The first thing that an old-school SimCity fan is likely to notice about the series' upcoming revamp, due on PCs in February 2013, is the level of detail. This includes graphical detail for sure; cities are finally rendered in full 3D, and you can twist, pan, and zoom the view to your heart's content. The graphics system uses tilt-shift effects and saturated colors to make it seem like you're viewing a tiny, living model world, an impression that is only enhanced by the satisfying thunk and cloud of dust that comes from placing buildings and objects.

But it's the level of detail in the simulation that's really stunning. While the SimCity franchise has always done a good job of covering macro-level trends in the life of your city, the new SimCity lets you get incredibly specific about your citizens. When you set up a residential zone next to a curvy cul-de-sac, for instance, you can actually see the "for sale" signs on the individual houses, and watch the moving vans filling in the vacancies.

Each of those residential families is fully simulated, to the point where you can follow them to their jobs or shopping trips as the days progress. The detail extends to other systems, too: you can actually see your coal piles dwindle as each individual truck picks up the raw fuel and delivers it to a smog-spewing power plant, or watch the cops in a shootout with a distinct criminal. It's a bit mesmerizing.

As far as tracking the larger, macro-level systems in your city, SimCity exposes information in distinct viewable layers, which strip all the extraneous stuff away and "expose the brains to the players" at a glance, as the developers put it. When you place a fire station or a sewage plant, for instance, the game briefly hides all the detritus of the city to show you a live, color-coded circle representing the effective coverage for the new installation. You can then upgrade these buildings after placement with decorative and functional additions, using a snap-on system based on the editor Maxis created for Spore.

The micro- and macro-level details combine to quickly give players a robust idea of how SimCity's interconnected systems play off of each other. Protesting workers in front of a factory, for instance, will tell you point-blank (with a click) that they quit because the factory isn't getting any power. You'll probably notice that those listless, unemployed residents will turn to crime, both by the graffiti that quickly appears on the sides of buildings and by the appearance of individual criminals, such as an arsonist that sets a window-exploding fire in a skyscraper. When things are working, though, the supply trucks and commuter traffic will tell you just as well as the layered view of things like connected power and water systems.

Annoying neighbors for fun and profit

SimCity's persistent, asynchronous multiplayer is focused on joint goals—major projects that can help different nearby cities in different ways. In the demo, this took the form of a new international airport that was being built on the empty land in between three very different cities.

The heavily industrial city to the northwest needs such an airport to provide additional shipping and freight opportunities, while the tourism-focused city to the northeast wants to be able to bring in more fans for a major sporting event at a new stadium (this timed event added a bit of urgency to the airport's completion as well). The newly created, residential-heavy city to the south, meanwhile, mainly saw the airport as a source of new jobs.

A major, multicity project like this requires a lot of varied resources, making them ideal for cooperation between multiple cities. That industrial city, for instance, is perfectly set up to create a plant that can produce the metallic alloys the airport requires, while the southern city with a surfeit of unemployed people can contribute the raw manpower needed to construct the terminals.

Cities in the new SimCity can share resources in other ways as well. It's relatively easy for a darkened city to connect up to a thriving power grid from the industrial metropolis next door, though the power-heavy city needs to grant permission for this kind of connection first (and it's not exactly clear what's in it for them, other than the joy of power altruism).

Connecting cities by road can also help automatically balance some deficiencies via the magic of the commute. In the demo, for instance, connecting a road from the new city to the town with a lot of empty storefronts led to an immediate traffic jam of cars eager to flood in for work opportunities. In short, if you want your city to be a success, you're going to have to make it an attractive place to live and work compared to its surroundings.

Connecting different cities isn't always a positive, though. Nearby towns can also share negative externalities like pollution or crime. In the E3 demo, a criminal in a flashy red car was seen driving in from a largely lawless section of the industrial town to rob a bank in the affluent part of the tourist-heavy city, zooming right by a police station as he did.

With a required Internet connection to play, some might be worried that SimCity will run into Diablo III style server problems at launch. The developers are adamant that they'll be putting backstops in place to prevent those kind of day one issues, but said that if it becomes a problem they could briefly allow people to play offline while things get fixed. That said, the game is designed to be played in that persistent, multiplayer world, so players won't be able to gleefully destroy a city and then go back to an earlier save file as if nothing ever happened, for instance.