The Cities Skylines Paradox: how the sequel stumbled
selix.net
selix.net
The engine does not lack or cause these things. The fact that the developers chose the HDRP pipeline for this game should be the most obvious dead bird in the entire coal mine. These games should be running on URP without question. We don't need advanced lighting systems in a top down city builder.
If we want an art workflow that allows artists to shit arbitrary content into the editor without thinking, we should probably reach for Unreal and flip on TAA like everyone else is doing.
I guess you could argue that top down should be defined narrower than that, but the steam tag Top Down is full of games like this [1]
You don't need a lot of things. The developers wanted the game to look better than the first, so went with HDRP because it claims to be a production ready pipeline that helps them achieve that.
But it was not and the developers did not have the time, or perhaps skill, to work around it's issues.
> we should probably reach for Unreal and flip on TAA like everyone else is doing.
First of all: "Just ask the entire studio to throw out all existing work and retrain staff to change their engine."
Second of all: Do you mean DLSS? TAA is an AA technique, it does not improve performance.
Third of all: Unreal? The engine notoriously ragged on as dragging down the performance of countless games in the last 2 years because it too has features that are easy to turn on and look good, but require skill and knowledge to fine-tune to be reasonably performant? That Unreal?
Just because you hit on something and gamers threw their money at you because you deserved it, it doesn't mean the next iteration has to have MORE OF EVERYTHING.
Even some series that have maintained quality have got a bit too big for their own good if you ask me. Did Horizon Forbidden West need to be that big? Zero Dawn was the perfect length if you ask me.
Even Witcher 3 has a faint whiff of 'it could have been a bit shorter and still brilliant'.
I'm not sure it's always the publisher's fault though. Success and the worldwide obsession for cancerous business growth can go to your head even without outside pressure.
Now Skylines certainly uped the game game in graphics, but honestly I would pay good money for an updated Sim City 4 or ... Sim City 3000.
A city builder doesn't have to LOOK amazing to be great.
Instead we get this... 0/2
And releasing a sequel gets you hype and press coverage - potentially expanding your customer base - in a way that releasing updates won’t.
There are some exceptions (No Man’s Sky?) but they are very few and far between.
It’s not about shareholders necessarily. It’s also about sustainability and people paying bills - they live in a capitalist society and can’t choose not to participate at the end of the day. You can’t ask a dozen or more developers to keep working on a game for free for a decade or more. They have to eat too.
The only other option is keep playing the exact same game with little to no changes. Which you can! The original is still available. But if you want it to improve and change over time or receive substantial DLC’s, somebody has to get paid at some point.
Free major updates make your existing customers happy but don't pay salaries. This is why so many games have moved to some kind of ongoing revenue model with Battle Passes, cosmetics, item marketplaces, etc.
Or just eliminate copyright entirely and focus on economic models that are based on funding creation. You raise money to build the thing, and once it's built, it's there for all.
I'm not sure this is true, see Factorio as an example. They released Space Age as a "DLC" but for full price and with clear messaging that it's version 2.0 of the game.
So, you never fall in the trap of Paradox Games and the eternal launch of DLCs for Stellaris/Victoria/Hearths Of Iron/etc?
If I told my boss that I wanted to spend 12 months refactoring our entire system in ways that would benefit our existing customers (who have paid once and won't ever pay again) but likely result in no additional revenue being generated, I doubt that project would be green-lit.
This is what I mean by engine updates that aren't just about graphics but the scaling/capabilities around the core gameplay. Updating Unity again or adding raytracing graphics wouldn't have fixed the actual problems with the rest of the engine.
Also the graphics/lighting seems much improved with a more realistic art style.
Both things which you cannot really retrofit into Cities 1.
You could work on a totally new game, but, I think companies are looking to cut costs by reusing content.
DLCs have a hard cap on possible sales in the same way a new game has a hard cap on possible sales. DLC releases can, and do, bring in new players to the base game.
But before that had a chance to fail from second system syndrome it was doomed to fail by insane demands from Take 2. News of work on KSP2 could harm sales of KSP1, so when hiring people to work on KSP2 they couldn't mention what they were hiring for. So you had a team who didn't know KSP1, and due to budget constraints were mostly juniors. Then to "save time" they were not allowed to only pick the good parts of the old source code or to even switch engine, they were supposed to just expand the janky KSP1 code base. Obviously without being allowed to talk to the developers of that code base, because secrecy. And no talking to fans about what they would want from a KSP2 either, because, you guessed it, secrecy.
So an inexperienced team disconnected from the fan base was supposed to fix a code base they were not familiar with, without speaking to the people who wrote it, add some cool features to it that the original team never tackled due to engine limitations, and release it to massive fanfare. Surprisingly this did not work. As the project was failing went back on many of those decisions, but it's hard to fix a project that starts off so wrong
Compare to Kitten Space Agency: hire KSP1 devs and KSP1 modders so you have people who can judge what worked and what didn't, start with a home-grown engine that fits the unique demands of a KSP-like game, talk with the community during development. Obviously they aren't far enough along yet to call it a success, but I give them much better chances
$$$. I think they need to design a long-term monetization strategy that does not require new major releases, but rather just more DLC, seasons, etc.
Of course. If history (and "IME") is any guide, this was all marketing and product manager driven. Creators of all stripes now create the thing THEY want, not the thing paying CUSTOMERS want.
That's perhaps overly cynical and sometimes this is not the case if some new set of features can't be easily done in the architecture of the original, of course.
I've written a mod to CS2 and CS1 (granted not a big mods but few small ones), Paradox mod store doesn't limit you in depth of the code mods. What you are limited by is churn in the internals of the game engine, as most mods use monkey patching techniques that then break.
What I wished CS2 modding had some official way to monkey patch, so they could somehow try to detect incompatible monkey patching when people have 100s of mods installed. Suppose two mods modify WaterSystem, it would show the user both mods and locations they've attached at. It would help debug things down.
Many gamers blame original game devs for broken game even though it was fault of the mods they've installed. For us who knows programming, that is ridiculous because these mods are monkey patching at so deep level... but that is probably reason many games don't have official modding as it weighs down their reputation.
On the bright side, maybe another developer can pick up the reins and release the next generation's city builder game.
City simulation games (Sim City, Factorio, etc.) are sort of a unique beast in that they have a ton of small scale detail that is animated and and dynamic.
The choice of engine here matters a lot, because engines are often highly optimized for specific assumptions and the assumptions of standard games (mostly static worlds with just a few dynamic entities - a platformer, a first-personal shooter) do not hold.
The studio taking this over should ensure they have some really good low level 3D devs guys on the team and a flexible engine.
I think that a home built engine could work in these cases, but only if you have the right guys for the job.
A custom engine is probably not a bad idea for a city builder. I feel like ECS is a good middle ground because you would need some pattern like this anyways and it would serve as a good reference if you decided to go fully custom.
I would challenge the notion that we couldn't develop an effective city builder within the constraints of a reasonable # of game objects. Players may be compelled to accept an experience that has a significantly smaller world size if the richness within each unit of world space is much higher.
They're both Tampere-based, in fact they're like 500 meters away from each other. Unlike CO, Iceflake is owned by Paradox. CO has no public projects outside Cities Skylines, so the question is will they fail and will their employees simply be poached by Iceflake.
As someone else pointed out, this is false. I have also created mods for both CS2/CS1 and I would even say it's the opposite. In my opinion, CS2 allows for even deeper code mods because they have mod tooling built right into the game unlike CS1. The host of the mods (Steam Workshop vs Paradox Mods) doesn't change anything related to mod capabilities.
> ...its long-time partner Colossal Order announced a quiet but monumental shift.
Ah yes, "quiet", like how it's been posted on every CS2 social media account, and blasted in every possible space of CS2. Haha Absolutely nothing "quiet" about it.