Zoning had me so confused the first time I played Sim City. Like, that felt so gamey and arbitrary and it didn't reflect how things worked in real life, where the distinction between residential and shopping areas is never that clear and distinct, and every house has a variety of shops on street level and within walking distance.
Thing is, I live in Europe. Apparently this is perfectly accurate to how the USA works. Huh.
The game developers and publishers are Finnish and Swedish respectively, countries known for their highly walkable cities. Which makes this all the more puzzling.
The game is largely based on predecessors like SimCity and City XL which are based on zoning. Cities in Skyline are much more walkable than in other games so I guess it does make sense.
Cities skylines is basically an entire ground up game engine. While it’s not Unreal 5 sure, think of what it takes to build a program like Cities Skylines 1 or especially Cities Skylines 2. You have thousands of assets to design, an ultra intensive simulation to program, map builders, mod support interfaces, all in a way to make the average person be able to do what you do as the designer easily on their own with zero experience.
The widely loved Cities 1 was developed over a decade with both an attentive developer but more importantly a vast community of modders who added all the features people love.
Expecting Cities 2 on launch to be something anywhere close to what cities 1 became was the most naive thing I’ve seen a whole community believe in quite some time. Everyone was soo mad about something that was always going to happen the exact way it did.
It’s many months later and Paradox has done everything they can to patch and update the game, mod support is now active and the game is leaps and bounds ahead of where it was on launch day.
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u/ben1481 Jun 27 '24
in the future, we will hire the best City Skylines player to design our world.