SimCity release date slightly pushed back, confirms EA

By: Muhammad Qasim Hassan

  |   October 25th, 2012   |  

Uncategorized

The fans of the city-building simulation SimCity will have to wait longer, though just slightly, as publisher Electronic Arts (EA) announced that the release date of the game has been pushed to March, 2013.

The game was originally scheduled to come out somewhere in February next year, but due to undisclosed reasons, some additional time has been bought by the company.

The slight delay is hardly expected to make the fans groan with disappointment as the game will become available in the North American region on March 5, whereas it will hit the shelves in the European region in March 8.

Development of the latest edition of SimCity is going on at full throttle at the EA Maxis studio, which had been focusing on The Sims franchise over the last few years.

The previous SimCity game failed to make much of an impact, with the gameplay and overall experience falling well short of the expectations of the fans.

The first couple of games in the franchise had been nothing short of revolutionary, giving players a degree of freedom that they had never received before.

The city-building simulation was a complete package, featuring natural disasters such an earthquake and tornadoes, an idea that was fresh and unique and thus carrying a strong appeal.

However, the studio seemed to have gotten distracted after releasing the first title in The Sims franchise, which was met with massive critical as well as commercial success.

With the priority evidently shifting towards The Sims, SimCity began to get overshadowed and without merit, as the quality of the game began to dip significantly.

However, the studio seems to have made up its mind to revive the series and this time do it with complete dedication so as to deliver nothing but a superb city-building experience to gamers.

The bar has undoubtedly been raised over the last few years, courtesy of the likes of social games such as CityVille developed by Zynga.

Maxis will surely have to come up with something very special to win back the fans that deserted it after an empty SimCity 4 experience.

One thing that the studio seems to be doing right is that it is building the game on EA’s latest Glassbox game engine.

This new engine will not only allow Maxis to introduce curved roads to the series for the first time ever, but will also allow it to integrate a number of new features.

One of the most notable changes in the upcoming SimCity game is that it will be full 3D.

It remains to be seen how the latest SimCity is received by the fans. EA and especially Maxis will surely be keeping their fingers crossed because the gamers have become even less forgiving than before in the recent years.