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

Heh

[Greyfox]

They could just work their way through the EA game archive making each one not suck in exactly the way that EA made each one of them suck. Five years later, one of the two companies would still be alive...

Re:modern gameplay renaissance?

[Anonymous Coward]

Whooooa! Better watch out, guys. We got a badass here!

Re:EA

[TWX]

Heh. I guess it's been a long time since I played SimCity titles regularly. I kind of gave up when The Sims came out and went in a completely different direction than the city-building games had gone. Thought about playing Streets of SimCity, but between the original overhead-view Grand Theft Auto and the first-person Carmageddon II and Monster Truck Madness on the PC plus Twisted Metal on the Playstation I didn't really feel a need to get into even more games. I didn't even know that EA bought-out Maxis.

Was there really any improvement in the SimCity titles after SimCity 2000? That was probably the last one I played regularly. It seemed, at the time, to be perfect. One could control the terrain, within reason, the under-terrain infrastructure, the water table, and obviously the roads and zoning. What else did a city simulator need?

Played for a few hours and got bored

[chad_r]

I played Cities: Skylines for a while. Some parts are cool, like setting transit routes, setting different policies for neighborhoods, or controlling downstream pollution. But it wasn't fun in the long-term, because:

1. 1) It's not challenging. Once you make it past about 10,000 people you rake in more money than you know what to do with
2. 2) City development isn't realistic. Real cities of 20,000 people don't have a network of subways and high-rise neighborhoods. Unlike real cities, sprawling cul-de-sacs are low-value because they tend to be farther from police and fire service.
3. 3) Grade schools and high schools aren't optional in real life. In Skylines, Putting in a grade school and high school raises the education level of citizens, which means they are too overqualified for industrial work. So industry basically only desires employees who didn't graduate from grade school??
4. 4) People are dumb with respect to jobs. A group of university graduates will travel to the next town to do uneducated farm labor, and it makes the farm sad but apparently the employees are fine with it

I'm glad there is competition and innovation in the simulation realm, but I didn't have the free time to play Skylines a lot.

Re:Played for a few hours and got bored

[BenJeremy]

Well, you can always grab some of the 40,000 mods they have for the game to make it more difficult or more fun.

It's a sandbox game with tons of mods. At this point, you can make the game pretty much any experience you want, by either using other people's mods (as simple as clicking a button in Steam) or creating your own.

That's kind of the point of the article.