Cities: Skylines from Colossal Order

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press release wrote:

- Designed to Impress: Massive map sizes and deep, detailed design controls allow players to construct the cities of their dreams, running everything from road building and zoning to public services and taxation – and, yes, public transportation

- Policy and Progress: Set a series of civic policies to guide the city’s growth; fine-tune the placement and direction of local districts

- Local Beautification: Admire the vastness of your city in a polished visual style and manage a living, breathing city, all the way down to realistic water flow in the irrigation systems

- The Sky is Not the Limit: Strive to build up a city towards jaw-dropping endgame “wonders,” and then go beyond what is possible with built-in game modding tools

For more information on Cities: Skylines, visit http://www.citiesskylines.com

Yay

Oh wow, almost all of their bullet points are in direct opposition to the current SimCity. Awesome!

Cities in Motion never grabbed me, but I know lots of people speak highly of the two games (and by extenstion, the developer). Since this will be a true city-builder, this is definitely now on my radar.

garion333 wrote:

Oh wow, almost all of their bullet points are in direct opposition to the current SimCity. Awesome!

IMAGE(http://thumbsnap.com/s/UTZ9fVGP.jpg)

As one of those that speaks highly about the two COMs (especially the second one) I am very excited!

I've actually reinstalled COM 2 a couple weeks ago, because I've been feeling the itch again.

Yonder wrote:

As one of those that speaks highly about the two COMs (especially the second one) I am very excited!

A year or so ago, I grabbed either COM1 or COM2 (can't remember) on a Steam sale and tried it, but yeah, playing only a transportation simulator didn't hold my attention very long.

I quite enjoyed Cities in Motion 1, but I thought the sequel was very poorly executed. It felt to me that their design goals exceeded their coding grasp, and I didn't feel the game worked very well.

I'd tread real careful on this one. CIM2 was good on the high concept stuff, just like this is, but the implementations of their planned features were often quite poor.

Given how burned I felt by CIM2, I'll definitely be waiting for reports back from the early adopters. I wouldn't mind paying full price for a quality city sim, but I'll definitely want to be sure that that's what I'm actually getting.

With luck, they will have learned from CIM2 and be able to make a better game this time around.

On the other hand, they may just be reusing their CIM2 engine and this game will be just as bad.

Looking good, I trust Colossal Order and Paradox to release a game that will have the complexity that I want in a city simulation, and the usability.

I feel like BadKen and Malor played a different game than I did!

CIM II was much better when you figured out how to play it. some of the functions are fairly non-intuitive. For example I remember endless frustration on figuring out how to lay a proper train so I stuck to making lots of bus stops and street cars.

Please have smarter traffic AI than CIM, please have smarter traffic AI than CIM, please have smarter traffic AI than CIM.

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/B8va6QN.jpg)

FFFUUUUUUUUU.

They've got a year of work ahead of them though, so there's lots of time yet.

Looks like a real city, though one without any traffic - and not a garbage truck in sight!

At first glance I couldn't tell what was the issue as I thought that all those cars were parked, but then yeah that is bad.

garion333 wrote:

Dev Diary: http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/...

Some nice stuff, but by far the most important bit was:

a road upgrading tool

So there is a very real chance that you won't have to demolish an entire road, destroying all of it's stops and breaking all of its routes just to repaint one of the lanes into a bus lane!

To be fair, SimCity allows for this.

Liking what I'm seeing so far.

garion333 wrote:

To be fair, SimCity allows for this.

I am purely, 100% sniping at COM 2 there. That's my biggest headache with the game.

Looking good, indeed.

Live gameplay being shown right now on Paradox's Twitch channel: http://www.twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive

[edit]

I've been watching for about 20 minutes now. With the UI and visuals on display, this basically looks like SimCity 5 without all the crap and restrictions that EA forced upon that game. In fact, it looks so visually similar to SC5 that I wouldn't be surprised if EA tried to take some form of legal action at some point.

MeatMan wrote:

Live gameplay being shown right now on Paradox's Twitch channel: http://www.twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive

[edit]

I've been watching for about 20 minutes now. With the UI and visuals on display, this basically looks like SimCity 5 without all the crap and restrictions that EA forced upon that game. In fact, it looks so visually similar to SC5 that I wouldn't be surprised if EA tried to take some form of legal action at some point.

I missed the stream, but I checked out the trailer linked on the channel. You're right on every point, and that actually makes me very happy. I was 100% okay with the look of SC5, but the limitations soured the game for me too much. I certainly hope they can keep making the game I saw them playing in the trailer.

Here's the VOD for those that missed the stream. http://www.twitch.tv/paradoxinteract...

The stream actually starts at about 14:30, after a bunch of trailers for various Paradox games.

Please don't be as bad as SimCity. Please don't be as bad as SimCity. Please don't be as bad as SimCity.

Oh please god don't let it suck that bad.

I am on my knees here.

Looking good! Although I saw this game mentioned some time ago, I have no idea why I didn't dig deeper. I'm very much looking forward to this developing. I just hope Paradox can make it really well, and become the new King of City Builders, much like they are in the Grand Strategy genre.

Fingers well and truly crossed, and with the Citybound guy jumping around moving country etc, I don't see that becoming a thing any time soon, so this is it. Help Me Paradox games, You're my only hope.

That is, unless Cities XXL isn't as bad as the previous one...

omni wrote:

That is, unless Cities XXL isn't as bad as the previous five...

FTFY

MeatMan wrote:

Why would they choose to use such a boring design for a city in this video? Seems like a missed opportunity.

omni wrote:

with the Citybound guy jumping around moving country etc, I don't see that becoming a thing any time soon

I was very interested in playing his game and had been watching his updates until recently, but yeah, lately it seems like he's spending most of his time on other things, so I don't expect Citybound to be finished for a long time.

omni wrote:

That is, unless Cities XXL isn't as bad as the previous one...

Due to Focus Home Interactive's actions over the last few years - releasing essentially the same game every year full of technical issues so bad that it runs like a slideshow when you reach just a moderately sized city - I have no faith in this XXL version. I played XL 2011, and it was a good game for the early stages of building a city, but the frustration with the tanking framerate eventually caused me to quit.

So far, things are looking very promising for Cities: Skylines. Fingers remain crossed.

MeatMan wrote:
omni wrote:

That is, unless Cities XXL isn't as bad as the previous one...

Due to Focus Home Interactive's actions over the last few years - releasing essentially the same game every year full of technical issues so bad that it runs like a slideshow when you reach just a moderately sized city - I have no faith in this XXL version. I played XL 2011, and it was a good game for the early stages of building a city, but the frustration with the tanking framerate eventually caused me to quit.

So far, things are looking very promising for Cities: Skylines. Fingers remain crossed.

Cities XL has been in a weird place where the game was bought by another company that for some reason didn't have the ability to properly support or improve it. The majority of the content of those updates was just some new buildings and whatnot. They had apparently admitted that for whatever reason they didn't have the ability to do any of the technical or lower-level changes that were requested (a serious memory leak being the worst offender.)

I'll look into this update tonight, but just from skimming the link they are making it multi-threaded, that's the sort of in-depth technical change that was supposed to be impossible. This is a strong indication that whatever hangup was stopping the new company from being able to properly support the game has been removed (maybe it's not the same company, did it change hands again?)

That's a really good sign. I actually really, really liked Cities XL. The biggest (non-technical bug) weakness was that the cities were very static once they reached stability. The realistic and interesting evolution of city areas, and ripple affects that spread out and changed different areas in different ways, just weren't there. I won't go into why that was the case, I do so a lot in the Cities XL thread, but I'll see if I can find out what "other features" Cities XXL will have and whether that big problem will be addressed.

Cities XL has been in a weird place where the game was bought by another company that for some reason didn't have the ability to properly support or improve it.

FHI bought it from the original dev/publisher in 2010 and released XL 2011 that same year. They've owned the franchise ever since.

The majority of the content of those updates was just some new buildings and whatnot. They had apparently admitted that for whatever reason they didn't have the ability to do any of the technical or lower-level changes that were requested (a serious memory leak being the worst offender.)

And yet, like I said in my post, despite claming to not be able (read: willing) to fix those major problems, they decided to release XL 2012 (in Oct 2011) and XL Platinum (in Feb 2013), both of which are essentially the same game, with the same major technical issues, plus a few added things, such as buildings and maps.

The fact that they now claim to be finally fixing the technical issues present in their previous 3 games, instead of patching in the fix to those existing games, they're asking gamers to buy yet another new XL game. To which I say, no thanks. FHI burned their chance at goodwill from me several times already.

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