Reddit AMA with Cities: Skylines with Update 1.1
Colossal Order just did a Reddit AMA session for Cities: Skylines over the recently-released Patch 1.1, which is quite a substantial content upgrade (especially so for a free one!) with lots of new features the players have been asking for, such as European buildings, tunnels and more.
With the huge update, there's questions and suggestions and all, the team decided to host an AMA session to capture player input in one go.
We have summarized and brought you the more popular questions. The entire thread may be viewed here.
Warning: This is still a huge wall of text but filled with lots of interesting nuggets!
Introduction
Who are we? Part of the development and publishing team!
- /u/co_martsu - Mariina, CEO of Colossal Order, inventor of Chirpy.
- /u/HenkkaArt - Henri, Artist at Colossal Order
- /u/TotalyMoo - John, Community Manager at Paradox Interactive
- /u/co_damsku - Damien, programmer at Colossal Order
- /u/queen_of_pie - Malin, community team lead at Paradox Interactive
- /u/Pallidum_Treponema - Kandra, producer at Paradox Interactive
- /u/JMunthe - Jakob, Brand manager at Paradox Interactive
About the Update
Are European buildings really restricted to 3 new maps? How about vanilla game north & south Europe maps? Can buildings be controlled through district tools? Or is it for the modders to unlock the new buildings for other maps too?
One of the reasons the European buildings are their "own set" so to speak is because they add quite a lot of graphical assets into the game which, if simply added to the vanilla game assets, would most likely exceed the system specs set for the game, making it require more powerful hardware and in worst case, render the game unplayable for the lower end machines.
This needs more upvotes for visibility! We're pretty much obliged to stand by our system requirements as far as I am aware.
The European buildings are only north-western European ones. Do you have any plans to add southern European buildings (e.g. from Italy) or eastern European buildings (e.g. from Russia)?
Currently, the European buildings are only high-density. It looks very weird when a city starts off with modern, American-looking suburban houses and shops, and then gets old European-style buildings. Why didn't you add some smaller European wall-to-wall buildings (such as houses in Tallinn or row houses which are very common in Britain)? Additionally, are there any plans to add these?
At the moment we don't have plans to add more European set buildings. However, I'm sure now that the European set is open for modders to play with, there will be more European buildings available in the workshop.
We have only limited amount of artists and getting as many European buildings as we could was already a tremendous task in such a short time, no less. At the moment there are no plans to add low density residential European buildings. Although, there are some European style low residentials in the game among the more modern detached houses.
About the Game
Did you actively seek to correct the problems of SimCity while developing Cities:Skylines?
No. We were creating our own game.
I'm sure this has been asked a lot, but any plans to incorporate something multiplayer-wise? It's something I wouldn't even mind paying for, to be honest! That's not to say the current game as it stands blows others away!
Nope, sorry! Multiplayer is way out of our scope to do in any fun/interesting way. Cities: Skylines is intended to be, and designed as, a singleplayer experience :)
Will there ever be paid content?
Yes, there will be paid expansions. We're aiming to pair them with free, large sized, updates like we do with EUIV/CK2. Our expectation is that our players will find them both substantial and worthwhile!
Now that you are done with what you promised to deliver, whats next in your checklist? (DLC/expansion/update)
Summer vacation. More improvements to both the game and the modding tools. New content/features. Not necessarily in that order.
Did you ever think the game would become such an instant hit? How does it feel seeing the community's positive reaction?
We knew it was a good game, but the insane reaction was far, far above anyone's expectations. I can't take any credit for the actual game but I had a warm feeling in my chest for several weeks after launch... actually it's not gone yet. :D
We knew that the game would have a wider audience compared to the more niche games, CIM and CIM2. But, like Moo said, no one could have anticipated such success.
Simplicity versus Depth! The decision between making something simple and easy to understand, but not very complex and powerful versus the opposite - powerful and complex, but with a steep learning curve and a lot of time investment for the player - is something you often have to face in designing (I guess?). Some players love to go really deep into micromanaging and want to regulate as much as possible (e.g. Traffic Management, I'm guilty of that!). Others want to leave a lot of decisions to the game and rather focus on something else. What is your take on this conflict and how are you going to approach that in future Updates and Addons?
This has been one of the more difficult things to balance in Cities: Skylines. We are known for more complex games and had to pull back a lot to make the game more approachable than our previous titles. We trusted the more hardcore players will be able to modify the game to their liking and we'll be focusing on giving more content and features to all the players and improving on the modding tools to cater to cater to the modding community. In the future we will try keep in mind the openness of the game for newcomers while adding depth to the game.
Hello! Are there any plans to address the fact that traffic bunches up all in one lane? Also, there's a bug where trains get clogged up leaving the city, is that going to be fixed?
The traffic is going to stay so that the vehicle's route is calculated only at the beginning of the journey for now. The train issue we must investigate more but it's in our radar now.
What are your favorite mods of Cities Skylines?
Dynamic Resolution, Traffic++ and that one citizen tracker mod that I can't remember what it's called.
I like Gula's buildings and nlight's and subsequently SurelyExploding's First Person Camera mods. Unlock 25 tiles is of course a cool mod, as well.
Did you run into any difficulties using Unity as your game engine? If you could go back knowing what you know now would you still choose it?
Unity (like any other game engine) has its pros and cons. I personally think that our programmers have been able to do a lot of things previously thought very hard or even close to impossible with Unity such as the rather extensive modding feature we have in Cities: Skylines. My biggest gripe would be the loading times opening and loading the project but that might just be my soon-to-be-old workstation that's acting up.
If paid mods were to come back onto the Steam Workshop, what would your standpoint on it be?
My personal opinion is that the paid mods are a not-so-good thing. The way they were implemented was short-sighted. I think that TotalBiscuit and Gopher on YouTube have good insights to the whole ordeal and what went wrong. Things like Patreon supported modders are, to me at least, a better way to do it. Of course, one should read all the EULA etc texts carefully before engaging in these things just to be safe.
Super tricky question that's still being debated internally, so there's no definite standpoint on this. The implementation that was done with Skyrim was so-so, but the idea itself isn't bad. I'm pretty sure Steam stated that they will be doing further experiments with paid mods. It will be very interesting to continue observing what the communities reactions are and see if anything potentially fits us and our players :)
Do you have any plans to eventually improve the game's graphics by either improving the models or releasing higher resolution textures?
Textures are one of the things that take up most of the VRAM with GPUs. Cities: Skylines has set specifications and we have to keep that in mind when creating assets for the game. We are using 1024x1024 and 2048x2048 maps in most cases with buildings and it is very unlikely that we can go much further what comes to the texture resolutions.
Unless our programmers come up with some new magical features that allow twice the resolution with half the RAM needed, it's probably going to stay pretty much as is. Of course, we as artists try to achieve the sharpest possible result when modeling and texturing, pushing the UVs of the models to the limit to get that last bit of free texture space in full use.
Wishlist & Future Updates
Roads! I think you can agree that roads make up a big chunk of the city builder genre. Although the current range of road types provided by the game are a good basement, there are endless possibilities and ideas on increasing the variety (road textures, road(-side) decorations, lane management, bus lanes, speed limits, pedestrian areas, ...). Do you have any plans on working on that? Maybe even giving the community tools like an asset editor for roads?
We love roads. Unfortunately having to go too deep with the roads can start feeling too much micromanagement and therefore we're not planning to go too much into details with them. However a couple of things we have discussed and are looking into: naming the roads, new road options/policies and figuring out if the roads could be made moddable. I have no ETA on any of these, just telling you guys what we are thinking would be cool.
Are there plans to add tunnels for pedestrian paths? I would love to build pedestrian underpasses!
It's something we'd like to see and is definitely somewhere on our to-do list. No ETA or indication as to when, though. There are lots of things we want to do!
The districts in C:S are a great idea and something I think we'd all like to see expanded. Any insight about what we can expect in the future with districts, like entertainment district, museum district, European/W2W district, pedestrian only, national parks, historic district, etc.
We're looking into working with the districts more.
Good evening, guys. Many players of CSL want to input trams in game. Do you have plans about it? And… What about trolleybuses as CIM (St. Petersburg), CIM2?
Trams are something we will think about in the future. So many players are asking for them to be added so it has gotten our attention. Also we like trams.
Woop! Trams are awesome, although not in Gothenburg...
Will we get different weathers at some point?
Commonly suggested idea that we think is pretty awesome, I can say that much :)
Do you have any plans for your next big update? If so, are you willing to give them away yet?
Yes, we do! Unfortunately I'm not at liberty to share anything yet but it's exciting stuff. Think gameplay, added depth and stuff that actually matters and you're well on your way.
Wacky Ones
Why did you remove the cruise ships all-terrain capabilities? :)
It was a sad day at the office. No cake was eaten that day.
From the Patch 1.1.0 Notes:
Cruise ships no longer travel over land :’(
Even the patch notes seemed sad about it.
I was sad as I wrote them :(
What would you do if EA tried to buy you?
http://i.imgur.com/U9JF72T.gif
EA’s Reaction
http://i.imgur.com/axPHflq.gif
What's the funniest glitch/programming error you have come across while creating the game?
It was early 2014 and I was trying the bus lines for the first time. I call it "The Party Bus".
http://i.imgur.com/o4vgc7C.gif
What is the favorite game you have ever played?
*puts on hat of shame* Vanilla World of Warcraft.
Thief II: The Metal Age was and most likely will always be one of the defining moments in my gaming career. It was something simply awesome and different to anything I had ever played before. Steampunk, fantasy, medieval, bows, arrows, flash bombs! What more can a child want?
Left 4 Dead :p
Do you guys have any feature that "we would love to implement that but we don't know how to do it/do it and still make it fun". Also, what are you guys currently playing? (It can the mobile, PC, console)
For the first question - Kaiju defense mode with Oculus Rift support. Second - Witcher 3, Hearthstone, Skylines :)
Cities: Racing where you spawn a vehicle and drive in a city you've created, racing against bots or other players in a 8-player urban car-extravaganza. It would definitely be fun but I'm not sure if it would be technically feasible to do it on top of a game like Cities: Skylines. :D Currently playing GTA V: Online.
Ponies! I play Best Fiends on mobile.
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