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Cities: Skylines II

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Re: Cities: Skylines II

#181

Post by Mayzie »

dysoco wrote: post #130
satvikpendem wrote: post #83

I find it hilarious that EA had the concept down and just blew their opportunity with Simcity 2013 (always online (which by the way was actually not true, people cracked the online requirement within the first day or so), had to contract with other users for basic services like sewage and electricity), paving the way for competitors like Cities: Skylines to take the lead instead. This reminds me of the same thing tha…

Wonder why a "The Sims" competitor hasn't appeared yet, would the lack of branding and general "charm" of The Sims(like Simlish) be a dealbreaker?

Paralives is the big one that's in development and crowdfunded.

They pull in >$40k/mo in Patreon funding, and have a team of >10.

Website: https://www.paralives.com/ Their Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/alexmasse

Unaffiliated, just a massive Sims fan :)

Re: Cities: Skylines II

#182

Post by dagorenouf »

The part of the trailer where we zoom-in to pedestrian level gave me an idea.

For all the higher-level systems thinking happening in city builders, we never go into the more subtle signals that can make a city feel great or terrible to its people.

Would be cool if we could zoom-in to a specific person in the game, and ask them how they actually feel living here, what they like or dislike about it. Including useless things that we can't possibly fix as a mayor. But that would give us cues to let us figure out what we could improve.

Then once we interview a few of them in a neighborhood, we'd get a picture of what to change to make them happy. We could also have different types of populations and neighborhood for different types of people.

Something more complex and organic than "people in this neighborhood don't feel safe, so you need to add a police station". This would add a layer of discovery and aliveness to the game.

Re: Cities: Skylines II

#183

Post by chris_va »

getpoked wrote: post #153
chris_va wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are we defining capitalism here? Because, you know, people are still getting paid for the work they are doing.

Getting paid for work is not the core underlying proposition of capitalism.

voluntary exchange and wage labor are... I am not seeing a contradiction here

Re: Cities: Skylines II

#184

Post by standardUser »

kridsdale1 wrote: post #175
sfcarrot wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EA is supposed to be pretty happy with its SimCity BuildIt as it is a new way of generating lots of revenue through micro-transactions and makes the balance sheets look better. Meanwhile, players are pretty happy with Paradox's real passion about how to build a better city simulation game. For what it is worth, it is a win-win-win for EA, players, and Paradox Interactive.

The original Maxis team are the losers here. They worked 4 years to make something they thought would drive the genre forward but were sabotaged by executives who forced them to add DRM which destroyed the franchise when the servers exploded on release day. Then all their assets were transferred to another team who made the mobile version.

The gameplay imitations were far more severe than the DRM and online stuff. A clean release may not have generated such a brutal backlash, but it wouldn't have resulted in a genuine SimCity successor either.

Re: Cities: Skylines II

#185

Post by paco3346 »

dagorenouf wrote: post #182

The part of the trailer where we zoom-in to pedestrian level gave me an idea. For all the higher-level systems thinking happening in city builders, we never go into the more subtle signals that can make a city feel great or terrible to its people. Would be cool if we could zoom-in to a specific person in the game, and ask them how they actually feel living here, what they like or dislike about it. Including useless t…

I have always wanted something like this but on an even more in-depth scale.

Let people playing game dev tycoon represent how successful a local business is. Let someone playing a GTA-like game be part of a police chase. Allow truck simulator players to be part of freeway traffic.

Obviously this would be extraordinarily difficult to pull off well, but I can dream.

Re: Cities: Skylines II

#186

Post by calsy »

pavlov wrote: post #128
satvikpendem wrote: post #83

I find it hilarious that EA had the concept down and just blew their opportunity with Simcity 2013 (always online (which by the way was actually not true, people cracked the online requirement within the first day or so), had to contract with other users for basic services like sewage and electricity), paving the way for competitors like Cities: Skylines to take the lead instead. This reminds me of the same thing tha…

I posted this earlier [1] but it’s an interesting little twist to this story… While EA was busy destroying the SimCity brand with unadulterated capitalist greed, Cities: Skylines was created with public funding from the Finnish government. No VCs wanted to invest in such a niche company. They were only able to get off the ground thanks to money from Finland’s public startup funding and arts grants. Capitalism on its…

A single example of government funding an indie developer of a niche title proves that the entire industry up until this point has been going about it wrong?

Government bureaucracy and inefficient spending never burned down good ideas? Never wasted untold billions on failed projects? When it comes to innovative ideas and forward thinking, people turn to short sighted bureaucracy and public funding.

Re: Cities: Skylines II

#187

Post by Tuna-Fish »

capableweb wrote: post #173
MoSattler wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They actually announced one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNhV-Gnjdy8

Interesting, seems Paradox is becoming the new Maxis, or maybe it's Colossal Order (developer of Cities: Skylines) who is also the developer of this "Life by You"?

Life by You isn't by CO, it's by a Paradox subsidiary they set up in the US, headed by the old EP of Sims 2 and Sims 3.

Re: Cities: Skylines II

#188

Post by kevinmchugh »

dirtyid wrote: post #150
toasteros wrote: post #20

I have a hard time with freeform city builders like Skylines or SimCity. The amount of unrestrained freedom makes me question why I'm even playing. I have the same issue with The Sims or something like Planet Zoo. That and Skylines giving me a blank canvas paralyses me. How does one plan a city? Where do the roads go? It's the sort of game I want to love, but I just get so overwhelmed by the sheer number of options a…

City builders experience leans too much towards god mode that closely resembles creators vision rather than the compromised mess that actual urban planning is. A proper city building experience would lead to a haphazard landscape where you hate 50% of what exists but just relieved it even got built in the first place.

I was fixing some traffic issues in a Cities: Skylines game and had to bulldoze some of the first housing I had laid down. I thought for a moment about the families who had lived there for years, and where they would move to, as I put in wider roads.

These games all represent resident happiness as some function of traffic, crime, garbage, pollution, but I don't think any of them have made an effort to zoom in on particular actions and how they effect the population. Or to represent long-term fulfillment. It would be a very different kind of game to highlight what actions an urban planner takes that have the biggest impact on residents.

Maybe the old newspaper function in Simcity games tried to capture this - or the outraged advisors a bit too, but it's never felt narratively driven to me.

Re: Cities: Skylines II

#189

Post by labster »

omnibrain wrote: post #161
0x457 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their sims-like game is actually developed by Paradox, so it's guaranteed there will be endless paid DLCs.

On one hand, that’s absolutely true. On the other hand Paradox does a good job in maintaining the base game and constantly supplying it with free new features with every expansion.

PDX has been burned before by releasing DLC features that implicitly depend on other DLC features, and having to release patches that either unblock or kludge around it. The policy of “new mechanics are free, special abilities are paid” seems to me like a hard-learned lesson on maintaining configurations.

Re: Cities: Skylines II

#190

Post by nitwit005 »

legitster wrote: post #31
toasteros wrote: post #20

I have a hard time with freeform city builders like Skylines or SimCity. The amount of unrestrained freedom makes me question why I'm even playing. I have the same issue with The Sims or something like Planet Zoo. That and Skylines giving me a blank canvas paralyses me. How does one plan a city? Where do the roads go? It's the sort of game I want to love, but I just get so overwhelmed by the sheer number of options a…

I similarly get bored of Skylines as soon as the game starts handing you near-infinite money. Making something aesthetically pleasing is only so interesting to me - I want the challenge of constraints. I actually have a similar problem with the Tropico remakes. Tropico 1 was hard . You could not survive a mission without dipping into the dictator toolsets. So striking a constant balance between economics and human ri…

Almost all simulation games suffer this problem of, well, winning. You'll see complaints that the late game of Civilization 6 is boring, as a sufficient advantage means a winner has been effectively determined.

The only fix I can see is to have much better scenarios, or AI opponents, which I tend to think only the external communities around these games can produce. They generally don't allow that level of access for mods though.

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