Some really promising additions here. I especially like the pedestrian roads, which hopefully means we will be able to build less car-centric cities this time around. Also the roundabouts look great.
Meanwhile I was excited to see parking lots. I will fill my city with concrete and you can't stop me!
I got a little bit too excited about roundabouts. "Ooh, they'll be so useful!". I know we kind of had them in the first game, but only really a huge junctions. I want to build Milton Keynes.
You cruel person... I hate driving through there... 🤣
Traffic accidents!
I shouldn't be happy over seeing my cims get wrecked, but I've wanted that for CS. The game mechanics of road blocked and temporary queues and having to remember to build detour-alternative roads.
It's probably just based on the road maintenance score, but I'd love it junction and road design played a part in accident frequency. So my town can have that one intersection that always seems to have a crash during rush hour every Friday.
Parking lots
Wow. Now you can finally build realistic American cities ;)
If all cims need access to parking that might actually make good public transit much more important for your city if you don't want it to look like Houston in the seventies
Do most cities in America have parking lots. I feel like every city I go to the parking is hardest thing to find. Walmarts and malls being the exception.
Parking lots are absolutely everywhere. Some zones just prohibit large ones for historic reasons or otherwise (it's possible maybe you were in one of those zones)?
Visit Nashville, TN (around Centennial Park), Orlando, FL (around the Mall at Millennia) or Jacksonville, FL (around St. John's Town Center) and you'll see what I mean.
About 20% of the land of major cities tends to be parking, and it's a big issue because that land could be used for housing. City builders tend to ignore that because it makes cities ugly (in real life, it does too!), but if they actually modeled parking in their simulation, it would have all sorts of ripple effects that would be interesting to plan around.
All but the biggest, densest cities in USA and Canada have their centers covered in parking lots and parking structures. There's an effort by urbanist groups to reduce the amount of land used for parking in cities. This resource shows how bad it can be:
I love how they're designing the roads so they actually degrade over time and need maintenance and the pedestrian walking areas. It's all the tiny details that has me excited.
In Cities Skylines 1, "Road Maintenance" was only done on streets that had too many rotting corpses.
Seems like they are adding a ton of improvements from popular mods. The automatic intersection feature is honestly the biggest though, it was so annoying having to find tune intersections in the first game.
I can't wait to pave over the green hills with parking lots. No, really.
Easy there, Counting Crows.
I'm so happy to see a thread about Cities Skylines here! And one with plenty of reactions and comments.
I was worried the community would vanish along with Reddit and I would have go elsewhere to get my complex intersection fix..
Me too—I was saddened when r/CitiesSkylines didn't take part in the blackout. A community for a game that became as successful as it is in part due to the hard work of unpaid third-party developers should have been at the forefront of the protests
The most interesting takeaway for me in this diary was that you can select individual lanes like the one in the video where you’re selecting an individual lane to create a slipway and how the mouse selectively panned over each lane and choose the one that created the said slipway. This is really exciting stuff and I really really hope that they fixed the traffic problems that the first CS game had 😭
I really love the UX here. It seems super intuitive, definitely much more intuitive than traffic manager mods and stuff like that. Want to add a lane to the side? Just move your cursor to that side of the road. Want to add a crosswalk? Just find the crosswalk asset and place it on the road...
So intuitive!
I love me some cities skylines. Even if it's just me making the worst-designed cities and getting mad about traffic.
I don't see any bike lanes :(
They said on Twitter and in the comments of the linked post, that there won't be any bikes at all at release.
They'll very likely be a DLC.
This is a little disappointing for me - I wanted to build from scratch on a more "human scale" or european style
Looks like I'll be on CS1 until the DLC comes out 😒
There are pedestrian roads so you can still do a walkable/bikable city. When the dlc comes out im sure itll be simple to just add bike lanes where you want on existing infrastructure.
Yeah, I hope they expand immensely on public transport, biking and walkable cities. Having to build car-centric cities would make me sad.
Visually it looks amazing. Love the addition of the "parallel roads" feature too, that'll be a huge timesaver.
I'm staying away for my own good. The first game sucked waaaay too many hours out of my life!
heh, I know the feeling. Aside from Minecraft, it's the only game I've cracked 1,000 hours in...
As a console player, this is immensely exciting.
Honestly, I was a bit surprised at how much better this seems! If the rest of the sequel has a similar level of improvements, it will shape up to be a great game at launch!
I love all the public transit and walkable stuff. Let me make my people-first cities! Also the traffic accidents and road quality stuff. If there's one thing I want the most it is greater depth on the management part.
I've not played for some time but I'm liking the sound of these changes! I'm glad they've started these diaries by talking about roads, which were always a pain point for me. Here's hoping the traffic simulation is also improved.
Looks like the topic of the second dev diary is traffic. So we'll only need to wait until the 26th to find out if they've accuratelly modeled terrible drivers.
The hype is real!
Wow, I cannot wait to try this. The stacked road tool looks really interesting especially in the city. I never tried it in v1 since it wasnt really easy. Parallel roads I had to use a mod tool to have that ability and itll be nice to have this built in.
Have no interest in building a city without bicycles -.-
Yeah. Cities: Skylines biggest draw was traffic simulation. If they are downgrading the variety of traffic and vehicles then I'll wait.
Nice to read and all, and I'm looking forward to that game, but am I the only one who expects a "development diary" to contain some information about the actual development of the game rather than just a feature presentation?
Dev diaries are a thing that paradox is known for doing. Sometimes it goes into the behind the scenes, sometimes it's about work-in-progress features, sometimes it is just showcasing stuff that is already done.
It's basically their name for roughly weekly posts about the current and future state of their games.
Revisiting my comment after the second episode was released: Interestingly, they run the same series of content under two different titles. Under https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/forums/cities-skylines-2.1147/ it's featured as "Development Diaries", while under https://www.paradoxinteractive.com/games/cities-skylines-ii/features the exact same bits are labelled "Feature Highlights".
Both places contain the same video, again titled "Feature Highlight", and the same roadmap for upcoming episodes of this series, titled "Dev Diaries Road Map".
That clip at 2:34 in the video where they build the off-ramp might have made me drool a little bit
Built in sewage & electricity to the roads! No more forgetting, and having a sewage backup emergency in your cities
Glad to see these tools be adopted in the sequel. They where some of the most popular mods for a reason
Okay, I'm excited now.
Roads are the backbone of a city
One if the things I liked about city builders back in the day was the aspirational approach to city design, I could build a city entirely using wind energy decades before it became possible in real life. This assumptions is dissapointingly but understandably backwards looking.
That said the parking lot and road maintained stuff looks neat. I hope it setup such that busses and other public transit reduce the need for road maintenance and encouraging foot traffic in an area encourages commercial growth. If well designed I think it could actually be a pretty powerful teaching tool of modern urban planning concepts that still haven't reached the mainstream(death to Stroads!)
It sounds like pedestrian only roads are confirmed, though, so you can build the walkable city of your dreams (minus bikes, gotta wait for a DLC to build the perfect Amsterdam clone)
With the plazas DLC for the first game, it's possible to completely cheese a city that has almost no cars aside from the emergency vehicles. I hope whatever they have planned for this game is more realistic and less cheesy.
I think that overall the project is showing disappointingly little vision. City builders need to somehow move forward from the SC4 formula (or at least create a city that feels more alive like in that game, maybe bias because I was a kid but still, the music also extremely elevated it)
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