SimCity's Cities Could Be More Cities In The Future

There is a chance, you'll be pleased to hear, that the newest SimCity could get its city sizes expanded. The current 2KM by 2KM limits are causing a bit of an issue with series fans and, in practice, have also proved a bit too small for my liking as well.
Maxis' Ocean Quigley spoke with IncGamer and after questioning into city sizes and the reason for them being smaller than in SimCity 4 ten years ago, he stated that:
"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 SimCity 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."
I appreciate the thought, no really, Maxis games have always strived to work on as many system configurations as possible. That said, I'm sure this is just backpedalling and excuses, in the light of just how a large a negative reaction there was to the decreased city sizes. But if the team over at Maxis can take onboard that criticism and change the size, allowing for optional bigger plots in the future, then good on them.
After playing the recent beta for SimCity (which is coming out in the next few days across the world) I can see that this newest iteration is indeed different to SimCity 4. I wouldn't say scaled back, simplified, or worse - just different. There is in fact a lot more complexity to the game's systems thanks to its new GlassBox engine. As well as that, cities are rendered this time around in full 3D, with realistic and process intensive simulations happening at street level, with the Sims themselves and vehicles, all the way up to power management and other such features. It's different and in some ways has been balanced to accommodate smaller map sizes, thanks to the new interlinking regions and player resource trading.
I look forward to seeing what Maxis adds to SimCity post-launch. I'm hoping for that size limit increase, but only if it's not DLC!
Posted 05-03-2013, 19:11
I'm still pissed about it. I'm not getting to play it, but I am pissed! Much like about how the servers are unavailable. Gee, you launch an online only game and servers can't handle it... idiots.