Gaming with SlowPsycho

Reading Time: 7 minutes

Whenever I buy a new game in Early Access, I tend to end up buying a dud. 95% of the games in my Steam Library are bought, I am very lucky if I get a key through KeyMailer. So the question is; will NewCity – or New Cities if you are on IndieGoGo – worth the £15 I just spent out on it?

NewCity is developed and Published by Lone Pine Games and is currently available on Steam Early Access for both Windows and Linux. At the time of writing this, the Alpha version is 0.0.54.5

On first glance at NewCity, you will have to forgive yourself to think that you are looking at something a little like SimCity 2000. It should, Lone Pine want to celebrate the city builders of yesteryear and give them a fresh coat of paint. This is not going to be your next Cities:Skylines. What the developer is hoping to do differently from other appears to be the way that you build your city…

San Francisco vs Los Angeles

Going through the New Cities IndieGoGo page, where Lone Pine Games are still accepting pledges; the developer talks about how there are two approaches to the game. One is to spend on services approach to keep people happy, one is the natural urban sprawl and build later. Not being a professional urban planner myself, I am trying a bit of both….

The building of your NewCity though is quite simple. Roads are straight, I have largely built up some grid structured cities so far though. You can also have the US favoured style of them running a diagonal main artery straight through it.

What I like – Some NewCity Detail

If you are looking for a game that you can take in a lot of detail about your residents then this could be a game for you. You can drill down to any household, any adult, and any building. You can really see what is going on. If the continuity of the detail is anything to go by, then I am impressed, I am currently watching someone who appears to have been my 176th resident in my city of 3,500.

What I am hoping to as NewCity progresses through Early access is some sort of quantification of those percentages. As I understand them right now, it appears that our friend Alberto has about 1000% of time available and as I understand it, he is at work and wants to either spend 30% (or 300%) of the time there, or he will spend 30% of his day there.

I have no idea how this is worked out though. Is there a logic that he is employed full time and will spend 8 hours of his day working at the school? Is the fact that “Visiting a Doctor” negative an aspersion that he is in good health? Is it that the percentages are actually the likelihood that Alberto will do a particular thing in NewCity?

I would love to find out, and I hope therefore that there is an opportunity that I can find him again later in the game to see how he is getting on…. or whether the school has sent him to an early grave before he retires. As yet I have yet to find a way to cross-reference someone back to their original stats unless you remember where he works or lives….

Public Transport

Having now managed to get a bus line running, I like the way that some of it has been implemented. Something which I miss from Cities:Skylines, especially with the Real Time mod running, is simple things like running buses to a timetable.

Now if you listen to some streamers on Cities and Transport Fever 2, you will hear them decree that timetables are far to complicated for the average gamer… saying that I am someone who also preferred Cities in Motion and their timetables.

There is a downside though and this is something that I would actually put as bad, even if you think I am just doing that as a bit of a segueway.

For me it is not quite right yet. The game suggests that for a city with probably half of it’s 25,000 people in the conurbation, it is going to take over 5 hours to travel the round trip. This was a simple bus route that to be fair, I would have hoped that it would be around 30 to 60 minutes each way, rather than 5 hours for a dozen stops. It’s also unfortunate that this then reflects in lots of buses driving around for a bit and then disappearing, rather than doing a fully enclosed and complete circuit.

Bus route creation is also reliant on you actually remembering what you have placed and where. As you can see, there is no indication of the districts that are in place and although I know that this is residential, once you have two or three urban areas spread out you have to start remembering where your town centres and industrial areas are…..

…. that’s of course if your passengers are kamikaze enough to want to board the bus in the first place…..

The Bad: Speed of (in game) Development

This is not a criticism of the developer, this is a criticism of how to progress in-game. Now you might know me by now, my style is like 6-high in Poker and I will stick the game on hard and try to fail miserably. Right now though, the game is going so slowly. Even on the fastest speed setting, I am able to sit here and write a few paragraphs between doing things.

If you are particularly interested in the finest minuta of graphs and can find all the really detailed stuff then you are in luck because in the interim you would be able to get masses of detail about your city such as unemployment:

The graphs are in some respects quite interesting, you can look at a local or national scale, compare the stats to the cities around you and … well I will let you find the graphs, consider it a challenge.

If I am playing this while I am doing a few other tasks then at the moment I would see it more of a background entertainment. You will see in the video I put at the end, that there are times when I am just sat watching, for no other reason that I do not know what to do.

The Ugly: Intuition

I am not going to beat about the bush. You need to go clicking to find anything. There are heatmaps in two different locations for example:

• One heatmap gives you information on how to read them,
• The other does not,
• The one that does not is the one that is easiest to find.

This is one of those things that I would expect in an Alpha game though. I would expect NewCity to have the same functionality duplicated somewhere, but not with the same level of finesse in both places. it’s almost like A/B testing in the SEO world or Facebook trying out two styles of ad in your news feed.

I would hope that over the coming iterations of the build that there is more information in the screens that need it, or an option to turn it off maybe.

In the same vein I am so hoping that there is a drive towards continuity. If you want someone to sponsor a zoo, they have to live in a mansion with Residential Tier 9 & Density Tier 0. That is all very good and in the zoning system there is an easy to find setting for density, but value for residences is then rated in dollars…. there does not seem to be a comparison yet.

Think of the Children!

One of the first things that the game introduces is education and the need for schools. I have not seen, found or had details for a single child yet though.

We have already seen Alberto working hard at the school, but no details in the school about how many children are being educated. We have seen many houses with a detail about the adults that are living there, but nothing about their offspring, whether freshly born or moved in from outside the area.

The game is still a little buggy – But I am not surprised

Again I have to quantify this comment as I know this is still very early in development. At the same time there are still a few bugs that I hope are pushed through development and resolved.

• Buildings that will build across a road and agricultural buildings that will engulf a residential property.
• Cars that will stop at a green intersection light, think about it for a while and then driver very, very slowly across the intersection before picking up speed again.
• RCI indicators that show massive demand for residential buildings, while entire districts are zoned and un-built on.

This is not a game for me to Stream…. yet

I can see great things in NewCity. I can see the level of detail and direction that I think that Lone Pine Games wants to take this game to. As a streamer, this is not a game that I think I would want to run on Twitch at the moment.

There is not enough to interject my inert ramblings at the speed and rate that I would want my ramblings interjected.

It is a game that I might end up reserving for my off-stream immersion. It is not too taxing at the moment and I can see where it wants to take me. In the mean time, check out this raw and unedited footage…. also without commentary… from the early gameplay I reviewed.