How Cities: Skylines Beat SimCity At Its Own Game

An anonymous reader writes: Maxis, the studio behind SimCity, was shuttered earlier this year. Fortunately, another studio has taken up its mantle. The small team at Colossal Order has already won acclaim for city-builder game Cities: Skylines (and sold millions), earning a great reputation with the modding community by avoiding all the mistakes the last SimCity release made, such as enforced online/multiplayer. A new behind the scenes feature looks at how the game came about — it was not a response to SimCity, surprisingly — as well as what's next from the studio.

"We are planning to start another game project sometime soon," says Colossal CEO Mariina Hallikainen. "We definitely want to focus on old-school simulator games and definitely PC. PC, Mac and Linux, those are our 'thing.' But I think we're maybe going to do something a little bit different."

Comments

EA

[phantomfive]

Sounds like EA has a new buyout target.

In fact 'EA' is the only thing that really needs to be said here, that's why Sim City failed.

modern gameplay renaissance?

[Anonymous Coward]

We had the Great Gaming Dark Ages from the early 2000's until recently, during which games mostly turned to shit, delivering little more than reskinned dumbed down pulp for the masses.

But now, it seems like there's a renaissance of good games trying to bring back actual gameplay. Will this succeed in the face of the studio execs who want to dumb everything down for the masses? I don't know, but it sure is nice to see some smaller studios trying. I'm sick of the handholdy pulp that's been coming out of the AAA studios.

Re:modern gameplay renaissance?

[TWX]

You know, as much as I liked titles that came out in the later video-acceleration era with advanced music and sound effects, there's still nothing quite like that first level of DOS-based DOOM with the overdriven guitar coming out of an FM-synth midi chip on a Soundblaster 16, with the monsters roaring and the lights flickering.

Re:Is this 2 guys in their moms basement?

[BenJeremy]

I'm guessing AC has never even glanced at this game, or is basing it on his experiences with Cities XL, an entirely different franchise by an entirely different company that has absolutely no connection with Skylines?

Cities:Skylines is a successor to Cities In Motion, though the developers seem to have listened to users and greatly improved everything they could. Right now, it's rated at 96% thumbs up, with over 10,000 positive reviews.

I don't think anybody in their right mind could say Cities:Skylines "sucks"

Cities XXL, on the other hand, the latest chapter of Cities XL that just came out in February, doesn't seem to be getting a very receptive review (though it still might be better than EA/Maxis' Sim City)

Re:Heh

[Darinbob]

I think a major flaw with Maxis is that they thought they had a must-buy title. As in Too Big To Fail. If a company thinks they can do anything, then they'll do things to screw with customers without them leaving. Ie, start to "monetize" things more. Horse armor, no one can bitch about that can they?

Thing is, it sort of works for awhile. There is a class of game buyers who just don't care. If the game is new they will buy it. Three months later they're on to something else and don't care about how they got screwed, and the price doesn't matter since they probably snuck the card of of mom's purse. Or they're the idiot on the forums who says "dude, lighten up, it's only the cost of 4 family size pizzas".

Re:Played for a few hours and got bored

[NicBenjamin]

1) You might be surprised. IRL if you're a growing region it's very hard for a city to go bankrupt. IRL Detroit has been in a bad region, dominated by a shrinking industry, and overseen by a state which would rather it went away, since roughly 1970. And we managed to not go bankrupt until very recently.

2) IRL it's very complex to value sprawling cul de sacs of suburban development. When first built they're great because the people who live there are the kind of people who almost never need the government, and have a fairly good income. If they weren't both they wouldn't be able to afford to buy into a suburb. This means a miniscule tax rate is enough to run the city. Then life happens, and 50 years later you've got houses designed to standards nobody wants, owned by people who were too poor to move out, which means that a) they need lots of government services, and b) they can't pay for those services with the miniscule tax rate, leading to c) the City Manager scrambling around to save the city while the long-time residents are convinced that it's still an upper-income enclave. Quite a few very smart people have pointed out that it's much easier to build new suburbs then build a new Brooklyn because of the way the Feds give out grants..

But in a world where you don't have the Feds actively subsidizing suburban growth, and region is growing (aka: a world where the game is fun), then having a core of apartment buildings surrounded by no development makes sense because it cost as lot less per unit to build/maintain a small apartment building then a suburban neighborhood.

3) This is a game. IRL in the US most cities have no control over their schools whatsoever because those are run by an independent school board. That would be no fun. So is forcing the player to plan an expensive education system from the beginning. Which is why no version of SimCity would require you get the entire City within the radius of a High School zone before you could build industrial zones.

4) Again, this is a game. It's no fun if you can't get started building pretty quickly, which means that educated migrants are necessary.

Now if you want a more realistic (ie: much harder) game you can mod it. But unless you mod in some pretty nasty ethnic dynamics you;re never going to make it as hard as real life is for cities like Detroit.