.
Ok fine. Civ 5 is a terrible example, etc. I was just bringing up an example of Day 1 mod support when you said earlier that hardly any games do that. Civ 5 stood out in my mind as a game that is very supportive of the modding community.
If you want to disprove that claim, you need to bring more than one counter-example. If you can only manage one counter-example, that kind of just proves the original point there.
Almost every Paradox game?
(I don't really care; I'd hope for mod support because the only thing keeping SC4 playble is NAM...but I am so disheartened by all of this online-based stuff that I don't much care about mod support when considering I may not even buy the game if its main focus isn't on letting me build the city and region that I want.)
Ok fine. Civ 5 is a terrible example, etc. I was just bringing up an example of Day 1 mod support when you said earlier that hardly any games do that. Civ 5 stood out in my mind as a game that is very supportive of the modding community.
If you want to disprove that claim, you need to bring more than one counter-example. If you can only manage one counter-example, that kind of just proves the original point there.
Starcraft II (although it's amazingly difficult to actually /find/ the mods because the end-user interface sucks so much ass.)
So can I make Gotham and infest neighboring cities with air and water pollution, organized crime, undesirable ethnic minorities, and communists, or what?
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Mostlyjoe13Evil, Evil, Jump for joy!Registered Userregular
So this is kinda like SimCity with Minecraft Multiplayer?
The only thing I really did not like about SC4 vs SC 3000 was that SC4 didn't have randomly occurring disasters, other than fire.
On the other hand, SC 3000 I found to be essentially unplayable with random disasters turned on, because fucking Earthquakes would just break random road tiles all over the Goddamn map, so after each quake you had to pause the game and spend upwards of 30 minutes just trying to find and replace broken road tiles.
SC games also need a much better / simpler traffic model, in my opinion. Traffic was easily your biggest problem to try and manage in SC4.
Shall we start to take bets on how long EA will keep the servers running?
And if this game doesn't make them fucking billions, the next bet will be how long EA keeps Maxis alive.
I guess I feel for Maxis, but EA makes it so easy not to buy their games anymore.
Spore was a terrible game. EA have nothing to do with their downfall. It's their own fault for being lucky once and consistently bad the rest of the time.
Coming back to SC5 though, my question becomes why are they saying one thing on that AMA thing, but saying something completely different in the article? If it's too early for something official how can they say it's not going to be supported out of the box? They've obviously put some thought into it. Maybe EA decided against it. Maybe Maxis themselves decided to take a step back and 'focus on the game' or whatever, but the fact remains that the quote in that article pretty clearly says 3 things:
a) No mods out of the box.
b) We're going to think about how and when we can support modding.
c) We're not idiots we know fans love mods.
Now C makes me hope like I said in my original post, that this is some kind of communication error. But the facts of A and B really bother me as someone who wants to mod the game when it comes out and is now beginning to worry that maybe EA/Maxis is going to pull a 'we can't figure out how to make it work w/ multiplayer oh well thanks for your money.'
In other words, I'm worried as a fan of the series. But I guess no one else is. My mistake.
-.-
SC5 will almost definitely have mod support. All previous SC games had support, Sims has support, SPORE is basically one giant mod factory of sorts, etc.
And if this game doesn't make them fucking billions, the next bet will be how long EA keeps Maxis alive.
EA is the only reason Maxis is still around. They were going to collapse after the terrible business decisions they made after SC 2000's success (releasing shovelware that all had some superficial connection to cities you made in SC 2000 - namely, SimCopter & Streets of Sim City - and then stalling SC 3000's release by insisting on fully polygonal cities before there was any hardware to support that kind of pipe-dream), and EA's acquisition bailed them out.
Ok fine. Civ 5 is a terrible example, etc. I was just bringing up an example of Day 1 mod support when you said earlier that hardly any games do that. Civ 5 stood out in my mind as a game that is very supportive of the modding community.
If you want to disprove that claim, you need to bring more than one counter-example. If you can only manage one counter-example, that kind of just proves the original point there.
Almost every Paradox game?
(I don't really care; I'd hope for mod support because the only thing keeping SC4 playble is NAM...but I am so disheartened by all of this online-based stuff that I don't much care about mod support when considering I may not even buy the game if its main focus isn't on letting me build the city and region that I want.)
Where is this kind of stuff coming from. You're not going to be forced to play in a multiplayer region.
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anoffdayTo be changed whenever Anoffday gets around to it.Registered Userregular
Shall we start to take bets on how long EA will keep the servers running?
And if this game doesn't make them fucking billions, the next bet will be how long EA keeps Maxis alive.
I guess I feel for Maxis, but EA makes it so easy not to buy their games anymore.
Spore was a terrible game. EA have nothing to do with their downfall. It's their own fault for being lucky once and consistently bad the rest of the time.
It wasn't that bad. Developers just need to learn that hyping up your games like that is just bad for business.
Give people hype that you can't live up to and you're just asking for your game to fail.
Shall we start to take bets on how long EA will keep the servers running?
And if this game doesn't make them fucking billions, the next bet will be how long EA keeps Maxis alive.
I guess I feel for Maxis, but EA makes it so easy not to buy their games anymore.
Spore was a terrible game. EA have nothing to do with their downfall. It's their own fault for being lucky once and consistently bad the rest of the time.
It wasn't that bad. Developers just need to learn that hyping up your games like that is just bad for business.
Give people hype that you can't live up to and you're just asking for your game to fail.
This is a pretty high level of silly goosery--Maxis was "lucky" more than once (The Sims, its sequel, multiple SimCity games).
At the same time, we can't just go blaming EA Games for Spore. Maxis had multiple hits, and more than a few screw-ups (Streets of SimCity and that sort of stuff). I'm actually not certain that games like SimCopter actually hurt them financially--I thought it was still profitable for all of its serious problems (certainly more than any other helicopter "simulation").
As popular as it is for our kind of gamers to hate on The Sims and sequels as the ultimate non-gamer game, it was still hugely successful--and as far as I can remember, it was only possible with EA's financial backing.
Posts
I don't remember where, but in some interview one of the designers states that they've got an asynchronous model for how your city interacts with the region/global economy. He even deliberately states something along the lines of "if you unplug your internet for a few seconds, things aren't going to come crashing down."
Well, we'll see.
The overwhelming response from the dev team was "Yeah, neither do we." They continually emphasized that a game like SimCity is only going to be as good as the depth of the modeling engine under the hood, which is why they've been pimping Glassbox so much.
That's exactly what it means
The developer interview that mr_mich referenced four posts up says that this is not the case.
I can't find the quote on Joystiq, but here it is from Aussie Gamespy:
Full article here
The second part gives me hope that they actually do, though I question the idiots part since they've apparently decided to not support it out of the box.... As a huge mod user and sometimes modder of SC4, this is sadly a deal-breaker for me. I really wanted a new SimCity too.
I bet this is because of the multiplayer focus too, seeing as the mods for SC4 at least were sometimes cheats/game-changing. Bah.
"No.. I was wrong. This must be what going mad feels like."
Most games now don't have mod support on Day 1, even things like Skyrim, which have the Nexus and a whole modding community, need time to stabilize before they can support mods.
Ok, no.
I think a good comparison would be Civilization 5. That game had mod support on Day 1. Hell they even released the mod stuff early to some modders so they had actual mods on Day 1. That's the way to do things, imo. That said, fine, it doesn't have to be Day 1. But this actually says it's still up in the air that it will get mod support at all. Ever.
So make excuses if you want, but it seems to me if they really wanted to support modding out of the box they could. The fact that they aren't says volumes to me about what they really consider important in the game. You would think considering they KNOW that modding kept the previous game fresh for more than a decade would make them be a little more clear about if there will be an ability to mod the damn thing and not 'we'll analyze the situation once the game is released and people have already given us their money for it'. Humph.
"No.. I was wrong. This must be what going mad feels like."
And if this game doesn't make them fucking billions, the next bet will be how long EA keeps Maxis alive.
I guess I feel for Maxis, but EA makes it so easy not to buy their games anymore.
Here's a better comparison than Civ5: SimCity 4. It didn't have it out of the box. They're not even at the point where they can show us graphics for this game yet, how the hell do we expect them to say that they can support mods at this point?
They've designed the engine with mod support in mind, and have said that they acknowledge that mods are the only reason people still play their game 10 years after release. He even said "we're not idiots" in regards to their stance on mods. It would be downright foolish to promise mod support at this point, especially if it meant delaying the game a year from now or releasing it in crappy shape.
I don't mean to be white knighting Maxis here, but I feel like we need to focus our concerns on things that are...concerning. Even though the DRM isn't actually always-on, it blows that I can't play SimCity on a laptop on a plane or something. One of the biggest draws of the game to me is that I can use it to kill time, when I can't do better internety stuff. It seems ridiculous that I can't make my own region totally isolated from their global economy.
I think you're reading into it too much.
Mod support is a tricky business. Civ 5 has it day 1 is because Civ 5 is a glorified SQLite state machine. The way it is built has more in common with your average business application than a game engine (it's also a big part of why Civ 5 is so goddamn slow and crunchy between turns). Because the whole thing just runs on top of a SQL db, modifying game rules is pretty straightforward, even if they didn't bother to make mods a first class feature.
With SimCity 5, they are using a heavily custom in-house engine, with some unknown method of storage. Whatever techniques they're using, the ability to support mods has to be carefully considered and implemented. GlassBox seems to have these concerns in mind already, though, so I'm not really worried about it. Just don't take them being careful about commenting on mod support as a sign that they don't want it; they've been very measured in their discussions about the game in general, not just this.
Oh really? That's pretty awesome; I was pretty happy about Battlefield 3's Battlelog for the same reasons; it's why we got stuff like the auto-retry button someone patched in, before DICE updated the UI to do it.
Don't get my hopes up like that!
A lot of games have used Flash tech to build their UI for years, so they could hire Flash developers to work on UI. The trend on the web now is moving more heavily toward native Html/Js/Css, since the HTML5 spec is being adopted and more people are using common frameworks to get around browser compatibility problems and the like. Also IE6 is down to 7.1% usage worldwide (a third of which is in China, btw), and 0.8% in the US.
You also get portability if you want to release apps that tie into the game; pretty easy to make a Facebook or mobile app using the same JS/Html assets. Also the advantages of the ecosystem, since anything that benefits the web could be applicable to your game's UI, like JsViews or Knockout.
Ok fine. Civ 5 is a terrible example, etc. I was just bringing up an example of Day 1 mod support when you said earlier that hardly any games do that. Civ 5 stood out in my mind as a game that is very supportive of the modding community.
Coming back to SC5 though, my question becomes why are they saying one thing on that AMA thing, but saying something completely different in the article? If it's too early for something official how can they say it's not going to be supported out of the box? They've obviously put some thought into it. Maybe EA decided against it. Maybe Maxis themselves decided to take a step back and 'focus on the game' or whatever, but the fact remains that the quote in that article pretty clearly says 3 things:
a) No mods out of the box.
b) We're going to think about how and when we can support modding.
c) We're not idiots we know fans love mods.
Now C makes me hope like I said in my original post, that this is some kind of communication error. But the facts of A and B really bother me as someone who wants to mod the game when it comes out and is now beginning to worry that maybe EA/Maxis is going to pull a 'we can't figure out how to make it work w/ multiplayer oh well thanks for your money.'
In other words, I'm worried as a fan of the series. But I guess no one else is. My mistake.
"No.. I was wrong. This must be what going mad feels like."
Almost every Paradox game?
(I don't really care; I'd hope for mod support because the only thing keeping SC4 playble is NAM...but I am so disheartened by all of this online-based stuff that I don't much care about mod support when considering I may not even buy the game if its main focus isn't on letting me build the city and region that I want.)
Starcraft II (although it's amazingly difficult to actually /find/ the mods because the end-user interface sucks so much ass.)
The only thing I really did not like about SC4 vs SC 3000 was that SC4 didn't have randomly occurring disasters, other than fire.
On the other hand, SC 3000 I found to be essentially unplayable with random disasters turned on, because fucking Earthquakes would just break random road tiles all over the Goddamn map, so after each quake you had to pause the game and spend upwards of 30 minutes just trying to find and replace broken road tiles.
SC games also need a much better / simpler traffic model, in my opinion. Traffic was easily your biggest problem to try and manage in SC4.
Spore was a terrible game. EA have nothing to do with their downfall. It's their own fault for being lucky once and consistently bad the rest of the time.
-.-
SC5 will almost definitely have mod support. All previous SC games had support, Sims has support, SPORE is basically one giant mod factory of sorts, etc.
EA is the only reason Maxis is still around. They were going to collapse after the terrible business decisions they made after SC 2000's success (releasing shovelware that all had some superficial connection to cities you made in SC 2000 - namely, SimCopter & Streets of Sim City - and then stalling SC 3000's release by insisting on fully polygonal cities before there was any hardware to support that kind of pipe-dream), and EA's acquisition bailed them out.
Sims happened after the EA acquisition, not before.
Where is this kind of stuff coming from. You're not going to be forced to play in a multiplayer region.
It wasn't that bad. Developers just need to learn that hyping up your games like that is just bad for business.
Give people hype that you can't live up to and you're just asking for your game to fail.
This is a pretty high level of silly goosery--Maxis was "lucky" more than once (The Sims, its sequel, multiple SimCity games).
At the same time, we can't just go blaming EA Games for Spore. Maxis had multiple hits, and more than a few screw-ups (Streets of SimCity and that sort of stuff). I'm actually not certain that games like SimCopter actually hurt them financially--I thought it was still profitable for all of its serious problems (certainly more than any other helicopter "simulation").
As popular as it is for our kind of gamers to hate on The Sims and sequels as the ultimate non-gamer game, it was still hugely successful--and as far as I can remember, it was only possible with EA's financial backing.
You've gotten a slow clap from me for that, Jam. Well done. "Lucky once"? What bullshit.