Cursed Utopias | Cities: Skylines Review (2023)
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- Опубліковано 3 лип 2024
- Cities: Skylines is not another "good with mods" game. The vanilla game is really good. Perhaps too good.
| Released in 2015, Colossal Order's Cities: Skylines seemingly overnight supplanted SimCity as the supreme city building game on the market. 8 Years later and it's finally done receiving DLC and content updates with a sequel Cities: Skylines II on the way. Seems to be the perfect time to review Cities: Skylines 1 and speculate on CS2. Also lots of discussing DLC, mods, and city types the game doesn't like. |
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- Chapters -
00:00 - Intro
05:21 - Mods & Mechanics
25:29 - Los Vegas
34:05 - UI & Tutorials
45:28 - DLC
1:01:01 - Custom Maps & American Cities
#citiesskylines #review #analysis - Ігри
Making a decent European looking city is also almost undoable. Hyped to see what CS2 can do!
I don't know how, but it's pretty much impossible to do either american or european cities, lol
@@KoylTrane The game's aesthetics and mechanics sort of coalesces into an amalgamation of both. On the one hand, you have European traffic signs, public transport preference and parking space ratios. On the other hand, the default building styles, progression, and how the zoning works makes everything look American.
Just add millions of illegals and boom! Europe
I'm surprised some of the insane requirements for unique buildings weren't mentioned, like how the observatory requires I think 100 abandoned buildings. There are plenty of others that require you to basically destroy your city too.
If this was removed by DLC, someone please tell me what the DLC is lol
They are unlocks: after you unlock them in one save, they are available in all saves. You can make a save of your current city, mismanage it, unlock, and then reload the good save.
@@markuskoivisto Good to know, thanks. If I ever go back to CS I'll just probably mod the unique buildings in though. I got a city to 150k pop so I feel like I deserve it lol
Honestly, this feels more like dunking on American building codes for an hour, than a review of a game
based
deserved
American cities are trash garbage. Most cities generally are honestly
Good
Completely justified.
I never see anyone take this perspective on citybuilders, but it's something I always come back to whenever I play one.
One of the most important aspects of the simulation is the ideology and set of economic assumptions it works from as a basis. SimCity 4, my long time favourite, is so brutal about this I can't help but suspect that series is a sly, Paul Verhoeven-esque veiled satire- The only way to make your city successful, the guaranteed route to success in those games, is to be the absolute worst neoliberal ghoul you can- You have to cut funding to your services, and let your zones gradually gentrify by restricting supply, to increase demand. That's what the game says is "good", that's what the game rewards with success. You have to create a housing shortage real estate bubble, and then your city suddenly booms. Education, good transport, etc... None of it matters. Land value is all.
As a kid, this didn't mean anything to me. As an adult paying a mortgage... Really makes you think.
With your notes about how you're hesitant to make videos on more niche games, I would absolutely love to see a proper deep-dive review of Rimworld (I heard you're use of the OST,) especially considering how it's somewhat similar to Cities: Skylines with its absolutely ridiculously strong modding scene and many potentially questionable balancing choices in a very solid groundwork for a game. Seeing your keen eye for game mechanics on a game I love so much but have to mod the shit out of (like many Bethesda games) would be great!
Whenever I see a game that has over $200 in DLC, it immediately makes me question if it's all worth it. Surely I'm not the only one. Maybe it's because of how most of the DLC/expansion packs I knew about growing up were _really_ good, but I usually find myself wanting to play the "best" version of the game possible, which usually entails all the DLC - more is better, right?
So when I see a game that costs THAT MUCH for what my brain automatically percieves as the "complete" version, I usually pass on it entirely, or wait until it gets a huge discount years later.
You ask whether there is a comprehensive video tutorial for EUIV. There is. There are hundreds. The issue is that they are comprehensive until the next patch comes out, changes something substantial, and then the tutorial becomes redundant. It's an unfortunate (and possibly fortunate, if you are a content creator with just one idea and don't mind redoing the same video every 6 months) and constant problem of Paradox's main titles. They change too often to tutorialise well.
HoI4 could be a really, really good study if you ever want to dive into grand strategy analysis. Not only does it have probably the biggest audience, but it really is a strange outlier of the genre, I feel. Despite coming out of the same studio as CK and EU, it couldn't feel more different, with the low emphasis on diplomacy and completely unique battle mechanics. I'd love to see you dig into that.
Recommending people to play HoI4 should be a crime 😂
If only they'd actually polish it instead of adding in mechanics that are based on concepts that don't exist.
as someone who loves EUIV and put a couple hundred hours into HOI4 i just cant forgive how much of it is just a spreadsheet simulator. super weird how a game only lasts like 10-15 hours and half of that is micromanaging your troops.
EUIV has near unlimited replay potential with the ability to start as any nation and realistically have a chance to become a regional and then global power. HOI4 on the other hand has a weird compounding growth factory system that handicaps all but the most relivant nations at the start. want to take over the world as el salvador? good luck with 2 chromium and a single factory.
@@broeretop1 Yes. Play HoI3 BIce. I want more nut jobs.
Never played the game but the idea that each citizen can be tracked tickled me pink with wonder. I'm sure it's amusing like five times but it plays into that 'Indian in the cupboard' and 'night at the living museum jedediah' motif.
Tracking the comutes of cims is mesmerizing. I've probably spent a 1/4 of my total playtime doing that. It also sometimes helps highlight traffic and transit bottlenecks, so it's pretty useful as well.
Well, congrats Private Sessions. Im downloading Cities: Skylines now. Here's hoping I can make heads or tails of the tutorial. Great video, as always!
Great video but the BGM makes me wish someone would make a 3 hour Rimworld analysis video. T_T
My major gripe is node limits, hitting a brick wall and having to strip out water pipes and install mods just to free up nodes is frustrating. Thankfully this seems to be addressed in CS2.
Everything shown so far looks so good and so relevant to what players actually have been requesting for years that I'm actually scared. I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop, the fatal flaw to be revealed.
omg thanks whoever mentioned a game called KENSHI in the comments, I just looked up that game and it looks like something I was craving and didn't even know it existed... not even gonna watch videos to not spoil the surprises
Great Video! Your reviews are really well made and enjoyable!
Sim tower, my favorite, nailed the passage of time. Two weekdays, one weekend day, and at night when everyone is asleep the spinning clock hands speed up until morning. A year winds up being a handful of weeks, so your tower is still tiny at year 2and 3
In retrospect, such a shame they didnt manage to pull off the sequel. C:S2 is just so completely broken it basically requires a full re-release to be anywhere as near as good as the first game. Just so many systems seem completely absent with just cosmetic placeholders that might never be implemented. Like the whole production chain to name a thing, but also very very basic stuff like public transportation. Sure it shows the numbers, but they dont seem to correspond to anything actually going on on the map. There are many experiments done by long time fans, like completely turning off all public transport, so setting funding to "0" , let the simulation run for an entire year and then compare traffic density... Which turned out to be exactly the same with no public transport... You could even see people walk in to the subway stations, that didnt have any trains running for an entire year... Thats just so bad that it almost borders on a scam and these issues are so fundamental that you cant really patch that in without redesigning the entire transportation model, one of the core features of any city builder.
You dont give yourself enough Credit. great vid and absolutely love your analyses of non Action-RPG titles. will watch more if you make them.
Perfect upload time. Just as I sat down with a fresh cup of tea
22:05 Let me just cry in my European 23% VAT plus countless indirect taxes... and by the end of each fiscal year they still take away between 14,5% to 48% of the total you've earned the entire year after having spent the whole year paying taxes out the eyeballs already. Gotta love it...
Game def is too kind to cars, good gameplay if they kept parking & realistic need for space for cars would follow reality. Where you want to stop cars and lessen them.
Maybe, but then CO should've given us WAY more tools to circumvent building terrible american-style cities. Which they didn't.
@@512TheWolf512 They really should have!
the day night cycle thing makes complete sense to me, trying to give a more realistic daily income, allowing enough speed up to take a more reasonable cash/s, and allowing the player to actually watch a day pass by rather than their city just spazzing out to a strobe light sun/moon
One big thing that made me stop playing the game (granted, after hundreds of hours) was the lack of feedback on what's going wrong. Usually, the game doesn't really let you fail too hard, so that's not a huge issue, but when you get bored with the base game and try to use some ground rules or mods to push up the difficulty of the game, the problems that occur often don't have an obvious cause that can be identified to be solved. Like I notice my income take a sudden dip into the negative. Is that just a temporary effect from a pensioner death spiral etc, or have I done something to make my city economically unsound in the long term?
This makes challenge runs more annoying than interesting to play and severely limits evergreen replayability.
I do enjoy your long form videos but these projects are absolutely well welcomed! I'm eager to try Cities 2 when it arrives. I like the idea of smaller videos and different genres!
I loved simcity 1, 2000, the snes one, 3000, 4, etc but I couldn't get into skylines. I think the two main sticking points for me was that is is more of a 'city painter' than a 'city game' and that the dlc were too compartmentalized. It didn't feel like a cohesive whole.
My ideal city builder game would let graphics take a backseat to more complex and realistic simulation, and a bigger picture approach. It would also place your cities in time, with demands and technologies changing as you progress. Imagine starting with a railway town in the 1800s, and over time paving and organizing a road network to accomodate growing numbers of car drivers. Then, eventually you’d reach a point where you have to connect to highways and deal with declining passenger rail numbers, and so on.
that game exists since 2018 it's called Transport Fever series and originates in Train Fever, which in my opinion even did a few things better than the later sequels, but I forget from memory which things are these
With regards to needing to build/plan road bypasses, etc - although it's a much different game, Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic (when playing with construction enabled) really does make you think ahead for some of that. It's not turn-based or anything, and frankly, only folks that want to love it will love it - it's a bit jank even as it nears full release. (Many folks compare W&R:SR to C:SL, but in my mind they are incomparable).
Love the content! Thanks for the video.
Honestly with the sim city that everyone hates, being my introduction to major city builders, I enjoyed it. Though when I ended up get City Skylines ages ago i realized how great city builders are.
Back during the pandemic I found a youtube channel of an actual city planer playing cs got me interested in come back into it and have had alot of fun.
I had something smart copied ready to paste here. It's not letting me paste. It was something about cheesecake and cats, i forget now.
Perfect podcast to listen to before I have to surrender up my phone & dime bag of coke.
I gotta go into the White House Situation Room to talk business with my dad, The Big Guy.
15:16 when the Rimworld music kicked in on your videoI thought I'd launched Rimworld by accident xd
Don't know if you actually read these, but I highly recommend Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic. It's more on the sim side of city builders but you can customize the level of simulationto your desire. Also it's basically the complete opposite of the way you've been playing CS, y'know being about Soviet cities, but I highly recommend it to any fans of the genre.
yes, building an Asphalt road on Realistic mode is a HARDCORE challenge that everyone should experience at least once in their lives 🤣🤣amazing game... very well optimized too...
@Private Sessions Your long format is great, I wish your videos were playlists instead to make them easier to bookmark / resume.
Solid vid as always bro
great video, Sessions
Been playing this game for awhile now,cuz SimCity just can't do even half of the stuff you can do in CS,but of course I've had(and still have)issues with it,like how cars clog up one lane in a 4 lane highway
I build a circular city like you might see in a Sci-Fi and uploaded the timelapse onto my channel, the game just can't handle zoning curves.
service radius is awful small
Hmm love the music! Brings me back!
Thanks for the quality content buddy
Yeah, you are correct about the lack of tutorializing amd general barriers to learning the mechanics. I picked up and put down this game several times before i really got comfortable with it and i still learned a few things from this video. There are a decent number of tutorials online, but a civilopedia style thing would have been very welcome
I've always wanted to like this game but when I see that it has some 400+ dollars worth of DLC I just end up with a headache because I don't know what dlc is basically "mandatory" and what mods I need to actually enjoy the game.
“If you build a new housing district, it will always populate with uneducated citizens.” You must be building a city in Oklahoma.
Or indeed Florida
I enjoy any video you put out
I guess I'm also dissapointed a bit in what was possible. You can't make the giant parking lot, urban sprawl, city or the walkable only, mass transit city or a small rural town or anything else bizarre. You can only build a "simcity" city, but with some good ideas taken from the simcity reboot and that works really well.
Would love to see a Civ 6 video
I hope this video finally gets me to play I've always wanted to try it
1:08:57 Glad someone got Winterhold working. Who's the city Jarl?
I hope you know that using Rimworld music in the background activates me in a primal way
Great video as always!
Have you played Banished? It's a pretty comfy builder game. It's not super difficult, but I think it makes for a good time.
Damn I didn't see that this was released. Good shit PS
Graveyard Keeper is a game that surprised me, initially I thought it was just some kind of Harvest Moon clone... the only way I can describe how it plays is "a top-down view 2D game that feels like playing The Forest" very impressive game design, but gets a bit too grindy towards late game
This video 100% reflects how amazing your content and the style of your videos works. Long form analysis, and or video essay types with deep thought and critique put into it is prefect and my favorite content on this platform. I just wish it wasnt so time consuming to make so you could make more videos faster haha.
I like how they made a game for making efficient cities and its nearly impossible to recreate our designs lmao
Given the prevalence of tracks from Rimworld's OST in this video, is it safe to assume that a review of that particular story generator is on the cards? Either way, great video.
Railroad Tycoon 3 (2003... fully playable in modern systems and also compatible with linux with stock Wine)
had a more believable Stock Trading simulator built into the game... that game's "economy simulation" will keep you on your toes at all times, there's no point in the game where you feel like you already won the campaign mission
More videos on survival crafting games would be nice
Soviet Republic is the new meta... you can do all the things we always dreamed about Cities Skylines 2 (without the cosmetic beauty maybe, but the functionality is there, like choosing which way the Footpaths are turned to, or connecting Footpaths with Roads manually...) The game is well optimized too being that it only takes 1 Gig of RAM while running on my laptop... I can play it perfectly fine while having youtube open on the side, something that I could not do with Cities Skylines 1.... is Cities 2 better in that regard?
What is the website / program you use at 8:50 to compare NY's size to CS's map size?
Lemme get that algo rythm
3:46 Good point. I always keep my 1.1.1c version of the game stored in the disk (the last vanilla version with bugfixes before any DLC baked in...) Over time, I found out that recent updates of the game would not work on my rig anymore, in particular after the Industries update the memory requirement skyrocketed, so many more assets have to be loaded in memory for the Industries DLC to work. And I don't like the core gameplay changes in Industries. So I also keep Green Cities now as my main version.
coupled with mods such as Theme Mixer (choose any textures for terrain, rocks, cliffs, etc, on the fly without game reload) Classic Sun Position and Classic LUT's... Relight LUT's... (to revert back to original 2015 launch Bright Colorful game instead of this new "gloomy" cloudy look that I despise...) and finally a mod called Fog and Clouds Remove which removes distance fog, height clouds and industrial smog
Also brilliantly pointed out in the video that the game punishes the player for trying to be creative with city designs. Anything that is not a grid will be punished with no service radius coverage, the service radius doesn't cover anything besides grids, it's a shame in a game of this scope. Also there's no way to properly deal with sewage besides dumping it on a river or ocean.
Cities version 1.1.1c (2015 right after launch) will play in a laptop with only 4 Gigs of RAM (give it some 4 Gigs pagefile and it will work with minimal lag) Industries won't ever get out of the menus on same machine. And Green Cities it's a gamble, sometimes loaded other times not.
Over the years, when I was still using Linux (playing the game over Wine emulator) I also stumbled on a weird issue: Pirated versions of the game offered a better service than the official ones when it came to the installer. Yes, even the installer Colossal Order chose to use on their releases was problematic, I don't remember that the issue was maybe something to do with latest NET Framework being required, some nonsense like that, so paying customers had to resort to pirate installers to be able to enjoy the product they paid for.
Fantastic game, but it has been seen over the years how colossal order didn't respect much their paying customer base, all kinds of questionable decisions from not giving info about performance issues, breaking mods on every new update without a care, forcing aesthetic changes down the customers' throats such as the changes in the way Sun is positioned and the stock LUT's (all these made the game darker and foggier) etc etc etc Even down to the installer...
YESSS!!!! Ive ALWAYS wanted to build north American cities!! Its sooo hard without mods
33:10 Six Flags: Good Adventure
Im sick, this long video with the calm voice helps. Thank you.
quite enjoyed the slower pacing of speech in this video compared to the older Skyrim videos... I could never sleep to the skyrim videos because they would always wake me up, the talking speed was too fast to the point of breaking any feeling of relaxation
The UI fix is simple just add a layer system that duplicates the vanilla AI with the DLC or mods replacing the relevant portions entirely. A player can use a button press to cycle through the various UI layers and even create a custom layer that combines several add ons into one layer.
Cheers for this PS. I've never been hooked by city builders after sim city 2 without some kind of gimmick or vibe (Its a city builder, but you're beaver people!) but I know people who are and might enjoy this.
Watched this once already. Perfect time to watch it again!
Wondering what PS thinks of CS2.
I (a console player ) think mods are like sauce, certain ones are palate fitting to most, and basicly complete the dish, but some make the taste funny , wich are also ok, but some levels feel like you have 1 slice of bread(vanila base frame) in a deep bowl of sauce( tho this is more at the level of only custom placed houses )
Since you mention other paradox games, I want to tell you I personally would enjoy a lot some essays on my dopamine mappies, but I understand they are niche enough to not make them very appealing for essays.
I will say 5 dollars a month for all the DLC is probably the best practice paradox has done, I don't expect games to be updated for free. their DLC pricing has gotten mega stupid in the last few years (going from 10 euros for a big DLC to 20 euros for a DLC)
but still Id rather this type of monetization over day 1 Battle-pass 70 euro base games
with paid cosmetics, convenience ,and DLC
Also "new" game every 2 years regardless of success (Ala Madden, Fifa, COD ect, Ubisoft)
Their DLC share, and monthly pay policy. makes it so you can say, Buy Eu4 for like 10 to 20 euros, then pay 5 euros. and boom you are done.
less than the price of a AAA game you get 10+ years worth of expansions and updates.
Hey man, i just want to say my condolences for cs2.... lmaoooo holy shit. I remember you hyping up the game on streams with pat and yalking about how what theyre doing looks really cool... its a shame that gaming in 2023, no matter what company it is, is succeptible to the same bullshit throw the product out, gaslight and lie to customers, and hopefully fix it later.
Just remember everyone, its a city builder not an fps like cs go :) it doesnt need to be 60 fps *dies of cringe*
(5 days ago) title of the video is: " I have some things I need to say about Cities Skylines 2 "
what a flop this thing was... heartbraking... Cities 1 was the game that made me upgrade my rig in order to play it
Banished 2013 still holds up pretty well... it's a short-lived sandbox unfortunately but the game aged really gracefully
a good way to combat those late-game budget surpluses could be to increase maintenance based on the average income. As more people get educated and become blue-collar workers, less of them are willing to do manual labor for low wages (especially considering that dense or wealthy areas are generally more expensive to live in).
also eu4 is perfect idk what you're talking about
Its weird being European and hearing all these weird terms about American city building.
Since you said you liked open-ended games, may I recommend Kenshi? It's one of the best RPGs I've ever played.
(5 days ago) title of the video is: " I have some things I need to say about Cities Skylines 2 " people are finally catching up to the bullshit that was the CS2 launch....
Yay!!!!
I’m into strategy games
have you watched any of the stuff Donoteat01 has made?
Got you all figured out - you'll do literally anything not to release that 3rd part of Skyrim review.
Luv me strategy games.
Luv me city builders.
Simple as.
If you swap Cities Skylines for Counter strike every time he says CS this video gets 24% more amusing
Eyo sesh, at the begining of the video you alluded to having the mods you were using in the description - I think you forgot them lol
I always forget something. It's up there now, thanks for the heads up.
@@PrivateSessions Np gamer
"Being familiar with other Paradox games"... now those are some games I would really love to see a Private Session on
I found large arpgs fit well enough into grand strategy, a lot of similar things I like but the ability to pause
Got to ask is the stealth video still in the works?
Watch til the end.
2:00
Very good timing as this was just recently added to the PlayStation plus catalogue
34:03
Soviet Republic stream NOWWWW 🤣🤣🤣pleeeeease
Surprise upload lol
"Airplanes's"
God please just strike me tf down..
Hey PS, are you from the NJ/Philly area? Because you pronounce water wrong
I think if you want ugly inefficient cities you would need less control and have AI to play as a bunch of independent actors, competing state and federal agencies, gerrymandering politicianz, NIMBYs, homeowners association, crazy loons, who are gonna build whatever they want, corporate lobbyists, genius architects with visions of grandeur, outdated unscientific views, etc. And most of the game would be trying to get them to listen, to meet, to agree on anything.
That joke about Minecraft mods actually got me to laugh irl. You get points for that
Sweden not Finland
I have phobia of roundabouts and I was glad not to see many of them during this video. Where I live there is one roundabout every 500 meters or less.
:)
I was completely unaware of how demanding and picky the "City Builder" community was... you guys need some hugs.
America is better than wherever you are from. Pally.. Don't dis our urban dystopias
The existence of Cities: Skylines 2 is not an excuse for the business model of CS: 1. In fact, it's very telling that huge amounts of DLC for CS: 1 are just basic features of CS: 2. Paradox are having cake and eating it, pretending CS is a live-service game with a regular surcharge to stay current, but then want to roll everything into a new game after fans have spent $400 on the previous game? Maybe just update the engine and release that as a free update?