Cities: Skylines 2's sterile perfection is killing the genre's soul
City building games have a Soul Problem pt.2
A player laments that Cities: Skylines 2 feels lifeless because everything is square, neurotically clean, and devoid of organic detail. They argue that stairs, potholes, graffiti, and abandoned houses are missing, and that relying on mods to fix this is unrealistic. The city should tell its story visually, not through stats panels.
In this game, everything is 'sanitized' to the point of neurosis.
- db48x
He is partly correct, but forgets about the polygon budget. The GPU is fast but not infinitely so. It has lots of texture memory, but not an infinite amount. Game developers have to balance graphical fidelity against the rendering time. They actually did a really bad job of this for Cities: Skylines 2 and it was a big reason why the game was so sluggish on release. Search for the story of the teeth for a particularly salient example.
Also that grand staircase should be something the player chooses to place, rather than something you get every time a path is sloped.
- stillpointlab
I recall working on a sports game where they hired a new art director who had previously worked in Hollywood on visual effects for movies. One of my coworkers had a meeting where the new art director requested that the player's uniforms have cloth simulation in the dynamic cut scenes.
It was then necessary to explain the difference between pre-rendered scenes and real-time rendering budgets.
It often isn't a question about whether or not something can be done. In pre-rendered scenes, or screenshots, the budget is very different than in game. At whatever target frame-rate you choose, there is a finite amount of visual effects you can achieve. Spending that budget requires compromise.
It's easy to live in a fantasy world where you can demand no compromise. The hard thing is doing the most you possibly can given very real budgets and doing so with the people you have available. Not every studio is Rockstar with the ability to throw unlimited devs for several years at the problem.
- matheusmoreira
> Does this look nice to you?
Yes, it does. It's exactly what I want my real life city to be like.
No plants growing everywhere completely out of control and invading perimeters they aren't supposed to be in. No cracked pavement that's just a rainfall away from being replaced with potholes.
Apparently, "soul" means a city that looks like it's unmaintained and teetering on the edge of a precipice, just about to be reclaimed by nature, a few years away from turning into the green urbanscape of The Last of Us.
- khalilravanna
Funny from the title I thought this was going to talk about how Cities Skylines lacks the soul of Maxis’ SimCity games. Skylines always felt sterile and dead. Just a piece of software. SimCity felt like a toybox buzzing with life and charm from buttons in the UI to the people milling about to the jazz soundtrack. There was vision and creative intent beyond just programming some systems. Hell, as much as everyone threw a tantrum over SimCity 2013 I think it still has infinitely more charm than Skylines.
Don’t even get me started on the gameplay loop that just feels like a simulation more than a game that’s been tightly balanced to be challenging. More of a sandbox with no real challenge to grow infinitely.
Different strokes for different folks but it always made me sad seeing Skylines take off and be talked about while the possibility of a true SimCity successor seems to have been buried with Maxis back in Emeryville.
- kajman
Cities: Skylines 2 is a particularly rough pick for this concept, since it's one of very few games I need frame generation to run even passably. LLMs seem plenty capable of tweaking existing assets to make a ton of variants, but actually displaying all of those performantly is then an engineering problem.
And without many variants, things like "splotchy wall apartment building" would get old so much faster when there's several square blocks of them instead of bizarrely pristine ones.
- esikich
Literally missing the forest for the trees. You're building a city, not a yard. I don't think making the city look procedurally worn or whatever they mean is trivial either. Feels like complaining about the graphics in Minecraft... That's not the point of the game.
- destrolas
Is “how hard would it be…” followed by an AI image going to be the new way to complain about games? Realistic textures, dynamic boundary rendering, etc would significantly increase the art cost and take a large bite out of the game performance budget for realistic aesthetics when the main audience draw is pushing the scale of the simulation.
- grobibi
Metropolis 1998 seems to understand this. Very excited for it.