João Melo points us at this somewhat interesting news. Big Download report that they plan to self-publish their future games online. Having got the rights back, their first game will be an improved version of City-Builder Children of the Nile (Who I recall I have a postmortem of lying around somewhere…). The improvements will be included in a new demo, and available as a patch to all previous customers. This is only the start- they promise all new PC titles before the end of the year. With their history in making management games – though Sim Cities: Societies disappointed us – you suspect they’re following in the steps of strategy-specialists Stardock in realising that a significant strategy-audience can be reached direct.
EDIT: Actually, this is also worth noting. Tom Chick talking about how lovely Sim City Societies is with the latest patch.
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I’ve been told that Sim City Societies has been so heavily patched that it’s actually ok at the moment.
I tried hard to get into Children of the Nile, but I failed miserably. Still, I suppose this is good news and I’d certainly be interested in seeing what other things Tilted Mill comes up with on their own.
Ooh, I might get Sim City Societies now.
More of this, please. Publishers suck dicks. Especially if they’re called ‘EA’ – I’m still angry about their insistence on not letting Europeans get Mass Effect through their digital download service until the EU store date.
Maybe this will make me finally play my copy of it.
CotN is my favourite City Builder ever, but it does take a different approach to others by being largely people-driven as opposed to building-driven.
SCS was rubbish.
SCS and Caesar IV are rubbish. Twisted Mill has zero city builder cred as far as I’m concerned. Why it was handed the keys to two venerable city building franchises still perplexes me.
Tilted Mill is made up of ex-Impressions staffers, and others AFAIK. They did the Caesar/Pharaoh/Zeus “walker” based City-Builder games, so they do have a lot of background in the genre.
But yes, Caesar IV was another disappointment, though it kinda had an excuse as they were contracted to deliver a Caesar sequel, not an original design. That doesn’t stop it from being a retrogressive step from CotN.
I had loads of fun with Caesar IV, even if it wasn’t a step forward.
With patch 5, SimCity Societies has gotten hard enough (on just the basic Strategic difficulty mode) that I kind of stall out and fail at it. Just like the old SimCities! So I guess that’s good, if you don’t suck at SimCity like me, or if you’re willing to put the effort into getting better at the game. Actually I do slightly better than with the old SimCities as the death-spiral is slower and you have more options (like selling back buildings) to get you into the black.
Until now even with the maintenance penalties you could still just build whatever and never fail, but income and maintenance is now very strictly tied together. There’s less of a difference between those two numbers, so after the initial spending spree you’re really operating on a shoe-string. Rogue citizens are more of a problem when losing a day of business productivity means going into debt, and when you have almost no cash you’re very tempted to plop down crime-ridden tenements because they’re so much cheaper to buy and cheaper to maintain.