Cities Skylines 2: Have we really come that far since Simcity?

I was incredibly hyped for Cities: Skylines 2 before release. I'd played the original for several hundred hours and I've always been a big fan of city builder games going back to the original SimCity and SimCity 2000. But so far, I've only put about 80 hours into Cities: Skylines 2. I just find myself bored, and I think it's time to ponder why.

For starters, I feel that Cities: Skylines 2 hasn't done as much as it could have to feel more like a simulation.

As the original Cities: Skylines aged, it started to feel more like a city painter than a city simulation. Despite adding features like industry specializations and new transport options, these additions never seemed to make a meaningful difference in how a city was run or how difficult it was to achieve positive outcomes.

I was hoping Cities: Skylines 2 might address this, and arguably it has ever so slightly. The game's beginning is more difficult than it used to be, especially at launch when it was essentially trivial from the start. But despite that, the simulation still comes across as shallow.

Sure, Cities: Skylines 2 simulates things like building development, transit, disasters, and has an economic model, but what's missing from the simulation is all the rough edges. Aside from traffic snarls (which also feel easy to address these days), there just isn't a lot of friction that would represent the more difficult parts of running a city.

Concepts like the difficulty of redeveloping an area, or the need to have local political support to make changes, aren't modeled. I understand it would be difficult to create a good simulation for these systems. But because they're not there, once a city becomes large and successful, there's really nothing stopping it. The city can grow permanently with no particular problems or issues facing it, except for bugs which do occasionally crop up (like the rather infamous homelessness bug that caused even the wealthiest citizens to ignore plentiful housing and choose to live in public parks).

One game mode that many older city builders (and some other modern ones) have, which I would consider useful to Cities: Skylines 2, is scenarios or a campaign. This has never seemed to be in favor with the Cities: Skylines development team, and Cities: Skylines 2 doesn't have any scenarios whatsoever. Perhaps they weren't a very popular feature, but scenarios are one way the developers could add some tension to this otherwise easy-breezy title. It would be fun to see scenarios where I had to overcome difficult weather, or a highly restricted map, or try to make sense of a tangled mess of transit. Being able to leap right into these challenges rather than grow a city to a point where it has any friction at all (which typically takes at least a few hours) could make the gameplay loop more immediate.

Another idea I'd like to see pursued is a more obvious and discrete economic or supply chain model. One of the best city builders I've played recently is Against the Storm, a roguelike city builder that focuses on resource acquisition and using those resources to keep citizens happy. It's a fairly difficult game (although not too bad once you understand the system), and while it's not a perfect analogy for Cities: Skylines, being much smaller in scale and having a post-apocalyptic backdrop that obviously wouldn't fit thematically with Cities: Skylines 2, having discrete supply chains to manage does create a more interesting gameplay loop where you have to pay more attention to how your city runs.

In Cities: Skylines 2, it might be interesting to see different maps have drastically different resources and to have more of a trading or external economic system where players must pay attention to what's coming and going in their city. That technically exists now, but it's very hard to drill down and see what's happening, and in any case, the comings and goings of resources don't seem to have much effect on a city's success. Plus, resources are generally trivially easy to get, so there's not much reason to pay close attention. A game where citizens aren't happy if they don't have good access to certain resources or needs like entertainment or consumer goods, and where those needs are somewhat difficult to fulfill, could be more interesting.

There are also some aspects of the simulation that, let's face it, haven't really changed much since the original SimCity. Yes, fire engines and police cars are physically modeled and must actually get to locations to fight crime or put out fires, but in practice this doesn't work much differently than the radius effects that used to be in play. And some aspects of these systems seem strangely trivial - like how the law enforcement system accounts for jail cells but I've never seen even the slightest chance of a city filling up the available cells. Now, focusing on law enforcement probably isn't the thing to do in Cities: Skylines 2, but it's strange that mechanics like this exist yet remain so basic, because serious concerns about crime rates or citizen unrest could be one way to add friction to the game and make it feel more like the simulation has any possible outcome besides gradual progress towards near-universal happiness (a nice thought for reality, but not one that's too interesting for a simulation game, I'm afraid).

My core complaint is really this: playing Cities: Skylines 2 today, I don't feel like I get much more out of it than I did with SimCity 4 or even SimCity 2000.

The scale is larger, the graphics are more detailed, there are some building types that didn't used to be available, but ultimately, I still feel like I'm painting down a city in whatever configuration I find attractive. In fact Cities: Skylines 2 is arguably a step backwards here, since older SimCity games had scenario, and getting a city off the ground in SimCity 4 was somewhat difficult (though, I'd say, once again trivial once the simulation was well understood).

In Cities: Skylines 2, there are no obstacles to overcome, no issues to address, no goal in sight. It's the kind of sandbox that falls apart as you start to dive deeper into it. A good sandbox game can allow you to set your own goals, but in Cities: Skylines 2 (and many city builders these days, especially those trying to simulate real cities), there aren't really any goals to set aside from perhaps making the city simply large. You can imagine for yourself that your city might use more trains than others or rely more on streetcars, or have a particularly heavy focus on density, but whether you do any of these things, the city is likely to be successful and, in terms of the simulation itself, feel very similar to any other city.

I don't mean any disrespect to the developers at Colossal Order who work on Cities: Skylines 2, because this is a very difficult problem. Translating the complexity of modern cities into something that's simulated on a computer remains tough even with today's most powerful PCs. I also recognize that this rant very much falls into the "gamer plays game for 1,000 hours, hates it" category of absurdity. Obviously, I actually do like these games a fair bit, because I've played them a fair bit. And if you ask me "Should I buy Cities: Skylines 2" my honest answer is yes. I just wish not only for replayability, but also for a city builder focused on simulation that comes out in surprises me with new mechanics and ideas.

I'm not saying I have any easy solutions here, but what I am saying is that I'm getting bored with city builders honestly. I have been for a while - although I played Cities: Skylines for a few hundred hours, that was honestly a lot less than I expected considering how much I enjoyed the SimCity games.

It feels like the genre is not focused on simulation currently. There are a lot of good cozy city builders coming out, and there are a lot of city builders that focus on fantastical or historical settings (like Against the Storm, with its entirely fantasy setting and medieval/steampunk vibe). All those games are great, but when it comes to city builders trying to simulate real-world modern cities and make that into an interesting gameplay mechanic, it seems we haven't come that far in the past 30 years.

Here's hoping we'll see some a revolution in the space in the next 30.