Cities: Skylines 2 has a release date!

β€˜Leigh πŸ³οΈβ€βš§οΈ@lemmy.blahaj.zone to Gaming@beehaw.org – 10 points – Coming October 24th, 2023 I Pre-Order Now I Cities: Skylines II Official Gameplay Trailer
youtube.com

Coming on October 24th… and this looks so good, I might finally upgrade my GPU. πŸ˜„

RIP SimCity, thank you for all you gave to gaming, but your time is even more over now than it already was.

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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.

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.

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

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First, the developer originally made transport games and that bias shows.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.