SimCity Societies [PC]

Let's get this out of the way -- SimCity: Societies is not SimCity 5. That in itself is going to turn off legions of Internet posters who will scream that EA is trying to dumb down Will Wright's classic franchise to get those millions of Sims dollars. If that were true, though, EA would never have entrusted one of its most valuable brands to a development crew like Tilted Mill. The company is filled up of refugees from legendary developer Impressions, which once created classic city-builders like the Caesar franchise (including the recent Caesar IV), Zeus, and Pharaoh. As for SimCity Societies... let's call it a side-project for the franchise Will Wright built. It's an intriguing remix, marrying the sandbox play SimCity is known for with the organic city-building Tilted Mill specializes in.

Traditionally, SimCity games have been based on a rather mechanical and deterministic view of what makes a city work. Buildings were placed, utilities were hooked up and players had to balance out the various influences of different types of homes, social venues and workplaces to create the kinds of neighborhoods and cities they wanted all while juggling the need for a balanced budget. The Sims themselves were rather an afterthought. If the player had enough schools, fire protection, police stations, apartment buildings and movie theaters, the Sims just showed up. SimCity Societies is a bit different; rather than challenging the player to build a city and keep it running, SimCity Societies is about the player choosing what kind of city they want.

The main gameplay mechanic of SimCity Societies is the "social energy" that is produced by a city. This energy comes in six different flavors: Wealth, Industry, Knowledge, Devotion, Creativity and Obedience. Each of them impacts the overall character of the city. Place a lot of Industry buildings, for example, and the city starts to take on the characteristics of an industrial slum circa 1920s Chicago. There are crumbling tenements, old-fashioned cars and advertisements for consumer products on building walls straight out of old issues of Life magazines. More than just the buildings will change though, as one particular sort of social energy starts to dominate a city, the very atmosphere changes. For an industrial wasteland, the sky turns yellow with pollution, the ambient music shifts and even the streetlamps and road paving begins to match the overall feeling of the city.

"The idea behind (Societies) is to offer players the opportunity to wield a magic crayon," said Jeff Fiske at a recent EA pre-E3 event. He was citing a presentation at the last Game Developer's conference in which creature creation tools for Spore or Nintendo's Mii creator were contrasted with creating an image in Photoshop. The difference is in how the former takes much of the drudgery out of the creation process and allows people to express themselves and create something cool pretty quickly. This idea finds expression in SimCity Society in the way managing, directing and harnessing this social energy to create a cool city takes the place of the more traditional SimCity tasks of managing power lines and underground water systems. In fact, with the exception of laying down a road network, there is no player-controlled infrastructure in Societies.

That's not to say there isn't any challenge in the game, though. Rather than trying to keep the lights on, a Societies player will be faced with creating and harnessing enough of a particular social energy to get the city they desire. The game begins with approximately 15% of the buildings unlocked and in order to unlock and place more advanced buildings, they need to be supplied with particular forms of cultural energy. Each type of social dynamic also comes with challenges that need to be overcome.

For example, consider a player who's looking for a New York-style city filled with great glass skyscrapers. Such buildings tend to require huge initial outlays of Simoleans (in-game money) and require a large supply of Wealth energy to support. (Wealth energy in Societies is the pursuit of material things -- a consumerist mindset as opposed to Industry which is the pursuit of money for its own sake.) In order to get that, players need to place down Wealth-producing businesses and homes for wealth-minded citizens. The problem with Wealth-producing homes is that they tend to be large (they need lots of room for stuff), they house few citizens that can staff businesses, and they needs lots of entertainment to remain happy (unhappy citizens don't go to work and produce less money). The land-use patterns and traffic flow needs therefore are going to be completely different from an industrial city where citizens are plentiful -- along with the health problems caused by industrial pollution.

Once players begin to master these challenges and unlock buildings, there's still plenty of the game left to explore. Each of the game's higher-level buildings offers fun things to do with their virtual terrariums. During our demonstration, I saw cities dominated by Obedience and Creativity. Of the two, Obedience was easily my favorite as it turns the player's city into a hellish Orwellian dystopia with cameras on every street light overseen by the brooding bulk of the Ministry of Thought. The Ministry can, at the player's command, unleash a group of "Men in Black" who will then proceed to patrol the streets rounding up "rebellious" types like artists, street performers and mimes.

The Creative city, on the other hand, has street lamps shaped like candy canes and factories that puff out smoke shaped like musical notes and Gingerbread Men. They also have a "Spirit Squad" building that unleashes a horde of cheerleaders to make Sims in the street happy. The challenge for an Orwellian society is to keep citizens content (Gulag!) without letting them get happy enough to get rebellious while a Creative society needs to keep its citizens focused enough that they actually remember to go to work and continue to provide tax revenue for the city. No word yet on what happens when the Men in Black meet the Spirit Squad, but I'm hoping for something spectacular.

The success of SimCity Societies will come down to how well the developers manage to marry their goal-oriented style of gameplay with SimCity's traditionally formless, goal-less style of "software toy." The solution they've come up with is intriguing on its own merits and it doesn't take too much time with the actual game to feel that same sort of organic wholeness feel that typifies a Tilted Mill product. Mix that with the creative depth and breadth of the SimCity franchise, and that's urban renewal anyone can get behind. SimCity Societies is scheduled for release in Q4 2007.

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