Earlier today an expansion for the latest installment in the SimCity series was announced, SimCity: Cities of Tomorrow. The expansion, which releases on November 12th will allow gamers to construct their cities as if the materials and resources available were as they will be 50 years from now.

Players have the option of building a clean, energy efficient, futuristic Utopian, or a corporate ruled, fast food ridden wasteland of consumerism and gluttony. Or whatever they want in between.

As of now, we are unsure of exactly what resources and structures will be available for city planners, but we do know that there will be more potential for creativity with SimCity: Cities of Tomorrow than displayed in any game so far.

Reviews for SimCity 2013, the game upon which Cities of Tomorrow will expand were overall lackluster, earning an aggregate score of 64/100 from Metacritic. Hopefully Cities of Tomorrow will pull the franchise a few rungs up the ladder.

Check out the announcement trailer and stay tuned to Gamingbolt for more updates as they are released.

It’s no secret that EA’s actions over the past years have earned them the reputation of being the epitome of a money hungry publisher who gorges at its consumer base. May it be the attempts to rob some established franchises of its identities (cough *Dead Space* cough), or the implementation of harsh and nonfunctional DRM in some of its game, EA has only managed to mashal the ire of fans.

Its most recent debacle, SimCity, was one of the most disastrous launches in the history of video games. The DRM blighted what is otherwise a great game, rendering the game unplayable to many. EA Labels boss explains that DRM was never a main priority among them, and was not implemented in Sim City just to combat piracy.

“That’s not the reality; I was involved in all the meetings. DRM was never even brought up once,” said Frank in an interview with GamesIndustry.

“You don’t build an MMO because you’re thinking of DRM – you’re building a massively multiplayer experience, that’s what you’re building.”

Frank assures us that DRM was not rammed down the throats by the executives, and that it was a part of the developers vision of the game.

“DRM is a failed dead-end strategy; it’s not a viable strategy for the gaming business,” he added.

“For the folks who have conspiracy theories about evil suits at EA forcing DRM down the throats of Maxis, that’s not the case at all,”

“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.”

SimCity was unanimously bashed for its strict implementation of DRM which forced owners into waiting queues which lasted anywhere between 30 mins to an hour,  just to play the game. We highly doubt that EA would repeat the same mistake after that backslash.

5. Sim City

One of the best possible thing you could want from a reboot is that breathes new life into a classic franchise by updating and refining it to meet more modern expectations, and that’s precisely what Sim City does.

The interface is sleek and refined, polished yet still easily navigable. They key difference is the implementation of more social, competitive elements. This is the first Sim City to feature bonafide interconnected online modes, pitching cities either against each other or forcing them to work side-by-side.

Online regions shake up the entire city dynamic, inviting real players into your region to create vast, interconnected states, each affecting one another is hitherto unknown ways.

Even small tweaks like pollution creating visible and tangible smog bring a degree of authenticity into your cities; never before has a Sim City game felt as alive as this.

4. Borderlands 2

There was a time when first and foremost games stood for fun, carnage and vomiting through joy. Borderlands 2 is all that and then some, a robust exploration into what’ll be one of the most joyous 4-person co-op experiences you’re ever likely to have.

Refined and injected with ever more personality than before, Borderlands 2 makes Pandora more open and more varied than ever before. It’s only now you can really look back and accuse the original Borderlands of Chronic Brown Syndrome even though it’s one of the more colourful entrants into the shooter genre.

In fact, Borderlands 2 makes Borderlands look like crap, taking every element and extrapolating it to ridiculous ends, which is really what the Borderlands ethos is all about.

Oh, and Tiny Tina, she’s the absolute boss.

3. XCOM: Enemy Unknown 

Winner of gamescom 2012 Bronze Bolt and Bolt From the Blue.

Now for something completely different, and perhaps the surprising entrant into our gamescom 2012 Top 5 list. XCOM: Enemy Unknown is a 2K reboot of a classic 1990’s turn based strategy game widely regarded as having some of the very best PC titles of that era. To the extent that to this day the 1994 UFO: Enemy Unknown -coined XCOM in the American and PlayStation releases- still garners an impressive fanbase.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown manages the spectacular feat of both being being a slick, turn-based strategy game for the current generation, but also captures the very essence of 90’s PC gaming in a neat little bag of nostalgia. The pre-rendered cutscenes whilst in glorious High Definition hark back to the juddery, pixelated mush of games gone-by, gently tickling your reminiscence in a way that’s almost magical.

The turn-based nature provides a plethora of tactical possibility and ingenuity, one can’t simply blame a faster trigger finger for failure in XCOM: Enemy Unknown, for failure you are to blame. Failure also has consequence too, once a solider is dead then forever they are departed from this world, meaning these seemingly faceless individuals may garner significance for the playing; potentially a significant disheartening loss both tactically and also emotionally.

Sim City is coming February 2013, and man it looks good. This is the Sim City game we have been waiting for ever since Sim City 4, almost a decade ago.

We don’t have much else to go on: the footage looked great, and it looked like some degree of freedom was afforded to the players this time around when it came to micromanaging the placement of individual buildings (players might remember that the older games only allowed for zoning). Apart from that, it seems that disasters return in full form, with the trailer closing with a T Rex attacking a city. It is also the first multiplayer enable Sim City game, that allows players either to collude together and form a nation, with each player managing one city, or by allowing a single player to manage an entire nation of Sim Cities himself.

Sim City is sure to be one of next year’s biggest games. Stay tuned for more info.

Here’s the first gameplay trailer!