One Final SimCity Complaint

I swear this is the last one, and it’s a beaut from BGR:

Several players have noted that the characters in the game don’t actually have any permanent jobs or homes. They simply walk to the nearest available open job or a suitable home at certain times, a simplification that creates major headaches in city planning. Sims that start walking don’t switch to mass transit if they don’t find a job nearby; kids don’t get to schools easily; all cops go to a single crime scene even if police stations are carefully spread in different parts of the city. School buses, fire trucks and tourist hordes all seem to have trouble finding obvious routes to their goals. As a result, designing a functional city may mean planning a street grid and placement of different facilities in a deeply counterintuitive way. Players have to design their cities to suit bad algorithms, not realistic goals.

How did a beta this flawed make it to market? I know releasing a wine long before its time is nothing new for EA, but the new SimCity must be the worst example. They sacrificed city-building in favor of small-level SimPeople simulation, but somehow managed to get that all wrong, too.

This is not the Maxis team I knew and loved from the 1990s, and it breaks my heart a little.