"There was no cake that day."īut a year later, Cities: Skylines was revived. "There was no point, no room for any competition. Maxis and EA announced plans to reboot SimCity.Įveryone who worked at Colossal Order understood what this news meant. But something happened that ruined all their plans. There was a day, early in 2012, when Colossal Order was just about ready to begin work on its dream game, when Paradox looked about ready to greenlight the long-cherished project. Paradox was cautious about embarking on such an ambitious project. Hallikainen and her team had spent years pitching a city building game to publisher Paradox, which the developer had worked with on urban transport series Cities in Motion. For a while it looked like the game wouldn't get made at all. The celebration was all the sweeter because success for Cities: Skylines had been a long time coming. Being from Finland we don't really do elaborate parties." The cake, she says, was "a classic, very good." It's in our nature to be very humble and hard working. There were a few words of congratulation and some laughs. Her 13-strong team gathered together in their Tampere, Finland offices and ate the cake. She decided to splurge on a decadent and indulgent treat.Īs CEO of the game's developer Colossal Order, she wanted to celebrate the young company's success. It might even come from Colossal Order, and who better to top Skylines than its own developer? Neither Paradox nor Colossal Order have indicated what the future of the series will be, or when they're going to consider Skylines complete, but it's gotta happen eventually.The numbers were wildly ahead of all projections. I'm going to believe in the cyclical nature of history (and this industry) and hope that the same will happen again-another big urban city builder is out there somewhere, even if it just exists in some designer's noggin at the moment. There was a time where nobody thought anything could topple SimCity, but Skylines proved that assumption wrong. The extremely positive reception on Steam is proof that there's a hunger for creative city builders that aren't fixated on the US and Western Europe. It's still in Early Access, but it's clearly on the right track. You're not just building a generic city you're building a Soviet city, and that comes with some unique considerations as well as a strong Soviet aesthetic. Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic is one of the exceptions, using its geographical and historical placement to create an Eastern European city builder that actually has some themes. It's a tiny plaster placed over a gaping wound, and I'd much prefer to see some Chinese devs making a city builder that lets you design distinctly Chinese cities. There are mods that fix the omission of the rest of the world, but usually only at a cosmetic level, as well as some light DLC that includes a few Chinese buildings. Skylines was developed by Finns and thus has Northern European and Scandinavian sensibilities, and builds on SimCity, which is distinctly American. The biggest gap, though, is the absence of notable city builders that look beyond Western cities. It's cute that anyone might think that would really do any good. Crime in general could definitely do with a rethink, since it's almost always present in urban city builders, but is never really developed into anything that can't be solved by plonking down a police station. Managing corruption and trying not to succumb to the temptations of a fatter bank balance is already demonstrably engaging thanks to Tropico, and there's room for an approach that's less of a caricature. There are threads within these broad subjects that might still be worth tugging on, though. Interesting, sure, but also gloomy and, if it's anything like reality, Sisyphean. I'm not sure that wrestling with class issues and the grimier parts of city living-of which there are many-would be much fun, though. City Life created a loose socio-economic system that even made classes rivals, though ultimately it didn't take it much further than the kinds of population systems that are common in economic city builders, which mostly express class as a series of needs-with the people at the top of the pile demanding more expensive and harder to obtain goods. Cities are deeply political and see some of the clearest divisions of class, but that rarely enters into the administrative puzzle of running one in a game. That would be peak numbers in another management sim.įeature-wise, there's just not much more that could be offered, but there are concepts that are still worth exploring a bit more. Even at launch, there were already pages of them, and talented modders are absolutely one of the reasons why, on a random afternoon six years after release and a year since the last DLC, there are nearly 20,000 people playing. Where there are gaps, or things that maybe don't work the way you want, there's always a mod ready to fix it.
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