30
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Frustrations with Cities Skylines 2 are starting to boil over among city builder fans and content creators alike
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- Authors
- Dustin Bailey
- Published
- Feb 6 2024
- Word count
- 997 words
I was looking forward to this game until it came out. Performance issues aside, they ruined the simulation aspects. All of it is basically lies and its sad.
As a person who didn't play either this game or it's predecessor, I'm curious what "ruined the simulation aspects" means. Would you care to elaborate?
There's no simulation. It's a painter. You paint zones, you paint stuff like utilities and monuments and whatever bullshit their art department comes up with.
An actual simulation game has a game involved. In a city builder, you need simulated people to want to move in. To do that (in line with the SimCity model, the classic originator of the genre), they have to have a place to live, a place to work, and places to shop. Those places need power and water. Access to transportation like roads or trains (and these days, walking, bike lanes, airports, whatever).
All that's handled by a complex web of algorithms. How much shit housing do you have, for poor workers? How much modest, how much good, how much great? How close or far is it from the stuff they want? How about jobs; how many need education, or supplies not in the city? Are they well paid, or not? How about taxes in the city that impact the sims, or their employers, the shops? What about city policies that (dis/en)courage certain things like mass transit or recycling or whatever?
That's what a city sim is supposed to be. You build a city that thrives, and it happens because you're playing with the sim. You see their wants, you provide, they grow and new needs show up, and you tweak some more. And more, and more, and more.
You put down a university, and in a year or two suddenly people are moving out because now they're educated and want well paid tech jobs you didn't zone or attract, and they want nice condos to go with those jobs, and nice expensive shops. Then you expand all the nice stuff, but now the poor people are pissed because they're priced out of everything. You go looking to expand their needs, but you're running out of room; who gets stuck on the outskirts, and will it work anyway? Maybe now you need mass transit, but where will you put it, and can you afford it? Is there the right mix of industry to support your commerce, or is everything being imported and is that bad? And a hundred more decisions that are fun to play with because that's why you sat down; to play the game.
Skylines provides none of that. It's just an empty painter. It makes for media-genic screenshots because it (insert musical voice and fluttering eyes) looks so pwwwweeetttttyyyyy. But it's lacking any game to back up the pretty. The game is what you want, unless you're my mom who plays Facebook games that are just as empty.
Except those browser static screen games run on her fifteen-year-old Dell office-castoff PC just fine, and Skylines is overloading top line streamer PCs like the little engine that couldn't.
Games mean game has to be in there. It's becoming more and more common for pretty to be all the big devs worry about, and all they can do. There's a whole slew of classic games in the sim and sim-adjacent genres, like SimCity, Civilization, Master of Orion, Master of Magic, Rollercoaster Tycoon, Railroad Tycoon, and many more. Games that are thirty or more years old, that you could play on a damn calculator, that look like stained glass you squint at through dirty lenses, that are fun. And people play those game today, even though they're ancient.
Which is to say nothing of modern takes in those genres or the adjacent genres, like Rimworld, Dwarf Fortress, Factorio, Kerbal Space Program, and so on. Games cranked out on an indie budget, with graphics that a "big name game dev" sneers at, but it turns out gamers want game play, not just "pweetty."
Skylines is not fun because, even if it runs, there's no game. You just go "ooh, I want more pwetty houses." Click, click, "oooh, I have pwetty houses now. Need some stores next." Click, click, swipe, drag, and now there's stores. There's no gameplay layer, just a paint layer.
They knew they had no game layer, because Skylines 1 had no game layer. Now they've blasted out 2, and amid all the global warming it's causing as computers struggle to get the frames rendered while space heating your house, there's still no game layer! Ergo, they must be bad game devs. They appear to be great digital painters, and would probably fit in well in a Hollywood effects house, but as for games ... nope. They forgot games means there needs to be a game in there.
I agree very much on it not really having much of "game" to it, and that the studio is quite lousy at developing games. Skylines 1 was really only good for having assets spawn in a city and laying down roads in a city, it didn't have much depth to what was going on in the background, wealth didn't exist and had a proxy behind it of education -- you place schools and citizens get more educated over time and that makes the level of their house go up and it looks more wealthy.
But,
To anyone out there who hasn't played it before: it has a simulation to it, a somewhat complex one, but it's not a simulation game.
It does track household wealth, and people pay rent, and businesses buy resources from other businesses and transform it in to another good that they can sell to someone else, and that company wealth is tracked, and yadda yadda yadda, it's there.
But for some strange reason, they didn't provide any levers for players to pull, and it doesn't have much effect on what you do. They spent a lot of effort on making a simulation and then the result is that it may as well not exist to the player, it's opaque and doesn't overlap with gameplay.
Take grain for example, in my city I have a deficit of grain, a huge one, much larger than other resources. The first thing to come to mind is I could reduce this deficit by building farms, but the official maps only contain small distributed spots of arable land, and even if you fill out every single little spot, I don't think the farms would be enough to cover the deficit. So what do you do? Well you ignore it and it's all fine, grain gets imported from outside connections, you notice no ill effects from the grain deficit, you're still making money hand over fist so you're not missing anything by ignoring it, your city goes on like normal.
The simulation also has many bugs that can cause whole parts of it to self destruct and cause issues with your city. On release there was a bug with garbage incinerators, where they just collected garbage and never burned them. If you placed one of these buildings, your city would eventually accumulate with garbage, happiness goes down, companies go bankrupt, things fall apart. What was the workaround before it got fixed? Just don't build them. Trucks will come from outside the city to pick up the garbage, then go right back outside the city and deal with the garbage. As a result, doing things would actively harm your city, and not doing things would make the game run like normal. It was the same deal with other buildings like cargo railroad hubs, airports, etc., where they were broken and building them would harm your city, but not building them would cause.....nothing bad to happen, the city would go on fine without them.
A prominent youtuber for the game posted a video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIdH28QExQc) recently detailing his frustration with a bug around land value -- namely that it would keep rising to absurd amounts and cause your city to die from within. Single family home zoning will cause land value to rise, renters won't be able to afford rent, they'll leave, the house will eventually be abandoned and then bulldozed, and no new single family homes will be built in its place. You're left with a vacant lot that's so absurdly valuable that no single family homes will be built there, but the value also won't go down. The only thing to do is zone higher density in the area because of how the game treats density and rent.
Also, after you get offices in the game, you start making so much money that you don't know what to do with it. I have lowered my tax on everything in the game to negatives -- literally paying people to live in my city -- and I'm not in any harm of going bankrupt, also hell, I couldn't even tell what the effects of it are, my city doesn't seem any different from when I was taxing people the default amount.
There is a simulation, there's very few ways of interacting with it as a player, there's numerous bugs causing it to go haywire, and the whole thing is built on dubious design decisions. The core game-loop is mostly the same from C:S1, but it's lacking mod support and assets that the first one had, so its just a boring game built on shaky ground.
Your feelings are coming through loud and clear, but that doesn't tell me what's wrong with the gameplay. City Skylines 1 was definitely a game with gameplay. I recall the most engaging part being traffic management rather than any of the things you listed, but that seems like a style choice rather than a flaw to me.
I guess it doesn't matter though. I didn't buy it on release because I didn't feel like I needed a second game, and given all the negative response, I probably never will.
I kinda disagree.
Skylines 1 really is only a bare bones game. It is trivially easy to never lose and to do whatever you want OUTSIDE of traffic. Power, water, services are all basically check boxes that are trivial to mark off (with the one exception of the bug where everyone aged at the same time so half your city would die at once and you couldn't burn the bodies fast enough).
Traffic was the only system with any gameplay/strategy/depth/decision making, and even then it mostly revolved around some very basic concepts and then dealing with bugs/pathfinding oddness.
Money after the early game is trivial to come by and you're mostly just putting what you want wherever you want. There's no lose state, and there's no direction.
For some people, like my spouse, that's part of the point. There's a veneer of an economy and needs and desires, but the eye candy can really pop. It lets you build out a perfect narrative vision of a town with any number of visual assets. It's painterly, and that can be a good thing.
Oh sure that's fine. There are people who just want to create their own cities with minimal restrictions or guidelines.
That said, i'm not sure how much i call that "gameplay". I get it, gameplay is a very wide term, but at the end of the day skylines is much closer to Townscaper than it is sim city, which is the itch most people have been trying to scratch for years now.
I enjoy both sides of games like this, but I think Cities Skylines 2 doesn't really feel like it was designed to be for designing cities just for visual appeal either -- I would have expected more options and assets on the graphical side of things if that was the goal.
This is true. They really dropped the ball on custom assets, and that's part of what's killing the game.
I agree with you for the most part and full disclosure haven't played any of the Skyline games...but I would argue that there is quite the audience for just a building platform. When I played SimCity and SimCity2000 I would always cheat to get unlimited money and then just build for the sake of building and wasn't interesting in any "game" during that. It was actually annoying. There's also a reason Minecraft Creative is so popular...
I will say though that if it's gameplay that's promised and not delivered then it's obviously disappointing to a lot of players.
Huh, thanks. I was vaguely under the impression that Cities 1 at least was SimCity-esque and doing a lot of those simulations. Otherwise what's even the point.
So are you going back to SimCity4 (the best city sim game EVER)?
Anyone who disagrees can fight me.
You're making me consider buying it. What are the pros and cons between Sim City 4 and 3,2,&1? I've never played any of them.
TL;DR go with either SimCity 3000 or 4, they're similar-ish but SimCity 4 is enough of an improvement that I would go with that. Every new game was an improvement over the last until the SimCity that shall not be named (2013), RIP SimCity.
SimCity 1 - still kind of fun but it's definitely quite old now, lacking the extra features and depth of the later games
SimCity 2000 - adds neighbors and a 3d isometric view. I have only minimal experience with this one. Adds water.
SimCity 3000 - adds more stuff like garbage management and better neighbor deals. Better graphics. Adds the advisor panel. Zone densites added.
SimCity 4 - adds proper regions so you can build all of the cities in a region. You only get neighbor deals if you build neighbors. Big improvement to traffic: different types of roads/streets and different types of transit solutions. Education has more options (high schools and colleges).
SimCity (2013) - just avoid.
2000, 3000, and 4 are available on www.gog.com while on Steam only 4 is available and it does not support cloud saves.
I'm playing on Linux. The steam version of 4 crashed on me fairly frequently... in Linux and was slightly better on MacOS. Currently I'm using the GOG version with some random person's wine wrapper. This setup basically does not crash. I don't know what stability is like on windows.
SimCity 2000 is notable for its spinoff games, Streets of SimCity and SimCopter, both of which allowed you to import your SC2000 maps and play them in 3D. This blew my mind in the ‘90s and it’s still a pretty cool concept today.
The other thing about the isometric perspective is that it added elevation. Cities in the original game were completely flat. Also IIRC SC2000 added alien invasions and cool sci-fi future tech. Pretty sure the first game just took place in present day but you could pick your time period in the sequel.
I played a ton of 3000 when it came out. I think it abandoned some of those wackier ideas. I remember it being pretty grounded and mellow. The soundtrack was super chill. I’d be up at 1am staring at the screen in a dark room and that music was just the perfect companion for late night city building. That was the last SimCity game I ever played but it’s the one I remember most fondly.
SC4 actually sort of brought that concept back. Little icons appear when you're zoomed in, you click them to play mini missions. I tried one once, didn't like it, never tried it again even years later.
I thought 3000 still let you do alien attacks and Godzilla and stuff? Maybe that was cheat codes or maybe it's just been too many years. SC4 ditched that stuff.
Sorry about the late reply. I don't remember which of the videos I saw testing it was better, but the 3 I watched were these:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27He2SJ1ObA
p1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6u7Gd21USQ
p2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3l0hUVIs8qE
And they tout "deep simulation" as the first thing on their website https://www.paradoxinteractive.com/games/cities-skylines-ii/about
https://i.imgur.com/2g5QVd9.png
I don't remember if its in those video or the countless others I've watched where, even if you try changing what is taxed, the businesses weren't moving out and becoming the thing that is taxed less. I think the person I was watching was trying to get textile companies to move in because he was making the raw material for it or whatever, and just couldn't get them to move in no matter what he did. It's wild and all lies from their marketing material.
Taxation mostly affects demand, and I don't think companies move out of buildings that easily.
What you end up with is spinning the roulette wheel and hoping the right kind of building will show up, since you have no influence over what gets built. The only thing the game seems to like you doing is zoning more industrial until the right thing gets built. Constantly expand and hope the game figures it out, that's the thing to this game :/
Starfield was bad, but I pretty much expected it to be bad. I actually thought Cities Skylines 2 was going to be pretty good.
It's worse than the first game in almost every way. Biggest disappointment of 2023 for me by far. So glad I didn't buy it (tried it on Game Pass).
Starfield is a constant reminder to me of how different some Bethesda fans are from me. As soon as gameplay footage was available I lost interest. And yet I see many people claiming to have hundreds of hours despite acknowledging the same shortcomings that turned me away. There are many comments like "Yeah after 50 hours I finally accepted this wasn't the game I'd hoped for". Like, damn dude. I love Skyrim and I think across 12 years, multiple playthroughs, and a dozen multi-hour mod order debug sessions I might have around 250 hours total. And there are fans out there dumping 50 hours into something just because they can successfully lie to themselves for that long?
My hours in Bethesda games have been (as slowly as their release schedule) going down. I had nearly a thousand hours across all my characters in Morrowind, maybe four hundred or so in Oblivion, three hundred in Skyrim (not counting hours troubleshooting mod load orders). The Fallout series has a similar decline. Believe me, I enjoy the games but Starfield is "Fallout 4 in space" with a healthy does of procedural generation thrown in.
I'm sure if I had the time or it was my 'first' Bethesda game I could see myself sinking hours in but as it stands they really tripled down on the "wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle" gameplay. At least Cyberpunk has less loading screens.
Starfield is Fallout in Space, but without all the things that make Fallout fun. It lacks the atmosphere, humor, exploration, music, style etc. Starfield looks, sounds and feels so generic, it's completely and utterly boring.
It's kind of ironic that they're having pretty much the same issues as their previous competitor (SimCity) whose demise caused them to become popular in the first place.
While this sucks for the fans I hope that these CS2 problems could open the way for other developers to try and compete in this type of citysim again.
I just wish we had a complex Simcity-like city builder with somewhat realistic, interesting, deep simulated systems. Since Maxis were EA'd out of existence, there has been no other city sim of that type (and SimCity ended up pretty broken, too); only Cities Skylines 1, but that always had a very shallow simulation.
Hopefully other devs consider the genre again.
(Workers and Resources looks great but I'm not a fan of the setting, and it's not really the type of citysim I'd like to see).
Metropolis 1998 is looking like it could be pretty cool.
I did try an alpha of it and it seemed neat, but I didn't tinker with it all that much.
It has to be satisfying to the team at Hello Games that No Man's Sky is now held up as the exemplar of post-release updates.