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