Simcity 2013 How To Make Money

Beyond the UI (buttons, menus, etc), the actual graphics themselves look identical. Have you not seen SimCity (2013)? How can you have seen SimCity (2013) and seen videos of Cities:Skylines and not see how identical they look? I've never seen two games look more similar in the entirety of my gaming life... and I've been playing video games since the original SimCity...

The trees, terrain, shadows, water, roads, buildings, the way things build, the pop-ups over the buildings, etc., this is all exactly like SimCity. And yes, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it," I get that, so don't spout that non-sense. The game looks IDENTICAL to SimCity (2013).

And in many ways, it plays identically.

I don't understand "the ability to edit maps (although terraforming in-game is unfortunately absent)". In what way are the maps editable without terraforming?

But even this lack of terraforming. Terraforming is something that existed in SimCity 2000, SimCity 3000, and SimCity 4. Then it wasn't part of SimCity (2013). So in this regard, CSL is more like SC2013 and less like SC4.

"Extensive graphs and city stats"? I'm sure CSL has these. You can't pin this on being "clearly" inspired by SC4 and earlier SimCity titles. These things also existed in the new SimCity game.

Are you trying to tell me that this is something that CSL offers that SimCity 2013 didn't:

... because it's not. SimCity 2013 did this exactly as well. Above is a screenshot of pollution from CSL. Below is a screenshot of air pollution map from SC2013:

And in fact, as terrible as SimCity 2013 was, in this specific regard, they've actually done a better job. SimCity offers different overlays for air and water pollution (maybe CSL offers that, but not that I've seen). SimCity's overlay once again has a lot more polish. We see wind direction, wind effects pollution, and we see the source of the pollution with these red bars to indicate who is polluting and how much.

But again, look at how identical these screenshots are! We want to see our pollution data? We get a sort of whited-out wire-frame type view with colorful overlay to represent the data we're looking at.

And here's the thing, I'm not even suggesting that this is a bad way of viewing your pollution data. I kind of like it.

The problem is, SimCity 2013 already did this, and they did it two years ago. And SimCity 2013 was, in my opinion, absolutely horrendous. I'd love for there to be a good, modern city builder, and I'd love for CSL to be that. But SimCity 2013 did so many things so wrong, so it's really disheartening to see that CSL looks so similar in so many regards.

Show me ANY CSL screenshot, and there's a SimCity (2013) screenshot that looks the same.

In fact, CSL actually carries over some of the same scale problems as SC2013, like airports being way too small. !!!!!!!! WHY!? Since before SC2013 released, people have been complaining that the municipal airport you can place in your city is way, way too small. And now, look at CSL. The airports are also way, way too small. From SC2013, CSL has ported over the undersized airport problem... this is essentially a 2+ year old known issue.

If CSL is going through such efforts to make their game look so identically similar to SC2013, I think I'd kind of like to here a dev explain these choices and voice their opinion explicitly on SC2013. I mean, the look and feel is identical. I'm not trying to accuse anyone of doing anything other than trying to make a great game... but if we're all in agreement that SC2013 was such a major flop, isn't it kind of reasonable for a developer to explain why there are so many extreme similarities (this is Ocean Quigley's look & feel, not Colossal Order's), and more importantly, what things they've changed from SC2013 (as a direct contrast to SC2013).

Again, I understand the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" policy... except that SimCity isn't their game. This isn't Maxis releasing SC2013 to fix all the things they screwed up. This is a different company, and yet 100% of the visual aspects of the game look and feel identical. IDENTICAL!

And in the end, if the game plays significantly better, then I'm actually okay with the game looking identical. Because for all its shortcomings, I actually did quite like Ocean Quigley's visual take on SimCity in general. But given that Colossal Order has gone to such extreme lengths to make the game look so identical to SimCity 2013, it's going to take a lot of convincing before I believe that the game will actually play better.

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Okay. Fine. Then let's go over the things that were broke about SimCity 2013 and explain how it has been fixed.