pontifus
@pontifus

I figured I may as well write something about Cities: Skylines 2, but everybody saying it's the kernel of a fun game launched six months or a year too early is right and I don't have much to add.

I guess where you come down on city-builders depends on how utopian you want them to be and whether you treat them as games or as toolkits for building little dioramas. I'm more interested in prodding the simulation, such as it is, than in placing individual park benches, and the inheritors of SimCity's black box are not where I look when I'm looking for visions of a better future. So, on the one hand, I absolutely do not need the character models in a game viewed mostly from several thousand feet up to be so detailed, and I personally would not have sacrificed performance for things like that. But on the other hand, now you don't need mods to make grungy US-style cities with too many parking lots, and I have to admit I find it kind of satisfying when the cities come out looking like the strange and terrible places where we actually have to live (though I will not be fucking with prisons or gated communities in C:S2, I don't think).

Mostly the issue is that there's an unbelievable number of bugs and/or things that just don't seem to be working right. Water is extremely weird. One of the new services, mail, does nothing except make people unhappy--post offices collect mail and don't deliver it, and post sorting facilities are entirely decorative. Land value vs. resident income seems to be busted given that people struggle with the cost of living basically regardless of what hellish conditions you make them live in and despite having access to high-paying jobs (and the game isn't self-aware enough for this to be some kind of commentary). Industrial zone demand results in truly dystopian factory wastelands, which, I dunno, maybe that's intended, but it seems like a little much even when my goal is uncanny liminal space Americana. RICO demand is strange in general and sometimes doesn't seem to have much to do with how people are using the existing zoning. I have no doubt that making all the numbers rub up against each other in a sensible way is very, very difficult, but I mean ... they could've called it early access, and that at least would've set expectations. One has to wonder if the developers knew the product was underbaked and the publisher said sell it anyway.


pontifus
@pontifus

Politically fraught bugs aside, C:S2 is a better game than it was last year, but I keep thinking about who it's for and why. Like, the recent economy patch resulted in an early game that demands more micromanagement than just waiting to build services until you have the population for them. You have to strategically underfund everything, mess around with taxes, go hard on specialized industry, and absolutely not buy map tiles you don't need--i.e., to restrain yourself from going right for a massive fantasy city and start with a small farming or mining town. Which is fine if you want something approaching realism, but I wonder who other than real sim sickos will figure all this out before running out of patience and turning on infinite money in an attempt to get anything at all out of this game they bought.

I appreciate the road-building and the new detailing tools and everything. Contrary to what I said just up there a ways, I've even kind of become a park bench placer. I care enough to be using a bunch of tryhard mods. But that wouldn't be the case if SimCity on SNES and SimCity 2000 hadn't been approachable enough to convince a single-digit-aged kid to care in the first place. I guess now, instead of fumbling around with the game itself, you're supposed to watch urban planners and civil engineers build theoretically sound cities on YouTube or Twitch and become invested that way. The developers of these kinds of games are disincentivized from making trial and error fun. It's not their problem anymore--just watch a beginner's guide. And all the ads for wireless earbuds and personal finance apps that implies.


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in reply to @pontifus's post:

I wouldn't be surprised if that last bit was true. Paradox (the publisher) is notorious for their in-house developed grand strategy games being seriously undercooked at launch, so if they had a close hand in Skylines 2 development some of that attitude might have been there.

Given how they act like any other big publisher now, firing all the Harebrained Schemes people right before their game came out and so on, I'd almost be more surprised if it isn't true.

in reply to @pontifus's post:

Hilariously, the economy update also inavlidated every tutorial that came out on release. We coincidentally started playing right after the patch, having seen a fair amount if release gameplay and it was rough.

The whole micromanagey slow expansion meta also seems to completely undermine development points and available land plots, since both are produced far in excess of what you can afford.
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Yeah, I'm probably overlooking some better ways of making money, but it sure seems like you spend a lot of time waiting around until you can even cover the up-front cost of buildings now. Kind of feels like you're pushed into putting down massive amounts of residential before you can afford the services for it.