EA and Maxis are already updating their classic franchise with things like curved roads, but Sim City is also coming to Facebook, the company announced today at E3.

Maxis Senior vice President Lucy Bradshaw made it clear where EA is setting its sights with SimCity social.

Screenshot showing the features of SimCity Societies: Destinations. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“One of our best known franchises, Sim City, has seen a lot of imitators over the years,” she said, in a not so subtle-dig at Zynga’s Cityville.

The game looks like a (much) more detailed version of Cityville, with good and evil multiplayer mechanics a la “Idle Worship” to give a little more depth of interaction beyond “beg your friends for a few more bricks.” It’s a similar story that Maxis is trying to tell with their new full SimCity title – the focus is on building an interconnected world where “social interaction” extends to every action the player takes in city creation.

EA has already seen some significant success with Sim franchises on Facebook – Th Sims Social may have declined faster than some might have thought, but it saw an impressive debut that challenged Zynga for the top spot in social games. Given the proven success of Cityville, SimCity Social is looking to have a good shot at doing that again.

The developers are promising a more intense depth of interaction than most city-building games on Facebook, and it will be interesting to see if the franchise that basically invented the genre can do it again on Facebook.

“You can focus more on the industrial side, you’ll have more pollution. Too much on business there might be more crime,” says developer Jamie Laes with Playfish. “There’s a lot of pushback and a lot of cause and effect coming from different areas of the game.”