Honestly? It's totally playable. It's a totally different experience to Cities: Skylines though. The scale of SimCity is way smaller, and the depth of details available in Cities: Skylines is way, way larger - but it's still a fun, casual city-builder and I really enjoy it now because of those differences. It's also interesting to see some of the things SimCity did in 2013 that Cities: Skylines would go on to do years later, such as using things like Ore Mines and Oil Wells to make metals and plastics, that you can then send into a factory to make goods that you can then export. I also love the modular buildings available in SimCity, and think it's really cool being able to expand a single power plant into something slightly more powerful for a fraction of the cost, rather than having to spend money, at full-price, on a completely new building.
@@ConflictNerd I remember SimCity tending to be more difficult than C:S on average as well, so it may be more for you if you like the management aspect more.
@@ConflictNerd Honestly Simcity13 gives like a special feeling when playing it, that C:S doesn't have. The modular building is so much more fun and C:S doesn't have it. They tried with airport DLC but its such a big flop. The sounds, zoning, gameplay, etc is so much more satisfying in simcity imo C:S does have more dept of details, but only in building aspect, not simulation aspect (C:S is litteraly a "city design game" at this point developed by the community)
The thing I love about this games is that it actually simulates real days instead of having no real schedule. For example sims will go back home at night and sleep and will go to work in the morning causing a morning rush hour, schools also wont be open all day like in Cities skylines and it just feels much more authentic, there should be a mod for that in cities skylines.
@@MichaelBelgium Time of day simulation, maybe. But not in simulation of traffic, life, work, traffic, water, traffic, public transit... did I mention traffic?
Sadly they achieved this by absolutely cheating with the engine. Yes, sims leave their homes in the morning and return back home in the evening- but not the same home. The individual agents will leave their home, search for an appropriate job in their radius, and go fill that. In the evening, they'll leave the job, search for an appropriate home, and go back to that. This was one of the many (many (MANY)) reasons map size was so small - if your city got too big, it ended up with a "wave" behavior" of skilled/unskilled jobs sloshing back and forth, greatly destabilizing the surrounding economy, which then resulted in an uncontrolled downward spiral. That combined with a horrid pathfinding led to things looking nice, but being utter and complete cr...aziness.
Many parts of SimCity were superior to cities skylines, but its main failing was it was limited, so maps were too small was the main thing. There were also the online issues and lack of modding. But it had so many great ideas, like the expandability of buildings, if you need more capacity in a school, make it bigger, same with power stations etc.
Not only that, but that the population it showed was scaled exponentially at some point, making balancing a total mess in a large town. Because it looks cooler when it says 500k instead of the real value of 13,5k, or something like that. It was proved from leaked sourcecode.
Such a shame. It had a pretty OK foundation (after the initial launch issues were dealt with) and I would have loved to see EA improve on the game. It's just so whimsical and adorable. It also actually looks visually appealing to me, which Cities: Skylines (which I love) does not at all.
The "always online" was what did it for me. EA's consistent use of "hey, we know this is a SP game mostly, but you have to use up any data you may have [because yes, some people did and still do have data caps] on loading up this game!" was the final nail in the coffin for me and EA. Since then the only games from EA I've bought are DAI (because I have written 1000 pages of DA fanfic so of course I did) and MELE (which was a gift from my son because he was unaware I was boycotting them). My review of C:S back in the day was basically "does what EA games claimed was impossible". [almost 10 years! Whut???] I do love watching Dylan's videos of it though. :D
Nah city skylines is superior, you can shit take on nostalgia all you want but you can’t deny CS surpassing them in every way. Especially with the newest update that isn’t even done being released FOR FREE
the game is good but people made such a huge deal of the city size back then it pretty much killed the game. it has lots of great mechanics and interesting features. It is unfortunate.
@@1ButtonDash The bigger issue for people at the time was the online-only requirement, excessive DRM, and terrible server support. City size was a problem after everything else was sorted, but those early stumbles cratered a huge portion of the player base’s interest
@@kpro8908 The online only requirement killed me. I couldn't play the game because EA wouldn't let me onto their servers. I am not going to get this game unless it is not on origin. It is a terrible platform. If this game would've been on steam, it would've been one of the most successful city builders of all time.
@@1ButtonDash City size wasn't the issue the issue was the countless bugs, crashes, bad AI etc etc. It wasn't people "making a big deal" that killed it, it was the game being bad that killed it
This game definitely has a certain charm. It's cute and fun. The small scale ruins the creativity and excitement for me, but it's still a game that I'll play for a weekend once a year or so.
same, I love playing this game. But only thing that puts this game over cities skylines is the Cities of Tomorrow expansion. I also got the limited edition from pre-ordering the game 9 years ago, so I have the landmark that shoots 10,000 people into space, which is fun. Also, I think the small city size really makes you push your creativity to make the most of it. There are some amazing cities out there with such small space.
I wish CS would implement the modular buildings. I loved them. I loved that if you had the red cross thing in your city, red cross tents would pop up all over your city( at the schools, town hall, ect.) During and after a disaster. I thought that was so cool.
This was my first ever city builder game, I got it when I was maybe 10, and even then I knew it was ganky, but I still loved it and reminisce it. I do think that this game had some features better than city skylines. For example expanding fire ambulance and police stations was cool. And having multiple cities was something I missed. Over of course cs is better
Yeah I think the only way to add more ambulances or trucks is to increase the budget in Cities Skylines. You can’t edit the buildings. But, you can move them around without bulldozing and you can rename buildings. Something SimCity doesn’t have.
@@mikeyreza , and @Retaliatergamer. I was 9 so same haha, and I completely agree with you both. So much nostalgia listening to the music and hearing the sound effects. Hoping for the same hoping eventually someone makes it.
God, I remember playing SimCity when it came out after years of playing City Life Deluxe on my father's computer, it felt so futuristic and the editing of individual buildings blew me away. I still hold hope that Cities Skylines 2 will have the social classes and building editing mechanics from mentioned games, cause they are just neat in my opinion.
Nah, to me adding an inevitable class divide is not the best idea. Unless you can resolve it in the game and build sort of a socialist society, unlike in simcity where you can't do anything about it
@@Mr-dm5we I think it's narratively interesting, like Monopoly. Cities Skylines is showing an inherently flawed system, but unlike Monopoly that wasn't their intention(I assume). Cities Skylines is to ekistics what Monopoly is to economics and that's great, the problem is that they didn't actually lean into it, most cities designed in Cities Skylines should be an utter unbridled mess, riots, poverty and all the misery of contemporary living. So adding social classes, inherent friction between them and even lobbying for policies by them would be fantastic, building a dystopia can be way more fun than building a utopia. Admittedly that's more of a writer than city-builder opinion but I love both.
I still play SC2013 occasionally. You can get quite far into the game on a Sunday afternoon rather than the mega time commitment of starting a City Skylines build from scratch.
@@Stettafire well.. it was EA's insistence on implementing an always on network features and forcing it on origin. So it definitely was EA's fault that the game released in the state in which it did. And it barely gave the game a chance to improve, it was killed way too soon.
Remember that biggest failure reasoning was the anti-piracy creating problems for the original game owners. Second reason was the lack of features, which got added with updates later on, but not that much because it failed a lot.
I played this game this year with my GF and it was way more fun than I ever thought it was. There is some real meat in getting a good city going, managing resources and working towards milestones. SimCity and Cities Skylines are both excelent in very different things. One does not scratch the itch the other does.
@@mikeyreza Absolutely. I feel a real lack of good games about building and managing that can also be played in co-op. Sim City 2013 could have been a real gem if only it worked a little better and the mapsize made more sense. You can get used to it but there is no denying it was a big letdown at the time.
Omg the memories playing this game. The bugs, the annoying traffic but still soo much fun. Btw just a tip i cant remember where or how but i used to have a mod for 1 way roads. Also here was the exploit that you can pauze the game (before the in game time hour is over like on x:57) put the tax on max go on to the next hour and put the taxes normal and it doesn't pist off the sims. For some extra money
@@mffuniverse3806 I don't really know how to explain it as to why I love Simcity 2013 and can't get into CS,IDK its just this kinda overall vibe that the game has that CS just doesn't,A part of it is the soundtrack and a part of it is the whole simulation part the day and night cycle,IDK yeah it just has that somthing,The visual design aswell overall its so much better to me then CS...
I wish they would incorporate little details like the construction workers, movers, rush hour traffic, etc in Cities Skylines... This why I like Sim City, for the visuals (for the most part).
Im one of the few people who enjoy simcity 2013 a lot more than cities skylines and i think simcity 2013 did is like doing most things right, its just that theres a few mistakes but those are major big mistakes
Never seen any of your content before but 8 hours after you uploaded this video, it got recommended to me and this is exactly what I was waiting for for a while: revisiting this lovely game!
Love to see this making a comeback! I was a diehard SimCity fan when I was younger. SimCity 4 and SimCity 2013 were my most-played ones. I love the nostalgia this brought me! If you play SimCity 4, even for one video, I’d be so happy!
I remember waiting for this game to come out like a kid waiting for Christmas, I spent lots of hours but always hated when I couldn’t pump water from the ground anymore and my city would slowly die just for me to start all over again. The sky bridges connecting the high tech building was next level in this game, have yet to see that on CS
I've been playing Anno 1800 a lot recently and I realized that a lot of the concepts that SimCity 2013 tried for have been adapted and surpassed in the Anno series. Although TBH Anno is more a logistic simulator than city builder, but you get the idea.
The visual of this game is so beautiful, the buildings being constructed, buildings interiors, even the grass... its a shame that we dont have a sequel
the main reason I stopped playing this game was the zoning. Once it goes to high density there is so much wasted space between all the buildings. I now play Skyline Cities where the building would build everywhere you zone.
Things and tips that may help you out: >Buildings will automatically upgrade once they have enough wealth/money and have the necessary upgrade paths >>Try to keep the factories away from the main population because they pollution and bring down the land value >Omegaco requires raw material and oil to make their products >>Will produce happiness and profits but also produce pollution and requires a lot of oil and raw material >Try to keep the factories away from the main population because they pollution and bring down the land value >Until you have a better sewage treatment try to have at least 2 sewage outflow pipes because it will overflow. I try to swtich between being one turned off and the other turned on to help prevent overflow. >With some tabs (like the school, mining, and tourism tabs) you can select the guide me button to help you with planning and building your city that specializes in a specific industry >If possible you can use mods to help you with your city
It had so much oppotunities but EA just ruined it. But I still love this game though, I love the multiplayer. Also it is kinda realistic, you don't see the Sims working at night or kids studying at night. Yes, I know that C:S has mods, but we're comparing base to base here. Especially I love the multiplayer. I still remember playing with buds, trying to build that common monument thingy(?). We failed, but still had so much fun.
Love this, nice to see this back on the channel, was my 1st city building game, still got the original installation discs for it 😂😅 might have to redownload it again
Building size is so small in this game that it’s not fun to me. You build a city and before you even feel that you’ve gotten started…you’re out of land space.
Personally i still love to come back to this game cause it's just so different to Cities Skylines and getting the building upgrades unlocked feels like an achievement. The Expansions to get the Megatowers and OmegaCo makes it even more fun.
I built a gaming PC for my future wife and I back in 2013 just to play this! OMG what a cluster F at launch. Servers were down and wouldnt let us play offline. We then played some Knight of the Old Republic together so at least it wasnt a complete lost. We never did come back to this game. I used my CD key in the EA App and it took so going to play tomorrow!
Imma say it. I genuinely enjoy playing sim city 2013 more than cities skylines. C:S is a technically superior as a city builder, but sim city is just more fun as a game.
i will say, if they made a new SimCity game that has most of this game's functionalities, is entirely singleplayer and didn't have such small city spaces, it would be a great success. The game is perfectly playable, it's fun and nowadays it doesn't have any of the issues it had at launch. This franchise deserves another chance but they need to learn from their mistakes.
@@Samuel88853 I disagree but you can also have a multiplayer option that isn't the entire focus of the game or at the very least, doesn't diminish what a player can do on their own.
Ah the nostalgia! I was so hyped about the game and played it quite a bit. Despite all the problema it had I always loved the modularity of the service buildings.
🤔 I can't remember buying any of the Sim City games. I think my first City building game was Cities XL - Interesting to watch but makes me love CS even more... Funny how over the years my choice of games have changed. Now I only get games that are different every time you play and can play these year after year without getting bored. I really hate to admit this but some of the most enjoyable games I have played were on the ZX spectrum or the C64. Cheers for the upload Dylan 👍
I can't believe this game is almost 10 years old already. I remember being so hyped for it when it was announced. I played it a lot and was definitely disappointed. I liked a lot of things, like the expandable buildings, the regional megaprojects, etc... But things like the power delivery SUUUUCKED. The "electricity balls" just bounce around randomly. Which means the further away from a power plant a building is, it's statistically less likely to get power. So my cities always ended up having a huge power surplus, but some buildings wouldn't have power if they were too far away. UGH. Also only having 1 road into / out of the "city" (more like neighborhood) meant every city had a huge traffic bottleneck. Also no terraforming, which was one of my favorite parts of SC4. But Cities: Skylines fed my cravings.
I don’t know if it’s all the sci-fi movies, but even when the game came out when I was thirteen, OmegaCo just seemed like it was somehow going to end up being malicious
What was it they didn't fix? I've found a lot of complaints people were making were because they didn't understand the design of the game. The only issue with the game that is still persistent today is building bus stations that travel to other cities still clog your regional roads
@@SageLakshmi Yeah, traffic is still a mess, which basically kills the game. I think the resources don't balance properly also it's very frustrating not to be able to link the cities correctly. You, hit a certain point where you just can't build anymore. Hopefully we'll get a new one soon Can't argue the innovation with megatowers and Sky ways, not that I could ever manage to build them.
Did you ever buy the cities of tomorrow DLC. I did and really enjoyed the different aspects of it with the drones and mega towers. Was awkward to get the balance right with the mega towers which I'm assuming was there way of increasing population in a city without adding more space on the map. Oh and Omega Co I used to really enjoy the money making aspects of Omega Co until eventually the government find out its a mega health hazard
The megatowers were tough to implement on my maps because they were always so hard to balance. If I remember correctly, the population in megatowers didn't really leave the tower too much. They would stay inside their tower and claim unemployment even if there were jobs around the megatower
I had waited until after Maxis/EA made it so you could play this game offline and by yourself a long while later. I had been hyped during college when they were dropping videos before launch. Having been a fan of SimCity 3000 and SimCity 4, I had high hopes for SimCity 2013. I have moved onto Cities Skylines and theres a lot I like about that game. But the population stuff in that game plus not being able to connect to neighboring cities or create your own complete metropolitan area, kind of makes the game a bit more difficult. Plus not being able to have a Nuclear plant go critical, causing indefinite radioactive areas, is kind of a bummer.
Not gonna lie, I loved (and still love SimCity 2013). At least the gameplay, server and technical issues aside. Is there anything that you would take from Simcity 2013 and add it to Cities Skylines, out of curiosity? I honestly love the region connectivity, shared utilities, and modular buildings.
I genuinely think they took the communities dissapointments with SimCity and took that into SimCity. City size, terrain tools, complex road building stuff like that
Every SimCity-save (in every game except SC4) always feels a little samey to me. Whereas all my Cities: Skylines saves are different and distinctive. IMO SimCity does the simulation aspect a little better, like you said, but that’s only because it doesn’t *allow* for the detailing like C:S does.
i started playing a few days ago as well again. it is still fucking hard and the music score, especially with cities of tomorrow addon . . IS STILL BETTER THAN CITIES SKYLINES! And the modular plopables are still incredible nice. AND THE FACT THAT ROADS CARRY WATER AND ELECTRICITY!
JFC it's been 10 years. I still play Simcity 4 by the way and enjoy it. Infact when I feel adventurous I try to play Simcity 2000 but due to it being old it throws tantrums.
I never really saw sc 2013 outside of people making intentionally bad cities like CallMeKevin, but I find it interesting how much of this game's features have been added to cities skylines 2. Modular buildings, wind moving air pollution, water and electricity under the roads etc.
Cities Skylines is undoubtably the best city builder on the market, but SimCity 2013 in some aspects like the moving trucks, and the real days (sims going to work in the morning, coming home at night) is far superior (Yes I know there are mods for this for CS, but I'm talking strictly Vanilla)
@@ConflictNerd, so true. I ended up getting into his content around the time Simcity (2013) came out. He had a truly magnificent voice and could capture my attention better than many others online at the time. Every time you play this game, I end up thinking about him.
This game had some great potential in theory, but unfortunately, somewhat failed to deliver on it. Expandable buildings would be incredible for example, as no two power plants are gonna be actually the same. Unfortunatly, the way its set up its closer to leveling up buildings vs making each building its own thing. I do hope theres a cities skylines 2 soon and they can take the best parts of what they have learned from 1, and bits from this game etc. etc. etc. and make an incredible sequal.
@0:59 "No one got early access." I got early access. Well, I mean, there was a limited beta release. The beta experience was far superior to the release day experience as the servers weren't overloaded and beta didn't have access to the later game bugs (many of which were never fixed).
AWESOME! I have many good memories of watching your cities of tomorrow let's play however long ago. Thanks for keeping up the great content, it's good to see you still getting good views.
Say what you want about it, and I won't deny its shortcomings, but at least the game looked good back then and still does today. Personally, I find Cities Skylines unplayable without the visual mods because the game is just so ugly. Even the vanilla buildings are mostly terribly designed and executed, at least buildings in SimCity look pretty cool.
CS would only be a average builder game but the Mod and Asset creators have taken the game to a whole new level. As you can see from the CCP packs that have been released they do listen to all of us and fingers crossed when CS2 makes it's debut they will incorporate everything we want into the main game. However it's gonna be a RAM killer probably and a min 32gb probably. - Console players are in for a treat when Sidai's map pack is released and will make the game a lot more fun for them but I really feel here should be no more DLC released after this batch but I have that feeling there is more to come 😔
i love the aesthetic of this game. the tilt-shift, vibrant colours, the philip glass-esque music that plays, it's honestly a lot more appealing than CS. cities skylines looks fine (and can be improved with LUTs and other graphical mods), and most importantly it plays much better, but it just lacks some of that unique pizzazz that simcity games have. especially the music, it's considerably better in simcity, whereas in cities skylines it's quite forgettable and a bit bland.
Always online and making design decisions around multiplayer in a city builder killed this game and rightfully so. I think EA walked back the always online part after a year or so, but the damage was already done and all goodwill spent. It's a shame; this could have been a great game had EA focused on improving the SimCity experience for their core audience instead of chasing the ephemeral 'wider audience' and thus alienating nearly everyone that was a veteran SimCity 1-4 player.
I just can't get around them giving us smaller cities and regions and also TAKING OUT FARMS. I could live with SimCity: Rural Town Edition, but at least give me my fucking farms.
I think the first time I watched your videos was do to you playing this game day one and I was a poor high schooler back then so I couldn’t get the game.
