"The rumors are true. SimCity is back." So said Maxis senior VP Lucy Bradshaw by way of announcing a new PC title in the seminal city-building series for a 2013 release.

During a Game Developers Conference presentation to gathered press, Bradshaw noted its been roughly ten years since Maxis last released a core SimCity title, and that the phones in many people's pockets now have the same power as the machines that ran SimCity 4 back then. The new SimCity will take advantage of advances in computer power to be the first truly 3D entry in the series. "This is like an entirely new playground for us, and we're going to take advantage of it," she said.

New visual features like dust clouds that kick up when a building is dropped will provide what Bradshaw calls "tactility and physicality" to playing the game, even during simple action like zoning. Not only that, but Bradshaw promised the new game will finally feature the "curvy roads" that series fans have been demanding for ages.

Bradshaw emphasized that the next SimCity (which she was careful not to call SimCity 5) will also add new global leaderboard competitions to the game, letting players strive to rank the highest on city attributes both positive (greenest, fittest, most educated) and negative (most depressed, slothful, dirtiest).

Despite promised deeper simulation features in the next SimCity, Bradshaw said the team was trying to make avoid making the game too complex. The aim is for a "what you see is what we sim" system that gives direct, visual feedback for everything you need to know about your city. "You should be able to read your city like a set of tea leaves," she said.

Bradhaw also promised the simulation would also have a game-like, playful side. "You never know when a giant lizard will show up," she said.

Polluting the next SimCity over

The new SimCity will also allow players to affect other connected players in the same virtual region with decisions that they make in their own city, Bradshaw said. Players will be able to cooperate by connecting cities together for regional upgrades, or be a more negative presence by spewing out pollution that will drift to nearby towns, for instance.

"We're talking about a SimCity where the resources are finite," Bradshaw said, "where you're going to be struggling with some of the decisions that people are faced with today, where technology and advances can ultimately have global impact."

To emphasize that point, publisher EA had An Inconvenient Truth director Davis Guggenheim speak at the announcement event. Aside from the scientific and political barriers to slowing and reversing global climate change trends, Guggenheim said, there is also a psychological barrier that leads people to disconnect from awareness of the problem and continue to simply live their life as they did before they knew about it.

Playing SimCity can help people avoid that disconnect, though, Guggenheim said, since they're being directly and consistently confronted with the negative effects of, say, building a cheap and easy coal power plant instead of a more renewable and clean energy source. "Before you know it you have smog in your city, and your water table is getting dirty and the people who live there are getting people are getting ill," he said.