Well, you see, a story-driven singleplayer campaign just isn’t as good of a platform for selling $1000 jpegs of spaceships to whales with terminal cases of sunk-cost fallacy, so unfortunately it had to be put on the back burner.

For what it’s worth, I say this as somebody who put a few hundred of my own into the game during the first couple years of fundraising. The but for the grace of God go I, et cetera…

“Twitter continues to chug along, maybe with outages here and there, not losing much traction. Maybe it ekes out a small profit, which Musk can use to salve his ego.”

Twitter’s big problem on this front is the massive amount of debt that Musk saddled it with in order to purchase it, which the company now has to make quarterly payments on. Twitter was very close to turning a profit pre-buyout, but thanks to Elon it now has to pay ~$1.5 billion dollars in debt service annually at the same time that it chased away something like half of all its advertising income. That’s why he’s laying off all his employees and skipping out on the company’s bills.

SimAnt has a warm, weird place in my heart, not least of which for the massive doorstop of a manual that it came bundled with, full of all kinds of science trivia about ants, including something like a very long term paper or a small textbook about them at the back! What a different era that was.

But it I don’t have it pre-loaded on launch day, might miss some of those magical Bethesda Bugs™ that get patched out after release! What if all the planets are just hats worn by NPCs and they forget to hide the legs? What if the spaceships get spontaneously replaced with Skyrim horses if you go in and out of building just right? I could miss some of the best moments of the game if I don’t get that unpatched Day 1 experience!

Damn. I don’t usually replay story-driven games like Cyberpunk (especially ones with the sort of… finality that Cyberpunk has) but it seems like CDPR is making it a much more immersive experience. We’ll have to see how that rumored new ending turns out. I get that they had a story they wanted to tell (and I felt it was a good one), but it was more than a bit of a downer that all of V’s efforts boiled down to a few different ways to be chewed up, spit out, and dying at the end. I like for my RPGs to give me more than an illusion of freedom (Phantom Liberty, nudge nudge?) , or else why indulge in the escapism?

Mass Effect 2, Grunt’s loyalty mission on Tuchanka. Always, always take the renegade interrupt to headbutt Uvenk and cut off his rant.

When in Rome…

On the one hand, if somebody wants to Haussmanize their Paris I’d say more power to you, the bulldozer tool is in the menu. On the other hand, some mechanic like Transport Tycoon’s where local councils stop letting you build around them if you get too aggressive remodeling their town could be interesting too.

At the end of the day, though, I wouldn’t want to take to much power or of the player’s hands. Will Wright described those classic Maxis games as “software toys,” and the freedom to mess around and see what happens is both part of the appeal and how games like SimCity came to seen as educational.

I got my money’s worth from the original, but I have two major complaints about it that, from what I can see, the new game doesn’t address:

First, the developer originally made transport games and that bias shows. C:S makes it incredibly hard to design a city that isn’t car-centric, and gameplay in practice tends to center on optimizing car traffic at the expense of everything else a city-builder could be.

Second (and this ties into the first, to an extent) is that the game doesn’t represent the passage of time, in a technological or societal sense. Real cities grow and change over decades and centuries, with decisions made in prior eras imposing informing and imposing restraints on those made after. C:S cities exist in a weird, timeless and anachronistic “now” from the start. This was something that classic SimCity games did well, at least in the context of an American boom town: as the years advance, so does the tech tree, opening up new mass transit options, cleaner and more efficient infrastructure items, and new kinds of commerce and industry.

Personally, I’d love a game in this genre that plays like SimCity but takes in the whole arc of history, say from from the Middle Ages onwards, so that players can start to appreciate how decisions they make hundreds of years prior can leave their mark on the city in the present – for example, where a defensive wall gets placed during a medieval time of war leaves a mark of the street networks, and changes the way that that social classes distribute through the city and leads to a high-rent luxury district in a future era.