Welcome to another edition of Paula’s Games Ramblings; you can find the other ramblings here.
Cities: Skylines II, revealed on the Paradox Announcement Show 2023, will be the sequel to one of the most beloved and best-selling modern city-builders on PC and consoles.
I’ve been playing Cities: Skylines for years and love it. Furthermore, I’ve built many cities of different sizes, some more successful than others. I’ve also learnt a lot about the game, and playing it on PC has given me access to mods and assets for the game.
Cities Grow
Through the eight years the game has been out, it has improved immensely from the base game that was first released.
Colossal Order has continuously updated the Cities: Skylines and released many DLCs and Content Creator Packs that all add to the gameplay. In addition, a very active modder community continues to release mods to improve the overall gameplay.
I use some mods myself when playing Cities, mostly quality-of-life mods. Mods add to the gameplay and make the game more player-friendly than the base game.
I’m excited about the release of Cities: Skylines II later this year. However, Colossal Order, which is developing the new cities, keeps things close to its chest and hasn’t released any information besides a video. Furthermore, the video they released doesn’t show any gameplay footage.
Hopes for Cities: Skylines II
So that’s got me thinking, what would all of us city builders like to see in Cities; Skylines II?
I’d like to see a more realistic base game, from its aesthetics (get rid of the cartoon-looking houses that the base game grows) and how it feels when you play it, to match it more to real-life cities. This would include having cities with run-down areas.
Mods Integrated into the Game
I’d expect mods such as Move it, Find it, Traffic Manager and many other essential mods to be part of the base game from launch. Move It allows you to move objects in the game exactly where you want them, and Find It lets you search, filter, select, and place assets.
It also provides some extra info that is usually not available in the vanilla game. Finally, Traffic Manager does what the name implies; it lets you manage the traffic on the road network. You can improve lane and parking usage and customise junctions, roads, and rails.
City Economy
A weaker aspect of the base game is the implementation of economic management. While you can higher and lower taxes and adjust spending on city services, that’s all you can do in Cities: Skylines; I’ll like to see that expanded with a deeper budget system implemented into Cities: Skyines II.
Having the player make more decisions, such as trading goods that your city has manufactured, having overall city events to handle, and road accidents to manage, would make city building much more intricate and involving for players.
Parking
For a city-building game, not having parking lots for your citizens to park their vehicles while they go shopping is a bit of a misdemeanour. Until recently, parking lots in Cities: Skylines were unheard of unless you used assets and mods from the workshop.
Of course, there are small parking lots attached to some of the commercial buildings. They grow when you zone a commercial area. But since it’s random, the buildings that grow in your city could have few parking lots.
Look around any real-life city; parking is a massive part of every city today. So allowing the cims in Cities: Skylines II to park their cars instead of putting them into their pockets would be fantastic. It would make any city much more life-like.
Changing Seasons on all Maps
While Cities: Skylines has weather, rain and wind, one thing the game is missing is the changing seasons. The game has green grassy maps and a few desert maps added with DLCs.
However, if you want to play on a map with snow, you have to buy the DLC Snowfall, which adds a winter weather system and snowy maps. Snow maps should be in the base game, as should changing seasons. Imagine watching the trees in your city change colour, and a light sprinkling of snow appear as the season changes to winter.
Larger Maps and Better Zoning
The base game of Cities allows you to build your city over nine tiles on the map. However, using mod 81 Tiles on PC, you can use every buildable tile on the map. I’d love access to the whole map; there are so many opportunities available to the player when they have all of the maps to build on.
We could build small outlaying villages to larger suburbia towns and connect them to a large metropolis. Adding medium density (at least to residential and commercial) and mixed zones would be a bonus too.