Sim City for PC is out now on EA's Origin Store

Electronic Arts has launched the latest version of its popular city-building franchise—Sim City. You can grab the game from EA’s digital distribution service Origin. The game is available in two flavours, a limited edition and a digital deluxe edition. The limited edition costs Rs 1,499 while the digital deluxe edition costs Rs 2,499.

The only difference between the two versions is that the digital deluxe edition includes all the day one DLC that EA has released for Sim City, which includes the British City Set, the French City Set, and the German City Set. These seem to be mostly aesthetic changes, and don’t have any radical impact on game balance.

Sim City is the latest in the popular city building franchise, and is meant to be a reboot to the series. The game goes back to its roots as it streamlines the gameplay of the previous games while leaving behind some of the arbitrary complexities that the previous games had, like the difficulty in laying down underground things like subway systems and water systems.

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Sim City is out now

Last year, Lucy Bradshaw, senior vice president of developer Maxis, which was behind the hits Sim City 2000 and Sim City 3000, said both purists and newcomers should enjoy the upcoming game that she described as the most realistic Sim City title yet. The studio had not put out a game in the franchise since Sim City 4 in 2004, but Bradshaw said EA had been considering reinventing the game for years.

The major new feature in Sim City is the game’s unique take on multiplayer. Multiplayer in itself is a new feature to the franchise. When you play a game, you have to first pick a region where you will build a city. This region can be anything, ranging from a small two-city region to a large 16-city region. Other players can join your region and take to building cities on the empty city slots. The game is balanced around co-operation between the different cities in a region.

The multiplayer has also ended up causing quite a stir, as the game requires you to be online all the time—even if you’re playing alone in a private region. While this had originally caused fans to get angry at EA, the problem revealed its true form during the US launch of the game, where a staggering amount of gamers were unable to even start the game. This is presumably because EA failed to predict the number of day-one players.

While the game may be off to a rocky start, EA may be working on fixing all of its server issues, and it will probably be playable by the end of the week.