Watch On
It’s Old Father Time right here—massive beard, robes, clock fetish—spreading the harrowing information that Cities: Skylines is already a complete decade outdated. 2015 was, it seems, truly fairly some time in the past, and never simply the opposite day. Awful stuff.
Naturally, Paradox and Colossal Order are usually not letting this milestone go with out discover. A celebration is kicking off, throughout each video games, that includes updates, freebies, free trials and new releases. Lovely stuff.
Here’s all the pieces that is coming to Cities: Skylines 2:
- Anniversary patch – March 18
- Dragon Gate creator pack – March 18
- Leisure Venues creator pack – March 18
- Mediterranean Heritage creator pack – March 18
- Atmospheric Piano radio station – March 18
- Jade Road radio station – March 18
- Feelgood Funk radio station – March 18
- Free weekend – March 20-24
And here is what the unique Cities: Skylines is getting:
- Anniversary patch – March 25
- Emerging Downtown creator pack – March 25
- Countryside creator pack – March 25
- Harvest Harmony radio station – March 25
- Free weekend – March 20-24
The anniversary patches provides you with a bunch of free parks and buildings to mess around with. In Cities: Skylines 2, they’re themed across the sequence’ birthday, and in Cities: Skylines you may get dynamic parks that change to replicate all of the expansions you have added to your library.
If you personal the Cities: Skylines 2 Ultimate Edition, you may additionally get the creator packs and radio stations free of charge; for everybody else they will be obtainable for buy individually or as a bundle.
On March 13, Paradox can also be increasing its subscription service, which it has been utilizing in its grand technique video games. In this case, it’s going to permit subscribers to play with each piece of DLC for a month-to-month price. If you already personal some, there shall be a “particular completion provide” that can assist you spherical out your assortment.
Paradox and Colossal Order have lots to rejoice. Prior to Cities: Skylines, the venerable city-building style was in tough form, particularly when it got here to fashionable metropolis constructing. 2013’s SimCity was a catastrophe that successfully killed the sequence (exterior of cellular spin-offs) and there wasn’t an apparent candidate to choose up the torch. Up till that time, Colossal Order was the developer of a great however area of interest transport sim, Cities in Motion.
I’ve chatted to numerous members of Colossal Order and Paradox concerning the recreation’s success through the years, and infrequently they current it as a spot of luck: proper place, proper time. There was starvation for a SimCity successor, and Cities: Skylines facilitated that. But that sells the unique recreation brief. It was much more granular than SimCity, with a a lot stronger deal with the simulation facet, and critically it struck gold by giving gamers a lot freedom to create their very own mods and property.
Before Cities: Skylines was even out the door, the modders had been tinkering away. So when it launched on Steam, the Workshop already had pages and pages of recent property and tweaks. Before too lengthy, folks have been recreating real-world cities or crafting their very own cyberpunk dystopias. It was all the pieces a metropolis builder wanted to be.
Of course, this tenth anniversary celebration is kicking off below the shadow of Cities: Skylines 2. A large disappointment regardless of the way you take a look at it. It’s in a significantly better state now than it was when it launched in 2023—as you’d definitely hope—however gamers proceed to criticise its stability, optimisation points and wonky techniques.
For me, the best disappointment was the absence of modding instruments: the factor that was so important to the primary recreation’s success. Not together with them at launch struck me as an enormous danger, however I by no means would have imagined we might nonetheless be ready for essential options like an asset editor greater than a 12 months later.
Only final week, on the cusp of the anniversary, Colossal Order apologetically introduced that progress on the asset editor was not going easily. “The implementation of the Asset Editor has confirmed extra technically difficult than initially anticipated as a result of hefty quantities of built-in property affected by the modifications, however it’s shifting ahead,” it mentioned.
So it is a bitter-sweet anniversary. Cities: Skylines is among the biggest metropolis builders ever made, however the sequel has been bouncing from downside to downside since 2023. Still, some freebies are good.
