News of Maxis’ upcoming Sim City expansion has accidentally hit the internet, with Green Man Gaming posting a listing for the DLC on their site (and then quickly removing it).

Maxis have since confirmed the expansion on their Facebook account, saying “Some of you may have seen thrilling new SimCity content that arrived too early at the gate. It’s coming May 28th. We think you’ll be amused.”

Unfortunately it wasn’t pulled down quickly enough, with one quick-thinking YouTube user catching the whole thing below.

Source: VG247

SimCity series creator Will Wright has used an address at the University of California to talk about the latest incarnation of his famous city-simulation game.

“I feel bad for the team. I kind of did predict there’d be a big backlash about the DRM stuff,” he said during his lecture. “It was kind of like, ‘EA is the evil empire, there was a lot of ‘Let’s bash EA over it. That was basically inexcusable, that you charge somebody $60 for a game and they can’t play it. I can understand the outrage. If I was a consumer buying the game and that happened to me, I’d feel the same.”

“I think people care if it doesn’t work. If you can’t play it on planes, stuff like that – I think there are some very valid concerns about it.”

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Maxis have released details of all the issues they plan to address with SimCity 3.0, due out “later this week”. The company are pushing out the big version numbers, with 2.0 only released two weeks ago.

Included in the list of fixes are changes so one vehicle will no longer block traffic on the entire highway, random air pollution from unknown sources, and continual improvements to the traffic routing system.

Check out the full list below:

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The long-awaited SimCity 2.0 patch has apparently caused massive sewerage overflows, with many users reporting citizens being continually hospitalised due to, well, pooping at a volume far beyond what their tiny bodies should be capable of.

Other bugs have also been reported, including loading screen lockups, buildings that won’t finish construction, and high levels of regional air pollution drifting in from empty regions. While traffic issues from emergency vehicle navigation have been fixed, other issues have arisen including traffic jams from mysterious taxi cabs appearing out of nowhere.

Maxis have issued a statement on their forums stating that players are “eager for more” fixes, and announcing that they’re working on a number of the current issues. “We are continuing to improve the traffic simulation, and decrease the need for rollbacks,” reads the statement.

EA recently revealed that people who purchased certain Oral-B and Crest brand products would get exclusive SimCity DLC — something that we found quite unbelievable, given the current state of the game. Read our thoughts here.

Source: PCGamesN

EA Maxis is still tinkering furiously with poor old arguably utterly broken SimCity. This week, the developer will release what it describes as its first “major” update, fixing a number of bugs, correcting some balancing, and ensuring your mayor drives the appropriate vehicle to work.

Some of the more interesting updates include a fail state for residential-only cities. A number of tweaks such as increased unhappiness from unemployment and decreased happiness boosts from tax cuts mean filling a whole plot with just houses will no longer cut it.

On the other hand, casinos have been buffed a bit so that they’re much more worth your time and resources, there’s a cooldown on random disasters, and some of the frustrating transit issues have been fixed.

The update will begin rolling out to servers at 1:00PM PST on April 22, which is 6:00AM Tuesday, Sydney time. Servers are expected to be unavailable for a couple of hours as a result.

Full patch notes are available on the EA Forums.

Earlier this month, EA announced that you could download free Nissan LEAF DLC into SimCity. Now they’ve announced a new DLC: exclusive tourist attractions which you can redeem from codes only available on certain Oral-B and Crest products. Yet SimCity is still a buggy, broken game. We need to ask some questions.

EA have announced that SimCity will be coming to the Mac as promised — and the date to circle on your iCalendar is June 12.

PC owners who have already purchased the game will receive a free Mac version as well through Origin, and EA have also confirmed that there will indeed be cross-platform play between the two.

Maxis claim that the Mac version is entirely native and optimised specifically for Mac hardware and OSX. There’s no word on a price, so expect it to be exactly the same as the PC edition.

Looking forward to SimCity DLC? Well, the first of it is here and it may leave a bit of a sour taste in your mouth: it’s an advertisement for Nissan’s LEAF-brand electric cars.

The LEAF charging station “provides happiness to the Sims that use it and a onetime wave of happiness to the nearby businesses,” writes EA.

“Need another bonus? It produces no sewage or garbage. That’s right! Green indeed.”

How does it all work? “Plopping down the Nissan Leaf Charging Station will add happiness to nearby buildings. Adding the Charging Station will not take power, water or workers away from your city. Zoom in to the streets of cities and players will start seeing a percentage of their Sims from all wealth classes driving the electric vehicles.”

As PC Gamer points out, this is essentially free DLC that just… makes everything around it better? All the time? For no cost at all — other than having to see a giant ‘NISSAN’ logo every time you scroll across your city, of course.

Source: PC Gamer

SimCity‘s Senior Producer Kip Katsarelis has taken to the EA forums to discuss the current state of the game and their plans for their next big patch at 2.0.

“For the future, in Update 2.0, we’ll be addressing the Recycling Center bug, fixing the fire engine clumping, improving the efficiency of Street Cars, and increasing the radius of river water,” writes Katsarelis.

“We’re also fixing the tuning on Casinos and are making them more profitable. These are just a handful of the substantial changes coming in Update 2.0.”

SimCity‘s most recent update was 1.8, which you can read the patch notes for here.

Source: EA Forums

EA Labels bossman Frank Gibeau has ruled out the idea that they forced Maxis to adopt always-online DRM for SimCity, claiming in a recent interview with GamesIndustry that they wouldn’t do such a thing because “DRM is a failed, dead-end strategy”.

“It’s not a viable strategy for the gaming business,” he concluded.

Gibeau also poured water on any conspiracy theories about “evil suits at EA forcing DRM down the throats of Maxis”. “That’s not the case at all,” he said. “At no point in time did anybody say ‘you must make this online’. It was the creative people on the team that thought it was best to create a multiplayer collaborative experience, and when you’re building entertainment you don’t always know what the customer is going to want. You have to innovate and try new things and surprise people and in this particular case that’s what we sought to achieve.”

“If you play an MMO, you don’t demand an offline mode, you just don’t. And in fact, SimCity started out and felt like an MMO more than anything else and it plays like an MMO.”

Gibeau did however say that he was “disappointed” that they didn’t do a good enough job of communicating with consumers about exactly how much like an MMO it was.

Source: GamesIndustry

As the below video demonstrates, there is something seriously wrong with SimCity‘s traffic pathfinding — especially when they’d rather climb this enormous TrackMania-esque rollercoaster road mountain than just cut across town. This single unbroken road goes so high, that at one point in the video an honest-to-god aeroplane passes underneath it on the way to land. I love it.

Source: PC Gamer

Players of SimCity are eagerly awaiting every patch as Maxis and EA continue to fix confusing AI and pathfinding issues, as well as fine-tune various aspects of their compelling but flawed creation.

Patch 1.8 has now been released, and includes changes to police station capacity bugs, road building bugs, and confusing text descriptions relating to missions.

Check out the full patch notes below:

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