SimCity Has No Abandoned City Mechanics, Says Creative Director

The rebooted SimCity introduces a lot of new ideas to the core city-building experience of the series and at least one of them might pose problems for gamers in the long term, if they are not careful about plotting their early moves in the game.

Ocean Quigley, the creative director working at developer Maxis, says that the team currently has no way of destroying cities that are aband oned in non-sandbox mode or multiplayer.

He tells Incgamers that, “if it really bothers you, you could destroy the whole region and start over but if you don’t want to do that you could send the city that is affecting the area a big gift of cash from the adjacent cities and use that to clean up.”

The option was not added because SimCity’s new structure encourages the creation of many specialized small settlements that can serve the needs of others, providing them with specialized goods and resources.

Quigley added, “we’re not ever going to kick you, we figured that would be the worst option. So if I invite you to play in my region and then stop playing, I can fo rmally ask you not to abandon your city, but if you don’t do that, that city is basically yours forever, it is locked as yours.”

Maxis and Electronic Arts have no plans to create a way for players to take over another city without permission or to kick someone out of a region.

This basically means that each SimCity player will have to be very careful about those he invites to his own region, making sure that they are ready to play the game in the long term.

The rebooted SimCity is designed to appeal to long-term fans of the franchise and to newcomers as well, with curved roads and a focus on tracking citizen needs and performance.