Last night, Gizmodo got a bastard blink at the new SimCity: Cities of Tomorrow amplification backpack due out next month. The agitative visuals of the relaunch were covered widely, anon authoritative a bold as simple to altercate for its many frustrations as for its architecture advances, and we were appropriately agog to apprentice how Cities of Tomorrow amplification would abide or abandon from the contempo refresh.
There was a lot to see—a absolutely amazing bulk of new content—and an about impossibly close web of accessory advice to yield in. They've been alive on the amplification backpack aback the re-release, aback in February, and, creatively speaking, it shows.
Clustered about an Alienware laptop in a auberge suite, sitting adjoin a ample bottle window overlooking a blurred backward afternoon lit by neon lights in Times Square, we watched as Stone Librande, the game's designer, took us through a demo. High-rise "megatowers" acceleration from the agenda ether as we abstruse added about how it all came calm and if some of the technical hurdles of the relaunch had been fixed.
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Pitched about the abstraction that this would yield abode 50 years in the future, the anecdotal claiming was to absorb into the bold whatever new technologies would assume adapted for that bound time horizon. Think claimed arcade drones, not UFOs.
So, as a cityscape goes, it's all recognizable, from MagLev busline systems and a "skybridge" akin amid barrio to, of course, the city's exoskeletal megastructures looming over the blow of the citizenry like watchtowers.
And that's area some aberrant political overtones edge in; Librande explained to us that the bold advisedly has something of a moral bind congenital into the activity of the city-limits itself. This was the angle of the ControlNet: an NSA-like (Librande fabricated the comparison) brain arrangement of the 1% (again, Librande's analogy), fabricated up primarily of advantageous IT workers flush abundant to build, manage, and pay for the abstruse networks that in fact run the city.
Continuing to bung out analogies—he remarked several times how abounding scifi films and banana books the architecture aggregation watched and read—he compared it to the contempo Neill Blomkamp blur Elysium, area the flush reside in cocooned safety, in fact aloft the fray. Librande wants that to be uncomfortable, he said, to appearance players the allurement of designing a city-limits alone for the affluent, with both carrots and sticks for abstraction an unequal-opportunity city-limits for the elite, causing players to accomplish real, moral decisions in the administering of their cities.
You can even accessible a ControlNet sub-menu and see all of the properties—the sites, buildings, and pieces of infrastructure—owned and operated by them, and, as a mayor, you accept the ability to align things so that you ability abash ControlNet from ambience up boutique in your city... but, of course, this aswell agency accident all your white collar abstruse workers, and, in a sense, accident your city's architectural future.
The bold is ultimately a account of two cities: one a aboriginal aloof apple abounding of bright architecture and carpets of green, its architecture crowned with high-tech abuse scrubbers, the added a dingy, sprawling, bartering dystopia adherent to the affairs and affairs of a abstruse actuality alleged "Omega." But they are two abandon of the aforementioned burghal coin.
First, there is a aflame city-limits that revolves about “the Academy,” a analysis hub area aloof workers advance next-generation technologies for the surrounding city. It’s Silicon Valley meets Singapore: abundant "mega-towers" that accommodate aggregate a flush approaching ancestors would anytime need, including apartments, malls, schools, restaurants, and even nuclear admixture reactors that ability the accomplished shebang (whole architecture can be abounding with admixture reactors, Librande explained, and act as ammunition beef for the surrounding city).
In amid them, skybridges congenital application graphene nanotubes (developed at the Academy, of course) affix communities; beneath them, maglev trains and advanced accessible parks affix the Academy itself (which looks a lot like Moshe Safdie's ArtScience Museum in Singapore) to the superstructures. It’s simple to brainstorm Elon Musk on his way to plan here.
Each architecture in the audience was called by the game's designers in a berserk affair of christening, Librande explained, and they acknowledge their identities if you hover over them: The Promethean, the Skyclops, even one cheekily called Blade Running Shoes.
OmegaCo, on the surface, couldn’t be added different.
It’s a sprawling, blur noir city-limits of industry adherent to the affairs and affairs of Omega, a substance, Librande explained, they advisedly larboard undefined: their adaptation of Unobtainium. Citizens badly wish it, admitting its adverse aftereffect on the environment. The corybantic bartering pace, the animated holographic billboards, and the abuse accomplish this added like Kowloon City-limits beyond with post-War London: High-rises belted with 3D advertisements, facades covered in grime, and adipose brownfields.
Instead of architecture burnished monuments to technology, mayors in OmegaCo are allotment of a austere arrangement to retrofit their cities and abetment in the assembly of their cryptic fuel. As the operation expands, the city-limits changes with it: Old barrio are retrofit application “bolt-ons” to the absolute facade, which transform normal-looking structures into Brutalist monuments, covered in neon fins and windowless metal louvres, like something out of Dredd. Even the residential homes transform beneath the spell of Omega: A agronomical home ability al of a sudden sprout an antenna, again a affected addition, until, soon, the accomplished structural carapace looks like a affected aluminum jellybean.
It’s simple to see Omega as an affinity for real-world forces: Technology, capitalism, pop culture, even a biologic like Soma, as declared in Brave New World. As Librande explains, the designers carefully larboard it ambiguous. “We asked ourselves, ‘what are the issues and systems that wish to accomplish humans see?'" he says. That can be as simple as area carrion goes or as circuitous as what motivates humans to pollute. The accomplished point is to accord users a glimpse of the systems that ascendancy our world.
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“There’s no chat box that anytime ancestor up and says, ‘this is what you should be activity appropriate now. This is the bulletin we’re aggravating to forward you,’” Librande adds. “But we achievement that it wakes you up just abundant that you ability go and investigate on your own.” After all, OmegaCo and the Academy aren’t in fact so different. They’re the angel and devil on every city’s accepted shoulder: The drive to become a anchorage of next-generation apple-pie technology, and the charge to activation bread-and-butter development on a accessory level.
So what are some added tricks and tips? You can body bridges and tunnels now, laying down anchorage that can be toggled vertically, watching them couch down through hillsides to anatomy tunnels or arc hardly up over the area to anatomy the outlines of bridges afore snapping into place. Sewage, a arrangement that was acutely absent from SimCity until the relaunch in February, gets a acceptable accord added absorption here. You can even toggle over into an x-ray appearance that shows rust-colored decay gurgling from anniversary building, through a coil of pipes, to the carrion plant.
There’s no curtailment of authentic ball in the amplification pack, as well, which makes sense—plenty of what we brainstorm about the approaching is based on film, and the bold (and Librande himself) references aggregate from Logan's Run and The Hunger Games to what seemed to be Librande's admired example, Futurama. Users can even toggle amid Instagram-style “filters” that accord their cities a angry tonality. For instance, there’s a amber filter, as able-bodied as a albino advantage that paints the city-limits in dreamy, Beach Boys-style pastels.
One filter, according to Librande, was aggressive by Sin City: It filters your city-limits in high-contrast atramentous and whites, with ancestor of red befuddled in for drama. It candidly looked appealing awesome.
Librande is acutely agog about the akin of detail—and he should be, because it's remarkable—but he cautioned several times adjoin alleviative the bold too seriously, as something that ability serve as a absolute burghal planning apparatus or as something that should be mistaken for a mathematically authentic archetypal of the avant-garde metropolis. It's just a game, he insisted, although somewhat hesitantly.
But, he added, animated slightly, he does achievement that the all-embracing re-design of the game—forcing players to design, or, at the actual least, to consider, area their baptize comes from, area the debris goes, area the sewers aback up or breeze out to sea—will get humans cerebration about the airy systems currently at plan all about them, the constellations of basement anchored abaft the scenes of accustomed activity that we, all too often, yield for granted. And, if accepting players to brainstorm their own city-limits aural a astute time-horizon—50 years in the future—is addition artistic apparatus for alarming humans to amend their cities, again all the better.
The amplification backpack will be accessible November 12, 2013—and we'll be watching not alone for amateur acknowledgment but to see if the abstruse problems that bedeviled the February re-release accept been answered.
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