Call me interested. I saw this a while back and considered keeping an eye on it. Where did you grab your pre-order sale from (if you don't mind me asking)? Thanks in advance!

I am interested as well. Let us know how you like it. I never got into playing the Sim City series and was always told it was fun. 

Bought it from GreenManGaming! Very excited for it! Definitely sold after watching the Let's Plays, etc.

Looks very nice, but tired of citybuilders not delivering. Will wait for judgements on playability at release.

It's definitely intrigued me, I believe I stuck it on my Steam wishlist so I could keep an eye on it.  If the actual execution gets good reviews after the masses have a chance to abuse it, it'll be a for sure buy for me.

It's still wait and see for me at this point - there have been a lot of builders that have sucked over the years, pretty much everything since SC4, as far as I can tell anyway...

cheers,

-tid242

My thoughts exactly.  I'm guessing you went through what I did -- excited about CitiesXL, then ........ yeah.  Then 'selling' a few patches you actually had to pay money for that fixed some but not all of hte bugs, then another pay-for-a-patch, and another ... and none of them have fixed all of the glaring issues in the original.  There was so much promise that wasn't delivered, it had so much potential but fell short and they bilked customers by expecting us to pay for patches that fixed only a few of the issues (but never quite fixed the memory hoggishness and horrible lag even on state-of-the-art gaming rigs with all the premium RAM/CPU/graphics cards, etc. -- probably the #1 killjoy of XL -- as well as other issues), and of course the SimCity 5 fail (hopefully you were as wise as I and balked at seeing it would require always-on Internet and, die-hard as you probably are as I am of the SimCity series, consider 4 to be the last real SimCity even though 4 didn't exactly thrill series fans either).

I'm going to wait well after launch to see myself.  I am worried aspiring devs might mis-read the SC5 and XL underwhelming launches as the market just not being ready, and ignore the fact there are a lot of us who want a good modern city sim but the quality of what's come to market has sorely disappointed us.  To me, it makes sense that the reason there is so much disdain for SC5 and XL is because there /is/ a market for city sims, but those of us who have played city sims since the earliest iterations of SimCity are not the typical impulsive FPS gamer, and catering to FPS fans that need dumbed down interfaces (and underlying simulator, in SC5's case meaning you have a serious cap in the size of the city you can eventually build to) in favor of insta-gratification makes us wary about what we spend our money on.  Devs walking and talking like salesmen won't impress us, we want content, we want playability, we want flexibility, we want a sim that we can start with a humble building and through our decisions and planning, make something grand.

This is indeed a problem with all games. Steam has made instant gratification the norm, and the emphasis has been placed on churning out games as fast as possible (Thus the rise of early access), and investing heavily in marketing to sell it. Eye candy graphics are number one, and quality and content are secondary, and the new consumer sees nothing wrong with this as long as they get to shoot at something with their friends.

Well, I'm repeating a lot of what you already said, but I wanted you to know I completely agree with you and unfortunately as us "old" gamers get replaced by the younger ones, this trend will just continue. I would say that developers are shooting themselves in the foot by going down this path, but crapware games are becoming the norm, and the FPSers either don't care or don't know any better.

Got the Deluxe on Greenmangaming for 29$. I'm enjoying it. You can find ton of streamers and youtubers playing it. Lots of good reviews and lots of my friends on steam are playing it. Since it sold 500k copies I'm sure paradox will dlc this game like crazy. 

I picked it up after the glowing release reviews. While the game does a lot of things right, I don't think it has staying power. While I'm playing I get the feeling of "just one more turn", but the next 30 minutes are the same as the last. Sure, I could grow my city to hundreds of thousands, but scale is really all the game has to offer. That, and about 90% of the time is spent thinking about how to best avoid traffic jams. 

There are no random events, there is no difficulty to speak of. Because it feels so repetitive, I hesitate to even mention the only fun thing that happened to me in case I might spoil it for someone else: if your water intake becomes polluted, you'll quickly see severe health issues, buildings being cancelled everywhere, your economy tanking in minutes as people stop working etc. There is practically no way back from this, even if you had a hospital for every toddler you'd still fail.

The game is still an 8/10 simply because it does a lot of things right with the simulation. If the gameplay was exciting it'd be a 10/10.

Reviews look good and it is selling like crazy (take that, EA). But what I'd really like to see is a city builder that runs through time - maybe 1800 to the present day - with new technologies coming available as time goes on.

That sounds like a very interesting take!

Tropico 5 did that.

Cool, I'll have to take a look at that. Have you played that (or anyone else), opinions?

Personally I think it was a marginal upgrade from tropico 4, definitely not worth the pricetag for a returning customer. But if you're looking for another fun sim with a bit of silly, Tropico's the way to go. 

It just so happens that this is a tropico 5 free-to-play weekend on steam.