Cities: Skylines

Cities: Skylines
Developer(s)	Colossal Order
Publisher(s)	Paradox Interactive
Producer(s)	Mariina Hallikainen
Designer(s)	Karoliina Korppoo
Programmer(s)	Antti Lehto Damien Morello
Composer(s)	Jonne Valtonen Jani Laaksonen
Engine	Unity
Platforms	Microsoft Windows OS X Linux Xbox One
Release date(s)	Microsoft Windows, OS X, Linux Xbox One 2016
Genre(s)	City-building, construction and management simulation
Mode(s)	Single-player

Cities: Skylines is a city-building game by Colossal Order and published by Paradox Interactive, released on 10 March 2015 for Microsoft Windows, OS X, and Linux, with an Xbox One port planned. The game is a single player open-ended city-building simulation. Players engage in urban planning by controlling zoning, road placement, taxation, public services, and public transportation of an area. Players work to maintain the city's budget, population, health, happiness, employment, pollution (land, water and noise), traffic flow, and other factors, however the player can play in a sandbox mode with two mods that come preinstalled in the game, ready to enable. These mods unlock all milestones and provide unlimited money to the player.

Gameplay

Cities: Skylines allows for construction of cities without an underlying grid structure, and a variety of transportation options.

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, 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, however the entire map (81 tiles, 324 square kilometers).

The game is rendered using tilt shift effects to give an impression of scope for the simulation.

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.

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. They 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 the person would be teleported back to their origin point instead of calculating a new path from their current location. 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 these 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.

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.

Expansion packs

An expansion for the game, titled After Dark, was announced at Gamescom 2015, which adds a day and night cycle to the game. It was released on 24 September 2015 for the PC, Mac and Linux versions of 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.

Reception

Reception
Aggregate scores Aggregator Score GameRankings 86.49% Metacritic 85/100 Review scores Publication Score Destructoid 9/10 Game Informer 8.75/10 GameSpot 8/10 IGN 8.5/10 PC Gamer (US) 86/100 The Escapist

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.

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 has used Cities: Skylines to plan and simulate a new transportation system, as described in the documentary My Urban Playground.

See also

• Cities XL, an unrelated city-builder developed by Monte Cristo and sequel to City Life