Coming on October 24th… and this looks so good, I might finally upgrade my GPU. 😄
RIP SimCity, thank you for all you gave to gaming, but your time is even more over now than it already was.
Really hope it’s less frustrating trying to build highways and onramps/off ramps. Always killed me trying to do that in a visually pleasing way.
I’m excited to watch smarter people than me play this game
Or dafter people. Looking at you Real Civil Engineer.
That looks amazing. I hope traffic AI is significantly improved.
Or at the very least, multithreaded optimized. My frame rates tend to drop dramatically once the traffic bogs down the 1 CPU that it decides to unload all of its pathfinding on.
Really hoping most of the features from the first game and it’s DLCs are in this one. I picked up 90% of the DLC and basegame on a humble bundle charity thing for like $60 last year but I know people have spend like $500 on this game.
Hopefully CS2 has enough content to keep people happy and the DLC can be bought on a good sale.
As a console player, I’m excited that there appears to be features coming that used to only be available using mods.
RemindMe! 5 months
awkward silence
I got my money’s worth from the original, but I have two major complaints about it that, from what I can see, the new game doesn’t address:
First, the developer originally made transport games and that bias shows. C:S makes it incredibly hard to design a city that isn’t car-centric, and gameplay in practice tends to center on optimizing car traffic at the expense of everything else a city-builder could be.
Second (and this ties into the first, to an extent) is that the game doesn’t represent the passage of time, in a technological or societal sense. Real cities grow and change over decades and centuries, with decisions made in prior eras imposing informing and imposing restraints on those made after. C:S cities exist in a weird, timeless and anachronistic “now” from the start. This was something that classic SimCity games did well, at least in the context of an American boom town: as the years advance, so does the tech tree, opening up new mass transit options, cleaner and more efficient infrastructure items, and new kinds of commerce and industry.
Personally, I’d love a game in this genre that plays like SimCity but takes in the whole arc of history, say from from the Middle Ages onwards, so that players can start to appreciate how decisions they make hundreds of years prior can leave their mark on the city in the present – for example, where a defensive wall gets placed during a medieval time of war leaves a mark of the street networks, and changes the way that that social classes distribute through the city and leads to a high-rent luxury district in a future era.
Well even walkable cities are car centric, and will be for a long time, so it’s only logical that a game set in a strange “now” will be like that.
You’d need to have something like future Anno time line or what simcity touched (although only with like single buildings) to change that. And even most fiction is not about changing cities to remove cars, but changing cars (blade runners 3d roads, self driving in minority report etc)
It’s interesting how car centric it feels when their previous games focused entirely on building public transportation. In a lot of ways Cities in Motion 1 is more fun for me than Cities Skylines, building a better transit system in a static city almost feels like solving a puzzle in away rather than pursuing mindless growth. I hope they can capture that feeling again.
There is definitely something to be said about the game tending towards being car centric. One factor for this not even directly related to transport that I’ve noticed myself a lot is the lack of proper mixed zoning, which can be a valuable tool of creating more walkable and public transport friendly cities.
I do like the idea of a city growing somewhat more organically over the years. I think it would also make it easier to not have one specific approach to transport being the objective best, because your earlier decisions would probably have some influence on that. It does sound rather hard to me though to find the right balance of how hard to deal with those historical restrictions should be.
On the one hand, if somebody wants to Haussmanize their Paris I’d say more power to you, the bulldozer tool is in the menu. On the other hand, some mechanic like Transport Tycoon’s where local councils stop letting you build around them if you get too aggressive remodeling their town could be interesting too.
At the end of the day, though, I wouldn’t want to take to much power or of the player’s hands. Will Wright described those classic Maxis games as “software toys,” and the freedom to mess around and see what happens is both part of the appeal and how games like SimCity came to seen as educational.
I didn’t see bikes or bike lanes in the trailer. I certainly hope those are in the game. Other than that, it looks awesome. I’m looking forward to it!
Previous base game has dedicated bike pathways, as well as roads with painted bike gutters, so safe to say those would make a return in the sequel
Biking and bike lanes were added in After Dark.
New transportation options: Bikes and dedicated bike lanes and bike ways let citizens opt for a faster alternative to walking. Bus lanes can be used to help the public transportation run smoother.
Great another DLC hell coming. Ppl never learn.
At least the base game is solid.
