As promised, March 6th came with the official reveal of Sim City 5. The best news from the announcement is actually that Maxis from Emeryville, the team behind the rest of the series, is in charge again.
The developer doesn’t handle too many projects, so you know they’ve had their full focus on Sim City 5 for awhile now. Here are their projects from the past decade.
2002 – The Sims Online
2003 – SimCity 4
2004 – The Sims 2
2008 – Spore Creature Creator
2008 – Spore
2011 – Darkspore
2013 – SimCity
They’ve also released a concept trailer. While the trailer does not represent what the final game engine will look like, it does give a very interesting idea of the ambition going into this project.
One thing is for sure: Don’t expect your current PC to be able to run the game well. Due to its size and complexity, the series has always been a heavy drain on PC resources. This entry will be no exception.
Here is what you’re going to need to run the game.
System Requirements
Processor:
AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core 4000+ or better or Intel Core 2 Duo Processor 2.0GHz or betterOperating System:
Windows XP/Vista/7RAM:
Windows XP: 1.5GB
Windows Vista and Windows 7: 2GB
PCs using a built-in graphical chipset are recommended to have 2GB RAMGraphics Card:
ATI X1800 or better*
nVidia 7800 or better*
Intel 4100 Integrated Graphics or better*DVD-ROM:
8x or better*Minimum of 256MB of on-board RAM and Shader 3.0 or better support.
Again, if the past entries are any indication, you better well exceed these stats if you plan on building very large cities.
Few other details have been made available, except for the mention of a small multi-player component (basically, you can interact with cities build by other people, instead of just your own).
Oh, except this one bit of good news:
The new SimCity, due for 2013 on PC and Mac, is powered by a new proprietary engine called GlassBox. It is described as “a new data-driven simulation engine” that is Maxis’ “bet for the future.” At a panel during Game Developers Conference, the studio detailed how GlassBox will power the upcoming SimCity “reboot” and promised that the modding community will be able to get their hands on their powerful new tools.
“We’re huge fans of our modding community,” creative director Ocean Quigley told the audience. “We’ve designed all this stuff to be moddable.”
“We know modding is hugely important to our community,” Quigley noted. “We know the reason why people are still playing SimCity 4 ten years later is because the modding community has kept it alive. GlassBox is built to be moddable, but beyond that we haven’t announced anything”
Also included in the official announcement were a series of slides. Enjoy those by clicking to expand this post.
I shall post again when more details come to light.