I find it hilarious that EA had the concept down and just blew their opportunity with Simcity 2013 (always online (which by the way was actually not true, people cracked the online requirement within the first day or so), had to contract with other users for basic services like sewage and electricity), paving the way for competitors like Cities: Skylines to take the lead instead.

This reminds me of the same thing that happened with Stardew Valley, the creator missed the old Harvest Moon games, didn't find a suitable substitute, and just build the entirety of the game from scratch, teaching himself art and music composition too. He's made over $300 million in revenue so far and might be the first solo game dev (or even regular software dev) to hit $1 billion in the course of the game's existence.

It just goes to show that the dominant players are not always dominant forever, and that common YC startup advice of understanding what exactly users want (hint: they don't want always-online DRM-filled games that nickle and dime you with microtransactions (well, most people anyway, there are always gacha/gambling-type whale gamers)) and serving them well is still correct.

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 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.

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 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.

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).

Time to get to work

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.

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.

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.

So. Many. Things!

Not much info other than the fact that it’ll release sometime this year on PS5, XSX, and PC. Teaser trailer is just a bunch of cinematics.

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.

IMPORTANT: the trailer and the screenshots are not actual gameplay. There is essentially nothing of the gameplay. At best you could say it is concept being shown but... I mean, what more of a concept can you do than just making better iteration of the first game?

Some people have also said they switched to Unreal Engine 5 but I have a hard time finding definitive source of that. It would be a major change since the original was made in Unity.

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

What a missed opportunity. Nothing futuristic, nothing good. Same old, same old. Car-centric cities.

I'm sure the game will be great. But I would have loved something more revolutionary.

What has made me give up on Cities Skylines is that you can't build a liveable city. It forces you to build US-style car-centric dystopias.

I found that once you reach a certain city size this game is just car traffic management.

Earlier today we had this HN story about how EA’s greed essentially killed the SimCity franchise for good:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35041202

In that context it’s notable that the company behind Cities: Skylines, the most prominent SimCity replacement, was originally funded by the Finnish government as explained on their Wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Order_(company)

VCs wouldn’t invest any money to build such a niche game, but Finnish national funding instruments for startups and arts were more willing to take risks.

A small story to keep in mind next time someone claims everything successful can be created through capitalism alone. It also happens that successful things are destroyed by capitalism and salvaged by public means.

The part of the trailer where we zoom-in to pedestrian level gave me an idea.

For all the higher-level systems thinking happening in city builders, we never go into the more subtle signals that can make a city feel great or terrible to its people.

Would be cool if we could zoom-in to a specific person in the game, and ask them how they actually feel living here, what they like or dislike about it. Including useless things that we can't possibly fix as a mayor. But that would give us cues to let us figure out what we could improve.

Then once we interview a few of them in a neighborhood, we'd get a picture of what to change to make them happy. We could also have different types of populations and neighborhood for different types of people.

Something more complex and organic than "people in this neighborhood don't feel safe, so you need to add a police station". This would add a layer of discovery and aliveness to the game.

I wanted to like Cities but I didn't.

The main issue is that the way zoning is done is really damn bad. Like not even American cities are that bad, zoning at its very very worst. There is no reason why it should be possible to have a much more flexible and powerful zoning code. Having mix use zoning, exclusion zones and so on. Why can offices and high density building not be in the same place?

I also dislike the roads, the basic building block is the road, but it should be the lane. You should be able to easily put together a few lanes, into a new road and then be able to use that. Currently you have to basically load 500 DLC road types just to cover all the basic things and even then it isn't great.

Parking, parking is the biggest problem with car based cities. And the game just ignores that issue, and that results in the problem with cars just being about optimization of intersections.

I also found the creation bus routes and other public traffic routes to difficult. It gets complex pretty quickly and once you have lots of them it just becomes almost unmanageable.

Having read the other article about EA's botched SimCity release, I had come across this trailer earlier today.

Does anyone have any interesting links, papers, references, etc. for implementing a city simulation? I really like the idea of agent-based models and actor systems, and I think it would be a lot of fun of learning about the science and engineering of the models behind these types of games.

Dunno… After spending many hours in Cities in Motion, and even more in Cities in Motion 2, Cities: Skylines just didn’t click for me somehow. It was kind of barren, with awkward road building (compared to CIM2), and just kind of restricting in a hard-to-define way.

Perhaps the DLCs have improved the situation, but I lost interest by then. Hope CS2 will be better!

Oh shit, it's real this time. If they expect me to get a 4090 for those reflections though, pass.

All joking a salad, probably all the very common constraints should be addressed, but I'd be stoked on an online component like SimCity 2000 Network edition. I'm not so into the idea of a pure sandbox anymore. They've had one of the longest beta testing cycles ever with that first version though, I'm hopeful.

One thing I was never fully able to explore, was the idea of taking a kind of broken city, and exploring ways to improve it given real constraints. I think a lot of people hate their hometowns, and would love to just start with that somehow.

Fwiw I do know about importing terrain maps and so on, which is cool, but it's still a sandbox. I like the idea of starting like 100 years into a city that's just been broke and struggling, with terrible infrastructure and lott of complaints.

Hopefully the AI is a _trillion_ times better.

I hope we can have more European style zoning.

Let's hope it won't be another car simulator.

Trailer disappointed me. Pass from me.

My only regret with Cities Skylines is that it's taken Colossal Order off of working on Cities in Motion - CiM 1&2 were very niche transit simulators but they were extremely well executed.

I'm glad to see colossal order and paradox are behind the sequel.

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?

I hope they don't go again with a car-centric idea of city building, but seeing the steam page screenshots I'm preparing for disappointment.

I don't really this game because there is no real granularity: the amount of citizens is simulated up to a certain amount, and above that amount, the game just increment numbers that don't mean anything.

I prefer games like factorio or microtown for example, where every object exist in the game, and is not just a statistic.

Having spent countless hours in Cities: Skylines I’m a bit worried that I haven’t spotted a single form of public transport nor more bike infrastructure than a painted bike lane. I hope we won’t have to wait for countless DLCs to add more interesting modes of transport that just cars

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.

This will come down to pricing. I don't see the core gameplay dynamic being substantially different so pricing will need to be reasonable for me to buy it if it's functionally a graphics upgrade

Anyone able to read between the lines and see what features will be coming?

This is just amazing. I still enjoy Cities Skylines I, have spent so many hours on it. A 2nd version can only be even more amazing. Understood that it will use Unreal engine 5.

I have a feeling that this isn't going to be available on the Series S (or if it is, it'll be like CP2077 on the original PS4/XB1). Oh well.

Would love to play this on my m2 mac, but i'm assuming its windows or console only? Or do we think this would be available on Apple devices?

The game looks fantastic, I just hope it doesn't become a DLC hell like other games (and the previous version of this game).

I'm really hoping they don't botch this release like some of their DLC. Most of the DLC released have pretty bad ratings on Steam.

I wonder if this will still use Unity

Cool!

I hope somebody makes a Streets of SimCity-style exploration/battle game from this.

That game was so much fun!

Is the original good? Growing up playing SimCity 2000

Traffic. Traffic, Traffic, Traffic. Please.

Oh shit, it's real this time

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They never fixed the terrible traffic AI in the first game.

I have no confidence in the sequel.

I'm looking forward to another soulless paradox game where the core mechanics are really stupid e.g all people who move in are born at the same time and will die at the same time so 90% of your city will instantly die in a year

And then they'll want £400 from you for DLCs while still not adding to any of the core mechanics