How Cities: Skylines Beat SimCity At Its Own Game 86
An anonymous reader writes: Maxis, the studio behind SimCity, was shuttered earlier this year. Fortunately, another studio has taken up its mantle. The small team at Colossal Order has already won acclaim for city-builder game Cities: Skylines (and sold millions), earning a great reputation with the modding community by avoiding all the mistakes the last SimCity release made, such as enforced online/multiplayer. A new behind the scenes feature looks at how the game came about — it was not a response to SimCity, surprisingly — as well as what's next from the studio.
"We are planning to start another game project sometime soon," says Colossal CEO Mariina Hallikainen. "We definitely want to focus on old-school simulator games and definitely PC. PC, Mac and Linux, those are our 'thing.' But I think we're maybe going to do something a little bit different."
"We are planning to start another game project sometime soon," says Colossal CEO Mariina Hallikainen. "We definitely want to focus on old-school simulator games and definitely PC. PC, Mac and Linux, those are our 'thing.' But I think we're maybe going to do something a little bit different."
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Heh (Score:5, Interesting)
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They could just work their way through the EA game archive making each one not suck in exactly the way that EA made each one of them suck. Five years later, one of the two companies would still be alive...
Sadly, that would be EA still alive. I don't understand it either, but that's how it would unfold.
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That's Satan for ya.
Re:Heh (Score:4, Funny)
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At least EA is sure to be eating their own dog food then. ;)
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their Midas poo-touch
If I had the points, I would sooo mod you up for that! I'm still giggling - thanks! :D
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Bullfrog games are going through that atm. We had a Dungeon Keeper successor released recently (but it was EA bad), a Theme Park successor in the works and I've been working on a Theme Hospital spiritual successor for 6 months now. No word on a Magic Carpet game yet.
Re:Heh (Score:4, Insightful)
I think a major flaw with Maxis is that they thought they had a must-buy title. As in Too Big To Fail. If a company thinks they can do anything, then they'll do things to screw with customers without them leaving. Ie, start to "monetize" things more. Horse armor, no one can bitch about that can they?
Thing is, it sort of works for awhile. There is a class of game buyers who just don't care. If the game is new they will buy it. Three months later they're on to something else and don't care about how they got screwed, and the price doesn't matter since they probably snuck the card of of mom's purse. Or they're the idiot on the forums who says "dude, lighten up, it's only the cost of 4 family size pizzas".
EA (Score:5, Insightful)
In fact 'EA' is the only thing that really needs to be said here, that's why Sim City failed.
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There was an AMA (ask my anything) on reddit a couple days ago from the devs of city skylines, and someone asked this very question [reddit.com]
"What would you do if EA tried to buy you?"
They responded with "Something like this" [imgur.com].
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I know I've seen that scene before, but I can't remember which movie it was.
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face/off
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Thank you.
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Is there actually a way for US businesses to prevent themselves from hostile takeover? Like, can they be "private limited companies" and just refuse to merge? If so, I think these guys should tell EA to fuck off, on principle.
Re:EA (Score:5, Informative)
Is there actually a way for US businesses to prevent themselves from hostile takeover?
Yes, the only reason hostile takeovers work is when the management doesn't own the company because they've sold the company through public stock. Then someone can buy all the stock (or, a controlling share) and they own the company.
In the case of Paradox Entertainment, the stock is not publicly traded, and the CEO owns a controlling share (of the private stock).
Re:EA (Score:4, Informative)
Paradox Entertainment is the publisher for the game. Colossal Order is the owner of the title, and the one who developed it. Colossal Order is also a private company, but the rest of your point stands.
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Public companies can also have a mechanism to halt a hostile takeover, it's called a poison pill. Generally it involves some kind of massive payoff to the current staff, but it can also be the automatic issuance of new stock which dilutes the holdings of the company attempting to do the acquisition. The first known use of the latter technique that I'm aware of was the Westinghouse corporation which issued massive amounts of stock when JP Morgan tried to take them over, ultimately providing them with enough
How to prevent hostile takeover... (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, there is a system called Poison Pill [wikipedia.org], also known as "Shareholder Rights Plan".
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Is there actually a way for US businesses to prevent themselves from hostile takeover? Like, can they be "private limited companies" and just refuse to merge?
Oh yes indeed - it all depends on what type of company it is. I am oversimplifying here, but there are (at least in the US four (and a half) types of companies based on ownership structure:
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Is there actually a way for US businesses to prevent themselves from hostile takeover?
Minor nitpick here is that the publisher is Swedish and the developers are Finnish so what is true for US businesses isn't necessarily relevant in this case.
Re:EA (Score:4, Interesting)
Was there really any improvement in the SimCity titles after SimCity 2000? That was probably the last one I played regularly. It seemed, at the time, to be perfect. One could control the terrain, within reason, the under-terrain infrastructure, the water table, and obviously the roads and zoning. What else did a city simulator need?
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I liked SC4 more then 2K. I never really could master 2K because I never figured out how to get subway tracks laid underground right. I mostly mastered getting pipes underground, but one subway track would never align with the next, and god help the poor Sim who thought the station was actually connected to either line. IIRC there was also a weird shortcut they took with water pressure. Your water pressure wouldn't be calculated from where you actually built your water towers, it would be calculated from th
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Simcity 4 is dramatically nicer to use than any earlier version of simcity. Also, it's meant to be extensible and there's loads of expansion content available from the community, which is cool. It also ties cities together more meaningfully than earlier versions. Otherwise, yeah, not much difference. Now the down sides, it's unreliable as hell and you have to dick around with command line options just to get it not to crash.
Even without the shitfest that was Simcity V, it was time for someone else to shake
modern gameplay renaissance? (Score:3, Insightful)
We had the Great Gaming Dark Ages from the early 2000's until recently, during which games mostly turned to shit, delivering little more than reskinned dumbed down pulp for the masses.
But now, it seems like there's a renaissance of good games trying to bring back actual gameplay. Will this succeed in the face of the studio execs who want to dumb everything down for the masses? I don't know, but it sure is nice to see some smaller studios trying. I'm sick of the handholdy pulp that's been coming out of the AAA studios.
Re:modern gameplay renaissance? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: modern gameplay renaissance? (Score:2)
I have E1M1 as my ring tone. Some people get it, most don't.
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Download Zandronum. Install. Load up Doomseeker. Point it to the Zandronum executable in the config menu. Point it to your Doom and Doom 2 WAD files in another option to the left of that menu. Set your server filter to cooperative and invasion and Deathmatch servers. Enjoy some of the newest and most awesome mods for doom to come out. Brutal Doom, Shotgun Frenzy, Master of Puppets, Complex Doom, Bosses From Hell, Samsara, Survivalism, Stronghold, RGA, it's a fucking dream.
Don't forget to use the OpenGL rend
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Ew, FM MIDI. After getting a WaveBlaster (yeah, not a great MIDI card) daughter card my SB16 ISA, it was better! I forget which soundcard had the best MIDI for DOOM. Was it Roland, GUS, or something?
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But adding more people and more money does let them churn out sequels like kleenex. All they had to do was get the bare essentials down to hook the newly opened "Bro" market and they can sell yearly rehashes with record profits.
EA is the mcdonalds of the gaming industry. Poor quality and no one with any self respect would admit to liking them. But every once in awhile you end up going there to satisfy a craving.
So yeah, not really a Dark age but more of a Fast Food age.
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I wonder what Bliz is smoking when it comes to WC and WC2 - I'd certainly pay $10 for a Windows copy, and it's not like they'd need to port it themselves, just license to GOG - free money!
To be honest, (Score:1)
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Damn if that wasn't true. I'm glad I got the entire thing on sale, but it was a pathetically small game with very limited development area compared to skylines, which is well pretty damned awesome.
Linux Support Was Why I Bought Skylines (Score:5, Informative)
If they keep up the linux support, I'll definitely check out their new games. Skylines could have used a bit more content, but it was worth it for the price.
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Didn't they update it just this week?
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The publisher (Paradox Interactive) has quite a few LINUX Games in their library. Their first hit was Europa Universalis in 2000, so they've been around awhile. The developer is a much smaller, newer company called Colossal Order. Paradox is Swedish, Colossal Order are Finns.
So check out their LINUX games [paradoxplaza.com]. Mostly they're Paradox's classic grand strategy game, but Colossal Order also has a couple transit system sims, and some fantasy stuff too.
cue lawyers in... five.. four.. (Score:2)
EA is such a behemoth that despite lack of merit, they can have the case tied up in court for years and bankrupt the little guy...
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SimCity Cities: Skylines (Score:1)
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It all goes by the wayside if your first experience with a game is crashing servers. Skylines didn't have that problem - even if some of it was a bit cryptic it got straight to the fun.
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I enjoyed SimCity 4 more than Skylines, but I'll take Skylines for what it is because SimCity 4 did not age well. It's difficult to get running on modern hardware, and it is full of quirks if you do get it running.
As for the latest iteration of SimCity, no thank-you. It may be a good game, but it wasn't designed with people like me in mind.
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EA never understood the SimCity Market... (Score:3)
I loved SimCity. I have never played a multiplayer game in my life unless forced to do so by the game's design.
What I want in a City sim (or almost any other game) is a detailed simulated single-player game. Note "game." I do not want a campaign, objectives (my least favorite thing about Railroad Tycoon II and 3 was that it took me a good 20-30 minutes to figure out how to just play the damn game without any fucking objectives), or even scoring. This is my simulated world Mr. game-runner, I want to pick a somewhat ridiculous objective and achieve it without the pressure of being told I suck because you idiots didn't figure out a way to score my ridiculous ambition.
I do not want a real challenge, because if it was a real fucking challenge I'd be too busy fighting to survive to achieve my ridiculous objective. I do not want to need to be online, because the time I will most want to play your game is when my internet goes out. Since half the point of having my own fucking world is that I don't have to deal with everyone else, I really truly hate the idea of mandatory multiplayer in principle.
Thus the games I have actually enjoyed in the past decade are so are all either a) Paradox games because Paradox still does this kind of thing (note: Paradox is the publisher of Cities), b) sequels to very old series which still keep to the model (ie: I loved Tropico, Civ, Railroad Tycoon, and Simcity 4), or c) extremely unusual Indy games. The last game I really got into was Dwarf Fortress.
Re:EA never understood the SimCity Market... (Score:4, Informative)
If I may point out Rimworld, it's pretty much DF, but with nicer graphics
Seems less detailed.
One of the charms of Dwarf Fortress is that it's clearly written by someone who is clearly an Aspie, and is thus ridiculously detailed. For example, your dwarfs have to wear socks. Each sock is tracked by the game. Each sock wears out. They replace them as needed with the most expensive sock available, and there are multiple ways to make a sock more valuable (ie: more expensive cloth, dying, decorations, better weaving, etc.). So if you get besieged by goblins who like red socks, you'd better make sure all the doors are locked before you start letting the militia shoot the siege, because if Urist McSuicidal realizes there's a red sock on the map whose owner is dead he'll sprint into the middle of the siege in an attempt to claim it first.
Another of it's charms is actually the ASCII graphics.
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So you spend $50 on a game and stop playing it after two years?
What, precisely, is wrong with you?
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I do not want a real challenge, because if it was a real fucking challenge I'd be too busy fighting to survive to achieve my ridiculous objective.
I love this sentence so much, I want to slap every hardcore gamer across the face with it from now until eternity. Perhaps I could print it upon a trout.
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It sounds ridiculous but it's so true.
In Dwarf Fortress You could not build a 20-level tower of pure glass, big enough to have rooms for the King, his entire Court, and a dozen or three or so favored dwarves, while exiling the peasantry to an impoverished existence deep in the caverns, if the game was actually hard. As long as you've got a water source, a couple farms, and walls high enough that zombies/goblins have trouble climbing them you can build whatever you want as long as you want. If the game tried
Re:Is this 2 guys in their moms basement? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm guessing AC has never even glanced at this game, or is basing it on his experiences with Cities XL, an entirely different franchise by an entirely different company that has absolutely no connection with Skylines?
Cities:Skylines is a successor to Cities In Motion, though the developers seem to have listened to users and greatly improved everything they could. Right now, it's rated at 96% thumbs up, with over 10,000 positive reviews.
I don't think anybody in their right mind could say Cities:Skylines "sucks"
Cities XXL, on the other hand, the latest chapter of Cities XL that just came out in February, doesn't seem to be getting a very receptive review (though it still might be better than EA/Maxis' Sim City)
It's simple (Score:5, Informative)
Skylines did so well because it focused specifically on player experience and fun rather than methods to maximize how much they can siphon out of your wallet. If you don't own it yet, but like city builders, you're missing out.
Played for a few hours and got bored (Score:5, Interesting)
I played Cities: Skylines for a while. Some parts are cool, like setting transit routes, setting different policies for neighborhoods, or controlling downstream pollution. But it wasn't fun in the long-term, because:
I'm glad there is competition and innovation in the simulation realm, but I didn't have the free time to play Skylines a lot.
Re:Played for a few hours and got bored (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, you can always grab some of the 40,000 mods they have for the game to make it more difficult or more fun.
It's a sandbox game with tons of mods. At this point, you can make the game pretty much any experience you want, by either using other people's mods (as simple as clicking a button in Steam) or creating your own.
That's kind of the point of the article.
Re:Played for a few hours and got bored (Score:5, Insightful)
1) You might be surprised. IRL if you're a growing region it's very hard for a city to go bankrupt. IRL Detroit has been in a bad region, dominated by a shrinking industry, and overseen by a state which would rather it went away, since roughly 1970. And we managed to not go bankrupt until very recently.
2) IRL it's very complex to value sprawling cul de sacs of suburban development. When first built they're great because the people who live there are the kind of people who almost never need the government, and have a fairly good income. If they weren't both they wouldn't be able to afford to buy into a suburb. This means a miniscule tax rate is enough to run the city. Then life happens, and 50 years later you've got houses designed to standards nobody wants, owned by people who were too poor to move out, which means that a) they need lots of government services, and b) they can't pay for those services with the miniscule tax rate, leading to c) the City Manager scrambling around to save the city while the long-time residents are convinced that it's still an upper-income enclave. Quite a few very smart people have pointed out that it's much easier to build new suburbs [time.com] then build a new Brooklyn because of the way the Feds give out grants..
But in a world where you don't have the Feds actively subsidizing suburban growth, and region is growing (aka: a world where the game is fun), then having a core of apartment buildings surrounded by no development makes sense because it cost as lot less per unit to build/maintain a small apartment building then a suburban neighborhood.
3) This is a game. IRL in the US most cities have no control over their schools whatsoever because those are run by an independent school board. That would be no fun. So is forcing the player to plan an expensive education system from the beginning. Which is why no version of SimCity would require you get the entire City within the radius of a High School zone before you could build industrial zones.
4) Again, this is a game. It's no fun if you can't get started building pretty quickly, which means that educated migrants are necessary.
Now if you want a more realistic (ie: much harder) game you can mod it. But unless you mod in some pretty nasty ethnic dynamics you;re never going to make it as hard as real life is for cities like Detroit.
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Say "IRL" just one more time. I dare you.
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No.
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IRL! IRL! IRL!
irl: "It's Showtime!"
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I agree on the challenging part, but I think there's an "increased difficulty" official mod. I haven't tried it.
As for city development, the cities are relatively small because they effectively simulate every single citizen. No cheating. This is why even a high-rise building will have just 10 inhabitants. I think it's a more honest approach than artificially multiplying everything by 100 as Sim City was doing.
I agree with overqualifications, that area needs tweaking. I always had problems even with industri
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Whether the game is challenging depends on what you consider a challenge. Even though money becomes less of a problem, I found that designing effective road and public transportation infrastructure is indeed quite challenging. Not just making it work, but making it work well.
I wouldn't get too caught up in how the game deals with certain numbers of citizens, rather think of it as a micro-simulation which is scaled down compared to the real thing. E.g. 10,000 Cities-people equals 100,000 RL-people or some ot
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It is indeed true that it is fairly easy to rake in money in Cities: Skylines. What you may not realize is that the main challenges are not so much in making money, but rather in dealing with the problems caused by a large population.
By far the biggest problem is traffic. It is quite difficult to design your city layout and road system in an efficient way that minimizes traffic jams and gridlock. In that sense the game is secretly more a game about transport network optimization than about anything else, an
Don't forget the myth, the legend, the Magnasanti! (Score:2)
Magnasanti 6 million residents, life span is only 50 years. A harsh existence:
Quote:
"The ironic thing about it is the sims in Magnasanti tolerate it. They don't rebel, or cause revolutions and social chaos. No one considers challenging the system by physical means since a hyper-efficient police state keeps them in line. They have all been successfully dumbed down, sickened with poor health, enslaved and mind-controlled just enough to keep this system going for thousands of years. 50,000 years to be exact. T
Now a standalone, please. (Score:1)
I don't want Steam and don't need Steam, so though I'd quite like to try this game (a type I've never really played before because each time a Sim City came out, I had something else to do and the chance passed me by), but not if it ties me to steam and internet.
Forced online and piracy (Score:1)
No mention of Citybound? (Score:2)
It's still under development, but it looks like it could be fun once finished:
http://cityboundsim.com/ [cityboundsim.com]