Cities: Skylines II

Cities: Skylines II is a 2023 city-building game developed by Colossal Order and published by Paradox Interactive. The game is a sequel to 2015's Cities: Skylines and expands upon many of its simulation factors such as simulated city and population sizes with improved traffic AI and management schemes. It was released for Windows on October 24, 2023. A release for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S was previously planned for October 2024, but was later indefinitely delayed. Critical reception praised its gameplay but criticized its performance requirements and other technical flaws.

Gameplay
Like its predecessor, Cities: Skylines II gives the player a virtual plot of land to create a city within. Players can lay down roads, zoning, utilities, and city services to bring in residents and businesses. The player can set city policies like tax rates and ordinances to influence how the city grows, from which they also receive funds to continue to expand the city.

Initially the player is limited to nine tiles of space to build on but can expand outward by purchasing additional tiles with city funds as they achieve milestones. Whereas the first game was limited to nine tiles covering 33.1776 km2 of area (81 tiles with user modifications) and the remastered edition to 25 tiles covering 92.16 km2, Cities: Skylines II allows players to build out to 441 tiles representing 171.33 km2 of area, meaning each individual tile is substantially smaller. With a third-party modification, this can be increased to 529 tiles, which increases the available area to 205.52 km2. Unlike the previous game which was limited to around 65,000 citizens, the number of citizens that can be directly simulated in Cities: Skylines II is limited only by a player's computer or console specifications. Each city can earn up to 2 billion currency units. Each map included with the game is based on a preset climate that influences weather behavior. Both the weather and the behavior of the city population follow annual and diurnal cycles, with each in-game day/night equivalent to one month of simulation time. Depending on the climate, the winter months may bring snow and other cold conditions, while summer weather may bring excessive flooding and tornadoes. Such disasters can be mitigated with additional disaster response facilities and services within the city. Like its predecessor, Cities: Skylines II operates in a compressed time fashion.

Cities: Skylines II improves and expands upon the robust city building mechanics fans know from the prequel, including fully realized transportation and economic systems, enhanced construction and customization options, including American and European styles, and advanced modding capabilities. Players have more fine-tuning control of residential, commercial, and industrial zones, including more zone types such as low-income residential and mixed-use residential/commercial. Signature buildings can be unlocked by reaching specific milestones and can impact the land value and other properties of whatever zone or city they are placed in. Rather than purely distance as in the first game, the simulated citizens use more intelligent methods to determine traffic routes, using route length, costs, comfort, and agent preference. Services like police and fire stations can also be assigned to specific districts to improve their response times, in contrast to the first game. In addition to public safety services, education, and waste management, Cities: Skylines II also adds in services for telecommunications, welfare, and death management. These services can now be expanded through upgrades of existing locations rather than having to build a separate service building. Passenger and freight transport options are more flexible, allowing for importing and exporting to other virtual cities, and rather than unlocking certain transport options based on city size, Cities: Skylines II has a technology tree on which players can spend development points to advance and unlock desired transport options.

Development
Cities: Skylines II was revealed on March 6, 2023, as part of the Paradox Announcement Show 2023. Adding to the base game, eight separate downloadable content packs are already slated for release, including the San Francisco Set, Beach Properties Asset Pack, two Content Creator Packs, the Bridges & Ports Expansion, and three Radio Stations in the Ultimate Edition option on the Windows, Xbox and Playstation online distribution apps. According to Colossal Order, the game had originally been planned to be launched in late 2020, however various issues encountered in development delayed the release.

Cities: Skylines II continues to use the Unity engine, like its predecessor. Unlike the first game, Cities: Skylines II was originally targeted to launch on both computers and consoles at the same time, but on September 28, 2023, Paradox Interactive announced that the console versions would not ship as expected on October 23 and that their release had been delayed to spring 2024. They further announced that preorders for the console releases would be closed and that all existing preorders would be refunded to the purchasers. Colossal Order explained that they were delaying the release to improve the quality of console gameplay and the optimisation of both console and Windows versions. Alongside the delay, they also announced an increase to the minimum specifications of the PC version of the game. In the week prior to the PC release Colossal Order further stated that the performance of the game may not be up to expectations at launch, but that they had planned a series of patches to improve this. According to Paradox Interactive, they have struggled with optimizing the game to a playable level for console, they have stated that they are hopeful April will demonstrate sufficent progress to continue with a release candidate, and continue work on optimization for a targeted release in October. On July 2024, Paradox announced a delay for console versions, due to stability and performance problems.

User modifications
Colossal Order also stated in October 2023 that while the game would support user modifications as with the original, mods would only be made available through the Paradox Mods library, which allows for cross-platform support, rather than through the Steam Workshop that the first game had used. A user modification in Cities: Skylines II can add content or change the game's behavior by overriding the code. This allows users to tweak settings and mechanics which otherwise cannot be changed in-game, as well as add more maps or more assets. At least eight building style packs, developed by popular content creators from the first game, will be made available for free through Paradox Mods. This modification support was not offered to everyone at the time of initial release, per the publisher's announcement. Third-party mod managers, such as r2modman, allows one to install mods from third-party mod repositories. One such mod is Realistic Density, which increases city density to real life levels by increasing demand, staffing and occupancy. Paradox Mods was released on March 25, 2024.

Downloadable content
, there are four DLCs for the game. More will be released in 2024. In April 2024, Colossal Order and Paradox Interactive released a joint statement addressing the backlash from the release of the Beach Properties DLC. In response, the DLC was pulled from the Steam storefront, and its owners were offered refunds. In addition, Ultimate Edition purchasers were offered three additional creator packs and three more radio stations. The statement pledged to focus on improving the base game and modding tools, focus on free patches and updates before spending more time on paid content, and put together an advisory meeting with player representatives.

Critical reception
Cities: Skylines II received "mixed or average" reviews from critics, according to review aggregator website Metacritic. The game was nominated for "Best Sim / Strategy Game" at The Game Awards 2023.

Leana Hafer from IGN said that although it has new enjoyable systems, the game can get better with post-launch content, stating "it feels like playing a beta, or a very early Early Access game." Ed Smith from PCGamesN describes how initial peaceful gameplay gave way to "supreme frustation and rage". In his Cities: Skylines II review, which scores the game seven out of ten, he concludes: "Something personal is lost in its larger scale while performance problems spoil the beauty, but this could one day become the superior city building game." Smith compared Skylines II to SimCity (2013), saying that both games experienced similar playability and performance issues. In an April 2024 retrospective, Rock Paper Shotgun said the performance had improved to tolerable levels but still needed more work. Despite issues with stuttering, their tests showed a two-fold improvement of frame rates in some cases.

The first DLC to be released for Cities: Skylines II, called Beach Properties, received near-universal negative reviews from players. Only 4% of the Steam reviews were positive three days post-release. Many of these reviews cited the lack of beaches and high price-to-content ratio as reasons for disappointment. In response, the Cities: Skylines II team apologized and announced plans to make this content a free add-on, issue refunds, and pledged to focus on gameplay issues before releasing more DLC.

Technical issues
In the days following the launch, the game received "mixed" reviews from players, with the majority of the reviewers criticizing the game's various performance issues and noticeable bugs. Since its release in 2023, Paradox has failed to shift public perception regarding the game, with the majority of community reviews in 2024 being negative on Steam. In the eighth edition of the Cities: Skylines II developer diary, Philip Hallikainen of Paradox said that "feedback has risen to toxic levels". The Beach Properties DLC received negative reviews from players who criticized its lack of meaningful additions and the studio's focus on creating paid expansions instead of improving the state of the game.

One issue that the community noticed was that each simulated citizen has their teeth rendered in full detail. Due to the fact that the citizens never open their mouths and the camera is usually positioned far away, the teeth are never visible. Developers confirmed this fact and stated that this does not contribute to the performance in any significant way. Colossal Order plans to address the performance issues, including those related to characters' teeth.

Sales
At launch, the game reached more than 100,000 concurrent players on Steam. In February 2024, Paradox revealed that the game had sold more than 1 million copies.

Response
Colossal Order apologized to players in April 2024 in response to the backlash of both the main release and the Beach Properties DLC. They pledged to issue refunds to all players who had purchased the DLC pack, to compensate deluxe edition owners with additional content, and promised that the studio would focus on fixing the game's various technical issues before working on future expansions.