Yea. It's "cool" in concept but there is nothing information-wise about the game. Does it fix the problems of CS1? Does it introduce new features? I want to be excited about it, but there is nothing to be excited about. Getting excited about a single trailer will just lead to disappointment later.
It’s annoying but it seems to be the way things are marketed these days to build up hype so I can’t really fault them for it. Better to release info piecemeal as opposed to one big info dump if you want to build up a following.
I'm all for the build up with piecemeal information, but this "release" contains no information. If they so much as said "Seasons matter", I'd be happy.
If foreshadowing is one of their intention with the teaser, I'm afraid they'll push raytracing very hard. Their trailer had a lot of 'reflect in water', 'reflect in glass panes' moments.
Eugh, graphics is the least interesting things about these kind of games! I would take better simulation and pixel grapics rather than fake simulation and "RTX ON".
Yes, but I said "(or if it is, it'll be like CP2077 on the original PS4/XB1)". I simply can't see the game running very well on 10GB of RAM. Maybe I'm being pessimistic, but that's just what I think.
I don't think there's been any official communication from MS, but it seems well-established at this point that Xbox games are required to release both on Series X and S, and with feature parity - except for graphics modes.
I'll be so excited if this allows multiplayer city building. Imagine the possibilities...
First of all, you get to collaborate and build things faster.
You could have a voting mechanic where the citizens (AI) resolves conflicts.
You could assign roles to subordinate players to manage things like traffic, services, new developments, etc.
You could implement trade across city lines, and have acquisitions.
It could easily turn into a MMO of epic proportions; with whole worlds built out.
And the other players could show up at city council subcommittee hearings to denounce your mouse clicks as the insidious, carceral hand of Big Developer, sucking the character right out of the neighborhood.
Truly excited about this one - there are not enough of these games in the genre. I wish they had announced a date but even if they had who knows how accurate it would actually be?
The only thing I got from the trailer would be ray-traced graphics and the description suggests that actions have more consequences which I read as bulldozing peoples houses makes people really mad at you and things like that
One of my favorite mod in Skylines that you can import _real world_ terrain maps into the game. Building your own city but better is a good fun (and challenge!) https://terrain.party/ Hope this will work in the sequel too
I spent so many hours hunting for cool bits of real world terrain and then massaging them into playable scenarios for myself (it's a lot of work to smooth out artifacts in the data and then add functioning water, vegetation, initial road connections, etc.). I don't know what the licensing concerns for the elevation data and maps would be, but I hope they consider integrating this functionality directly into the game in the future.
You can get heightmaps from NASA's SRTM data without any licensing concerns at all, and they can be used in Cities Skylines (without mods) without any problem (provided you put the heightmap into the right file format). This was pretty much always possible, it's just been a lot of steps and sort of a hassle without projects like that facilitating the process for people.
It would be incredible to have a globe viewer/DEM download tool built in to the game, but the bandwith required for hosting the project might turn into an issue (I'm reminded of the situation with high res imagery for Command: Modern Operations/TacView, where users are strongly encouraged to download only what they need due to server constraints).
If you could find heightmaps dating back to seattle's founding that would be pretty annoying map, but only if you couldn't just flatten out parts of it at will with no cost. it's still pretty challenging geographically to this day, but it went through many re-grade projects as it grew.
I hope this time the game can really take advantage of multi core computing, the first one was bounded to a single core: a long as a city has more than 5/10k citizens, it starts lagging
That was my thought as well. Hell, just subdivide my city as my CPU core count goes up. There would be overhead for boundary interactions but it would still be way better. We can buy 32core chips now.
I have put many hours into Cities Skylines and I am really looking forward to this. The obvious thing people will want them to fix is traffic and vehicle pathfinding, put personally I hope they let us build more pedestrian-focused streets. I so desperately want to build walk and bike friendly cities with beautiful pedestrian malls and walking-only streets but the game kind of forces you to build out extensive car infrastructure. I also hope they offer a way to do true mixed-use building instead of being forced to choose residential/commercial/industrial/office.
I also hope that they'll let us build more "european" cities that aren't so horribly car centric and are more diverse.
Hopefully we also get a bit more diversity of gameplay - Skylines got pretty repetitive quickly with only challenge being traffic optimization. The new DLCs didn't really add that much to gameplay except different things to paint between roads. I hope things like universities, industry, agriculture, airports, etc. become a an actual challenge to build, fund and retain - maybe pull in some things from the Anno series to make it happen.
I'm curious how much they'll pull over from the existing DLCs, the Plazas and Promenades pack does allow for pedestrian cities. But not in a European sense despite the dev being in Europe.
We could even begin with a concept of mixed zoning that's so standard in many world cities. The usual "stores on the street, apartments above" design.
(I was really surprised that actual USA is building cities the same way SimCity modeled - with complete separation between commercial and residental areas).
This was standard in US cities in the early 20th century (prior to 1920) before the value of the real estate (and taxes) and automobiles changed the model. Mixed use may be coming back-California recently passed a state law allowing for it, I believe . Here is one article on the topic of mixed-use:
And if you haven’t read anything by Jane Jacobs, it’s worthwhile checking out her books written (1950-1960) about the importance of city neighborhoods from the perspective of NYC urban dwellers.
The limits of every simulation game come into play where they start to "cartoon" how the world actually works, which has always been the case with city builders in the Simcity mold. The approaches to traffic, crime, pollution etc all act in a way to give an impression of the real world while not really going deep into the subject and making the solutions be a bit lock-and-key, fitting our existing norms rather than presenting an emergent problem: a lot of times it comes down to building "expensive structure X" to solve your city's issues. The original Simcity is ultimately broken, speedrunner style, by reaching into the guts of the sim to realize that every zone just needs a token road or rail by it, not a connection, and therefore can be approached with a nonsensical pattern of disconnected structures.
I think Skylines did a good job of modelling complex traffic, but when I came back to it a month or two ago, I was disappointed by how much it felt like I was steered towards creating a "city of the past" and not engaging with any new technological or economic developments. Like, you can build an Amsterdam-like bike city in Skylines, with the appropriate DLC, but it's not modelled in a fine-grained way and just feels like you have magicked away commuter traffic by dumping bike lanes everywhere.
In the end, if I want to plan a city of the future, I should probably go back to drawing on graph paper like when I was 8 years old.
Well, I personally think that these sandbox games need a bit of suspension of disbelief and roleplay to be truly fun.
If you optimize the fun of the game by breaking it (and that's usually rather easy), you'll just... not have fun with it. This is why I personally prefer to avoid using broken strategies and set my own fun challenges to build themed cities.
Which is why I kinda wish there was more variety in Skylines - besides Vancouver, I also want to make messy cities like Shenzen or Bangkok, or London and maybe deal with local limits and idiosyncrasies.
One rather big cartooning, which the old Sim Cities did better, has to do with development over time. In the first Sim City you started in 1900. And although the implementation of any kind of historical progress was extremely limited (it took a while to get access to nuclear plants as I recall), my imagination did a lot of the work. (Listening to Dire Straits "Telegraph Road" helped too). And SC2000, the last I played, had a lot of progress elements and even the memorable "arcology" futuristic buildings.
In Cities: Skylines, you start in 2010 as I recall. Not only is it rather more implausible to start a city in the wilderness then than in 1900, but you have idiots tweeting at you - forever.
I'd love to see a city builder where the challenge wasn't about urban planning, but in adapting to a changing world. ("Then came the trains, then came the ore, then there was the hard times, then there was a war")
It’s true that every building needs to be on a street but it is nevertheless possible to build substantial pedestrian architecture. I’ve spent many happy hours building pedestrian infrastructure and encouraging my peeps to walk and catch the subway.
And if you don't want your cities to die from traffic congestion you need to make it all walkable with good public transportation.
I can get much further through the middle game by focusing from the start on not building all kinds of roads. I used to run a big highway down the middle of my city thinking that was the right way to do it, but you're vastly better off not doing that, because if you build that road, they'll overuse it.
The sims will walk a pretty unreasonably long way as well, I've built ped overpasses that were packed, while having nice and quiet roads.
CityPlannerPlays is a good youtuber to learn how to build cities that aren't terrible, and aren't overly cheesing the game mechanics:
CPP is really great. Recently discovered, and I'm binge-watching through all his content. I love the stories he's telling, plus the insides he gives as being an actual city planner.
The game desperately needs a 'campaign', similar to (but hopefully richer than) what the Roller Coaster Tycoon series had, just to give some structure to repeated gameplay.
There are scenarios[1] in the game, from my experience that is very similar to what RCT used to have. You're given a map and a point in time where the map has certain issues, and you have to solve them. The issue is that they are gated by DLC, so not all players can experience it. Also they aren't really deep and don't have too much re-playability.
If they don't give us mixed-use zoning I'm going to tableflip, so here's hoping. I dislike how Western-centric the concept of zoning is - in most of the world having a grocery store at the bottom of a building is normal!
Likewise I wish they would model the amenity effect of businesses. Commercial zones in C:S are only about employment, but IMO having good amenities near residences is a huge influencer of QoL and should be modeled.
In fact I would love to see zoning become a more full-fledged game mechanic - balancing the amenity effects of mixing business with residential with the nuisance drawbacks.
Likewise the idea that you had to start every city with a huge freeway is a bit of a turnoff. Give me a start with a train station! I want to make a beach town that's primarily accessed by train!
Don't you mean US-centric? I don't recall a UK city where there wasn't a grocery store within a 10 minute walk of everywhere and I don't recall visiting a city in Europe that wasn't pretty much the same.
It's very common for Dutch shops to have apartments above them. Sometimes it's where the shop owner lives, sometimes not. Many modern shopping malls include a lot of residential space of some sort. Many neighbourhoods have corner shops.
Another interesting thing that these games don't support is reusing existing buildings for a different purpose. Former industrial or dock areas are always popular places to turn into expensive housing or shopping areas.
There are a couple of mods that let you change what buildings are used for, or rebalance how dense they are. Ploppable RICO, Realistic Population, etc. You can even go so far as to use Procedural Objects with Service Cubes. Use PO to create a completely unique building, then hide a Service Cube inside it that provides housing for 100 families, another that provides some commercial, and another that provides a city service like a school or a morgue. There, instant mixed–use building. Overlap it with a subway station for extra realism.
One of my favorite Youtube series is Cities Skylines: MARS <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDX8YQ_aGnY>. The author goes hog–wild and builds a complete city into a dome on Mars using custom assets he created himself (the game comes with asset editors), Procedural Objects, Service Cubes, and liberal use of the Move–It mod. It really is an astounding work of art, but you can also see why Colossal Order didn’t make a game with that level of freedom built–in; it almost becomes more of a 3D modelling program than a game. There’s a fine line between competing with SimCity and competing with Maya or Blender!
Be good if the cost of car parking was accounted for. Want to have cars? You've got to have large parking lots cluttering your space with low appeal, or your buildings cost far more to build / lower density etc
Geoff Manaugh: While you were making those measurements of different real-world cities, did you discover any surprising patterns or spatial relationships?
Librande: Yes, definitely. I think the biggest one was the parking lots. When I started measuring out our local grocery store, which I don't think of as being that big, I was blown away by how much more space was parking lot rather than actual store. That was kind of a problem, because we were originally just going to model real cities, but we quickly realized there were way too many parking lots in the real world and that our game was going to be really boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots.
Manaugh: You would be making SimParkingLot, rather than SimCity.
Librande: [laughs] Exactly. So what we do in the game is that we just imagine they are underground. We do have parking lots in the game, and we do try to scale them -- so, if you have a little grocery store, we'll put six or seven parking spots on the side, and, if you have a big convention center or a big pro stadium, they'll have what seem like really big lots -- but they're nowhere near what a real grocery store or pro stadium would have. We had to do the best we could do and still make the game look attractive.
I too have put lots of time and energy into this and many other city building games.
Agree on everything you say, but I do wonder to what extent the bad traffic and all those limitations are an inherent statement that these games carry by design. A statement on how we think urban design should work blah blah.
SimCity 2000 certainly had a sharper, more pointed set of things to say that presumably originated with Will Wright. Skylines obviously can’t be too political about it, they just have to keep it mild to sell.
> Combine that with that UK city that wants people to get permission to leave there zones...
If you’re referring to the Oxfordshire plan, this has been somewhat misrepresented. The proposal is to limit access through some specific roads in the city center. Residents can use the ring road to access the same destinations without any restrictions.
Yeah, after all the insane conspiracy theories of the past couple of years, I thought conspiracies had peaked. But no, this one takes the cake. Apparently everything that helps people and makes life a bit nicer is inherently suspect and evil. Only if we suffer in mindless dystopia can we be truly free, or something.
Some people oppose walking and biking and transit infrastructure on the basis that poor and other undesirable people will start showing up in their neighborhoods.
Not everything has to be political, but if you start digging, everything is.
a cool extended feature of that would be to have pre-built unoptimized cities with a budget to update existing metro areas to more walkable and efficient metro areas (with metrics that track things like CO2 emissions).
It would be great if a game like that was such an accurate city simulation that you could use it to experiment with different kinds of infrastructure and draw conclusions from that. I'm probably asking way too much, but it would be awesome if possible.
I love the Traffic challenge. Often I build a super condense city with horrible traffic, and then work towards optimizing it while keeping as much as possible intact. I hope that traffic will as well be realistic and that it can be used by city planners. It should not get easier, but more realistic.
Well crap, I'm going to have some serious competition :D
I've been developing a city builder myself over the last year (Metropolis 1998). I wanted to do a 3D version sometime in the future, but alas. Maybe people will be tired of purchasing $15 DLCs on top of a shallow base game (probably not).
As long as the shallow base game still has more gameplay hours than most games I don't think people mind additional (also needing to be worthwhile) content costing money. That's Paradox's general business model and I think it works great for the types of games. I think I have nearly all of the optional content for Cities Skylines now but dollars per hour I'm still doing better than when it launched and when it launched the dollars per hour was still significantly lower than traditional games.
Looking at Metropolis 1998 my feedback would be I'm excited for the concept of a modern take on retro builders but I'm worried the gameplay will end up more "2D grid traffic simulator" than city builder. "Traffic simulator" can be a key layer for city builder die-hards but I'm hesitant that a 2D grid approach would be more interesting than base CS1, particularly with a free mod that simulates traffic more realistically (albeit not as performant what you can do with the traffic and road designs in 3D freeform is also much more interesting). I'll keep an eye on it though, it may be something I pick up in the future as it materializes :).
Thanks! I agree with your feedback. I intend to have different options to mitigate the traffic if people don't want to manage it. My biggest inspiration for the game is actually roller coaster tycoon. I want to offer to the player the option to sit back and enjoy what they built (from scratch if they want!), and then switch back to managing and building their city, much like a theme park.
i like that idea. i would enjoy watching what i built. taking this as a springboard for a feature discussion: many sim games suffer from needing to build american style car centric cities. how is your approach here? could we build historical european cities? futuristic car-free ones? public transport like trams? separate bike paths?
I'd love to fulfill all of those options, and I plan to, but I dont think I will have them all available in the first release build. I'm the only developer working on the game, and the only other person I work with is the pixel artist.
So expect cars and sidewalks. Pedestrian-only walk ways should be possible in the first release.
Also if you're willing to wait about 6 months for any DLC, you can pick it up for a couple dollars. I don't think I've paid more than $5 for any of Cities Skyline's major DLC.
Yes. I'd rather buy an indie game with SOVL and pixel art than a big production. Just seeing the photorealistic images on the steam page is a turn-off. I'll take a game looking like SimCity 2000 or 3000 over that.
Btw I'm also working on my own indie game, it's quite challenging but I'm happy with progress I'm making by being consistent on it.
The graphics remind me a little bit of the ones in OpenTTD (an open source transportation tycoon game), the top down view also looks interesting, since most games just stick to one perspective. Oh, maybe the style is a little bit like the Simutans game (another transportation tycoon), but that depends on the graphics package.
I don't think that anyone has quite done city builders where you can look inside of buildings, so that sounds pretty unique - good luck with your project. I'm pretty sure that the genre is big enough for Cities: Skylines II, niche games like Urbek City Builder (voxel based city builder where building placement matters, almost like a puzzle) and plenty of other games out there, so don't feel too discouraged.
I wouldn't be worried, the market for modern city builders is large enough to support a few of them, assuming they're distinctive enough. I'm kind of shocked nobody made an attempt to displace C:S in the last couple of years. Meanwhile we have hundreds of variants of The Settlers and Caesar.
I'm curious about some of the tech behind this if you don't mind me asking:
1. Is the top down view just rendering the same isometric assets from a different viewpoint, are they pre-baked sprites, or are they completely different and hand-tuned?
2. How are you doing the changing wall height for seeing inside buildings? Do you just have 4 pre-set wall heights that you're animating between globally, or is it dynamic?
I have a hard time with freeform city builders like Skylines or SimCity. The amount of unrestrained freedom makes me question why I'm even playing. I have the same issue with The Sims or something like Planet Zoo.
That and Skylines giving me a blank canvas paralyses me. How does one plan a city? Where do the roads go?
It's the sort of game I want to love, but I just get so overwhelmed by the sheer number of options and I'm not sure what to do.
On the other hand, games like Tropico (at least the later titles - 3, 4, 5, 6) having a "story" to play through help a bit because there is direction in what to build and where. Conversely, though, cities I build in Tropico end up being haphazard patch jobs where I find an empty space and put a dozen wind turbines in it because that's what the mission calls for, and so I miss out on some of the potential satisfaction.
There's two separate subgenres, and that's fine. Because its just a different game in general despite both being simulators.
If you like Tropico, then you probably should give TwoPoint Hospital a try, as well as Ceasar 3, Cleopatra, and a few other games of the more "agent simulation" nature... with actual goals and challenges to defeat and win.
Sim City / Cities Skylines is less about gaming and more about play. There is no winning or losing in these games... I mean nominally, if you run out of money I guess you lose. But the games are setup so that you don't really run out of money under typical circumstances.
I think it correlates to how much uninterrupted blocks of free time you have. My almost middle school son loves it, but he has much more free time than I do (maybe because he hasn't discovered HN yet!). In my free time, I want to have a specific end goal or victory condition.
Nah, there are countless roads to different game style preferences. Sandbox games without constraints can be a nice escape from a life that feels especially regimented, even if you only get to play in them here and there; or they can just be a fun game style that you ran into at the right and that stays interesting through nostalgia and accessible through familiarity; etc.
Conversely, goal-oriented games can just feel like "work" to someone who feels like their life involves a countless measurements and expectations, or just like intellectual labor to someone who is learning all the time; etc
As they say, it's really very hard to account for taste. It's usually not worth trying to analyze it for anyone but yourself (and only then if it helps you to do so).
I similarly get bored of Skylines as soon as the game starts handing you near-infinite money. Making something aesthetically pleasing is only so interesting to me - I want the challenge of constraints.
I actually have a similar problem with the Tropico remakes. Tropico 1 was hard. You could not survive a mission without dipping into the dictator toolsets. So striking a constant balance between economics and human rights was an interesting challenge. (It also made for a much more biting satire). The games since 3 are still pleasant city-builders in their own rights, but make it a bit too easy to win on the straight and narrow.
You could use a game trainer to limit how much money you receive. I usually do the opposite since I hate grinding in a game for virtual money or points, feels like a waste of time for me as compared to working on something cool in the real world.
Same decay happened in Civilization. Civ4 was a great challenge in terms of making choices and fighting off a somewhat competent (at least enough to make you take it into account) AI. Civ6 seems to be more of a design game after you get past the initial hump a getting some early infrastructure together without going bankrupt or conquered.
Almost all simulation games suffer this problem of, well, winning. You'll see complaints that the late game of Civilization 6 is boring, as a sufficient advantage means a winner has been effectively determined.
The only fix I can see is to have much better scenarios, or AI opponents, which I tend to think only the external communities around these games can produce. They generally don't allow that level of access for mods though.
I haven't really spent much time on simulation games past SimCity 2000, but I find this odd. Even the most winsome cities and countries in the world are struggling.
Instead of scenarios or AI, why wouldn't it be the case that success invites more problems? You've got issues with immigration happening too rapidly for the population's taste, inflation devalues your accumulated resources at a more rapid pace, essential workers' pay isn't keeping up with FAANG, inequality is rampant, lots of homeless druggies appreciating your shelter & food bank infrastructure but locals are fed up, and also the next level up in government works against you out of envy or simple lack of appreciation for you contribution to the public purse. Power structures crumble because citizens get lazy and entitled, not knowing how good they have it, populism and self-interest rule the day.
Design success as the enemy of success, and you never run out of issues to solve. That said, it would be nice to see the winning endgame in real life for a change.
I'm sure you could design it in a way that people wouldn't mind. Most games get harder as you succeed at them. Rimworld is a builder game that does it. And not just through increased complexity, but by making the environment more hostile.
Having a dynamic environment is one of the things that I've long wanted city sims to have. SimCity always had disasters, which is in the same vein, but they always felt like an afterthought (or a joke, in the case of alien or monster attacks). City simulations pretend to be serious flaw toys, so let me deal with a recession (or even a boom), or a dioxine contamination, or civil unrest. Not with a minigame, but let me deal with the city management aspects of those events.
Exactly. It's essentially a sandbox city builder with some highway optimisation thrown in. SimCities 4 was more fun because it was more challenging and felt more like a game, rather than a sandbox.
There are so many interesting gameplay things Skylines could do to be more fun for me like:
1. Subway optimization, e.g faster train cost more but people get to their destination faster, slower trains allow for shorter distances between stations.
2. Parking optimization, e.g. building with parking costs more (because more land has to be bought), but allows people to travel to the place in
3. Low vs high taxes, nanny state or pure capitalism? How would that affect the economy and people's satisfaction?
Do you know that Cities Skylines introduces the services after you reach certain population milestones? It starts with just Power and Water. https://skylines.paradoxwikis.com/Milestones
The trick is to start small, like a country town with farms and a small downtown. Build from there.
There's also the flip side which is just sandbox building a city to your specifications and ignoring the city building aspects of it. Almost like building a model of a city.
I think a lot of people compare playing the game to the hobby of model trains / town building.
There really isn’t an end goal for me, I’m not trying to make my city a certain size. I’m trying to make something beautiful, that is fun to imagine living in.
I also think mods are essential if this is the way you want to play, as it’s much easier to get nit-picky and detail oriented with the correct tools.
For me, a lot of game choice comes down to: I build/plan/learn things all day. Sometimes I want to do that in a game, but often I'm looking for something that doesn't feel like that -- either because its a game style that taps into a very different kind of experience or because its one that I internalized so long ago that engagement feels pretty chill.
Learning a new sandbox's toolbox of system parts and laying out clever designs while I stare at a screen can read a lot like what I do with most of my weekdays, but without the return in pay or reputation.
The 'pointlessness' is what attracts me. I dislike playing according to other peoples goals, achievements, rules. I'll make up my own, thank you very much. And I will change my mind whenever I feel like it.
How does one plan a city indeed! Why would you want the answer?
Thinking about schools, the workplace, the economic systems we live under, and how many things constantly require action from our brains (vs. free space to imagine), the former three all frequently punishing significant deviation from a given norm, this isn't entirely surprising. Unfortunately I've found it impacts me, too.
And then when they have kids, they remember how much fun it is. Kids give me the excuse not to be embarrassed, but I'm not really building the sandcastles just for them!
Ironically, my absolute favourite beach activity is road building. I head off to the edges where the rocks, sand, and shore meet where the sand is damp. I then compact damp sand onto the rocks to make little roads and try to build a network of roads that keeps road gradient below a certain threshold. It’s a fun problem solving exercise and almost on a par with Cities Skylines!
> That and Skylines giving me a blank canvas paralyses me. How does one plan a city? Where do the roads go?
The base game isn't quite this much of a blank canvas. You have a budget, and you have city needs. You try to fit the needs within your budget, while trying to expand and grow with what the immediate geography allows you to do.
You almost never (unless you're an advanced player who knows how to scam a bunch of money) have money to waste to treat central planning as a blank canvas.
> The amount of unrestrained freedom makes me question why I'm even playing.
Well I hope you don't have the same feeling about life. Because we are all free to choose our own adventure (with some choices obviously better than others), and there are no clear objectives or goals besides what you set for yourself.
City builders experience leans too much towards god mode that closely resembles creators vision rather than the compromised mess that actual urban planning is. A proper city building experience would lead to a haphazard landscape where you hate 50% of what exists but just relieved it even got built in the first place.
I was fixing some traffic issues in a Cities: Skylines game and had to bulldoze some of the first housing I had laid down. I thought for a moment about the families who had lived there for years, and where they would move to, as I put in wider roads.
These games all represent resident happiness as some function of traffic, crime, garbage, pollution, but I don't think any of them have made an effort to zoom in on particular actions and how they effect the population. Or to represent long-term fulfillment. It would be a very different kind of game to highlight what actions an urban planner takes that have the biggest impact on residents.
Maybe the old newspaper function in Simcity games tried to capture this - or the outraged advisors a bit too, but it's never felt narratively driven to me.
This is what attracted me to the Surviving Mars series. It does a good job of constraining resources and giving you a general goal to build towards when building your settlement in a specific drop zone. You do reach a point where you feel like everything is on cruise control and there's nothing more you can really achieve, but its fun to pick up once a year at this point.
Some of the later DLC have been pretty half hearted yet at the same time they've hired modders for some of the more popular mods (like traffic manager) who've said they weren't working on DLC, so this has been in the works for a while
You can see a bus at 1:27 and 1:52, but I really hope that the public transport system is better than what they showed in this first trailer, especially trains.
One thing that annoys me about the first game is the way the commute times are not factored in at all to happiness or whatever. People literally go from one side of the map to the other for work and you aren't punished for terrible transit design (and cars magically disappear). I think the AI is too crappy for commute times to be a feature, but I hope they improve AI and add it for the sequel because it is just one of the most important aspects of city design.
That would be a nice improvement to the simulation. Currently traffic really only affects city services; more buildings will burn down if the firetrucks take longer to arrive, more sick people die if the ambulance can't pick them up in time, etc, etc.
Hugely excited to see what the game really looks like. If they could fix performance and add some new gameplay dynamics it'd be great but if they are going to make it something completely different I'd be excited to see it as well.
I loved the SimCity series, so you'd think that Cities: Skylines would have appealed to me, but it's always felt frustrating, which I attribute to a few core issues:
- Agent-based simulation instead of model-based (the latter is what the Maxis games used). Agent-based simulation is performance-intensive, and in practice it led to all sorts of gamebreaking bugs. Last I checked, the game still caused traffic jams because every car would enter the turning lane immediately. It also causes the infamous death waves. Some of these are hard to fix without changing the core simulation model. Some of these would be trivial to patch, and it's kind of embarrassing that they haven't.
- The DLC is essentially mandatory, in that they release updates to the free game alongside every DLC, and the free updates introduce some of the features but not all, and they end up breaking the balance of the game unless you purchase the full DLC.
- The game is far too easy, unrealistically so. Even on the harder difficulty setting, it's just way too easy to create a cash cow and create the optimal city without any real challenge.
Cities:Skylines is good in sandbox mode, if you want to create beautiful-looking models of cities. Which is a valid use case and there's definitely a market for that. But for people who like the original SimCity games and enjoy simulations, it's... just not that. There's a reason that professional city planners used the original SimCity games as tools for study and development, and that's what made (for example) SimCity 4 Rush Hour so much fun to play.
Whenever I want to play a citybuilder, I end up going for Factorio, Oxygen Not Included, or Rimworld. None of those are citybuilders, but they're the closest thing I've found to substitute for what made SimCity games enjoyable that Cities:Skylines lacks.
> Whenever I want to play a citybuilder, I end up going for Factorio, Oxygen Not Included, or Rimworld. None of those are citybuilders, but they're the closest thing I've found to substitute for what made SimCity games enjoyable that Cities:Skylines lacks.
You know, I never thought about the factory automation/colony simulator genres as being similar to the city builder genre, but... now that you brought it up, I think I see how said genres would appeal.
You can definitely make the city less traffic-heavy, especially after the DLC. But even in vanilla, for the commute traffic it's mostly a matter of having enough pedestrian bridges and tunnels so that they have uninterrupted journeys, and for the trucks the trick is to place rail depots near industrial and commercial districts so that they never need to get to the highway. Do those two things and you've cleared out most of the problem.
Everything else is taken care of by designating a faster arterial road at certain intervals(so that the driving AI's preferences are more predictable) and then designing a one-way flow in and out of areas with a lot of conflict points. It is not exactly how I want to envision my city, but it's also not extremely complicated to work out.
The game really limits traffic reduction mostly through the city services, which all have to drive down the roads to provide services.
I feel like most of these city building games is that they feel like a doll house. You can create all the nice things you want and have a pretty city that you'd like to live in.
However, the cities themselves don't have much of a personality. It's barely a simulation. I'd like to see certain areas becoming rough sort of ghettos. People in the city having different backgrounds. Just creating a school in those places would not necessarily improve things.
I'd like to see economic effects happening and causing disruption in the city. Big companies coming and going and affecting daily life.
I'd also like to see rich regions forming. Cool places that everyone wants to go.
Essentially, I'd like to have less control and see things not working out exactly like I planned. Everything always goes exactly to plan.
I completely agree, and it's true more for Skylines than the old SimCity games. The "simulation" aspect is lacking in respect to developing different kinds of neighborhoods. I spent a lot of time in Skylines modding and creating custom neighborhood sets that could emulate various levels of density or socio-economic status. But that's the doll house approach, it doesn't emerge from the simulation. At least in SimCity 4k you could create distinctly rich and poor neighborhoods and the factors that led to those neighborhood types were reasonably well-simulated.
I think one problem with many city builders is how they don't really have proper sense of time. Houses you plop down now are exactly the same as you did 50 in-game years ago, and even megaprojects usually complete in trivial amounts of in-game time. Combine this with the player having near god-like powers to build whatever and eventually raze down and reshape any parts, and it leaves cities very hollow
Imagine the individual people in the simulated cities were run on a ChatGPT-like backend, and remembered everything. Held grudges for destroying their neighborhood. And therefore self-organized into gangs, etc.
I hope they get perf down. The first game runs great on my M1 until we get to around 100K residents or so. That's not a huge number of people for a real world city, but I guess simulating traffic + pathfinding for 100K+ actors is a dicey proposition CPU-wise.
IIRC, SimCity 4 didn't have this issue but it sort of cheats by chopping the map up into multiple tiles in a region and only simulating a subset of your population. Which honestly seems acceptable to me.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 277 ms ] threadFirst of all, you get to collaborate and build things faster. You could have a voting mechanic where the citizens (AI) resolves conflicts. You could assign roles to subordinate players to manage things like traffic, services, new developments, etc. You could implement trade across city lines, and have acquisitions. It could easily turn into a MMO of epic proportions; with whole worlds built out.
So. Many. Things!
It would be incredible to have a globe viewer/DEM download tool built in to the game, but the bandwith required for hosting the project might turn into an issue (I'm reminded of the situation with high res imagery for Command: Modern Operations/TacView, where users are strongly encouraged to download only what they need due to server constraints).
Use this instead: https://heightmap.skydark.pl/#
Hopefully we also get a bit more diversity of gameplay - Skylines got pretty repetitive quickly with only challenge being traffic optimization. The new DLCs didn't really add that much to gameplay except different things to paint between roads. I hope things like universities, industry, agriculture, airports, etc. become a an actual challenge to build, fund and retain - maybe pull in some things from the Anno series to make it happen.
(I was really surprised that actual USA is building cities the same way SimCity modeled - with complete separation between commercial and residental areas).
https://www.secfin.com/private-money-blog/2021/12/15/the-ris...
And if you haven’t read anything by Jane Jacobs, it’s worthwhile checking out her books written (1950-1960) about the importance of city neighborhoods from the perspective of NYC urban dwellers.
I think Skylines did a good job of modelling complex traffic, but when I came back to it a month or two ago, I was disappointed by how much it felt like I was steered towards creating a "city of the past" and not engaging with any new technological or economic developments. Like, you can build an Amsterdam-like bike city in Skylines, with the appropriate DLC, but it's not modelled in a fine-grained way and just feels like you have magicked away commuter traffic by dumping bike lanes everywhere.
In the end, if I want to plan a city of the future, I should probably go back to drawing on graph paper like when I was 8 years old.
If you optimize the fun of the game by breaking it (and that's usually rather easy), you'll just... not have fun with it. This is why I personally prefer to avoid using broken strategies and set my own fun challenges to build themed cities.
Which is why I kinda wish there was more variety in Skylines - besides Vancouver, I also want to make messy cities like Shenzen or Bangkok, or London and maybe deal with local limits and idiosyncrasies.
Magnasanti
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTJQTc-TqpU
In Cities: Skylines, you start in 2010 as I recall. Not only is it rather more implausible to start a city in the wilderness then than in 1900, but you have idiots tweeting at you - forever.
I'd love to see a city builder where the challenge wasn't about urban planning, but in adapting to a changing world. ("Then came the trains, then came the ore, then there was the hard times, then there was a war")
Yeah, I wanted to start Skylines but found that it all begins with a highway...
I can get much further through the middle game by focusing from the start on not building all kinds of roads. I used to run a big highway down the middle of my city thinking that was the right way to do it, but you're vastly better off not doing that, because if you build that road, they'll overuse it.
The sims will walk a pretty unreasonably long way as well, I've built ped overpasses that were packed, while having nice and quiet roads.
CityPlannerPlays is a good youtuber to learn how to build cities that aren't terrible, and aren't overly cheesing the game mechanics:
https://www.youtube.com/@CityPlannerPlays
[1] : https://skylines.paradoxwikis.com/Scenarios
Likewise I wish they would model the amenity effect of businesses. Commercial zones in C:S are only about employment, but IMO having good amenities near residences is a huge influencer of QoL and should be modeled.
In fact I would love to see zoning become a more full-fledged game mechanic - balancing the amenity effects of mixing business with residential with the nuisance drawbacks.
Likewise the idea that you had to start every city with a huge freeway is a bit of a turnoff. Give me a start with a train station! I want to make a beach town that's primarily accessed by train!
Don't you mean US-centric? I don't recall a UK city where there wasn't a grocery store within a 10 minute walk of everywhere and I don't recall visiting a city in Europe that wasn't pretty much the same.
Another interesting thing that these games don't support is reusing existing buildings for a different purpose. Former industrial or dock areas are always popular places to turn into expensive housing or shopping areas.
One of my favorite Youtube series is Cities Skylines: MARS <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDX8YQ_aGnY>. The author goes hog–wild and builds a complete city into a dome on Mars using custom assets he created himself (the game comes with asset editors), Procedural Objects, Service Cubes, and liberal use of the Move–It mod. It really is an astounding work of art, but you can also see why Colossal Order didn’t make a game with that level of freedom built–in; it almost becomes more of a 3D modelling program than a game. There’s a fine line between competing with SimCity and competing with Maya or Blender!
Geoff Manaugh: While you were making those measurements of different real-world cities, did you discover any surprising patterns or spatial relationships?
Librande: Yes, definitely. I think the biggest one was the parking lots. When I started measuring out our local grocery store, which I don't think of as being that big, I was blown away by how much more space was parking lot rather than actual store. That was kind of a problem, because we were originally just going to model real cities, but we quickly realized there were way too many parking lots in the real world and that our game was going to be really boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots.
Manaugh: You would be making SimParkingLot, rather than SimCity.
Librande: [laughs] Exactly. So what we do in the game is that we just imagine they are underground. We do have parking lots in the game, and we do try to scale them -- so, if you have a little grocery store, we'll put six or seven parking spots on the side, and, if you have a big convention center or a big pro stadium, they'll have what seem like really big lots -- but they're nowhere near what a real grocery store or pro stadium would have. We had to do the best we could do and still make the game look attractive.
Agree on everything you say, but I do wonder to what extent the bad traffic and all those limitations are an inherent statement that these games carry by design. A statement on how we think urban design should work blah blah.
SimCity 2000 certainly had a sharper, more pointed set of things to say that presumably originated with Will Wright. Skylines obviously can’t be too political about it, they just have to keep it mild to sell.
I do remember this guy making a great series of videos explaining a lot about how cities were/are made while playing through a modded copy of Skylines. Highly recommend here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwkSQD3vqK1S1NiHIxxF2g_Uy...
I can imagine what you’re wanting for will probably be delivered with a variety of mods and community content. Or as DLC?
Since you asked, "Conspiracy Theorists Think Walkable Cities Are Really Open-Air Prison Dystopias Now":
* https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7g898/walkable-15-minute-ci...
"Conspiracy Theorists Are Coming for the 15-Minute City"
* https://www.wired.co.uk/article/15-minute-cities-conspiracy-...
If you’re referring to the Oxfordshire plan, this has been somewhat misrepresented. The proposal is to limit access through some specific roads in the city center. Residents can use the ring road to access the same destinations without any restrictions.
Not everything has to be political, but if you start digging, everything is.
I've been developing a city builder myself over the last year (Metropolis 1998). I wanted to do a 3D version sometime in the future, but alas. Maybe people will be tired of purchasing $15 DLCs on top of a shallow base game (probably not).
Time to get to work
Looking at Metropolis 1998 my feedback would be I'm excited for the concept of a modern take on retro builders but I'm worried the gameplay will end up more "2D grid traffic simulator" than city builder. "Traffic simulator" can be a key layer for city builder die-hards but I'm hesitant that a 2D grid approach would be more interesting than base CS1, particularly with a free mod that simulates traffic more realistically (albeit not as performant what you can do with the traffic and road designs in 3D freeform is also much more interesting). I'll keep an eye on it though, it may be something I pick up in the future as it materializes :).
So expect cars and sidewalks. Pedestrian-only walk ways should be possible in the first release.
found it on Steam. added to my wishlist. will also check out early access...
Btw I'm also working on my own indie game, it's quite challenging but I'm happy with progress I'm making by being consistent on it.
The graphics remind me a little bit of the ones in OpenTTD (an open source transportation tycoon game), the top down view also looks interesting, since most games just stick to one perspective. Oh, maybe the style is a little bit like the Simutans game (another transportation tycoon), but that depends on the graphics package.
I don't think that anyone has quite done city builders where you can look inside of buildings, so that sounds pretty unique - good luck with your project. I'm pretty sure that the genre is big enough for Cities: Skylines II, niche games like Urbek City Builder (voxel based city builder where building placement matters, almost like a puzzle) and plenty of other games out there, so don't feel too discouraged.
I'm curious about some of the tech behind this if you don't mind me asking:
1. Is the top down view just rendering the same isometric assets from a different viewpoint, are they pre-baked sprites, or are they completely different and hand-tuned?
2. How are you doing the changing wall height for seeing inside buildings? Do you just have 4 pre-set wall heights that you're animating between globally, or is it dynamic?
I have no confidence in the sequel.
That and Skylines giving me a blank canvas paralyses me. How does one plan a city? Where do the roads go?
It's the sort of game I want to love, but I just get so overwhelmed by the sheer number of options and I'm not sure what to do.
On the other hand, games like Tropico (at least the later titles - 3, 4, 5, 6) having a "story" to play through help a bit because there is direction in what to build and where. Conversely, though, cities I build in Tropico end up being haphazard patch jobs where I find an empty space and put a dozen wind turbines in it because that's what the mission calls for, and so I miss out on some of the potential satisfaction.
If you like Tropico, then you probably should give TwoPoint Hospital a try, as well as Ceasar 3, Cleopatra, and a few other games of the more "agent simulation" nature... with actual goals and challenges to defeat and win.
Sim City / Cities Skylines is less about gaming and more about play. There is no winning or losing in these games... I mean nominally, if you run out of money I guess you lose. But the games are setup so that you don't really run out of money under typical circumstances.
Conversely, goal-oriented games can just feel like "work" to someone who feels like their life involves a countless measurements and expectations, or just like intellectual labor to someone who is learning all the time; etc
As they say, it's really very hard to account for taste. It's usually not worth trying to analyze it for anyone but yourself (and only then if it helps you to do so).
I actually have a similar problem with the Tropico remakes. Tropico 1 was hard. You could not survive a mission without dipping into the dictator toolsets. So striking a constant balance between economics and human rights was an interesting challenge. (It also made for a much more biting satire). The games since 3 are still pleasant city-builders in their own rights, but make it a bit too easy to win on the straight and narrow.
The only fix I can see is to have much better scenarios, or AI opponents, which I tend to think only the external communities around these games can produce. They generally don't allow that level of access for mods though.
Instead of scenarios or AI, why wouldn't it be the case that success invites more problems? You've got issues with immigration happening too rapidly for the population's taste, inflation devalues your accumulated resources at a more rapid pace, essential workers' pay isn't keeping up with FAANG, inequality is rampant, lots of homeless druggies appreciating your shelter & food bank infrastructure but locals are fed up, and also the next level up in government works against you out of envy or simple lack of appreciation for you contribution to the public purse. Power structures crumble because citizens get lazy and entitled, not knowing how good they have it, populism and self-interest rule the day.
Design success as the enemy of success, and you never run out of issues to solve. That said, it would be nice to see the winning endgame in real life for a change.
And a game almost everyone will hate, as it slaps you in the face and spits on you for succeeding.
Having a dynamic environment is one of the things that I've long wanted city sims to have. SimCity always had disasters, which is in the same vein, but they always felt like an afterthought (or a joke, in the case of alien or monster attacks). City simulations pretend to be serious flaw toys, so let me deal with a recession (or even a boom), or a dioxine contamination, or civil unrest. Not with a minigame, but let me deal with the city management aspects of those events.
There are so many interesting gameplay things Skylines could do to be more fun for me like:
1. Subway optimization, e.g faster train cost more but people get to their destination faster, slower trains allow for shorter distances between stations.
2. Parking optimization, e.g. building with parking costs more (because more land has to be bought), but allows people to travel to the place in
3. Low vs high taxes, nanny state or pure capitalism? How would that affect the economy and people's satisfaction?
There's also the flip side which is just sandbox building a city to your specifications and ignoring the city building aspects of it. Almost like building a model of a city.
There really isn’t an end goal for me, I’m not trying to make my city a certain size. I’m trying to make something beautiful, that is fun to imagine living in.
I also think mods are essential if this is the way you want to play, as it’s much easier to get nit-picky and detail oriented with the correct tools.
Learning a new sandbox's toolbox of system parts and laying out clever designs while I stare at a screen can read a lot like what I do with most of my weekdays, but without the return in pay or reputation.
How does one plan a city indeed! Why would you want the answer?
That game is Simcity with objectives.
After a while, grownups lose what to do with a plastic bucket and shovel at the beach.
Good reminder
The base game isn't quite this much of a blank canvas. You have a budget, and you have city needs. You try to fit the needs within your budget, while trying to expand and grow with what the immediate geography allows you to do.
You almost never (unless you're an advanced player who knows how to scam a bunch of money) have money to waste to treat central planning as a blank canvas.
Well I hope you don't have the same feeling about life. Because we are all free to choose our own adventure (with some choices obviously better than others), and there are no clear objectives or goals besides what you set for yourself.
These games all represent resident happiness as some function of traffic, crime, garbage, pollution, but I don't think any of them have made an effort to zoom in on particular actions and how they effect the population. Or to represent long-term fulfillment. It would be a very different kind of game to highlight what actions an urban planner takes that have the biggest impact on residents.
Maybe the old newspaper function in Simcity games tried to capture this - or the outraged advisors a bit too, but it's never felt narratively driven to me.
https://www.reddit.com/r/macgaming/comments/jw3e1c/game_benc...
Not with the Traffic President mod which allows you to disable cars despawning and adds to the challenge of building a good transit system.
- Agent-based simulation instead of model-based (the latter is what the Maxis games used). Agent-based simulation is performance-intensive, and in practice it led to all sorts of gamebreaking bugs. Last I checked, the game still caused traffic jams because every car would enter the turning lane immediately. It also causes the infamous death waves. Some of these are hard to fix without changing the core simulation model. Some of these would be trivial to patch, and it's kind of embarrassing that they haven't.
- The DLC is essentially mandatory, in that they release updates to the free game alongside every DLC, and the free updates introduce some of the features but not all, and they end up breaking the balance of the game unless you purchase the full DLC.
- The game is far too easy, unrealistically so. Even on the harder difficulty setting, it's just way too easy to create a cash cow and create the optimal city without any real challenge.
Cities:Skylines is good in sandbox mode, if you want to create beautiful-looking models of cities. Which is a valid use case and there's definitely a market for that. But for people who like the original SimCity games and enjoy simulations, it's... just not that. There's a reason that professional city planners used the original SimCity games as tools for study and development, and that's what made (for example) SimCity 4 Rush Hour so much fun to play.
Whenever I want to play a citybuilder, I end up going for Factorio, Oxygen Not Included, or Rimworld. None of those are citybuilders, but they're the closest thing I've found to substitute for what made SimCity games enjoyable that Cities:Skylines lacks.
You know, I never thought about the factory automation/colony simulator genres as being similar to the city builder genre, but... now that you brought it up, I think I see how said genres would appeal.
I found that once you reach a certain city size this game is just car traffic management.
Everything else is taken care of by designating a faster arterial road at certain intervals(so that the driving AI's preferences are more predictable) and then designing a one-way flow in and out of areas with a lot of conflict points. It is not exactly how I want to envision my city, but it's also not extremely complicated to work out.
The game really limits traffic reduction mostly through the city services, which all have to drive down the roads to provide services.
However, the cities themselves don't have much of a personality. It's barely a simulation. I'd like to see certain areas becoming rough sort of ghettos. People in the city having different backgrounds. Just creating a school in those places would not necessarily improve things.
I'd like to see economic effects happening and causing disruption in the city. Big companies coming and going and affecting daily life.
I'd also like to see rich regions forming. Cool places that everyone wants to go.
Essentially, I'd like to have less control and see things not working out exactly like I planned. Everything always goes exactly to plan.
IIRC, SimCity 4 didn't have this issue but it sort of cheats by chopping the map up into multiple tiles in a region and only simulating a subset of your population. Which honestly seems acceptable to me.
If you have a spare desktop lying around, it really helps to do the simulation "in the cloud."
You run it on the desktop and remote play it using remote desktop or steam’s equivalent on your laptop?
I used to do that with my powerful desktop, leave it in my home office and remote play CS from the living room. Lag was good enough to play.