Cities: Skylines - Paradox Interactive Makes A SimCity

cybrxkhan

cybrxkhan

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So PI just announced they're making their own version of SimCity, basically.


Link to video.


Pretty cheeky how they bashed the new SimCity here and there ("play offline", etc). On the PI site they've listed some of the features:

Inhabit a world where you define the rules. Cities: Skylines invites you to create the city of your dreams in a sprawling landscape dominated by cloud hugging structures and jaw dropping architectural marvels.

Developed by Colossal Order, Cities: Skylines offers sprawling landscapes and maps with endless sandbox gameplay and new ways to expand your city. Key to progression is the ability to influence your city’s policy by incorporating taxation into districts. All this including the ability to mod the game to suit your play style makes this the definitive city building simulation.

You’re only limited by your imagination, so take control and reach for the sky!

Main features:

  • City policies: Set policies to guide how the city and districts develop over the course of your playthrough.
  • City districts: Personalize city districts with names of your choice for variety and personality.
  • Road building and zoning
  • Unlock buildings and services
  • Taxation: Fine-tuning the city budget and services and setting tax rates to different residential, commercial and industrial levels and controlling what kind of areas are more likely to spawn in the zoned areas
  • Public transportation: Build transport networks throughout the city with buses and metros
  • Outside connections: Make industry and commercial districts flourish with new customers in the neighboring cities
  • Wonders: the ultimate end-game content that the players strive towards
  • Huge maps: Unlock new map tiles with unique possibilities to expand the city
  • Water flow simulation: Add new challenges to water services.
  • Polished visual style and core gameplay
  • Modding tools: Built in feature designed to encourage creative pursuits.
Click to expand...


So... Good? Bad?
 
Looks good to me! Looks like it's based on the Cities in Motion 2 engine too which is pretty cool with roads and buildings. I've been making maps for it and thought several times this should be a city building game.
 
I want to get excited for this game, because it really does look like it can and will be good. It looks and sounds legitimately interestingly enough to justify a deeper look when it is release at least.
 
It definitely sounds interesting (and was unexpected!). Big maps and being able to play offline, that's two of the important differences from Sim City 5. Gameplay is the other key, of course, and it's hard to draw much from what we have so far. I tried Cities XL a few months back, and just couldn't get into it like I can with SC3K and SC4. Too little information and feedback, and thus too little immersion. Hopefully Colossal Order and Paradox can capture that magic that makes being a mayor in Sim City so fun, without the drawback of SC5, and with their own interesting changes.

This also means I need to play Cities in Motion, which has been sitting on my backlog for several months now.
 
I'm not expecting this to be amazing, but it is excellent to finally see someone trying to compete (CitiesXL is basically abandoned) with Sim City.

I'm rather pissed off that they don't seem to have any famrs though. What the hell is city sim game's problem with agriculture?
 
I can't help but imagine that somehow Paradox misunderstood all the request for more internal peacetime management in EU for requests to create a whole new game of nothing but peacetime internal management :p
 
I like that the trailer music sounds SimCity-ish. Or, at the least, it sounds better than the music from CitiesXL.

I hope that the gameplay is closer to SimCity than CitiesXL, I couldn't really get into the latter the way I did with the former for whatever reason.

Maniacal said:
I'm not expecting this to be amazing, but it is excellent to finally see someone trying to compete (CitiesXL is basically abandoned) with Sim City.
Click to expand...

It just needs to be as good as the new SimCity, which shouldn't be too hard, hopefully.

Maniacal said:
I'm rather pissed off that they don't seem to have any famrs though. What the hell is city sim game's problem with agriculture?
Click to expand...

Hopefully they'll show it at a later time, all we have right now is a trailer with alpha gameplay anyways.
 
I welcome this attempt to reclaim the spirit of SimCity for all, as oppose to what EA did.
 
Looks extremely promising. After CiM2, Colossal Order was just begging for a big investment to put a proven great engine for city simulation to proper use. Hope Paradox has thrown a good deal of money at this to get a properly polished product, and looking at the first screenshots of UI and such it does look like a vast improvement.

Colossal Order have made some bad design decisions IMO on earlier games, like the reliance on selling skins and maps as dlc rather than expanding and polishing core gameplay. Hopefully with a bigger budget, more established engine and SimCity5 as an example on what not to do, this won't be an issue.

Maniacal said:
I'm rather pissed off that they don't seem to have any famrs though. What the hell is city sim game's problem with agriculture?
Click to expand...

I watched the livestream presentation, and I'm sure I remember Fred Wester mentioning farms at some point regarding Cities: Skylines.
 
Oda Nobunaga said:
I can't help but imagine that somehow Paradox misunderstood all the request for more internal peacetime management in EU for requests to create a whole new game of nothing but peacetime internal management :p
Click to expand...

Well you will get a DLC that enhances war, (the best part of the game) and improves ROTW.

This Thread should be titled Victoria III, I was expecting Victoria :cry::cry::cry::cry:


It looks really good this game, (at least it seems it won't be a Simcity failure)
 
Sim City 5 is too brainless. Simply stick down roads, zones, parks, import power and water and Voila, high wealth skyscrapers appear.

Anything must be better than that.
 
Now I'm wondering whether we will be able to terraform our cities ala the old Simcity's god mode. Also, it doesn't seem like we are getting it but I really hope we get simcity 4-esque regions, but oh well.
 
cybrxkhan said:
Now I'm wondering whether we will be able to terraform our cities ala the old Simcity's god mode. Also, it doesn't seem like we are getting it but I really hope we get simcity 4-esque regions, but oh well.
Click to expand...

Well one of the features is you can make huge huge cities so I'm guessing it's an alternative to region play but they haven't disclosed by how huge a city you can make.
 
Leonel said:
Well one of the features is you can make huge huge cities so I'm guessing it's an alternative to region play but they haven't disclosed by how huge a city you can make.
Click to expand...

The city expansion thingy could be interesting, indeed, as it also seems like you can have specialized districts and what not, and I suppose it'll still definitely beat the new Simcity's tiny city sizes anyways.
 
As with any other company. It's the best system for adding content to a game.
 
The city-expansion mechanic could be interesting, and somewhat mirror how cities tend to actually expand. You kind of have it in Sim City 4 with a big city plot and not using it all at first, but unlike in real life all the land in your SC4 plot is technically part of your city from the beginning.

Lights said:
Well you will get a DLC that enhances war, (the best part of the game) and improves ROTW.

This Thread should be titled Victoria III, I was expecting Victoria :cry::cry::cry::cry:


It looks really good this game, (at least it seems it won't be a Simcity failure)
Click to expand...

I don't think Paradox Development Studios has the bandwidth to do Vicky 3 right now. They're working on HOI 4 already, and they're also still expanding CKII and EU4, both of which it makes sense to expand as long as they have good ideas for how to do so. I wouldn't expect them to start seriously developing another new game themselves (as opposed to publishing someone else's game, and perhaps assisting a bit, as is being done here) until HOI4 is out or they stop releasing expansions to CKII, possibly both.

And I'm kind of hoping they eventually revisit Rome. I'd certainly be happy with an updated Victoria with a better UI, more to do, and a nice EU4-to-Vicky-3 converter (and, ideally, a Vicky3 to HOI4 converter, too, but I'd rather have the former). But EU:Rome ought to be redone at some point and brought up to Paradox's current standards.
 
Potentially interesting, but the arc of EU4's development cycle has burned any pre-order worthy goodwill I had towards PI. Hopefully this will be amazing but I'm gonna file it under the "Wait and See" category instead of the "Get Hype!" category.
 
I never played either CiM, but I've heard good things about the franchise, and I'll be following this one. I can say with full confidence it's easily going to be better than the abomination that calls itself after a classic gaming franchise, since PI isn't gaming-company-that-shall-not-be-named and isn't going to intentionally screw the game up :p

Quintillus said:
I don't think Paradox Development Studios has the bandwidth to do Vicky 3 right now. They're working on HOI 4 already, and they're also still expanding CKII and EU4, both of which it makes sense to expand as long as they have good ideas for how to do so. I wouldn't expect them to start seriously developing another new game themselves (as opposed to publishing someone else's game, and perhaps assisting a bit, as is being done here) until HOI4 is out or they stop releasing expansions to CKII, possibly both.

And I'm kind of hoping they eventually revisit Rome. I'd certainly be happy with an updated Victoria with a better UI, more to do, and a nice EU4-to-Vicky-3 converter (and, ideally, a Vicky3 to HOI4 converter, too, but I'd rather have the former). But EU:Rome ought to be redone at some point and brought up to Paradox's current standards.
Click to expand...

Interestingly, aside from Runemaster and HOI4, PDS is actually working on an as-yet-unannounced game known so far only as "Project Augustus." It's not clear what exactly this is, and the responses from PDS devs (expected of) have been vague at best and contradictory at worst. But they do seem to have the resources to pull off Vicky 3, and I really hope that's what they're doing.
 
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