Everything seems to be open all the time, so you can’t create the duality of a city’s night and day life. This is perhaps hyperbolic, but it’s not unreasonable to point out that some of the game’s simulation systems could be a bit better. Someone once described Cities: Skylines to me more like a Factorio-style production chain engine than a serious city builder. More ‘Federal’ involvement – or a less American-specific variant – as well as modelling more how cities within the same province or region co-operate (and compete) with each other, would be amazing. It’s a common trope of most city builders to ignore largely the outside world, although some have tried to model it in the past, but we’ve love to see Cities 2 be a bit bolder and really take a stab at bringing in outside context. This touched on the concept of ‘Federal’ agencies that are integral to the American system of government, and reinforced the idea that your city doesn’t exist in a vacuum. One of the more interesting Cities: Skylines expansions was the Natural Disasters add-on.

While it may seem like an obvious request, we’d like to see a Cities sequel fully embrace the latest tech so that the underlying simulation can be as powerful as it can be, and of course the graphics are living their best life. There’s nothing wrong with Cities’ graphics or its underlying performance, but a lot has changed in five years, even in terms of the Unity-based engine the first game was built on. I don’t think Paradox were expecting Cities: Skylines to become the hit it turned out to be, so you can imagine investment in the game – especially coming out of the relatively niche predecessor of Cities in Motions – was restrained. It goes without saying that this is all aspirational, but it’s based on research taken from among the Skylines community, such as this reddit thread.

2022.09