Cities: Skylines from Colossal Order

omni wrote:

Looks like tomorrow will see the embargo lifted on reviewers with preview copies.

According to quill18 on this reddit thread, the embargo for reviews is March 10, while the embargo for Youtubers and Twitch streamers is tomorrow (March 3). I'll definitely be watching his Youtube and Twitch channels for some Skylines gameplay.

MeatMan wrote:
omni wrote:

Looks like tomorrow will see the embargo lifted on reviewers with preview copies.

According to quill18 on this reddit thread, the embargo for reviews is March 10, while the embargo for Youtubers and Twitch streamers is tomorrow (March 3). I'll definitely be watching his Youtube and Twitch channels for some Skylines gameplay. :)

Quill tweeted his schedule earlier today:

Cities: Skylines LIVESTREAM! (March 3rd @ 9am EST / 2pm GMT):
D-Man777 wrote:

Quill tweeted his schedule earlier today:

Cities: Skylines LIVESTREAM! (March 3rd @ 9am EST / 2pm GMT):

Perfect! Thanks for the heads up.

Thanks for the clarification. Strange way to divide the embargo really, I would think that youtubers and streamers would be able to show more of any potential failings or issues than a text based review by a media outlet in the industry that can be more favourable towards games than 'regular' fans of the genre.

Either way, I'll be trying to clear my diary at work roughly around 2pm

EDIT: Here's a list of Let's Play and streams for today.

Quill has begun posting his videos. Playlist here. His older ones are in this playlist too.

I just want to personally thank each and every one of you who will watch the streams and LPs and report back since I am simply unable to do so with my life the way it currently is.

I am glad I pre-ordered this.

omni wrote:

Thanks for the clarification. Strange way to divide the embargo really, I would think that youtubers and streamers would be able to show more of any potential failings or issues than a text based review by a media outlet in the industry that can be more favourable towards games than 'regular' fans of the genre.

While I agree with the logic, I'm sure the review embargo is all about Metacritic, as usual, since LPers and streamers aren't giving the game a score.

I've been watching quill's stream for about 45 minutes, and other than the annoying "chirper" feature that he left enabled, everything else seems good so far. Now I just need to see gameplay from someone whose city has reached a large size and population, to see if the game's performance holds up.

I was thinking about this game vis-a-vis Cities in Motion the other day, and I reallized how much I would like a multiplayer version of a city buoilder with different responsibilities and gameplay for each person. Having one person playing Cities:Skyline while another player plays Cities in Motion 3 inside that changing city with the budget the first player allots him would be fantastic.

I'm not sure what other slots would be fun and work well, but maybe having another player play as the Fire, Health and Safety director and another play as the Education director would be doable.

That sounds like it would end in disaster, much like real utilities and government.

So, from watching streams on and off as the day allowed, these are my positives and negatives so far. I'm saving the lets play videos and anything 'not live' until tomorrow. Excuse the brain-dump.

Positives
--------

The game is very pretty. Toy-town, rather than realism, but looks good.
Road building seems to be fairly flexible (even if a bit clunky to do complex road designs)
Water physics (not normally something that matters, but more on that below)
City size - The 9 city tiles actually give you a considerable estate to play in.
Traffic - it seems to cause issues, which is good, but not on the city-wide lockdowns that occasioned in SimCity.
When upgrading roads to deal with increased traffic, the zones automatically move outward, where possible.
The statistics and information available from the various overlays are very well done, and seem to good a very good overview of what is happening in the city.
The game controls for placement, and the camera controls appear very fluid, regardless of how much is on-screen. I've not seen any slow-downs when zooming in and out, or panning quickly.

Negatives
---------

Difficulty - it doesn't appear to be that difficult to make a successful city
No disasters - I think disasters are a pretty easy way out for city builders to increase difficulty. I'm not a fan of that mechanic as a difficulty moderator, but they should still exist.
Fires don't spread between buildings - If a small house goes on fire... *shrug*. Might not concentrate on Fire Services when the risk is only to individual buildings at once.
Building scale - Not a huge deal at the start, but I don't feel there is enough difference in size between a 1 house plot, and a tall skyscraper.
There appear to be some issues integrating the highway connections into a city. The in and out roads seem to be quite strict in how they merge into the 'normal' roads of the city.

Expansion
---------

Roads - The ability to make complex overpasses, roundabouts, slip roads, and one-way streets actually gives considerable flexibility in how you push traffic through your city. I've seen some very good (and -very- bad) examples of how road placement can have a huge impact on traffic through a city. Traffic may be a bit contentious, as too many traffic issues will have people hailing it as broken, but not enough, and it removes on of a city planner's biggest issues with a large town or city.

Water Physics - this was pretty neat to see. A streamer I was watching placed his water pumps close together. The result was that the water level immediately in front of the pumps was diminished enough that it impacted the function of the pumps - they couldn't access enough water any more. The same guy also build two Hydro dams at either end of the river - the result was that the whole river dried up, again causing issues to his water supply. the water level upstream from the dam also rose, covering a small part of the land on either side. He decided to destroy the dam, for obvious reasons. The result was that the water pushed back down the riverbed, and when it came in contact with a road bridge, it actually began to flow over the bridge for a short time. The same happened when the water reached the second dam at the end of the riverbed. Not really functional, but was good to watch.

City Size - Obvious comparisons to SimCity are impossible to avoid. By the looks of it, one city-tile is around the same size as a city in SimCity. There's been a lot of chat on reddit etc about Colossal Order doing a u-turn on how easy it would be for a modder to unlock the full 25 tiles, but I honestly think the 'maximum' 9 tiles available for one city would be a very good size to work with. They've obviously done considerable testing on performance of even larger cities, and decided that 9 tiles is optimal for the recommended specifications, to keep the game available to a larger audience.

Conclusion
----------
In short, it's obvious that they have taken inspiration from SimCity, and tried to refine it and remove some or all of the main criticisms of that game. Whether they have managed to do all they hoped, I'll reserve judgement on until I get to play the game myself. For the size of the team, and for the price, along with the fact that they are supporting a considerable amount of the requested modding abilities, I think it will be good value for money. If modders manage to break out of the provided editor, perhaps utilising an external additional application (much like SKSE for Skyrim, or Forge for Minecraft), and if it has a good enough draw that it pulls some of the SimCity4 modding crowd, I think the game could have some really long legs. I guess the limits of Unity may provide more of a barrier than SC4. That's not to say the game won't be very enjoyable without mods, and I expect I could easily get 60-100 hours of enjoyment out of the vanilla game, but if the above is possible, then I can see a considerable amount of content and changes being made available, and it could finally replace SC4 as the 'best' city-builder around. We all know how much we want a new King, SC4 is 12 years old, it's time.

I hope that time is now.

Thanks for the summary of what you've noticed. I've just been watching quill18 all day while working, so I'm sure I missed some details. My main concern is with late-game performance. Quill is about to end his stream soon, and I have not seen any slow down, but his city is only at 47K population as I type this.

Difficulty - it doesn't appear to be that difficult to make a successful city

For anyone concerned about the difficulty being too easy, it's been confirmed that a "hard mode" mod made by the devs will be available on Day 1.

Robear wrote:

I am glad I pre-ordered this. :-)

Chump!

Map Editor and Asset Editor look SO MUCH DAMN fun!!! I think I might spend more time on creating stuff for the steam workshop, than actually building cities.

I seriously can't wait for next Tuesday.

Still haven't seen anything off-putting about this. Looking forward to the 10th. It coincides with a few days vacation I have from work for soon-to-be-parenting things, so a relaxed, calm city builder will be just the ticket for some time off.

In other news, EA have closed Maxis Emeryville. Sad to see for the employees, and I wonder if we've seen the last of the SimCity franchise.

omni wrote:

In other news,

That's so "other" that I would suggest posting it in a thread that's actually appropriate. I would prefer that this thread not be derailed by any discussion of EA and/or Maxis and/or SimCity.

MeatMan wrote:
omni wrote:

In other news,

That's so "other" that I would suggest posting it in a thread that's actually appropriate. I would prefer that this thread not be derailed by any discussion of EA and/or Maxis and/or SimCity.

See RIP Maxis thread here.

Fine.

This might sound strange to some, but I'm disappointed that the game doesn't feature a day/night cycle. It therefore doesn't have the challenge of solving traffic problems at peak times, and that is a little unrealistic for a city builder. I don't know, I guess I'm just chasing Sim City 4 remastered.

Careful mentioning that franchise here.:P

I'd rather have traffic that works than a day/night cycle. Day/Night seems like something for later iterations instead of something that would be on the top of a design sheet.

omni wrote:

Careful mentioning that franchise here.:P

Yeah, might get minimodded.

There's a comment on one of the Steam discussions that notes that a dev said that they were looking at day/night cycles, but no ETA had been decided upon.

Yeah, a day/night cycle would be a nice thing to have, but considering the small size of the dev team (around 10 IIRC), I'm impressed by what's already in the game based on what I've seen. Like Robear said, the dev/pub said that it was on their wishlist to add to the game at a later date.

I still haven't seen a streamer or LPer with a city larger than 60K population, so I'm still curious if the game performance holds up in the late game. If anyone finds a video with a large population (100K+), please link/embed it.

garion333 wrote:
omni wrote:

Careful mentioning that franchise here.:P

Yeah, might get minimodded.

Don't hate me because I'm right.

MeatMan wrote:
garion333 wrote:
omni wrote:

Careful mentioning that franchise here.:P

Yeah, might get minimodded.

Don't hate me because I'm right. ;)

Spoken like a true (mini)mod.

MeatMan wrote:

Yeah, a day/night cycle would be a nice thing to have, but considering the small size of the dev team (around 10 IIRC), I'm impressed by what's already in the game based on what I've seen. Like Robear said, the dev/pub said that it was on their wishlist to add to the game at a later date.

I still haven't seen a streamer or LPer with a city larger than 60K population, so I'm still curious if the game performance holds up in the late game. If anyone finds a video with a large population (100K+), please link/embed it.

I hope they're not limiting that with the streamers. Hate that crap.

garion333 wrote:

I hope they're not limiting that with the streamers. Hate that crap.

I seriously doubt they are. It seems that no one that I've seen has played a single city long enough to get past 60K.

Is it Tuesday yet?

kexx wrote:

Is it Tuesday yet?

Let me introduce you to a new game: Drink until it's Tuesday!

MeatMan wrote:
garion333 wrote:

I hope they're not limiting that with the streamers. Hate that crap.

I seriously doubt they are. It seems that no one that I've seen has played a single city long enough to get past 60K.

I don't know at what population Quill18 finished his last livestream, but he just tweeted that he was going for 200k today. He started 30 min. ago.

D-Man777 wrote:

I don't know at what population Quill18 finished his last livestream, but he just tweeted that he was going for 200k today. He started 30 min. ago.

Cool. I've been watching him, and I know that he started a new city after his first one reached about 40K-50K, and his new city reached just over 60K before he went offline yesterday.

Not sure how this happened, but I just preordered this game. It didn't help that it was only $21 from GMG VIP. I don't even know a lot about this...

I truly had so much fun with SimCity for the hours it took to fill up a city. I started maybe 5 cities after that and had about 50 hours of playtime. I couldn't stop playing during that time.