29
votes
Cities: Skylines II | Official release trailer
Link information
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- Title
- Official Release Trailer | Coming October 24th, 2023 I Cities: Skylines II
- Authors
- Cities: Skylines
- Duration
- 2:28
- Published
- Oct 19 2023
Might give this game a miss.
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that Cities: Skylines exists and that SimCity has been thoroughly dethroned as the premiere city-building simulator, but the amount of paid DLC expansions that Paradox and Colossal Order shat out for the first game was off-putting to me.
I don't want to feel like I have to spend hundreds of pounds on a game and its dislodged expansion packs to get the full experience.
Paradox milked Cities: Skylines with DLC harder than EA milk your typical Sims game. How do I know they're not gonna pull the same shit with the second game?
This is the Paradox formula, I've found people either love them or hate them. Personally I've never found the need to have all of the DLC they release to feel like I'm having a complete experience and only purchase packs that have content that interests me. They usually release free updates alongside paid DLC, so even if you aren't buying new content the game is constantly being worked on and improved. You can spend hundreds on Paradox games, but I'd argue you really don't need to.
I think I paid for one expansion of Stellaris, and I still had quite a good time with it despite paying less than $15 for the experience.
It also helps that for much of Paradox's library, the DLC is often a proper expansion which comes out later and not just a handful of skins and sidequests.
I bought one DLC pack for CS1, it was the first one I think (After Dark from memory, might be wrong)felt so ripped off that I never bought another.
I don't like the model they use, I think with a game like that content is best left to modding/users anyway and they do at least enable that.
Most DLC for S:C were absolutely skipable, but each brought a free update with great features to the base game.
Also, "harder than your typical Sims game"? Please. Both pricing and amount of DLC as well as modding availability make this blatantly untrue.
It's also worth noting that the majority of the DLC content for the first Cities: Skylines is in the basegame for Cities: Skylines 2. This is in pretty stark contrast to the Sims series, by far the biggest offender when it comes to DLC, which has repeatedly stripped back basegame features in favor of DLC.
...also yeah comparing the Sims series favorably to literally any other game when it comes to DLC is laughable. Even Paradox can't compete with the sheer costliness of buying all the DLC for the Sims 4.
The Sims must kneel before Train Sim and its $10,000+ in DLC.
holy shit I knew train people were crazy but damn
I'm not remotely interested in Train Simulator, but from what I understand nearly nobody buys all the train DLCs. Most people have one or maybe a handful of trains that they're really into for whatever reason. Physical model trains are similar.
ah yeah ig that makes sense
One look on the Epic Games Store listed 67 DLC add-ons, priced between £26.99 and £3.39 (3 of these 67 add-ons are free I should add.)
The Sims 4 on the other hand has 71 unique sets of DLC, including 14 expansions, 13 game packs (one of which is free), 19 stuff packs and 25 kits. The most expensive expansion pack of these is £35.99 (after a 20% off discount.)
Now that I looked at it more closely, maybe 'harder than your typical Sims game' wasn't entirely true but they're pretty fucking close, especially when you consider the fact that EA had a six month headstart and haven't even announced a brand new Sims game yet.
For context, on Steam (in my region), all Cities: Skylines DLC costs about €395, while all DLC for The Sims 4 costs about €1160.
Out of these, about €90 of the Cities: Skylines DLC seems to be simply music, with as far as I can tell no impact on the actual game. It may be that some part of the DLC for The Sims 4 can be categorized in a similar fashion, but that's not something I can judge from their names.
And the 6 months later release date for Cities: Skylines doesn't make much of an impact when the games are both now 8-9 years old.
Unrelated to main discussion though just wanted to add. Epic Store still doesn't have a clear cut way of knowing total cost of all DLCs plus base game. That's why Bullmaestro thinks Sims and CS1 DLCs are on same level.
I very vaguely recall an uproar as some C:S DLC added features that got removed from the main game upon DLC's release.
You can be pretty damn sure that that's exactly what they're going to do. It's how Paradox operates. I'd say that isn't even all bad for the consumer: As an enthusiast of a genre, you can get a pricey, but generally high-quality game with regular updates. Well, the updates are what makes the game pricey. If you don't care nearly as much, you go in 3 years later and get a good game, though ever so slightly dated, with lots and lots of content for a much more reasonable price. Of course that'd mean that you in particular would have to give the immediate post-launch hype a pass, but that's not a bad thing as far as making informed consumer choices goes.
Yep paradox = 1000$ dlc minimum
I have a slightly different perspective as I don’t really mind the Paradox DLC (I’ve played a lot of both C:S and Stellaris).
The base games are usually very feature rich and you can get many, many hours of enjoyment with the base game. Plus there are usually a few quite large free patches throughout the life of the game.
The paid DLC can be found regularly on sale and enhances what I would consider to be otherwise complete games.
The expansion route isn't a problem. Developers do need to get paid for their time and there's only so much content you can realistically fit into a base game (see Star Citizen).
The only issue with expansions is when the content doesn't justify the price. This is the problem with The Sims expansions, incredibly so with the Sims 4.
There is always the "this should have been in the base game" argument but all good expansion content will feel that way. If the base game is truly bad without that content, then skip until both the content and the total price matches your expectations.
It's certainly a better system than a live game filled with premium currency and efforts to make you spend it.
Starcraft was a great RTS before Brood War. But Brood War was near perfection. It made the expansion mandatory for online play, but IMO it was well worth it.
I think I personally bought and pirated StarCraft: Brood War more than any other game. Hardware was constantly shifting and losing CD Keys was no joke back then.
Piracy mostly happened in the form of LAN parties, especially when you had newbies or guests joining in.
A bit off-topic, but as someone who played both Brood War and StarCraft II from closed beta all the way to around 2018-era Legacy of the Void and peaked at both Diamond in 1v1 and Master in 2v2 in the latter sequel game, I have a far less favorable view on Brood War.
It is a horrendously clunky experience to play and is unnecessarily mechanically intensive to the point where playing it competitively is a one-way trip to severe carpal tunnel.
Twelve units or one building at most can be selected at once. Macro involves configuring loads of camera hotkeys (CTRL+Function keys) around your base, left-clicking every production building and spamming production hotkeys laid out all the way around your keyboard to produce units optimally. Until Remastered, you couldn't even rebind these hotkeys. But wait, there's more. A glitch existed since the game's original launch that made key presses on your keyboard not register if your left mouse button held down, which resulted in a lot of missed actions.
Just the proposal from the Brood War Remastered dev team of patching this glitch sent the Brood War community in an absolute uproar, which represents the game's other glaring flaw. The vast majority of hardcore Brood War fans are insufferable elitists who think the game is perfect and that it is a cardinal sin to even think about any balance adjustments or quality-of-life changes.
A build of the game exists where the 12 unit/1 building selection limit was removed. Unfortunately, this build of this game was only ever shown at BlizzCon and was only ever made playable to those who physically attended the convention that year. The mere suggestion that Blizzard release it as an optional game mode for people who don't want to play with clunky-as-fuck unit selection limits that even Ensemble Studios moved on from in the same year of release with AOE2 is enough to make any BW fanboy's blood boil and incite a heated flame war.
When your game is balanced around (tournament-legal) movement exploits and glitches such as ones listed below, it's not a sign of a well-balanced game.
I will clarify:
At its time, it was perfection. Agreed in retrospect its not quite so favorable.
I do think having unlimited unit selection in SC2 had its own set of disadvantages, but yea there was plenty of jank in Brood War as well lol.
I've seen the performance benchmarks, I'm not going to touch this game until it's fixed.
This video shows how awful it is. My PC has the same specs as the one used in the video (AMD 7800X3D CPU and RTX 4090 GPU).
27 FPS on literally the best gaming PC hardware? What's going on??
Shitty game development is what's going on :(
I'm curious to see if they fixed my main issue with the previous game, which was it was more sandbox than game.
It was pretty trivial to get a city off the ground, and the main "game" was traffic (which uh...had some issues). Water/Electricity/Services were mostly just checkmarks, and there weren't many interesting buildings. While it was a travesty in many ways, the last Sim City had building upgrades that really made them interesting, and made it feel more gamey (although also a game you just could not lose if you tried).
I'm hoping they've added more depth to the other systems.
I've watched a load of pre-release Let's Play's and Livestreams of C:S2 and it's basically still just a sandbox sim at its core. They have natural disasters in the base game now, as well as map specific resources, and various other minor things to make every map feel a bit more diverse, and the game play more like a proper "game" rather than solely just a sandbox sim. However it still seems pretty trivial to build a functional / financially stable city, unless you crank up the disaster frequency and strength to ridiculous levels, or give yourself self-imposed challenges and restrictions.
I personally like that though. I just want another relaxing C:S sim like the first one to build my cities in, but updated to modern standards (which C:S2 looks to be, especially with the much better graphics, reworked road and traffic system, reworked zoning, etc).
And I'm personally not looking for another wacky city building game from C:S2 like SimCity is, with alien abductions, futuristic archologies, and whatnot. But to each their own. I don't think C:S2 is for you if that's what you're looking for though.
p.s. I do actually enjoy some wackiness and a challenge in my city builders occasionally too. But when I am in the mood for wackiness I go replay Tropico 6 (or Tropico 3, my fav one), while waiting for Tropico 7 to come out. And when I am in the mood for a genuine challenge I go replay Frostpunk, while waiting for Frostpunk 2 to come out. :P
I read in some review that CS2 has something called "government subsidies", which automatically adjust based on how much money you lose.
I feel like this can detract from an already easy game (CS1 was anything but challenging when it came to finances), especially if it's not ta transparent & adjustable mechanic.
I hope at least that some of the gameplay challenge will come from the improved systems, otherwise starting a new city is going to feel like a repetitive chore.
That's fair, but I think if such a mechanic is toggleable via a settings menu or difficulty slider it's totally worthwhile. Not everybody wants the same amount of gameplay challenge from a game like this.
I think those "federal/state" like government subsidies are only available in the early game. AFAIK they're only meant to be a temporary stopgap while you're still creating enough jobs and unlocking all the services the citizens that initially moved in require, and they aren't active for the entire game.
Edit: https://www.paradoxinteractive.com/games/cities-skylines-ii/features/economy-production
p.s. I never found establishing a new city boring or repetitve though. IMO establishing a new city and designing the initial layout of it is one of the most fun parts of the game. :P
I loved CS1, played it for so many hours and got deep into mods and huge cities etc.
I was excited for CS2, I really hoped they would implement a bunch of quality of life improvements for sandbox builders like me but looking at reviews they have not done this, some of the things seem even worse in fact. When playing in sandbox/creative mode CS1 was a game of fighting the engine in many ways, a lot of time was spent fixing the things it got wrong and this doesn't seem to have changed.
That is of course aside from the impossibly bad performance. Maybe in a few years I'll be able to take a look at it but for a game that has been in development for so long I'm left wondering why... that doesn't even appear to be finished.
Would you mind listing some examples? Particularly of what's worse? I haven't been paying super close attention besides watching a few of the feature highlights videos and some streams.
I was watching IGN's review and saw the problems they had with auto-terraforming as an example of this. Building for the sake of building, as in entirely cosmetically in CS:1 is basically about managing your frustration with the engine and covering up all the mistakes it makes in an attempt to make it look nice. A lot of the work is using mod brushes of things like concrete, grass etc to cover up the mess.
I was hoping there would be less of this required in CS:2 but it seems not, it even seems to be worse in the case of the auto terraforming.
I know it's not a sandbox/cosmetic builder at heart and there's an actual game in there with most players not caring but for me CS was always just like a big lego kit to build something that looked pleasing, I'd spend hours building sunken highway designs and neat highly detailed cities in general... I just found it relaxing. Some of the repetitive work is okay but it does get tiring and the engine could/should be a little smarter about how it places buildings as an example.
Here's the IGN review where some of the issues are highlighted: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rn7WVoFdxWA
I bought it shortly after release, played it for three hours and refunded it. 30FPS on an empty map is unacceptable. I some reports of users with 4090s getting single digit framerates on the main menu.
There's a lot of negativity in the comments so let me be the positive one: this game is really, really fun. I am loving the road tools and terraforming. The zoning breaks can be a bit frustrating sometimes but wow, I just love the freedom and creativity afforded to me by this game. It's, like, nearly perfect.
The performance woes are overblown mostly by people expecting that games are only playable at max graphics settings. With a few simple graphics tweaks, I'm playing the game at a smooth 50 fps@2k on my 6750XT at mostly low and medium settings and the game looks great!
Ditto. I'm having a lot of fun with it too. I understand people's frustrations if they really are getting 15fps on their high end cards, but the game's been running perfect fine on my 3070Ti, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
I don't think that's entirely fair. There's people with high end CPUs and 4090 GPUs having trouble running the game at all. Tweaking the settings gets them barely into double digits on the main menu and just reach 50fps. On an empty map.
If anything, I think you're one of the lucky ones. Optimization is funny like that.
I can handle some stuttering (even when zooming in on an empty lot...) but, even with the settings on High, the game looks plain bad.
I don't know what exactly is the problem. The textures, or perhaps the lighting. While CS1 looks charming and appealing, CS2's terrain reminds me of KSP 1. Just a single texture repeating all over a plain.
The antialiasing is also jarring, all the edges look jagged and it's a bit off-putting.
I'll definitely be waiting for a couple of patches before hopping back in.
Reading all these comments makes me glad I cheapened ouy and just bought Cities Skylines (1). I got that, pluw the european style (whatever that is) for $8-ish on sale yesterday on instant-gaming.com. i'm considering on getting the dlc for it now.