It seldom seems to matter these days whether or not the games industry's technology is building wo💙rlds too complex for its games.
Designs are drowned by details, ideas are pushed aside by economics, and the pric🍸e of construction𒊎 routinely undermines creativity. Except in the case of Tycoon games, however, where the building of worlds is the design.
Rollercoaste𒊎r Tycoon 3, for example, has continued to demonstrate how both attention to intricate detail and a runaway sense of scale can combine to benefit the strategic model underneath.
Tyco𓃲on City, a game that lets you rebuild New York from the first brick upwards, is pushing that▨ theory to its limits.
"It's a massive challenge," confirms Deep Red director Clive Robert. "We have෴ to build a city with tens o💎f thousands of buildings and populate it with 60,000 people. Every district is the equivalent of an entire map in Rollercoaster."
Like that game,൩ City instils in you the belief that every man, woman and child in its world exists for every second that you play.
From 🎐𝓡an overview of your cosmopolitan domain, a flick of the mousewheel shuttles via a single unbroken zoom to street level, where cars back up behind traffic lights, pedestrians follow their dynamic itineraries, and life in the Big Apple continues as if viewed from a real-life window.
Predictably, the pre-polish, pre-optimisation build demonstrated chugs and grinds as if its host computer's video card wer✨e melting (it most probably was), and one look at the full skyline of a fleshed-out, 🗹shadow-casting New York makes you fear for your own PC when release day comes around.
In spite of our overall enthusiasm, we do have reservations that only ⛦proper hands-on testing can overcome.
The ꦐcon𒊎struction of Tycoon City's world is still your responsibility in terms of which buildings go where, how they look and what they offer, but it doesn't entirely feel like a place that, from a distance, you can look upon as your own.
The city's 🗹road layout will always be fixed, and unless you're playing in Sandbox mode, so will the positions of ༒its landmarks.
Will this damage the player's vital sense of affiliation with the world they create? We shall see. Once the final product is in our h𓆉ands, however, we'll hopefully be too busy building up to let such things get us down.
