Bradshaw on SimCity: “In many ways, we built an MMO”

Simcity as an MMO could have worked, I don’t know.

This brings to mind the CivWorld MMO (basically, Civilization MMO) that was out last year as a Facebook game. I know, what the hell is this nonsense, right? It was also the most fun Civ game I’ve ever played, because of its MMO elements.

I’ll briefly describe it – players spawn into “worlds” and they control a city each, and there’s about 200 players per world, and each world lasts about 1 week – it goes from stone age to space age and then the game ends.

Within that one week, players have to ally together to form civilizations, and jointly cooperate to research tech, build armies, and vote on important issues (wars, civ-level policies, etc) and of course build and “acquire” wonders, usually by attacking another civ. There was an open economy, and the prices tracked supply and demand in real time, so, for example, during an outbreak of war between major civs resources would be in short supply as everyone would be buying up materials to make war. The world would transition in between major phases when certain milestones in technology were reached, and each phase had unique bonuses (dark ages = slow research etc) It was all very flavourful. Influential cities within the civ would hold positions like “War Minister” or “King” or “Education Minister” which came with special powers. I remember holding secret negotiations with the stronger members of an enemy civ, convincing them their cause was hopeless and they were going to lose anyway so they should defect to our side before we declared war.

It sounds like Maxis were thinking of something along these lines – global economy, each player controlling a small town that altogether made up a city, specializations that allowed each player a unique role. I’m not sure it’s good enough, though, in this case. But I’m confident it could be done in theory.