A cat, a cat, and a cat

First, and foremost, I think it's way too early to say anything about TDU:SC, because we simply don't have anything to go off of here aside from the flashiest launch trailer content. This is never a great indicator for whether a game will deliver or not.

Going wholly off on a tangent, I'd point to GTA V's launch trailer.

I actually felt really charmed and attracted to GTA V back in 2011. It evoked something, an ideal and mood that felt real to Los Angeles. There's an attitude evoked in seeing the world of GTA V and that is what's supposed to sell the game, and sell it did. This, however speaks nothing of the actual gameplay of GTA V itself (which is fine).

What I mean here is, do those people doing yoga in their expensive condos, the homeless people living in tent cities or the migrant workers choking on pesticide mean anything to this game's content? Is that guy in the sports car revving his engine at a woman walking by to show off machismo important?

In a sense, not at all. These aren't things that ultimately factor into what you actually do in the game, but the trailer more importantly sets the tone or vibes of the world GTA V takes place in. The launch trailer chooses to be a counter point to the grittier New York City drama that is GTAIV.

So was the same in CP2077's trailer material, including the "what is cyberpunk" monologue Mike Pondsmith waxes poetic on what CP2077 is supposed to be. None of that mattered at launch.

That is all to say in the same vein, TDU:SC's launch trailer evokes much the same. It's all vibes.

All I can say is that folks should manage expectations. What is the feel of the driving going to be? How immersive and actually exciting will driving around be when it's not a scripted environment? Will any of the aesthetics of being "Sharps" or "Streets" matter to you?

Looking back at the Test Drive franchise, it's also important to remember that this isn't a franchise that was necessarily all that good, as far as racing simulators go. It's first installments were clunky and limited by hardware at the time, although innovative and engaging at the time. It's transition into 3D was handsomely beat out, however, by the likes of Gran Turismo, Need For Speed and other franchises.

It wasn't until the game released the first Test Drive Unlimited, that the game hit its brand identity and place in the racing world. Taking nods from Midnight Club, Driver, other roaming driving games and combining that with high flyer culture, TDU2 brought the best of cars and being a snobbish asshole together in one package.

I think one of the most engaging aspects of TDU has been the fact you're there to show off your massive dong. In the original, the dong consisted of racing challenges to other drivers in an MMO environment, and Atari hit pay dirt on this one game. That was repeated in TDU2. You're there to play in a world populated by other people who believe their dicks are huge because you own like five Ferraris or something, and not only that, but also a huge mansion to house them all. Funny enough, late-game TDU2 isn't so much a game about buying and driving exotic cars as much as "buying new houses so you can buy more cars."

What I'm saying is TDU1's success was a fluke and it's attempt to repeat it in TDU2 was modestly possible, if not for the game being fundamentally broken at launch and then never getting quite fixed after that. Atari essentially abandoned the game after releasing the casino and motorcycle DLCs, and online play servers were gradually shut down due to inactivity.

TDU:SC is not going to show you how the game is potentially going to fail. Under a new developer and publisher in France, one with a track record in making racing games, I'm not sure how well this execution will go beyond "vibes".

But you're also here to ask me if TDU:SC is going to be "any good" or not, implying that TDU2 was a "bad" game, but here's the thing. I think TDU2 was a great game, flaws and all. Part of what made the game most charming was that it promised so much, and failed to deliver because it gave you exactly what it promised.

This is a game that promised you a party of assholes, and you got it. It's a highflyer universe about party people driving around expensive super cars, and yet you look closer and you had some of the best hilariously self-critical writing out there.

Everyone in the game is incredibly fake. All your rivals are terrible people. You're encouraged to get plastic surgery just for the fun of it. Your driving instructor looks like a sex pest.

And then you're driving around and the game throws Running Wild by the CunninLynguists on their sound track at you, which when you think about it, is the antithesis to the aesthetics this game is trying to evoke.

TDU2 was a mess in so many ways, and playing the game with no sincerity evokes so much fun.

It's just so zany. And I hope that, in this latest installment, we are once again treated to what can only be something just as insincere and gaudy, lest it'll actually be insufferable.

We're thinking back to the concept of gentrification and the ultimate limitation of many city building simulators as we really look into the San Francisco Housing Element. It's brought back my latent criticism for many of these games in how they fail to understand the humanity of the people who live and work in a city.

As Douglas wrote in the piece linked above, and later echoed by Kunzelman in Vice, as the concept of a city is reduced to a system, the ultimate goal becomes an exercise in making number go up. You want more people. You want more agents. You want more money. You want to push the simulation to become more complex within a finite box, which ultimately means you build upwards—and if you're building upwards, such projects assume that these complexes are better in some way than a base-level dwelling, and the ultimate goal is to build beyond basic developments because they enable you to collect the one definitive metric to the success of your mayoral mettle: more tax dollars.

So, of course you want neighborhoods to have schools, and of course you want neighborhoods to have public safety institutions such as police and health care. These are needs that any neighborhood should have, but they become a gateway to success for the video game denizens. High wealth residents pay more tax dollars and that money becomes the metric for judging how successful your city is run. Thus, in games such as Cities Skylines, the highest echelon of development presumes high wealth citizens.