There’s a hard limit on city size in EA’s upcoming revisit to the civil-plan ‘em up Sim City. That fact is rubbing some people the wrong way. These are people who presumably want to recreate Judge Dredd’s Mega-City One, have their industrially created landcape sprawl so large it crosses entire states and contains 800 million people without proper education or employment. The crime rate will skyrocket and the rule of law will be carried out by specifically trained peace-keepers who act as the immediate dispensers of capital punishment for the harshest, but entirely commonplace crimes.
That… That sounds excellent, actually. Good on them. Good on them for campaigning for that thing they want to do that I assumed and just made up.
Unfortunately, they won’t be able to do that, even if they have a machine that could render that all in prestine detail, because according to an interview that Incgamers conducted with the game’s director Ocean Quigley, there’s confines based on the team’s expectation of the computers being used to run the game. He tells us:
“That is just a performance decision. Given that was the performance constraint we decided to work under, we built a larger region environment and a bunch of the multiplay to work with 2km cities. At some point in the future, especially with mainstream computers become more capable, we could certainly make the city sizes larger.
We need to keep in mind that Sim City is a mainstream game, it’s not a game that is only going to run on high-end gaming PCs, it has to run in your Dad’s PC as well.”
All hope’s not lost, because he went on to add:
“We’ll eventually get around to expanding the city size but I can’t make any promises as to when.”
Presumably this will mean future DLC, but we can maintain a brief feeling of relief that our dreams of a dystopian hellhole may one day become reality.
