Everything About Cities: Skylines - Paradox Greets You!

oh i see!

 

i cant see videos so.
did it have a disaster?
fire, car accident, etc?

one thing that bothers me is the graphic, i'm not sure why when zoomed in it looks like a toy just like sincity

interesting , look forward to it

the graphic, somehow it looks scaled and close to reality when seeing from every angle

 

So I had a bit of time to think about some
possible features that I would like to know about how
CSL will handle them:
As you may know about CXL, passengers came via highways, airports and
ports, and effected the functionality of hotels and offices, as well as some special
buildings that were relying on passengers.
So now for the possible Rail in CSL- how often will I need to repeat the words
Rail and Cities:Skylines such that Rene will get a heart attack - I would like
to know what the additional effects will be. I can indeed imaginge that
train supply enhances the functionality of offices, as many people that work
for a nationwide or even multinational company work at one location
but have meetings in regional headquarters once in a week, or bi-weekly, ...
and travel there by express trains, at least for Europe, I'd opine that this
was a mere fact, not sure about the US, though. I imagine that most
people there have to use airplanes for meetings, if they don't meet via
Skype or similar services...
But even if meetings could become redundant, then at least the presentations
of external consultants will need such people to travel to a certain headquarters
via car, train, airplane. But I think that as soon as they arrived at the central station
or the airport, they use cabs/taxis to reach the headquarters then (or first a hotel);
and this given that they don't drive there by car...
So I'd not say that citywide public transportation will truly enhance the
category "passengers" (if CSL takes this over or uses a comparable system).
What I would be interested in now instead was to know how CSL will handle
a taxi transportation system. Most taxi services (if not all) are privately owned,
but at least for the transportation from the main train station to the hotel or the
headquarters, the taxis need a public good before, the train (of course, in downtown
areas like Manhattan, taxis could simply be used instead of public transportation systems
liek metros, because the rich office employees have enough money to spend ).
So taxi service would enhance passenger functionality much better than other citywide
public transportation systems, and would make these public transportation system even redundant
once an effective taxi service company has been installed.
So how do you plan to let players handle such services that are privately owned in real life,
but that at least partially depend on public goods, like taxi services, casinos (depend on
tourists, which come via airports, train stations, highways, and possibly use taxis to drive from
the airport to a casino/hotel), just to give some examples...

I hope this was not too confusing

 

Hi again John,
Most appealing aspect of CXL for me? Hmm, it's not one simple answer unfortunately and I don't know how useful my thoughts will be to you because according to current "gaming theory" and all the psychological crap that has formed it, I am an aberrant gamer.

I'm in my late 40s so my ideas about enjoyment from games has changed quite a lot over time.
I hate button masher style games because I'm no longer "twitchy" enough to be fast enough (and so I cannot compete with most of younger gamers hahaha!) I'm not casual enough to be satisfied by the simplistic games like you find on Facebook, I don't like linear/on rails gameplay and I utterly hate "fetch & carry" gameplay designed to increase the amount of time it takes to play a game, e.g. the Citadel in the first Mass Effect game, the idea of making the player go to some far distant location to get information or an item and then make them travel all the way back to the start location only to have to go to another far distant location when a simple radio call would have achieved the same result really annoys the #$%@ out of me. It's bad game design made to make the player waste time and it makes me think the developers couldn't come up with any sort of story mechanism to keep you progressing through the game. If I see this in any game, I am less interested in buying it.

I'm not hard-core enough to care about achievements. In fact I think the majority of achievements in modern games are utterly pointless because I believe an achievement should mean you actually did something significant.
Completing the tutorial is NOT an achievement, starting the campaign is NOT an achievement, collecting your first 50 items is NOT an achievement, advancing through the various chapters of a game is NOT an achievement, reaching a level in any level-up game is NOT an achievement and so on and so on. All these things are the things you do just by playing the game normally without even trying. I don't view a "gamer score" as any true representation of how good a player is.
One day soon you'll get an achievement just for turning the console/computer on!
Having my town in Banished recover and start to flourish again after having about 60% of the population killed and 50% of the buildings destroyed by a tornado and then having the remaining population starve until I was left with 20 citizens from the original 240, is more of an achievement in my mind than many of the achievements you see in Steam games for example.

Unfortunately many modern gamers seem to believe that they can't enjoy a game if there aren't any of these trivial/meaningless updates to make them feel validated and game companies throw more and more garbage achievements into a game to make those sorts of players buy the game. If I see a lot of (in my opinion!) pointless or stupid achievements for a particular game, I am a whole let less interested in buying it (because my mindset is that if the game developers are catering to that particular gamer type, the game isn't going to be my type of game)

I like CXL because it doesn't cater to the "validate my existence with a meaningless achievement" crowd.
I like it for the ability to create a city the way you want to (taking into account terrain and other "realism" aspects such as population size and budget) rather than being dictated to about how you have to play the game but there are still requirements to achieve something e.g. unlock new buildings or road sizes by having a certain population size. So there is a challenge to the game but it's a natural progression in the game rather than some artificial creation designed to limit your progress until you've satisfied some game designers idea of difficulty.

I like the idea of having new buildings/features/whatever unlocked by progressing through the game but I despise artificial difficulty like for example, increasing the hit points of a boss monster to make it much harder to kill or requiring a very specific formula (i.e. the "strat") to defeat it. I prefer something that says "here's the problem, here's the tools, now YOU find a way to solve it". I like games that challenge you to think rather than just push some button or other. An example of what I mean is easily found in many of the tutorials for Cities XL. Some player used nothing more than in game resources to create something different or unique within the game. One of my favourite examples is Kipate's tutorial on French Chateaus & Formal Gardens http://xlnation.net/resources/tutorials-by-kipate-2-french-chateaus-formal-gardens.881/
The game let Kipate express imagination and creativity to build something incredible.
CXL doesn't block the player from trying these things and anyone with a little curiosity and patience can find new ways to achieve the same thing. That's something important to me for my idea of enjoyment in a game.

I don't worry very much about reaching end game in lots of games I play (including the city builders) because I like the journey through the game more than the end content of the game. Even with my very first city builder, Sim City on the Super NES, I never bothered to finish a city because I had more fun just building the cities. In some games I deliberately do not finish the game because I like to wander around in the game world - the journey is more interesting and more fun than the destination is. Cities XL lets me endlessly tinker with a city without having to care about reaching end game and as long as I've satisfied the population/budget requirements I can remake the city however I want and how many times I want.
In many cases, I've deleted cities I made in CXL because I wanted to go through the earlier process of building up the city all over again - I enjoy the creation aspect of a city in the game more than reaching the end of the game.

However, a very important aspect of the game for me is the ability to add mods. The game without mods is a good enough game but once you add some of those mods, the game becomes a truly great game. I don't have the patience for modding so I also feel that modding for a game should be somewhat easier than it currently is for some games. One of the truly great aspects of my CXL experience has been seeing a building, bridge etc. etc. in a movie or a picture from the net and recognizing it because someone has made a mod for it for Cities XL (and I've had it built in one of my cities) or finding that someone has made a mod of a structure that I've seen in real life.

So yeah, there it is. That's my answer.
Long, rambling and probably not very useful!

 

I don't mind the graphics that much, I want gameplay, features, functionality.

And yes of course eye-candy is nice, but rather should dictate worth in fun'nes and feature & functionality wise.

 

I just hope this game can run on low end notebook
I've build a small village sized city on simcity and it already as slow like 5million population city on cxl

 

Wow i really can tell i´m totally looking forward to this! Awesome

 

The thing that bothered me the most when playing CXL was the lag, making the game run on 10 minutes per frame. Furthermore, I think the original game was a bit limiting. For example if you have a city at sea, it's nearly impossible to make a tunnel because you can't build under the water level nor you can build the tunnel under buildings or plaza's.

It's the mods that made this game how it is now. That's one of the things I liked most: if you ever want to build something special, just download it. Also you could combine mods to make something truly unique. By combining a limitless construction mod (which allows you to place buildings on other buildings' bases) and terraforming (which allows you to higher/lower the ground of a certain area), you can stack buildings on top of each other. Also there was a great variation of buildings (New York, Florida, the Midwest, Northern USA, Latin-America/Southern-Europe, the Netherlands, England, Germany, Scandinavia, Russia, China, Japan and the Middle-East). So I'd say diversity was the thing I liked most about CXL (with mods).

 

Btw, @KevinTheCynic:

Just imagine me to be a guy, though...

And I have to say that I agree with you that these extra points
(oh, you made 10 roads, get a cookie) are some kind of trash for me
(but they are given in CXL Platinum, too )

 

@ Kipate
Yeah you're right, there are achievements in CXL but they are related to the progress of your city and not necessarily to your progress through the game. They are sort of like the achievements you get in the Forza racing games that recognize you have successfully completed a special manoeuvre or that you have maintained a high speed without crashing for a certain amount of time.
I know some people are annoyed by them particularly when you have six or seven pop up at the same time but I can deal with them because they're about something you did for the progress of your city. They aren't some reward for playing the game for 10 hours or for having five friends play at the same time or something stupid like that.
For me, gaming is a hobby, I play for the enjoyment of the game, I am not playing the game so that I can get a social network or to get some social networking reward/achievement. If I wanted that then I'd register on Facebook and pretend that I have lots of friends.

Something that I have seen on Steam forums that makes me cry is when people complain that a game has no Steam achievements, I've even seen one person say he would not buy a game if it does not have Steam achievements. What the &$#@ is he playing the game for? Is he playing it for the enjoyment/challenge of the game or is he just playing it to get the Steam achievement so he can sit back and believe that other Steam users will think he's important?
I personally think that is an insult to the people who made the game and to the gamers who want to play the game because they have fun with it. If you're only getting a game for the achievements, then you are not really interested in the game (and if you aren't actually interested in the game then you should not buy it in the first place). That's the same thing as buying all the Stephen King novels but not actually reading any of them, you only bought them so you can show your friends that you have them all.

 

So my Muhamad Ali Grill will be enough?
And btw, we are just making a short pause from
asking heaps of more questions, as we all need
a bit of time to build our CXL cities
Or enjoying real life

Edit: so any educated guess what an appropiate PC would be like?

 

I love what I've seen so far and the fact that you are a 9 man development team, for me is even better, because I would guess that you will carefully follow the feedback from your community, more than a huge (evil) company would do!

So thank TotalyMoo for answering our question and congratulations cause you guys are doing a fantastic job so far!

To me, the key of the Cities XL success can be summarize in one word: Freedom!

It's a concept that KevinTheCynic expressed perfectly in his post, and that's why the ability to individually place any building in the game is a CRUCIAL key element of success!

Freedom means also modding: the more you can mod, the bigger the community will become.

if you (TotalyMoo) have followed little bit this community, you definitely have already realized how many awesome modding achievements this community has reached thanks to some truly skilled and amazing modders that have tweaked the game to his limits to give us some truly unbelievable results.

Just have a quick tour in the Resources section to have an idea of a game can evolve during time thanks to the community.

You guys, seem like someone that will constantly update the game, so really the limit is the sky!

So please, think carefully about adding the individual placement to the game, because that one, in my opinion, is the starting point that any citybuilder should have!

Now I'll enjoy the videos you posted and eagerly follow this conversation.

 

How is harmony in this game? Are there religion? Faith? Houses of worship? Or pantheon?

How is city politeia gonna function? Advisers??

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politeia

Could the mayor set up polls or referendums or such?

 

Hmm not gonna end without question, propapbly regarding to happiness that we already seen will the harmonica to be..?

Or not, ur call. But do these stuff in the city that makes cims happy do those evolve'n'grow?

How dynamic is the game? How much there is that feel that a lot is happening in the city, and not just eye-candy?

What kind of reactions and interactions will the gamer be facing? Tasks?

Surely modding alone is enough to keep the game interesting, like in CXL's case, but the game is quite static, how will this be avoid in the new Cities Skylines?

EDIT: Removed irrelevant information. Please try to keep on topic. -snick