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Nowhere is this clearer than in the Parks’ levelling systems. The basic park levels aren't particularly pretty or interesting.
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But then the question remains – why not play those games to get your fix of running a park, rather than these simplistic versions?
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Of course it would be far too much to ask the Amusement Park to offer the same level of building variety as RollerCoaster Tycoon, or the Zoo type to offer the mechanics of Zoo Tycoon. You may be able to zone out your Park area, but the building options within each Park type are sorely limited. The problem is that even with Cities’ impressive level of granularity and the extra microscopic dimension that Parklife gives to recreational spaces, it can only go so far – and Parklife reveals its limitations far too early in the process. Players can set the price on the gates, lay out all the concessions, amenities and attractions, and get creative with the shape and size of the park – likely attractive to those dedicated players that want to accurately depict real-world parks like Hyde and Central. Rather than set down a pre-fabricated park of minimal size, Parklife allows players to zone out an area as a park space and then build a park road by road, attraction by attraction, tree by tree. British landmarks, French landmarks, and more were available early in SimCity’s lifespan.Where Natural Disasters and Green Cities felt like they brought a sense of reality and vulnerability to our precious cities, Parklife is mostly a mixed bag of aesthetic assets that allow players to design recreational spaces in a more granular fashion. EA clearly made SimCity expecting to sell people new buildings, both down the line and at launch. The former path would seem to be easier, and indeed it’s the model EA followed with 2013’s disastrous SimCity reboot. There are two ways to monetize a city builder: You can release expansions with new buildings or release new features. That said, Cities: Skylines is the most successful implementation of Paradox’s model-so successful, in fact, that 2018’s Cities: Skylines feels like its own sequel. Even as someone that doesn’t mind Paradox’s setup, I’ll admit it’s intimidating when you go to purchase a game and realize there are 40-plus different add-ons to sift through too, trying to discern what’s important to buy and what’s not. Others lament the trend, reminiscing about a mythical time when games didn’t want to squeeze as much money out of players as possible. Paradox is a microcosm for the industry-wide “Games as a Service” debate, with some happy to have a reason to keep playing the games they already bought and love. That model permeates most of Paradox’s published titles, from Crusader Kings II to Europa Universalis IV to Stellaris and so on. In many ways, Paradox predicted the current “Games as a Service” trend-a near-constant stream of post-release DLC, with certain smaller features given away to players for free. Paradox’s DLC strategy is controversial, to say the least.