Cities: Skylines

Gameplay

Players start with a plot of land - equivalent to a 2-by-2-kilometre (1.2 mi × 1.2 mi) area - along with an interchange exit from a nearby motorway, as well as a starting amount of in-game money. The player proceeds to add roads and residential, industrial, and commercial zones and basic services like power, water, and sewage as to encourage residents to move in and supply them with jobs.

As the city grows beyond certain population tiers, the player will unlock new city improvements including schools, fire stations, police stations, health care facilities and waste management systems, tax and governing edicts, transit, and other features to manage the city. One such feature enables the player to designate parts of their city as districts. Each district can be configured by the player to restrict the types of developments or enforce specific regulations within the district's bounds, such as only allowing for agricultural industrial sectors, offering free public transportation to residents in the district to reduce traffic, or increased tax levels for high commercialized areas.

Buildings in the city have various development levels that are met by improving the local area, with higher levels providing more benefits to the city. For example, a commercial store will increase in level if nearby residents are more educated, which in turn will be able to allow more employees to be hired and increase tax revenue for the city. When the player has accumulated enough residents and money, they can purchase neighboring plots of land, allowing them to build up 8 additional parcels out of 25 within a 10-by-10-kilometre (6.2 mi × 6.2 mi) area. The parcel limitation is to allow the game to run across the widest range of personal computers, but players can use Steam Workshop modifications to open not only all of the game's standard 25-tile building area, but the entire map (81 tiles, 324 square kilometers).

The game also features a robust transportation system based on Colossal Order's previous Cities in Motion, allowing the player to plan out effective public transportation for the city to reduce traffic. Roads can be built straight or free-form and the grid used for zoning adapts to road shape; cities need not follow a grid plan. Roads of varying widths (up to major freeways) accommodate different traffic volumes, and variant road types (for example roads lined with trees) offer reduced noise pollution or increased property values in the surrounding area at an increased cost to the player. The road system can be augmented with various forms of public transportation such as buses and subway systems.

Modding, via the addition of user-generated content such as buildings or vehicles, is supported in Skylines through the Steam Workshop. The creation of an active content-generating community was stated as an explicit design goal. The game includes several premade terrains to build on, and also includes a map editor to allow users to create their own maps, including the use of real world geographic features. Mods are also available to affect gameplay; prepackaged mods include the ability to bypass the aforementioned population tier unlock system, unlimited funds, and a higher difficulty setting.

Development

Finnish developer Colossal Order, a thirteen-person studio, had wanted to create a game with a broader scope than its transportation-focused Cities in Motion games for some time, but could not initially secure funding from publisher Paradox Interactive. While Colossal Order had the idea and technical capability to build out Cities: Skylines since 2009, it did not actively develop the title, as Paradox feared that the market for city simulations was dominated by the SimCity franchise. The 2013 version of SimCity was critically panned due to several issues, and its failure led Paradox to green-light the development of Cities: Skylines.

One goal of the game was to successfully simulate a city with up to 1 million residents. To help achieve this goal, the creators decided to simulate citizens navigating the city's roads and transit systems, to make the effects of road design and transit congestion a factor in city design. In this, they found that a growth and success of a city was fundamentally tied to how well the road system was laid out. Colossal Order had already been aware of the importance of road systems from Cities in Motion, and felt that the visual indication of traffic and traffic congestion was a easy-to-comprehend sign of larger problems in a city's design.

To represent traffic, Colossal Order developed a complex system that would determine the fastest route available for a simulated person going to and from work or other points of interest, taking into account available roads and public transit systems nearby. This simulated person would not swerve from their predetermined path unless the route was changed mid-transit, in which case they would be teleported back to their origin instead of calculating a new path from their current location. If the journey required the person to drive, a system of seven rules regulated their behavior in traffic and how this was shown to the user, such as skipping some rules in locations of the simulation that had little impact while the player was not looking at those locations. This was done to avoid cascading traffic problems if the player adjusted the road system in real time. The city's user-designed transportation system creates a node-based graph used to determine these fastest paths and identifies intersections for these nodes. The system then simulates the movement of individuals on the roads and transit systems, accounting for other traffic on the road and basic physics (such as speed along slopes and the need for vehicles to slow down on tight curves), in order to accurately model traffic jams created by the layout and geography of the system. The developers found that their model accurately demonstrates the efficiency, or lack thereof, of some modern roadway intersections, such as the single-point urban interchange or the diverging diamond interchange.

Release

Cities: Skylines was announced by publisher Paradox Interactive on August 14, 2014 at Gamescom while in the alpha stage of development. The announcement trailer emphasized that players could "build [their] dream city," "mod and share online" and "play offline"—the third feature was interpreted by journalists as a jab at SimCity, which initially required an Internet connection during play. Skylines uses an adapted Unity engine with official support for modification. In early September 2014, a release between the first and second quarters of 2015 was estimated; Colossal Order expects to continue development on Skylines after its initial release. On February 10, 2015, a trailer announced the release date as March 10. Colossal Order have also announced that the game would be released for the Xbox One.

The game was built from the ground-up to be friendly to player-created modifications, interfacing with Steam Workshop. Colossal Order found that with Cities in Motion, players had quickly begun to modify the game and expand on it. They wanted to encourage that behavior in Cities: Skylines, as they recognized that modding ability was important to players and would not devalue the game. Within a month of the game's release, over 20,000 assets had been created in the Workshop, including modifications that enabled a first-person mode and a flying simulator.

Paradox has announced that the game will be released for the Xbox One console and Windows 10 in Q2 2017; the version will include the After Dark expansion, but no other expansions. The Xbox One/Windows 10 port was completed by Tantalus Media.

Expansion packs

An expansion for the game, titled After Dark, was announced at Gamescom 2015, which adds new unique buildings, including a casino and a luxury hotel, and settings for expanded tourism and leisure specializations. It was released on 24 September 2015 for the PC, Mac and Linux versions of the game, simutanously with a free patch adding a day-night cycle into the game.

A second expansion, Snowfall, adds in snow and other winter-themed elements, as well as trams/streetcars, and was released on 18 February 2016. Alongside this release will be an update for the game that will include a theme editor, enabling players to change all the game's graphics to create visually different worlds, such as an alien landscape, and which can be shared through Steam Workshop. In early March, a free DLC titled Match Day was released, which added a football stadium.

At Gamescom in 2016, Paradox and Colossal Order announced a third expansion pack, Natural Disasters, which added natural disasters to the game, in addition to new services that would allow the player to prepare for future disasters and recover from them afterwards. Other new features included a scenario editor and in-game radio stations. It was released on November 29, 2016.

The "Mass Transit" expansion, announced in February 2017, will include more diverse options for the game's mass transit systems, including ferries, cable cars, blimps, and improved commuter hubs.

Paradox has also announced a series of downloadable content featuring new building styles and other assets that were created by members of the game's modding community, starting in 2016. For example, the first will be a new set of art deco-inspired buildings created by Matt Cruz. Cruz will receive a portion of the sales of the content from Paradox.

Pre-release

When the game was first announced, journalists perceived it as a competitor to the poorly-received, 2013 reboot of SimCity, describing it as "somewhat ... the antidote to Maxis' most recent effort with SimCity" and "out to satisfy where SimCity couldn't." A Eurogamer article touched upon "something of a size mismatch" between developer Colossal Order (then staffed by nine people) and Maxis, and their respective ambitions with Skylines and SimCity.

Critical reception

Cities: Skylines has received positive reviews from critics. IGN awarded the game a score of 8.5 and said "Don’t expect exciting scenarios or random events, but do expect to be impressed by the scale and many moving parts of this city-builder." Destructoid gave the game a 9 out of 10 with the reviewer stating, "Cities: Skylines not only returns to the ideals which made the city-building genre so popular, it expands them. I enjoyed every minute I played this title, and the planning, building, and nurturing of my city brought forth imagination and creativity from me like few titles ever have." The Escapist gave Cities: Skylines a perfect score, noting its low price point and stated that despite a few minor flaws, it is "the finest city builder in over a decade."

Much critical comparison was drawn between SimCity and Cities: Skylines, with the former seen as the benchmark of the genre by many, including the CEO of Colossal Order. Generally critics considered Cities: Skylines to have superseded SimCity as the leading game of the genre, with The Escapist comparing the two on a variety of factors and finding Cities: Skylines to be the better game in every one considered. However, some critics did consider the absence of disasters and random events to be something that the game lacked in comparison to SimCity, as well as a helpful and substantial tutorial. Disasters have since been added to the game in a DLC.

Commercial reception

Cities: Skylines has been Paradox's best-selling published title: Within 24 hours, 250,000 copies had been sold; within a week, 500,000 copies; within a month, 1 million copies; and on its first year anniversary, had reached 2 million copies sold.

The city of Stockholm, Sweden, where Paradox's headquarters are located, has used Cities: Skylines to plan and simulate a new transportation system, as described in the documentary My Urban Playground.