Man Forza Motorsports and Cities Skylines 2 came out within two weeks of each other, and I was so pumped for both. Thinking I'd have two genre-defining games to enjoy for years, it was definitely the most disappointing month of gaming for me.
As a comment on the article: yes, of course - the lack of all the things are symptoms of "this must release now". They fumbled it so badly, a new developer got put on it.
Literally missing the forest for the trees. You're building a city, not a yard. I don't think making the city look procedurally worn or whatever they mean is trivial either. Feels like complaining about the graphics in Minecraft... That's not the point of the game.
Also, it's very much a matter of taste. I like the pristine look. I have real life if I want to see dingy, worn down buildings and yards. I don't want that in my fantasy city.
Part of the author's point is that the way the city "feels" is not just part of the game but, for them and for a subset of other players, a key part of the game. We're talking about how to make a city simulator have more verisimilitude with the cities you are simulating!
But if you miss the trees for the forest it's bad too.
I wouldn't want a building to be represented by a box that says (office) even if it made for a better simulation. Nevermind I just remembered how much time I soent playing dwarf fortress.
Frostpunk (only played first) did a decent job with this. It’s all coal fire power and heavy industrial buildings, very grounded and pragmatic, so it’s all dirty and loud and belching flames/smoke. It was somewhat obvious given the setting but regardless it works so well. The city feels very alive.
Personally (apparently like you) I didn’t have any desire to re-play the game, but boy was that first play-through enjoyable! They really did well in making you feel the intended vibe with the visuals, sound effects, bits of dialogue etc
Same experience here. Amazing first run, but it's not really a city-builder you replay constantly, it's more of a solved puzzle game once you finish the run. Definitely worth playing though.
It has been a few years since I fired it up so I decided to temper my memory in case it was rose tinted lol I do remember feeling super invested and feeling like the place was my own creation
I don’t really think aesthetic details can create soul where there is no soul. Somehow I can’t imagine a world where games cost millions of dollars to produce yet also have soul mechanically injected by following some art director’s design-language protocol.
AI is going to be big here. You previously had to create a few art assets and reuse them. Cities has to be grids of blocks of buildings. You couldn't have an agent go and design a building that curved to the block perfectly. The slope couldn't have some stairs easily.
The author of this created these images with AI and that's exactly the solution for game makers. There may be base assets but AI is pretty damn good at contextually modifying them.
I saw a city sandbox (no simulation, just a kind of zen garden) on a voronoi grid but I forgot what it was called. No AI, and you could build in random shapes.
There was a big heyday a decade ago with town builders, like Banished, Farthest Frontier, Manor lords and a bunch of ancient history ones. It seems to have died out again the last few years. And I don't know any that replace simcity or cities skyline 1. The only city sim I play nowadays is Soviet Workers Republic, some combination of those words.
Maybe we'll get a million new city sims with the ai goldrush that have unique takes.
Think I gave up on actual city sims with massive scale.
Manor Lords was only released early access in 2024, and has been 99% hype. The developer put in the bare minimum to gameplay then spent months and months on random visual stuff like "walk through your town in 3d" mode. It's only recently that it became remotely worthwhile.
It's not an example of the heyday of townbuilders except inasmuch as the existence of the heyday enabled a borderline grift.
Check out timberborn. Its the best new town builder. It's like banished but mixed with fluid dynamics. Water is a scarce resource and you have to manage flooding and droughts. You can also damn the wrong thing and flood your village
One small but charming game is Urbek City Builder. Has voxel graphics and less of a simulation and more of a radius placement system. Not very well known but it's one I've really enjoyed.
Sim City on SNES felt like it had a soul. The music was fantastic. I was never great at it but the slow pace was super cozy to let play in the background.
For those of you who grew up with the city builder classics, I just announced Jerry Martin (SimCity, The Sims) and Paul Zimmermann (Space Haven, Wildfrost) are the two composers I am working with.
That's an incredible get. As someone who grew up with SimCity (DOS), I thought I'd been hurt too many times (CS:2, SC2013, [..]) to get my hopes up again, but here we are. Wishlisted.
Is “how hard would it be…” followed by an AI image going to be the new way to complain about games? Realistic textures, dynamic boundary rendering, etc would significantly increase the art cost and take a large bite out of the game performance budget for realistic aesthetics when the main audience draw is pushing the scale of the simulation.
Yes, it does. It's exactly what I want my real life city to be like.
No plants growing everywhere completely out of control and invading perimeters they aren't supposed to be in. No cracked pavement that's just a rainfall away from being replaced with potholes.
Apparently, "soul" means a city that looks like it's unmaintained and teetering on the edge of a precipice, just about to be reclaimed by nature, a few years away from turning into the green urbanscape of The Last of Us.
I'm so glad I finally encountered neighborhoods with all natural yards right in the middle of cities that make them so much nicer to walk through, apart from the bees.
Instead we have to beg most big cities to install trees at $40k/pop so you aren't getting melted in the texas sun walking your dog.
> No plants growing everywhere completely out of control and invading perimeters they aren't supposed to be in. No cracked pavement that's just a rainfall away from being replaced with potholes.
Fwiw this would certainly strike me as soulless. Haven't you ever seen pleasantvile?
I one time unravel why old dutch city centers are so enjoyable to just walk around. I had somewhat of an idea but it was insufficient for the millage. Bothered me for decades hah.
One ingredient was that each building was added to the whole one by one, they could build anyplace as long as it didn't piss anyone off. Those who had money build big luxurious and in the face, those who were poor build some place out of sight, say at the end of an alley and everyone in between found their place to fit their thing. Some wanted to look more wealthy than they were, some wanted the opposite. On a slightly curved road one side is small on the front and large in the backs while the other side offered the opposite.
The final clue came as an old painting of a road that currently has the most expensive buildings in the city. They are 3-4 floors and have all kinds of attachments and expansions. The garden borders on the harbor and sits one floor lower than street level.
In the painting however the brick work was terrible, the attachments were made of rotten wood. Then it struck me the painting was some spot half way in 500 years of "cardboard" prototyping. If a building or pig shed was ever so slightly in the way, slightly misplaced or didn't fit in it didn't survive in the long run. Eventually someone would correct it again and again until they got it right. Then when they got the shape right they would rebuild it the same or upgrade it. In the last cycle over the last 60 years the old monuments got floor heating, AC, modern wiring and plumbing, some even got new floors and a new foundation with the building still standing. It's not done, it's never done.
The Division (both first and sequel) did such a good job having a worn/lived in feel to the city terrain. Wandering around the streets at night was such a fun experience. I need to go back and replay. The designers did such a good job.
I am fine with games showing an abstraction of the real world instead of simulating every detail. I am also fine with other games simulating every detail.
Cities: Skylines 2 is a particularly rough pick for this concept, since it's one of very few games I need frame generation to run even passably. LLMs seem plenty capable of tweaking existing assets to make a ton of variants, but actually displaying all of those performantly is then an engineering problem.
And without many variants, things like "splotchy wall apartment building" would get old so much faster when there's several square blocks of them instead of bizarrely pristine ones.
Yeah, I was thinking that reading this. This looks great for that one small screen he showed, but if every two story house has the same dilapidated painted brick siding it looks just as bad. Even if its not all, how many repeats are acceptable? It breaks immersion more to have the exact same dilapidated house in more than one location than it does to have perfectly pristine houses everywhere
He is correct, but forgets about the polygon budget. The GPU is fast but not infinitely so. It has lots of texture memory, but not an infinite amount. Game developers have to balance graphical fidelity against the rendering time. They actually did a really bad job of this for Cities: Skylines 2 and it was a big reason why the game was so sluggish on release. Search for the story of the teeth for a particularly salient example.
When the player zooms in to street level on a building it's worth the performance hit to load in more details and do so in a better looking way. When it's zoomed out to view large portions of the city (or the whole thing) then sure, you have to trade off graphical fidelity for performance and usability as the user builds out the city and wants to watch it grow. The amount at a given zoom should be based on the graphics settings, and low should allow for low detail even when zoomed in.
You are correct but what the article is asking for is nothing out of the ordinary, in fact mods already do what the author is asking for, just not in an automatic way
And how are those mods on baseline performance? Are the mods appropriate for general audience mid range rigs? The tech industry has the capability of pure ray tracing. Game engines don't use it because the audience willing to shell 10k for PC to run it is exceedingly small. They have to target mid range specs to have an audience big enough to make money.
LOD techniques are commonplace. Cities: Skylines and the sequel both implement them. Telling us that a game developer can use LOD to fit more graphics into the same poly budget is not telling us anything we don’t already know.
And the problem still remains that all the graphics must fit within a certain poly budget, usually whatever can be rendered at 30fps on the minimum spec hardware. Adding features to every property in the city to represent weeds, fallen leaves, broken concrete, grime, wear, etc all adds to the rendering cost of the game. It all comes out of the same budget, even if those features are invisible at longer distances. Worse, that cost is multiplied by everything the user has created in their city. The more such features the developers add, the smaller a city the user can build before the game’s performance drops to unacceptable levels.
Anyway, CS and CS2 already go to great lengths to add soul to the game. Every asset has defined locations where props can be placed. One house can have a swing set while the identical house next door has a pool, or toys, or a car, or shrubbery, or any of thousands of other possibilities. The author is just complaining that these props do not make his cities look dilapidated enough.
His most valid complaint is that the games don’t do much to obscure the exact property lines, which are always perfect rectangles. Perhaps in the future one will, though it will still have a budget to fit within.
It's quite possible to do all that. Most AAA titles do by now. But creating all that detailed content at multiple levels of detail is a big job. GTA VI cost between $1.5 billion and $2 billion to produce. When you do those big zooms, vast amounts of data has to be shuttled in and out of the GPU. VRAM is too expensive to keep it all live.
There are some other current problems. GPU prices have not come down.
If you want a big, high-detailed world, you need a few hundred dollars of GPU.
GPUs on laptops tend to be underpowered, and if you make the GPU work to its full capacity, it runs down the battery.
One of my interests is technology for large metaverses with high detail and good performance. Everybody who made metaverse noise during the boom failed at that. Second Life, which is a large metaverse with good detail but slow performance, is about as good as it gets.
(It's been improving recently; they've hired some good graphics developers.)
Improbable's Morpheus/M-Squared [1] looked promising, but the site hasn't been updated in a year and the Discord community seems to have died. They usually run with "cloud rendering" (each user ties up a dedicated gamer PC in a data center), which is too expensive except for special events. Roblox is probably the only other serious US player working on this. Unreal Engine 5 can do big, static worlds that have lots of instancing, but that's achieved using large amounts of preprocessing, optimization, and performance debugging.
The underlying problem is that good simulated cities are about as interesting as real cities. Kind of boring. Second Life has a terrible problem with new users. At the start, you're in a big world the size of Los Angeles with about 40,000 people spread around. You don't know anybody. You have no idea what to do first. There is no obvious goal. There is no built in game. The system itself is completely indifferent to you, like real cities. You can explore the huge user-built world freely, but only when some users organize an activity does much happen. There's a lot going on, but it's hard to find. Those seeking passive entertainment give up quickly.
Culling details smaller than a pixel isn't even sacrificing quality. It's literally just what rendering is. That's why you don't render a sheet of 10^23 individual atoms.
As well as the teeth, I understand they had issues along the lines of using preview rendering tech in unity that then was not further developed and dropped from the engine? Causing them to need to write a fair amount of render stuff themselves? .. something similar to that at least I'm sure.
I would say the game should generate some kind of a grand staircase every time a slope is the right shape, but let the player replace it if they wish. Would be even better if the element was chosen based on zoning policies, local ordinances, land value, etc. Soul by default, but infinitely customisable.
Most of the changes replace one model with an equally detailed one, or add a bunch of decals that are cheap in modern engines with clustered rendering.
Adding props is a bit more expensive, but they can be very low detail and still look good from a distance. Something small like a newspaper or plastic bag can be less than 30 polygons with a 64x texture.
Nobody's asking for ray tracing and complicated shaders. Just small tweaks that make a city look more natural.
I recall working on a sports game where they hired a new art director who had previously worked in Hollywood on visual effects for movies. One of my coworkers had a meeting where the new art director requested that the players uniforms have cloth simulation in the dynamic cut scenes.
It was then necessary to explain the difference between pre-rendered scenes and real-time rendering budgets.
It often isn't a question about whether or not something can be done. In pre-rendered scenes, or screenshots, the budget is very different than in game. At whatever target frame-rate you choose, there is a finite amount of visual effects you can achieve. Spending that budget requires compromise.
It's easy to live in a fantasy world where you can demand no compromise. The hard thing is doing the most you possible can given very real budgets and doing so with the people you have available. Not every studio is Rockstar with the ability to throw unlimited devs for several years at the problem.
It seems like it was difficult to even get the simulation part of the game (the important part) correct at launch as well.
Only now three years later with Iceflake Studios taking over are we starting to see the game turn a corner and become really solid and having a roadmap with some hope.
I wondee if the domination of 3D rendering we have today is having a bad effect here. I remember old tile-based games (like SimCity or Transport Tycoon), or games with fixed backgrounds feeling much more natural here, simply because you can "prerender" (or simply paint) your desired level of detail without having it affect your runtime compute budget. Of course the cost is less flexibility at runtime, but that cost may be acceptable.
For a modern take on this, look at Factorio. Why can an industrial zone with a population of one look more lively than an entire simulated city in Cities Skylines?
soul is probably not a performance limitation; fancy/fluid animations dont hurt frametimes any more than stiff motion. realtime 3d is just so much harder a design space to work in, with too many DoF to properly attend to every parameter.
strong leadership with narrow scope makes the best version of anything.
Apparently Factorio can actually heavily tax GPUs because everything is 2D and not a single 3D asset it can cache and render from.
But it can take decades for 3D to catch up to 2D - Warcraft 3 looked much worse than StarCraft imo, and it wasn’t until SC2 that it finally looked as good or better.
Tax GPUs how? Rendering a big set of tiles with minimal overlap is very fast, and Factorio is pretty good about VRAM use. High resolution textures need 2.5GB with space age, medium resolution a quarter of that. And other settings can cut that down.
Maybe sometimes there are too many particles but that's hardly a 2D versus 3D thing.
If you play the RTS Desperados it's still looks really good even though it was made in the early 2000s and it's all down to the the scenes being essentially painted. It's a shame this isn't done more often in my opinion.
To each their own. I personally find the visual aesthetic of Factorio to be very rough around the edges (literally and figuratively). I respect this is a design choice to help the entire simulation scale well. But I, personally, would never rank it's aesthetic above that of something like Skylines.
Even in high-end VFX (previous industry - working on pathtracing renderers), things were often over-the-top in terms of how things were modeled (polycount) or how the lookdev (shader material definitions) were done.
Some of that was due to just human time resource constraints (and assets being modeled for director validation at full screen turn-table resolution, but then just used at 1/8 size in the film), but other times it was just people losing context as to what was "needed" or would even make any difference (unfortunately, often without considering the "cost" - in terms of memory usage and CPU-time for rendering / compositing) - vs look difference.
Then there are questions from the artists like "Why's this rendering so slow, it's 'only' a load of skyscrapers in a city with the camera 0.5 km away?"
You then have a look at what's actually going on, and all the rooms in the skyscrapers have modeled (and lookdev-ed) furniture and things like lamp shades around lights. Which A: is expensive memory-wise and just silly, but also makes light-transport to sample all the lights and light the scene (even with clever NEE light-sampling techniques) stupidly expensive.
Then again, that same building, this time being rendered from about 300m away was very slow to render, and we looked at the BSDF material stack, and there was a homogeneous volumetric scattering layer on the glass windows. Like - WTF - that's insane for a uni-directional path-tracer (and physically wrong). "What's this for, this is why it's so slow.?"
"Oh, it's to represent the algae/dirt on the glass".
Most 60fps games with real-time cutscenes do switch to 30fps for them for twice the frame budget, so maybe it wasn't a completely out there idea and did have some basis in reality with simplified game-style cloth sim. Could be that it was normally a bit too expensive for the team player counts but was at least on the edge of feasible with twice the budget.
The author kind of sort of points this out, but cities skylines 2 not only has a ton of detailing options but it has built-in modding which is what brings out this type of detail work.
Yes, by default it’s a little flat. But also, it’s a city builder. Most of the time you’re not zoomed in this close. And not all players intend to focus on these details.
The problem with stairs might be getting people to negotiate them smoothly. The Sims (up to version 3, anyway) didn't want to deal with collisions on stairs, there's no animation for squeezing past or turning around, so Sims approaching stairs spend a lot of time slowly getting out of one another's way to decide who's going to use the stairs first, and waiting for other Sims to finish so that the next Sim can embark. If you throw a party in a house with stairs, some guests can spend the entire time stuck in the stair queue, and then they go home and complain that the party was no fun.
I'd like the AI disclosure to come earlier, though. I was wondering what was giving the "improved" look. May be possible with DLSS5-like tech, and style transfer.
Now, indeed, tthis is a city builder, and I am not necessarily interested in dead leaves when I play one. But what do I know? Most of my experience is with Sim City 2000.
97 comments
[ 0.17 ms ] story [ 10.3 ms ] threadAs a comment on the article: yes, of course - the lack of all the things are symptoms of "this must release now". They fumbled it so badly, a new developer got put on it.
I had an argument at one point, honest!
It's truly amazing. It integrated with my ten year old Alienware keyboard and made the lighting ice blue during a snow storm.
The author of this created these images with AI and that's exactly the solution for game makers. There may be base assets but AI is pretty damn good at contextually modifying them.
Maybe we'll get a million new city sims with the ai goldrush that have unique takes.
Think I gave up on actual city sims with massive scale.
It's not an example of the heyday of townbuilders except inasmuch as the existence of the heyday enabled a borderline grift.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2287430/Metropolis_1998/
For those of you who grew up with the city builder classics, I just announced Jerry Martin (SimCity, The Sims) and Paul Zimmermann (Space Haven, Wildfrost) are the two composers I am working with.
Yes, it does. It's exactly what I want my real life city to be like.
No plants growing everywhere completely out of control and invading perimeters they aren't supposed to be in. No cracked pavement that's just a rainfall away from being replaced with potholes.
Apparently, "soul" means a city that looks like it's unmaintained and teetering on the edge of a precipice, just about to be reclaimed by nature, a few years away from turning into the green urbanscape of The Last of Us.
Instead we have to beg most big cities to install trees at $40k/pop so you aren't getting melted in the texas sun walking your dog.
Fwiw this would certainly strike me as soulless. Haven't you ever seen pleasantvile?
One ingredient was that each building was added to the whole one by one, they could build anyplace as long as it didn't piss anyone off. Those who had money build big luxurious and in the face, those who were poor build some place out of sight, say at the end of an alley and everyone in between found their place to fit their thing. Some wanted to look more wealthy than they were, some wanted the opposite. On a slightly curved road one side is small on the front and large in the backs while the other side offered the opposite.
The final clue came as an old painting of a road that currently has the most expensive buildings in the city. They are 3-4 floors and have all kinds of attachments and expansions. The garden borders on the harbor and sits one floor lower than street level.
In the painting however the brick work was terrible, the attachments were made of rotten wood. Then it struck me the painting was some spot half way in 500 years of "cardboard" prototyping. If a building or pig shed was ever so slightly in the way, slightly misplaced or didn't fit in it didn't survive in the long run. Eventually someone would correct it again and again until they got it right. Then when they got the shape right they would rebuild it the same or upgrade it. In the last cycle over the last 60 years the old monuments got floor heating, AC, modern wiring and plumbing, some even got new floors and a new foundation with the building still standing. It's not done, it's never done.
https://www.alamy.com/old-brick-waterfront-houses-of-de-boch...
The second building has the wrong color bricks at the top and the 4th has these cheap ugly modern windows in the roof that should really be deleted.
The scaffolding really completes the story.
Cities have no soul, without the nature
And without many variants, things like "splotchy wall apartment building" would get old so much faster when there's several square blocks of them instead of bizarrely pristine ones.
https://www.ign.com/articles/cities-skylines-2-dev-addresses...
The solution is mods by modders for modders.
LOD techniques are commonplace. Cities: Skylines and the sequel both implement them. Telling us that a game developer can use LOD to fit more graphics into the same poly budget is not telling us anything we don’t already know.
And the problem still remains that all the graphics must fit within a certain poly budget, usually whatever can be rendered at 30fps on the minimum spec hardware. Adding features to every property in the city to represent weeds, fallen leaves, broken concrete, grime, wear, etc all adds to the rendering cost of the game. It all comes out of the same budget, even if those features are invisible at longer distances. Worse, that cost is multiplied by everything the user has created in their city. The more such features the developers add, the smaller a city the user can build before the game’s performance drops to unacceptable levels.
Anyway, CS and CS2 already go to great lengths to add soul to the game. Every asset has defined locations where props can be placed. One house can have a swing set while the identical house next door has a pool, or toys, or a car, or shrubbery, or any of thousands of other possibilities. The author is just complaining that these props do not make his cities look dilapidated enough.
His most valid complaint is that the games don’t do much to obscure the exact property lines, which are always perfect rectangles. Perhaps in the future one will, though it will still have a budget to fit within.
There are some other current problems. GPU prices have not come down. If you want a big, high-detailed world, you need a few hundred dollars of GPU. GPUs on laptops tend to be underpowered, and if you make the GPU work to its full capacity, it runs down the battery.
One of my interests is technology for large metaverses with high detail and good performance. Everybody who made metaverse noise during the boom failed at that. Second Life, which is a large metaverse with good detail but slow performance, is about as good as it gets. (It's been improving recently; they've hired some good graphics developers.) Improbable's Morpheus/M-Squared [1] looked promising, but the site hasn't been updated in a year and the Discord community seems to have died. They usually run with "cloud rendering" (each user ties up a dedicated gamer PC in a data center), which is too expensive except for special events. Roblox is probably the only other serious US player working on this. Unreal Engine 5 can do big, static worlds that have lots of instancing, but that's achieved using large amounts of preprocessing, optimization, and performance debugging.
The underlying problem is that good simulated cities are about as interesting as real cities. Kind of boring. Second Life has a terrible problem with new users. At the start, you're in a big world the size of Los Angeles with about 40,000 people spread around. You don't know anybody. You have no idea what to do first. There is no obvious goal. There is no built in game. The system itself is completely indifferent to you, like real cities. You can explore the huge user-built world freely, but only when some users organize an activity does much happen. There's a lot going on, but it's hard to find. Those seeking passive entertainment give up quickly.
[1] https://docs.msquared.io/morpheus-platform
Adding props is a bit more expensive, but they can be very low detail and still look good from a distance. Something small like a newspaper or plastic bag can be less than 30 polygons with a 64x texture.
Nobody's asking for ray tracing and complicated shaders. Just small tweaks that make a city look more natural.
It was then necessary to explain the difference between pre-rendered scenes and real-time rendering budgets.
It often isn't a question about whether or not something can be done. In pre-rendered scenes, or screenshots, the budget is very different than in game. At whatever target frame-rate you choose, there is a finite amount of visual effects you can achieve. Spending that budget requires compromise.
It's easy to live in a fantasy world where you can demand no compromise. The hard thing is doing the most you possible can given very real budgets and doing so with the people you have available. Not every studio is Rockstar with the ability to throw unlimited devs for several years at the problem.
Only now three years later with Iceflake Studios taking over are we starting to see the game turn a corner and become really solid and having a roadmap with some hope.
For a modern take on this, look at Factorio. Why can an industrial zone with a population of one look more lively than an entire simulated city in Cities Skylines?
strong leadership with narrow scope makes the best version of anything.
But it can take decades for 3D to catch up to 2D - Warcraft 3 looked much worse than StarCraft imo, and it wasn’t until SC2 that it finally looked as good or better.
Maybe sometimes there are too many particles but that's hardly a 2D versus 3D thing.
What kind of 3D caching are you talking about?
Some of that was due to just human time resource constraints (and assets being modeled for director validation at full screen turn-table resolution, but then just used at 1/8 size in the film), but other times it was just people losing context as to what was "needed" or would even make any difference (unfortunately, often without considering the "cost" - in terms of memory usage and CPU-time for rendering / compositing) - vs look difference.
Then there are questions from the artists like "Why's this rendering so slow, it's 'only' a load of skyscrapers in a city with the camera 0.5 km away?"
You then have a look at what's actually going on, and all the rooms in the skyscrapers have modeled (and lookdev-ed) furniture and things like lamp shades around lights. Which A: is expensive memory-wise and just silly, but also makes light-transport to sample all the lights and light the scene (even with clever NEE light-sampling techniques) stupidly expensive.
Then again, that same building, this time being rendered from about 300m away was very slow to render, and we looked at the BSDF material stack, and there was a homogeneous volumetric scattering layer on the glass windows. Like - WTF - that's insane for a uni-directional path-tracer (and physically wrong). "What's this for, this is why it's so slow.?"
"Oh, it's to represent the algae/dirt on the glass".
"I'm sorry!?"
Yes, by default it’s a little flat. But also, it’s a city builder. Most of the time you’re not zoomed in this close. And not all players intend to focus on these details.
I'd like the AI disclosure to come earlier, though. I was wondering what was giving the "improved" look. May be possible with DLSS5-like tech, and style transfer.
Now, indeed, tthis is a city builder, and I am not necessarily interested in dead leaves when I play one. But what do I know? Most of my experience is with Sim City 2000.