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Cities: Skylines II

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Re: Cities: Skylines II

#231

Post by panick21_ »

I wanted to like Cities but I didn't.

The main issue is that the way zoning is done is really damn bad. Like not even American cities are that bad, zoning at its very very worst. There is no reason why it should be possible to have a much more flexible and powerful zoning code. Having mix use zoning, exclusion zones and so on. Why can offices and high density building not be in the same place?

I also dislike the roads, the basic building block is the road, but it should be the lane. You should be able to easily put together a few lanes, into a new road and then be able to use that. Currently you have to basically load 500 DLC road types just to cover all the basic things and even then it isn't great.

Parking, parking is the biggest problem with car based cities. And the game just ignores that issue, and that results in the problem with cars just being about optimization of intersections.

I also found the creation bus routes and other public traffic routes to difficult. It gets complex pretty quickly and once you have lots of them it just becomes almost unmanageable.

Re: Cities: Skylines II

#232

Post by Havoc »

This will come down to pricing. I don't see the core gameplay dynamic being substantially different so pricing will need to be reasonable for me to buy it if it's functionally a graphics upgrade

Re: Cities: Skylines II

#233

Post by calsy »

pavlov wrote: post #222
calsy wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it does say exactly that. EA is not an isolated company afflicted with capitalism. When you say a companies failures are due to capitalist greed, that means something. You are blaming the fundamental economic principles that the majority of publishers (and western businesses) operate on. Words like greed imply there is an inherent evil or 'sin' in capitalism that corrupts, and EA has somehow become its victim. In…

That’s a completely incorrect interpretation of what I wrote. EA destroyed a valuable brand by managerial greed. That’s a fact. Another company got funded by public means when capitalist institutions didn’t want to give them the time of day, and is now a successful business. That’s another fact. I didn’t say anything about an inherent evil or sin. If you believe capitalism always executes perfectly and is beyond crit…

You have no proof the brand was destroyed by managerial greed. You also never said managerial greed, you said capitalist greed.. big difference.

You mention capitalisms failures and destruction of ideas while public funding saved the day. Pointing out that a single government grant does not make a game industry or save ideas destroyed by capitalism is not projecting ideology.

Re: Cities: Skylines II

#234

Post by hoseja »

gorgoiler wrote: post #216
Terretta wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The amount of unrestrained freedom makes me question why I'm even playing. After a while, grownups lose what to do with a plastic bucket and shovel at the beach.

Ironically, my absolute favourite beach activity is road building. I head off to the edges where the rocks, sand, and shore meet where the sand is damp. I then compact damp sand onto the rocks to make little roads and try to build a network of roads that keeps road gradient below a certain threshold. It’s a fun problem solving exercise and almost on a par with Cities Skylines!

I like making dams.

Re: Cities: Skylines II

#235

Post by pavlov »

calsy wrote: post #233
pavlov wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a completely incorrect interpretation of what I wrote. EA destroyed a valuable brand by managerial greed. That’s a fact. Another company got funded by public means when capitalist institutions didn’t want to give them the time of day, and is now a successful business. That’s another fact. I didn’t say anything about an inherent evil or sin. If you believe capitalism always executes perfectly and is beyond crit…

You have no proof the brand was destroyed by managerial greed. You also never said managerial greed, you said capitalist greed.. big difference. You mention capitalisms failures and destruction of ideas while public funding saved the day. Pointing out that a single government grant does not make a game industry or save ideas destroyed by capitalism is not projecting ideology.

Did you read the story of SimCity 2013 linked here?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35041202

It seems pretty clear that this game was destroyed by EA management's poor decisions. They forced the game to require an active online connection primarily as an anti-piracy move, but then underfunded the development of the server-side functionality, so the servers were down for most buyers. For strategic reasons, they wanted to tie SimCity into EA's Origin game distribution platform, but this was just a hindrance to players.

Why did management make these decisions? To maximize shareholder value and increase their quarterly profits. EA as a company is a good example of the kind of short-term thinking that capitalism can encourage.

It's good to have a counterbalance. It can come in many forms. Tax-funded public instruments are one, but another important source of funding that's not distributed by capitalist principles are the various private foundations. And most of those were of course founded on wealth created by capitalism. So I'm not at all opposed to private wealth and market-driven resource allocation — I just don't think it should be the only way, or some kind of received truth that's above criticism.

Re: Cities: Skylines II

#236

Post by raincole »

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…

> He's made over $300 million in revenue so far and might be the first solo game dev (or even regular software dev) to hit $1 billion in the course of the game's existence.

So you use revenue as a measuremeant of success, which is very reasonable.

> (hint: they don't want always-online DRM-filled games that nickle and dime you with microtransactions (well, most people anyway, there are always gacha/gambling-type whale gamers))

Then you said this. You know in terms of revenue, microtransaction is the most successful model, right? Mobile gaming is now bigger than PC gaming + console gaming. And they're basically all microtransactions. $300 million sounds a lot but it's just 2~3 months of Genshin. If revenue is a sign of what players "want", then the only logical conclusion is a lot people "want" microtransactions, they just don't admit it like people want BigMac but say they want to eat healthy.

I think it's a strong no-true-scotsman fallacy right here. You believe players don't want microtransactions, because you don't think those casual players who play Candy Crush, Clash of Clans or Genshin are "true players".

Re: Cities: Skylines II

#237

Post by ztrww »

kridsdale1 wrote: post #176
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.

sims style DLCs are just a proxy subscription revenue model. As long as people are engaged consumers you can keep developing. If they don’t care about a particular DLC they don’t have to buy it. Sims 4 now has like 8 years of developer labor in it, if you were to install all the content. The original $30 (after retail cut) a user paid in 2015 wouldn’t have sustained that work.

Having to actually pay a subscription is actually much friendlier to players who want to get into the game a couple of years after it was first released. Of course the DLC model is much more profitable overall

Re: Cities: Skylines II

#238

Post by xdrosenheim »

acchow wrote: post #108
izacus wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also hope that they'll let us build more "european" cities that aren't so horribly car centric and are more diverse. Hopefully we also get a bit more diversity of gameplay - Skylines got pretty repetitive quickly with only challenge being traffic optimization. The new DLCs didn't really add that much to gameplay except different things to paint between roads. I hope things like universities, industry, agriculture,…

> I also hope that they'll let us build more "european" cities that aren't so horribly car centric and are more diverse. Yeah, I wanted to start Skylines but found that it all begins with a highway...

It would be so cool to only have a rail station to begin with.

Re: Cities: Skylines II

#240

Post by Quarrelsome »

raincole wrote: post #236
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…

> He's made over $300 million in revenue so far and might be the first solo game dev (or even regular software dev) to hit $1 billion in the course of the game's existence. So you use revenue as a measuremeant of success, which is very reasonable. > (hint: they don't want always-online DRM-filled games that nickle and dime you with microtransactions (well, most people anyway, there are always gacha/gambling-type whal…

So apparently people _want_ to smoke tobacco.

My issue with your comment that I have attempted to frame in that pithy one-liner is that microtransactions are often sold through a manipulative sales window, in some cases games are designed around them to make the micro-transactions more appealing (e.g. games that throttle your progress unless you spend).

In addition, using revenue as a measure of popularity with micro-transactions is problematic because they are designed to effectively segment the market. This means they're not necessarily a solid indicator of what an average/median user might want because sometimes much of that revenue is a product of relatively few users (aka "whales").

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