Basically what you mentioned; more personality and a more realistic feeling progression for how your city grows. Systems that tell stories, instead of just simulate. Have the start of your city be more of a prompt to tell a story and build off of, instead of having a completely blank slate every time. Where a metropolis springs up in the middle of nowhere, with no sense of place and no neighbouring towns or anything to make it feel grounded in reality. Start the player off with a little mining town or farm instead, and have that inform the citizen's demands, and the kinds of people that come to live there. I've also always liked the idea of having quests and procedural objectives popping up to give you some direction. You can come up with goals for yourself just fine. But again, it would be a nice prompt to build off of, give your citizens some personality, if you had a city council or citizen movement come up to you to demand some new park or protest your new highway or whatever. And I want proper support for bike lanes, pedestrian neighbourhoods, and infrastructure that isn't so car centric or grid based. In Skylines it almost feels like your citizens are cars instead of humans. Every building generates cars, and the main concern when plopping down a factory or tourist attraction is how it will affect car traffic. On the Skylines reddit, the main metric people use to measure the success of a city is the traffic percentage, not citizen happiness or revenue or anything like that. A good multiplayer mode might be fun too. I've been watching the 5 builders 1 city youtube series lately and it's really fun to see people take turns building one city or region. But Skylines wasn't really built to support this, and SimCity's approach was very very flawed. Also, just better interface design. I get that most of the UI mess in Skylines comes from a need to differentiate a little from their SimCity inspiration, combined with a way more limited budget and team size. But I like it when games explain themselves through intuitive design and icons, and I don't have to resort to youtube tutorials to learn basic functions. Most of this comment isn't so much a 'what would you want in a new city building game', as I'm just listing what I'd want for Cities Skylines 2. But realistically, that's probably what we're gonna get. A Skylines sequel. I don't see any other studio stepping in to develop their own take on this specific genre of modern city builder. Unless it's in the form of smaller, more focused games like the Mini Motorways, Workers & Resources, or the medieval town builders like Banished. Anyway, cool video!
Thank you! Amazing suggestions! The dynamic quest thing is something newer to strategy games and I love it. Stellaris has it and I know a few others do as well, like Humankind.
@@NthReview Yea I first noticed the quests thing in the Endless Space/Legend games. And obviously RTS games have had optional objectives and stuff. But for big, open ended 4X, management or city builder games like this they're really nice to have as well. They could even work it into a new version of Chirper. Have those tweets give you optional objectives, make that thing actually useful!
I just hate cities skylines I download 1 mod because base game is so bad and I want to make it good I download mods and assets the game is awesome with mods but after playing 10 mins it just crashes and i spend 6 hours and fix it I play 10 mins again and it crashes if they just fix crashing the game would be heaven for me
Quick tip - In SimCity, you can zoom out to see the whole city if you enable the Planning Mode Camera under Gameplay settings. Drove me crazy, too, until I found that
In regards to the cost of all the DLC, I got the whole thing in a humble bundle. (Yes I know this video is a year old and that bundle is long over, but knowing humble bundle's recent trend of dusting off old bundles, hopefully they will bring it back again this year, especially with the DLCs added since then.) Just to add, I love your channel so far, only discovered it today and your reviews are excellent, you have a unique style and sense of timing I find very enjoyable. I look forward to delving further into your work, especially your immersive sim deep delves.
As someone that has many hours in both SC2013 and CSL, my biggest issue with CSL is how surface level the simulation is outside of traffic. Crime for instance, manifests as complaints on a semi-randomized timer in the absence of a police station, whereas SC2013 has actual criminals that appear due to lack of education, unemployemnt, etc that go around comitting crimes. Also the UI in the PC version of CSL is so damn ugly, the console version is slightly better. Pretty much all of SC2013's problems can be traced back to EA insisting on a live service multiplayer game.
The speech and thought bubbles in SimCity was an amazing feature It let us know what really the citizens feel, need or love or hate. For example if theres a fire a speech bubble would come up from that building "I'm looking up on the Internet on how to deal with fire" When we have fresh clean water, speech bubbles would say "i can finally take a shower now that our mayor has put a water pumping station" This makes us feel that the Sims of SimCity are our people, sort of "virtual kids"
@@NthReview also What makes us happy, and, what makes us unhappy tabs when you click on a building I miss these things in cities skylines There's no one to guide me except that useless Twitter ripoff
I think Collosal Order listened to you haha. CS:2 has servuces under roads (minus highways), added mew stuff to make buildings modular (although its not as good as it could be) and roads are improving a lot of stuff. Im looking foward towards a review of CS:2 from you :)
Heh, I doubt this machine will run it, unfortunately. They’re already apologizing for performance issues instead of delaying the game to fix them, which isn’t a great sign!
@@NthReview they've delayed the console version, which indicates to me that the issue with that is performance. Hopefully they'll get some improvements done gradually
Majestic essay there. From beginning to end you convey all the points to a great conclusion. Which saddens me for simcity as cities skylines just dont do it for me. CS even 2 is like a pretty picture, you know it's pretty if you look at it but you don't really want to stare at it forever. You want to touch it and change and feel it and you just can't cuz its just a spreadsheet after all. 😂 If simcity were to raise again learning from its previous mistakes it will undoubtedly be a hit for the ages. Maybe now with the crappy deliver from cs2 we might see a comeback, if only we can be so hopeful.
I played the original SimCity and the one for DS along with the Cities Skylines. Sim City is a fun game i played as a kid that felt like leveling up a character to the max with the futuristic timeline. But as an adult, i love the idea of, if this was built in real life would it work, and nothing else matters to me. I built a bike bus and metro focused city to 100,000 population and basically have no traffic. I built the city i would live in and love the game. In Cities Skylines 2 I hope they make more stuff thats based on newer growing cities that are less car based, maybe even a zombie apocalypse disaster would be cool too.
I hate knowing that skylines 2 is close to release but being published by fucking Paradox means you pay for half a game then on day 1 of release you get to buy the other half in the form of 50 "DLCs" Paradox means this game will be even worse than the last.
Enjoyed this video and review, but it was clear from the beginning that you dont like skylines and that shone through the entire video. I enjoyed SIm city, but the biggest lots in skylines is far better than trying to smush everything into one square in sim city.
can i be honest? A game based on **real** city building processes would not be fun. No matter how much certain urban planners or planning aficionados would want for these games to reflect more closely the reality of building and managing a city, a game based on that would be boring, hyper technical and frustrating.
Only if you let it be. There are lots of ways that so many other simulators *can* be boring, but through clever game design, are made into education, authentic and reliable models for their subjects while also being fun experiences that people like to invest their free time into. The problem is everyone's just copying the model that's worked for decades and no one's thinking outside of the box... or understanding in the slightest how cities actually work, even if you're not drafting master plans and launching city council committees.
@@NthReview I guess non-Euclidean can mean anything that is not that weird American zoning variant. In principle, it could get arbitrarily complicated. In reality, you'd almost never want Euclidean zoning for a healthy city. You don't want to end up with US cities.
SimCity 2013 is something of a guilty pleasure for me. Don't get me wrong it's a terrible game,.. Honestly Anno 1800 has been my go to City Builder, it's more than just that. I cannot recommend that game enough. Hitting those chats for the algo.
Well, this was a strange listen. On one hand Cities Skylines is the adopted and only true child of the last good Simcity. Simcity 4. On the other hand, arguing about it is like arguing that the Earth is round. Some people will vehemently disagree, and engaging in that debacle will not get me anywhere.
Cities Skylines lack the simulation city specialization aspect of the Simcity though, I wish devs actually hired Will Wright to make it better because it just feel boring and stale after awhile.
thanks my dude. cities skylines has this ugly ugly "and now...what?" feel to it. where you CANT have comic mega skyscrapers. where you just get these fake over and over repeating "tweets" which are REMOTELY connected to whats going on. but otherwise useless. where you dont have political gameplay, where....i mean you can do some natural disasters. yeah. its just a city builder. for people who perhaps even study city planning or such stuff. who are theoreticians. i think i've played the great economic simulators. but they must offer more than just "adjust until number x is achieved and then what?".
This new review is a much fairer look at both games, without reserving any necessary criticism. Skylines certainly isn't perfect, and realism is it's biggest burden. The traffic simulation is one of the best parts of Skylines.
So about the roundabout thing: You don't need a mod for it. If you click the routes info view, there's an "intersections" info view. If you click that, it shows you your intersections. You can then click the traffic lights and they disappear.
I played city skylines now im playing simcity 2013, I don't understand the hate behind simcity 2013 sure it does lack many options but the game was like abandoned and never been updated long time ago simcity have huge potential if only it receive more love from it's creators, sorry for my bad english.
1:10:52 "Raw numbers are fine, but tell me a damn story..." I love Cities Skylines, this shit is so much fun, but I haven't been able to put that one singular gripe about this game into words until I heard you say that. The game does everything it wants to, and it does it well, but the one thing I find lacking about it is that I still want it to be a game. Tell me a damn story.
A story... In a full city sim... Is like wanting a story in MS Flight Simulstor, Euro/American Truck Simulator, Bus Simulator, Farm Simulator, Elite Dangerous, Eve Online and so...
You make up your own stories. You're basically GOD in this game. I once followed a CIM and she sat on a park bench for days. I felt sorry for her. Joking aside, when I play CS, I don't really look for stories to be honest. I'm just trying to make a city.
I play cm on switch And I saw a police officer who rode a tram bike to work with his dog everyday until one day he died and the dog well.. He kept wandering around the park for weeks and then despawned
As a person looking on who has casually played both games (and much more intensely played the original SimCity and SimCity 2000), I think that you still have a bias against Skylines, and I'm not sure entirely why. The "story" argument kind of falls apart, for me because in games like this and 4x games and open strategy games like this the story comes from what you do. If you aren't self-driven and imaginative then the story will never come or it won't feel right. You don't need a game to have the classic Maxis charm to have that. I do think that your criticisms all have validity, and I hope the skylines team is reading, because while I may disagree with the intensity of the flaws of skylines, I agree with their existence and details. And I wouldn't object to Maxis-style goofiness or some hand holding and improved communication of data. Like for someone like me a full slow tutorial that shows how to interpret data wouldn't be a bad thing, even if better players don't need that.
I think Skylines differs from a 4X game (and those can get obtuse as they layer on mechanics) is that Skylines is far more essentially a fluid dynamics simulator with a very thin spreadsheet-y mask to contextualize the stocks and flows. I think that's fine if that's what you want, absolutely, but as these games become more complex, I'm less interested in seeing what the numbers ARE and more interested in what the numbers DO.
Using LUT/color correction mods in Skylines will definitely improve your experience. And also you need to use camera positions utility/first person view camera mods to get closer with cims. Those two will make a big difference in my opinion. And sorry for my bad English 😅
Sure, I figured there were mods for it (and I did put in a half-hearted attempt to find a better renderer/LUT) but it proves my point: philosophically, these things weren't important to the team over the course of 6 years.
I feel like ignoring the massive modding and asset community makes analysis of cities: skylines kinda pointless. People don't like the game because of what the developers offered on release, and in fact most people who build have major problems with the base game and the dlc, but the modding community has made some extremely interesting builds possible, to the point where I haven't seen any builds in any other city builder come even close to the detail or even functionality of a properly modded skylines build
@@patrickwilliams1206 That's such a high threshold of investment for a new player, though. How is someone approaching the game fresh supposed to know what "properly modded" means, when everyone has their own definition? How long do you have to play before you can finally settle on what is a good build of the game for you? I just want to play a city builder that's decently playable out of the box, not play "test this mod" for 100 hours before I can finally sink my teeth in.
@@Crazy_Diamond_75Honestly, the community just shows you what mods are out there and are good all the time. And installing them is just simple as going to the workshop and ticking a box.
Deleted my comment on the first one to come to this one and see if you had shed some of your obvious bias and nope, still clear as day. You mask it better in this one, to be sure, but you take every opportunity to dig at C:S in ways that you give either a gloss-over to EA/Maxis for or pooh pooh them away as quaint or something. I finally gave up at 50:00 or so when you insisted that all of the C:S DLC should've been free this whole time. What a silly assertion. For a $30 initial investment, then selective $15 packs as continuing content, I don't feel like I've overpaid for 5+ years of entertainment. Let me put it another way; EA would've charged twice as much for packs of content containing far less than any of the non-creator packs in C:S. I realize I'm screaming into the void here, because I'm certainly not going to change your mind, but I just can't get past your bias and flawed logical footing on some of the finer points. Production quality is great, and I even agree with a large portion of your comments aside from the above, but not for me. Good luck!
What's interesting is that we agree that EA would've charged bank for DLC had they not smothered their game in the crib. I bet if they had moved along, Paradox wouldn't have been so intent on charging what they wanted for their DLC. Honestly, SimCity should be free entirely, lol. It's only us suckers who make long videos about it who are still giving them money for it! Haha, have a good one.
completely disagree, Minecraft especially had get 1000% more content in the last 12 years and you had only to pay once 10-30€ for the game and all updates are for free and here you have to pay for day,night circle, a thing, that every other game would update for free or have include during release. If i would spend 20-30 for an dlc, then i wanted an improvement, that makes the game alot better. All DLCS together could 1 expansion pack and that for 20-30€, that could be fair but no one would pay 20€ for day and night or for monorail.
@@urkern988 So you're saying that a dozen people should've built the game that they did then...what, waited to ship it until they could add all the rest of the features? I won't argue that day/night would've been nice, but if you think that all of the later developed content should have been free you haven't ever run a business. Also, comparing that game to Minecraft is laughable, given that MC was basically financially *set* since they sold a squajillion copies right off the jump. I'd be willing to bet the C:S devs didn't have that luxury.
@@kamodius The financial crisis of businessmakers is not my problem and if they do rip off with crashgrabbing and with adding essential DLCs for an unfinished game, i have all right to criticize this practice, especially if other developers wont do this. That makes Paradoxon faulty and greedy and their game not buyable for me, cause i dont want support this, if you want buy beta to full version steps, instead of only the full version, do it, i only pay money for good quality finished products and not for ridiculous business plans.
1:07:56 I think instead of making it seem like a negative idea by saying Colossal Order ripped off the interface for Cities Skylines from SimCity. We should look at it more like Colossal Order knew its key demographic and knows its potential future clientele. So it would only make logical sense for them to create an interface that would be *_1000 times_* easier for the city-building fan community to crossover and start playing *_Cities Skylines_* without much of a learning curve. Making a similar interface meant that more people would be willing to start playing this new game and not fear having to learn a totally new set-up.
58:12 I'm glad that you Nick, along with *_Colossal Order CEO,_* Mariina Hallikainen, also mentioned that *_Cities Skylines_* feels more like the tech-advanced successor to *_SimCity 4._* I've always thought that because of how unique SC4 was with having DLCs and mods (even though it was untested areas, extremely buggy and unstable, BUT as a community we understood because it was uncharted territory for everyone) but was just limited by the technology of the time. *_SimCity 4_* would have become *_Cities Skylines_* if it was developed and released around 12 years later in 2015 instead of 2003.
Great video! I really like Cities: Skylines, but any personality in the game has to be injected by the player. I played it for the first time a year ago and found it frustrating and kind of boring. Then recently I started watching City Planner Plays (watch his Verde Beach series for a great vanilla build full of detail and personality and story) and he renewed my interest in the game. I love the realism aspect to it, and there's always another neighborhood or block I can detail. The game doesn't reward detail and terraforming and interesting road layouts, but doing those things greatly enhances the feel of the game.
Paradox has a disconnected DLC problem that would prevents them from reaching higher levels of coherent game systems. DLCs from them don't interact with themselves really. They build them with the idea that they don't know if you'll have the other DLCs.
Very good video, though there were a few inaccuracies with the Cities Skylines critique. The base game does have specialized industry, it's just expanded on in the DLC. You can put an industry specialization on a district and the zoned industry will grow buildings to take advantage of the resources. It uses the same extractor - > processor system as the DLC but you have way less control over the ratio and placement of them and the building assets themselves are constrained to the sizes of the vanilla growable buildings. Without the warehouses and unique factories, it's impossible to make a profitable import based industry, which makes the ore and oil industries borderline useless because of how quickly they run out. You can turn off traffic lights and replace them with stop signs or nothing at all, making for more accurate roundabouts. Admittedly though, it's buried in the traffic routes info view for some reason. Campuses does have event venues in the form of varsity sports that function like the ones in Sim2013 while also boosting campus attractiveness and earning money. Other than that, it was really interesting seeing what was lost in translation between the two games. That said, I'll trade all of the fancy demolition effects, art style and free features for Cities Skylines' solid gameplay foundation in a heartbeat, even if I have to pay more for trams.
Cities Skylines is great, but it lacks personality. Its a City Builder, you get evreything a city has, and you get to build it, it doesnt really have anything interesting about it. Anything fancy. You either wanna build a city or you dont, and despite its mechanical depth, i could never really get into it because playing it felt like flatlining a heart monitor It lacks an identity, something to differentiate it from the rest (with something thats not just mechanical depth)
Couldn't agree more. I feel the same way. Cities Skylines is more of a simulation rather than a game. It lacks a bit of the charm of the SimCity games. It's just all a bit dry.
@@benn87Playing sim city feels like being back in math classes. I can do that, but why would i? Its exactly as dry as doing calculations in your head, and about as terrible of a form of entertainment aswell.
My Steam review, back in July 2021, pretty much summed it up. The game thought that just being better than the disaster SimCity 2013 was would be enough. Good thing we got a sequel that addresses most if not everything, but hell, guess we'll be having to wait for 2040 to run it fully modded 60fps.
That's the worst part. Paradox + optimization goes together like water and sand. Can't enjoy a city builder if I can barely run it, and I'm using a 4080 for crying out loud. The game doesn't even look good enough to warrant the horrible frame rates
I also prefer SimCity 2013, but its kryptonite is the city size. Still, I prefer to actually play SimCity, while these days I mostly prefer to watch others play Cities Skylines. Because the detailed traffic management and achieving ultra realism does not thrill me when I try to play (though it's impressive to watch others do it). And you were able to articulate so much of why Skylines feels a bit soulless, and is lacking the whimsy that I like in SimCity. Edit: You've also really intrigued me about Satisfactory (which is a game I'd never heard of). Esp. since it seems like we may both enjoy similar elements of city builder games.
I just finished the video after starting it a day or two ago, and I've gotta say, as usual (even though I know you made this almost a couple years ago) you hit the nail on the head. To be honest, the longform content you produce meets and even exceeds the quality of the content I would come to expect from your contemporary longform RU-vid Channels such as Noclip, Raycevick, GVMERS, and even (though tangentially related) Game Maker's Toolkit. I'm hoping that you can get the viewership you deserve.
What made Maxis games great IMO was the human element. You developed a connection not just with your advisors, but with your workers on the street level. This goes all the way back to something like SimPark and SimSafari. You cared about providing for your sims (or tormenting them with disasters). To me that was the appeal of SimCity, not tall buildings and highway networks.
I did like all City Builder games I've owned. Even SiMCity 2013, even Cities XXL. But nothing can beat Cities Skylines. Though EA fucked everything up back then, not just Simcity.
I felt like Skylines, at least mostly, does what I expect. Someone needs to drive across town to do something? They will. They might not be happy, but they'll do it until they flat out move out. I used to think Sim City 3000 was the best of all the Sim City games, until a very recent replay, and I really sat down to try to understand how transit works. And then I finally figured it out, and I realized that building only the boxiest shaped cities, that can't actually take full advantage of things like the subway travel distance just began to suck the fun out of the process. Getting people off the roads enough to clear up congestion seemed best achieved by putting a bus station, later a subway station, in the middle of a residential or industrial zone square. But the limiting factor, that industrial sourced traffic can never use the subway or busses, forever forces industrial zones to be clustered throughout the city and close up against residential and commercial zones, because trains can only go half the distance of subway, and roads 1/4, and that's assuming a straight line.
It's so sad that they abandoned Simcity 2013, they should have just stuck with it. At least they got SimCity BuildIt right even though it is a gridding money pit lol
While watching this video, I realized that this is the follow up to a video I commented on earlier. What I said earlier certainly doesn't ring true in this video, that is for sure. In my opinion, this is one of the best reviews of Cities Skylines I've seen, and comparing it to Sim City really brings your points home. I have spent hundreds of hours in Cities Skylines, and you managed to put into words a lot of problems I didn't even know that annoyed me with the game. You also brought out positives that I hadn't thought of either, in addition to solid and interesting info on both games, the history, the process and the creators. I simply had to log onto my old YT-account and give a reply, because this is a solid piece of work you put into this video, and it shows. Usually it takes me days to watch long format reviews, even if I love them. This one I almost watched from beginning to end in one sitting. Hope to see more long format reviews from you, because this was both informative and entertaining. You actually made me reinstall the game and look forward to sinking even more time into the game. Thank you!
You're very welcome! I've got plenty of other long reviews as well. It's my dream with these to be able to talk about games in a unique way, to appreciate them (or not) for what they are. Cheers!
Prior to SImCity 5, I vividly remember playing one of the older SimCity games and had an absolute blast when I was a kid at school (sadly I can't remember which one it was). Now having played SimCity 5 prior to purchasing Cities Skylines, I was utterly disappointed. And for two reasons. Firstly was the OBSURD online only requirement. Yes they removed it after the fact but by then it was too little too late. And secondly was the GOD AWFUL small map sizes. Cities Skylines and Cities Skylines 2 is a breath of fresh air and applaud Mariina and her team for this. Cities Skylines is MILES better than what SimCity 5 was.
I do wish we got a map in SimCity 2013 that was 4 times larger. It really would have solved a lot of issues. The rest of the features are great, but size is a problem. The thing I find SimCity2013 more fun than SimCity 4 even though I very much enjoyed it. SimCity 4 bugged me that you would have businesses just go out of businesses for no reason and the Commercial and Office buildings never seemed to get that big. SimCity2013 addressed those issues having one huge one being just size. Skylines was fun from the modding side of things and just the overall ability to make a city an actual city. It didn't have the issues both games suffered from, but then it had its own issues. The big thing I enjoy with SC2013 is the fact you could expand or change a building you placed down like a power plant. Where Skylines like SC4 it is what you put down. Skylines 2 went to fix thing issues with the first, but then fell harshly on problems like needing a much stronger PC in a bad economy. Skylines 2 has a lot of other issues. I really wish EA would start on a New SimCity, but I am not sure they understand the crowd. It seems games like this require indy or small developers. The bigger a developer gets the issue becomes quality in the loved series always dies.
LMAO, I didn't hit the like buttons until you reminded me to do so at the end! I know both games, I really enjoyed the comparison, looking into the Dyson Sphere Project now.
54:40 Hot take: Paradox is doing what bethesda is trying to do. Think about it, the modder packs are A LOT like paid mods by bethesda, except not sht and the modders get more than a tiny amount of money for them, the content's actually quality, even if filler, unlike the trash put into the anniversary edition, and paradox games have EXTENSIVE modding communities that are happy to fix whatever issue the devs overlooked, and yet the games arent obscenely buggy, like bethesda's stuff.
Cities Skylines is what is great, however if it were to stand with SimCity 1 for DOS and SimCity 2000 it sort of fails a little, not in the simulation department, but the fun department. Why? SimCity 1 for DOS and SimCity 2000 allowed you to import your city from the older game into the newer one... Fair enough... But if you wanted to have fun in the city, you could load your SimCity 2000 city into a game called SimCopter and play it there in 3D! That hasn't happened with City Skylines yet, but is a massive plus for the old games.
I don't mind cities skylines. But the reason I always liked Sim City was the fact it was more charming and less realistic. But oh well. Perhaps some day we'll get a new Sim City
Now the real reason why Cities Skylines matter more than SimCity that you also touch on with the detail in Skylines is control. If you plump down X structure to fix Y and hope it works out and that the automatics does it for you. In reality it rarely does, the machine requires tweaking, and Cities Skylines gives you that power to change the cogs to do what you want. It is like the RTS games like "Men of War" and "Company of heroes" they both feature equally brain dumb, poor shot Ai that doesn't move in the best way to a target. But Men of War has an ace in it's sleeve on Company of heroes... You could assume manual control of the unit, make that move down the alleyway, take that special critical shot required rather than cuss at the screen and hope the Ai would do the right thing or the automatics works out. And the ability to make it work is the strength of Cities Skylines over other games.
I feel like some of the music in skylines also rips off simcity 2013 I also bought simcity 2013 after watching one of your videos (maybe this one?), and I don't think it's that bad
Okay i am quite late to the party here but there is something that really irks me and that is the interpretation of "realism" used here and by many other people that seems like "because there is something not out of reality its unrealistic so nothing matters anymore.". Just because a Dragon flies around in the sky doesn't mean Iron behaves differently, those are two different things and just because a, to our reality, foreign object exists doesn't mean it becomes unrealistic. To achieve that it would need to break its own rules, its own "reality". Its a very absolutist and limiting mindset that always annoyed me, same with the notion that realism makes for bad games when in fact its the blend of reality distilled down to its core made into gameplay that makes for the most interesting games. Little of that has much to do with this video but it irked me and a comment might help with the algorithm.
Okay, before I forget. I'm at a 40-ish minute mark and Tropico isn't mentioned once. Or maybe I missed it, who knows? Anyway, it's pretty good. Dunno if it adheres to your city-building standards, of course.
Hahaha, wow! Thank you for this review. This is very close to exactly how I feel about one of favorite games that I've been playing since the original game. This SimCity was supposed to be the exact (perfect SimCity) game I had been envisioning since the beginning, and I was so excited to purchase my copy of the game just after returning from my first military deployment overseas. Naturally I was extremely disappointed along with everyone else that my $50 game was completely unplayable, but my love for the game allowed me to be naively optimistic in being content to wait for Maxis to fix everything. I too tried Skylines, but discovered as you mentioned, that it is a bit cold and not much more than a simulation rather than a fun game. I just recently started playing SimCity again and see that some of the server glitches have been resolved while there are still some very disappointing bugs in the game. I so wish they had just allowed Maxis to still work on the bugs and upgrading the game to that vision they had. In fact I still wonder if there is enough interest in crowd funding a revival of the development. Anyway, this video made my day, thanks!
Thank you! BE sure to check out the new video I posted today about Urbanist RU-vid, too! I just posted it, but I know fans of this review might appreciate it, too.
The best defend for Simcity ever, its such a shame that SimCity 2013 gets a lot of hate and pepole don't see over its flaws insted see its charm, great Review and Yeah SimCity 2013 is the better city builder than Skylines.
I honestly don't understand the thought that Skylines should be more tutorialized - it's simply an updated version of the design ethos of SC2k-SC4. Anyone experienced with city builders has an intuitive sense of how these games work. Roads, utilities, zones. Anyone who isn't familiar with them either won't buy the game or they'll watch some content creator play it and figure it out. I found the sims in SC2013 to be incredibly naggy and annoying with these little mini quests that happened over and over and over again. I also found it hilarious that the initial tile in CS was the same size as the whole buildable map in SC2013 - felt like a real middle finger to Maxis/EA
I thought SC 2013 was over tutorialized too, which is why it sucked as a tutorial: you couldn't get into the actual flow of what you needed to do. CS had the opposite problem were they're offering this buffet of mechanics and options and then kinda tossing you into the pool. It's great if you already know what's going on, but then you're kinda relying on a lot of experimentation when you could be implementing what you want. A lot of the deeply passionate C:S players I see are the ones who are crafting cities like they would miniature railroads with mods and stuff. It's nuts, but that's not the experience I want from a city builder because so little of it seems to have any actual, measureable effect on things.
@@NthReview yeah I guess it's really just a matter of what one is looking for. A big part of my own enjoyment for 2k, 3k, 4 and Skylines is that sandbox feel.
Interesting to watch it now and see that some of the things that were issues for you in Cities Skylines were changed/implemented in Cities Skyline 2. It's a shame new game was released with so many issues. Pretty disappointing and kind of reminds me of the failure of Simcity. Hope they manage to fix it soon 🙈
The irony that they made so much money copying SimCity with the first game and had so time and resources to develop a sequel that it wound up the way it did.
@@NthReview I know.Colosal Order have no visionary and heart , with city building games.They just make , copy and paste , from Maxis , but in a bad way.Simcity 4 will always be the best
Starting out, it seemed like SimCity would be the better game, but all this cramped space, mining, and resource juggling really turns me away. Skylines just doesn't seem that better and is still overwhelming with the options you have. City building really needs to be done by committees that specialize in different things
So Sim City is like a board game you hop on to on a lazy Sunday for 2 hours to relax, without straining your mental capacity too much, as so many things will be done automatically, and then as quickly forget about it, while Skylines is more of a project than a game, if you will? Requiring you to make decisions and solve problems yourself. The thing is, most people playing strategy games will expect the level of complexity and challenge of CS, so I guess that's the big reason they picked the clear winner here (minus the DLC thing, which we can all agree is ridiculous).
I don't think the weight or value of a game is based on how sophisticated it is or how many mechanics it is. As computers got more powerful through the late 90s and the 00s, it seemed like strategy game developers felt those genres could only advance if they became bigger with more stuff going on. On its face, there's nothing inherently wrong with that, especially since physical board games, however niche, could get insanely complex and take months or years to play. But did that necessarily make sense? Was that necessarily the best thing to do? Lots of people like Master of Orion 2 over the original, latter Civ games over simpler earlier Civ games, playability issues aside. If Maxis had been allowed to flesh out SimCity instead of being dumped to the curb in an era before No Man's Sky or Cyberpunk 2077 or what-have-you, I think it would've eventually shined and felt complete. C:S got by in big part because of what they were able to lift from SimCity (2013) without penalty and by adding more depth if you wanted it. I think C:S is a stronger game than SimCity, but that's because SimCity never had a chance to live.
@@NthReview Yeah I'm not saying that straightforward/simplistic/minimalist/whatever-you-call-them games are inherently worse. What I'm trying to say is the devs seem to have utterly failed to meet the expectations with this one. Apparently a shoebox-size city-builder is not exactly what people anticipated from Sim City franchise. I had great fun with SC4 back in the day and personally, I would see no point in switching to a game so limiting as Sim City, even though the older instalments have aged rather badly. I can see some things they did right with Sim City but it kinda fades when the whole premise is a miss.
@@kilagorila The shoebox sized lots aside, again, C:S borrowed so much from SimCity. If SimCity had been given a chance to breathe and not immediately slaughtered, we wouldn't even talking about C:S, it would be just another niche Paradox game while EA continued to make millions. SimCity was ahead of its time and C:S cashed in on that.
Easily my favorite city builder surpassing my previous favorite SimCity 4. Too bad they just keep releasing fucking DLC on top of DLC. You need to pay 300$ for the full expirience so... no thanks, I'll keep borrowing it. Societies was neat with the whole cities change with themes. Never played 2013 one
ProTip For Best Cities Skylines experience for SimCity players 30+: Download the soundtracks from SimCity 1-4. Create playlist in your media player. Open CS. Play playlist.
I would have been happy if they stuck to isometric graphics like in SC 3000 and focused on making a feature rich in depth game that wasn't demanding on pretty much any PC and you could make cities that would potentially span 100 times the max area of Cities Skylines.
I think they needed to (finally) transition to 3D, but they were definitely ahead of their time, hence the very small lot sizes. They could definitely get away with it today. I'm curious what C:S2 does, but from their logo it looks like it's going to be an artistic mismash of just bad, incoherent design again.
Cities Skylines reminds me of model railroading, lifeless set of assets you plop down and look at, with an extra down side, it looks horrible unless you fix it with mods. The art design is non existent, its only innovation being bigger maps and mods which are absolutely great features do not make the game worth the appraisal it received. I applaud them for trying though and I'm happy they made a lot of money so they can make a good game out of Skylines 2.
It definitely has the "LEGO System" approach where they provided a standard and everyone just made content to fit that standard, so there's tons and tons of content for it.
I ask you to make the game cities skylines for mobile, it is like a computer, if the size reaches 1 GB, it is not a problem, but make this beautiful game for mobile
I think for me it's about recognising the sims/cims/whatever as more than just passive participants in the systems of a city, but as people who actively shape a city through the things they do. It might be as simple as the way they look after their houses, or don't, that affects a particular neighbourhood. People trying to prevent you demolishing an old building they still value, or trying to block the building of a new road and its necessary demolitions. The public transport options people use; a real sense of citizens reacting to the decisions you make and those reactions having an effect on your next decisions. What if a lockdown is ordered for everything against essential travel/work: how does this affect the city? Crime seems a particular example of this: crime in a real city has real effects, it's so much more than an abstract number that determines whether people want to live in a particular place. To take a trivial example, a police car chase might well have effects on the transport system (eg blocked roads). What if the fear of crime prevents people from leaving their homes? A police outrage prompts protests and riots. And so on, and so on. I think in all of this, it's the recognition that the people living in the city shape that city somehow and aren't just there to fit into the systems you've created, or the simulation runs by. How do you simulate this, how do you incorporate it but still make the game fun (ie your city can't be wrecked beyond repair by events outside of your control - you must always have the tools to be able to deal with the situations that arise).
How one designs a game around real "Sims" versus entities that are abstractions of broader trends is a very, very interesting question and as I say in the conclusion, it's not an easy answer because it's never really been done before. I'd love to try though, to answer those deep questions.
Regarding dlc, you realize Skylines launched at $30, right? At $60 then sure the "dlc should have been free" argument makes sense, and I won't defend the pricing model they did settle on but let's be realistic.
Eh, pricing is a subjective thing and Paradox as admittedly awful about its dlc costs even compared to its competitors, and reviews did comment on the relatively light content at launch, so I'll concede the point.
I have always felt like somethings missing when playing a city builder game, that a new layer is needed to complete the puzzle. A Crusader Kings politics and events layer with deep impact on costs and management of the city might be a start.
I really wish I could try out Cities: Skyline, all that talk about numbers and trafic seems right up my alley. I've always been against that realism mentality in videogames, I've always enjoyed stilized styles way better. But with city builders I make an exception. The game can't run on my potato laptop, though, even in empty lots it had really low fps.
Another complaint about CS: The cities are painfully, painfully European. The constant spam from the bird. Pretty much your only source for citizens input, spammed by cat lady screaming her cat is in a tree, or how recycling acknowledges our carbon footprint and is good, EVERY 5 FUCKING SECONDS THE ENTIRE FUCKING GAME.
You're a smart and well lived dude, gotta say. I'm a third of the way through and basically what I'm getting is 'modular buildings are so fuckin good omg' and also 'the zoning brushes are way more annoying in Skylines'. I dunno... Sim City is boring as shit and the same game every new map. You summed up why Skylines is better multiple times. It's the little things, the power setup, sewage, traffic (like you even said it's an entire game), zoning. SIM city will always be now its setup every game and your city can only look so good. Meanwhile vanilla skylines can remake Chicago with very realistic car traffic and pedestrian traffic while also replicating the look. I I get the love for SIM city but other than modular buildings any other advantage you're giving it is disingenuous. It's a one play through game.
