Cities: Skylines II announced, launching later this year on PC and consoles

[Shawn Knight]

Something to look forward to: Developer Colossal Order has announced the long-awaited sequel to its popular city-building simulator. In Cities: Skylines II, players will have the opportunity to design and build the city of their dreams. The two-minute-and-change announcement trailer featured mostly non-gameplay visuals with narration that makes it sound more like a god simulator, but perhaps Colossal Order is simply looking to highlight the many elements that players will be responsible for managing.

Indeed, a description on the game's landing page notes Skylines II will challenge your decision-making skills with deep simulation and a living economy. The sequel also promises a fully-realized transportation system, plenty of construction options and advanced modding capabilities.

The first Cities: Skylines landed in 2015 for PC and helped plug a hole left by EA's disastrous reboot of SimCity a couple years earlier. The sim was a hit with gamers, earning a score of 85 over on Metacritic and a user score of 8.7 out of 10.

Colossal Order followed up with a bevy of expansion packs and DLC that collectively iterated on the base game, transforming it into something that was nearly unrecognizable form the original (in a good way), and brought the game to additional platforms. As of last spring, Colossal Order had sold more than 12 million copies of the game across all platforms. Last year alone, the game welcomed more than 5.5 million new players.

Last month, publisher Paradox Interactive announced a remastered version of Cities: Skylines for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series. The refurbished game dropped on February 15, delivering a host of upgrades optimized for current generation consoles including more buildable tiles to create larger cities, improved graphical performance, a new environmental control panel to adjust weather and the time of day and a new quick selection tool.

Cities: Skylines II is due out sometime later this year for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, Game Pass and PC via Steam. Pricing has not been revealed but you can add the game to your wish list over on Steam.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/97833-cities-skylines-ii-announced-launching-later-year-pc.html

 

[yRaz]

EA messed up SimCity, thank god that Cities: skylines is around and the Anno series. City builders were such a big part of my life in the 90's and early 2000's. I can understand why it isn't as popular as it used to be(no I can't, everything is fornite and CoD), but it's just such an easy way to relax. Sometimes you don't want hardcore, fast action games. Sometimes you just want to relax and zone out without having to worry about much.

As small as the genre might be these days I'm happy they're still around

 

[rsmith222]

Popularity doesn't prove quality. Lots of terrible fast food and WalMart clothing are proof of that.

Velveeta 'cheese' — loaded with aluminium, is proof of that. Not only does it have a terrible texture and flavor, it out-sells high-quality real cheese, cheese not loaded with a neurotoxin.

So... my question is: Is Cities Skylines a fun game, or is it dull and pretty? Does it do more than provide traffic simulation as the core, with not much fun to be found in other areas?

I haven't tried it but I did see warning hints in some reviews about such things.

 

[corrosive23]

Popularity doesn't prove quality. Lots of terrible fast food and WalMart clothing are proof of that.

Velveeta 'cheese' — loaded with aluminium, is proof of that. Not only does it have a terrible texture and flavor, it out-sells high-quality real cheese, cheese not loaded with a neurotoxin.

So... my question is: Is Cities Skylines a fun game, or is it dull and pretty? Does it do more than provide traffic simulation as the core, with not much fun to be found in other areas?

I haven't tried it but I did see warning hints in some reviews about such things.

The worst part about it is, that since its a Paradox game, it has literally 50 DLC. And every update breaks mods.

 

[Tuxie]

Cities: Skylines is the city builder I've enjoyed the most since Sim City 2000 for the Amiga, and I've played most of them. Really looking forward to Skylines II since the original is starting to feel a bit old, graphics wise.

My biggest wish for the sequel is a good street walking mode. A driving mode would be really fun also. And paintball!

 

[dangh]

Can't wait for it. I already spend hundreds of hours on skylines, it is top level city builder with many different aspects to focus on. I hope new version will continue with the same settings, bit worried about this story trying thingy.

 

[Puiu]

Hopefully they make something good and they don't screw up what they've built with the first one

 

[Bacchus222]

Popularity doesn't prove quality. Lots of terrible fast food and WalMart clothing are proof of that.

Velveeta 'cheese' — loaded with aluminium, is proof of that. Not only does it have a terrible texture and flavor, it out-sells high-quality real cheese, cheese not loaded with a neurotoxin.

So... my question is: Is Cities Skylines a fun game, or is it dull and pretty? Does it do more than provide traffic simulation as the core, with not much fun to be found in other areas?

I haven't tried it but I did see warning hints in some reviews about such things.

I'm just trying to find the question "which cheese do you hate, and why?" in the original article....

 

[jason lee]

Popularity doesn't prove quality. Lots of terrible fast food and WalMart clothing are proof of that.

Velveeta 'cheese' — loaded with aluminium, is proof of that. Not only does it have a terrible texture and flavor, it out-sells high-quality real cheese, cheese not loaded with a neurotoxin.

So... my question is: Is Cities Skylines a fun game, or is it dull and pretty? Does it do more than provide traffic simulation as the core, with not much fun to be found in other areas?

I haven't tried it but I did see warning hints in some reviews about such things.

I never buy that **** at the grocery store. Only when the restaurants serve it on a cheeseburger.

 

[alexnode]

Popularity doesn't prove quality. Lots of terrible fast food and WalMart clothing are proof of that.

Velveeta 'cheese' — loaded with aluminium, is proof of that. Not only does it have a terrible texture and flavor, it out-sells high-quality real cheese, cheese not loaded with a neurotoxin.

So... my question is: Is Cities Skylines a fun game, or is it dull and pretty? Does it do more than provide traffic simulation as the core, with not much fun to be found in other areas?

I haven't tried it but I did see warning hints in some reviews about such things.

I really like it, no it is not perfect but if you like making nice neighbourhoods and grandiose cities then you are in for a treat. I have an almost four digit number of hours on it. The simulation aspect of it is great at small/medium scale but sometimes breaks in megacities, with traffic and jobs being quite difficult to handle. Ok last time I played was 3 years ago so maybe there are improvements. There is sandbox if you want just pure building and decoration. The mod community is amazing, and usually there is a mod to solve every little kink. So, I am really excited for CS 2 ... I hope the simulation aspect of it will take advantage of the increased processing power of modern computers. My only worry is that they will release a barebones game to do DLCs which is Paradox' s tactic.

 

[rsmith222]

My only worry is that they will release a barebones game to do DLCs which is Paradox' s tactic.

Learned from EA. The Sims 4 was incredibly brassy, considering how many hundreds of dollars people poured into Sims 3 – and the fact that Sims 4 had tablet-grade graphics. It didn't even have some of the features non-DLC original Sims 1 shipped with.

One of EA's executives threatened the Sims community by telling them that if they didn't cough up hundreds of dollars for Sims 4 trash the company wouldn't bother to release Sims 5.

SimCity 5's entire city footprint was designed to force-feed the DLC, which make building larger cities possibly via vertical kludge.