SimCity was the most high profile launch disaster of 2013. As well as server failures, the ‘always online’ and multiplayer focus alienated many fans of the series. While EA have done much to fix SimCity, one developer has decided to start from scratch and make Citybound, the SimCity he always wanted.
Anselm Eickhoff was disappointed by SimCity, so decided to read up on traffic simulation and procedural generation techniques. He began to develop Citybound, a game that will run in a special version of Chrome on PC, Mac or Linux. When he announced his intentions on the SimCity subreddit, the response was incredible. It seems lots of SimCity fans have been waiting for something like Citybound.
Anselm Eickhoff describes the what he wants to do with Citybound:
It’s easy to see why people got excited by that: every point addresses a major criticism of SimCity. Whether or not Cityboundcan deliver is yet to be seen – it’s promising, but it’s a huge project for a single developer. Eickhoff is taking Minecraft as the model for development – charging people for access to the alpha and beta stages, instead of going to Kickstarter or elsewhere for funding.
Eickhoff hopes to get an alpha version ready in one to three months, so we don’t have too long to see whether it lives up to community expectations.
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[Source: Reddit, Citybound DevBlog]
