Cities Skylines: The saga continues
As the sequel product continues to struggle, Paradox releases more content for the predecessor
Let me start with a somewhat overdue channel update: Last week, I received some good news from the data recovery service that I hired to salvage my SSD. They told me that “99.9%” — yes, they actually used the figure 99.9% — of my data is intact. The only damaged file that they found is a saved game for Atom RPG, a game that I opened just to get a quick look at the UI. So it’s a thing of no real importance, and it’s backed up on the Steam cloud anyway. I have to assume, then, that the read/write head was damaged, but that damage to the platter was either not as extensive as they had thought, or confined to sectors with no data on them. Needless to say, this comes as a substantial relief, and I’ll take this opportunity to once again thank those of you who kicked in to help me cover the fee.
I still have to sort out with them a point of confusion about the invoice for services rendered that they sent me, but once that’s resolved they’ll send me a replacement drive with the data on it. I hope to receive it by the end of the week, and I’m looking forward to reacquainting myself with some nuggets of content that I mean to share with you over the life of this blog.
While marking time, I took note of the online chatter about the first anniversary of Cities: Skylines II, Paradox Interactive and Colossal Order’s ambitious but troubled city-builder game. Over the past year, C:S II has been hounded by complaints (many of them quite salty) about sluggish performance and lack of features. I haven’t played it myself — it debuted on PC only, with no mention of when a Macintosh port would be available. But the consensus seems to be that Colossal Order botched its debut and, even after a year, the game is not yet in a satisfactory state.
This would seem to put the Cities: Skylines franchise in an awkward place. Clearly, C:S II is supposed to represent the long-term future, and it follows that Cities: Skylines is supposed to fall into neglect as more and more players shift over to the sequel game. But the long-term future isn’t ready for the present, and no one knows for sure it will become so. In the meantime, the first game sits in limbo with support, both official and community-driven, drying up like stale bread on the shelf.
Or is it drying up? A year after Cities: Skylines was marked for obsolescence, the most popular user mods are still being updated. Community members are still generating new content. Paradox just released a couple of content creator packs as DLC, which necessitated a new version of the base game. One of the new DLC is a collection of Alpine village-style assets, which doesn’t interest me much. But the other is a gorgeous collection of maps and roundabouts and interchanges by community creator TeddyRadko, sold under the brown-paper bag name of “Map Pack 3.” I found $6 at the bottom of my credit card limit, so I sprang for it after watching City Planner Plays’ preview on YouTube.
In particular, TeddyRadko’s map Karstlands caught my attention. It has a Scandinavian-sounding name, but its central feature is a moated compound of ruins that rather reminds me of an ancient Southeast Asian capital. I suppose it was meant to evoke an equally ancient Northern European village. But the moat, the walls and the perfectly rectangular shape reminded me more of the Imperial City of Hue. In any event, I decided that I wanted to use that ruin as the germ of a city.
The backstory that I invented here is that a village has sprung up around an abandoned walled compound that belonged to a predecessor civilization. The tree lines remind me of hedgerows and I’d like to keep a rustic feel to this part of the map; there will be little high-density zoning and the “No high-rise” ordinance will be in effect. The villagers want to turn the ruin into a tourist attraction, so I will try to zone it as a city park, using the City Park DLC. The roads criss-crossing the ruin will have to be demolished and replaced with park foot paths. Industrial and high-density development will take place on the opposite bank of the river, and I eventually want to create a city that has this huge archaeological site as its main tourist attraction.
Having grown up and lived most of my life in a huge metropolitan area that is synonymous with suburban sprawl, I have long held a fascination with how cities grow and develop over time. Without a doubt, this is what drew me to city-builder games like Cities: Skylines and (of course) the SimCity series. However, I have yet to see a city-builder that takes in the true sweep of historical evolution. The technology level doesn’t change, nor do you see buildings change from thatched huts to modern tract houses. You can imagine your city evolving over the course of, maybe, 50 years, but you’re not going to see London grow from a medieval warren of cobbled streets into a glass-and-steel modern city.
I particularly like this map created by TeddyRadko because he plopped into it a feature that at least enables me to create a head-canon in which the present meets the distant past, at least in a modest way. It’s not real in that that big walled compound is just a decoration, not a functional asset. But I think I can tinker with it so that the mechanics of the game will treat it as a tourist attraction, this thing from the distant past that the present decided to preserve so that they could pimp it out as a reason to visit the city. There will be cims walking and bicycling along its pathways. I think this will be the most fun I’ve had with Cities: Skylines in a while, and Cities: Skylines II can wait.
Nice, a map that facilitates a story. : )