"It's kind of like getting back to the roots," says Mariina Hallikainen, CEO of Colossal Order, developer of Cities: Skylines. I'm speaking to Hallikainen at a demo of Skylines upcoming Mass Transit DLC, which hearkens back to Cities in Motion, Colossal Order's 2011 public transportation simulator (which was followed by Cities in Motion 2 in 2013).
The Mass Transit DLC will introduce four new transportation options to Cities: Skylines. The expensive yet efficient monorail. Cable cars, good for sending passengers over slopes or uneven landscapes. Ferries for carrying commuters over water. And the best (if not the most realistic) option: blimps. I didn't get to try out the DLC myself, only watch as it was demonstrated for me, which is a shame because I really want to get my hands on those blimps. I'm already dreaming of a city that relies entirely on blimp-based public transport. Blimp City, I'll call it.
Tying these new public transportation options together—along with existing ones like trains and buses—will be mass transit hubs. During the demo we look at one that combines a bus station with the monorail, and Hallikainen says there will be four more types of hubs when the DLC is released, letting your passengers easily switch from rail to bus lines or from trains to monorails. Also planned for the DLC is a tool to help your manage automobile traffic: stop signs you can place to improve the flow at troublesome intersections.
While you won't be able to set ticket prices for your various new forms of mass transit, you'll at least be able to customize them: choose their colors, set their schedules (for instance, if you want them running during the day or at night, or both) and name the individual lines. You'll also be able to see how many passengers are waiting at the various stops, and how long they are having to wait, which will help you gauge demand and efficiency.
As always, Paradox is including some free content along with the paid DLC (neither the price nor the release date for Mass Transit has been announced yet). In the base game, even if they don't buy the DLC, players will be able to name their city's individual roads, an addition which was inspired by a popular Cities: Skylines mod.
For someone like me, who always creates beautiful, picturesque cities but also completely sucks at managing my traffic problems—as evidenced by the time I attempted to actually drive through my city in a modded first-person mode—the mass transit mod looks like an extremely useful addition, providing new ways to cut down on all the cars and trucks endlessly clogging the streets.
Plus, there are blimps, which I have been watching take off and land during the entire demo. Blimps have special landing pads where (patient) passengers can board. "It's like a bus stop," Hallikainen explains. "For blimps."
Blimp City, I imagine, will have many. As another blimp lands on the screen, I ask if Hallikainen has even been on a blimp. She says she hasn't.
"It's a relatively slow means of transportation," Hallikainen admits. "But it's something that you can avoid the traffic [with], pretty much."
Blimps are also a bit silly to serve as public transportation, but I think that's the point.
"We kind of already got criticized, like 'Who will actually want to use blimps in their city?'" says Hallikainen. "It's a game so we don't always have to be super realistic with it. With this game, we take inspiration from real life and want to make it lifelike, but I think there's room some fun stuff."
"It's insane," says Alexander J. Velicky. "It's difficult to describe what it's like in comparison to what I thought it would be. Imagine if you had never seen or heard of a rollercoaster and someone was trying to describe what it was like to you. You could try to imagine what it would be like, but then when you actually ride on one you'd be completely surprised."
Arguably the most famous modder-turned-developer of recent times, Velicky is talking about full-time game development. Aged just 19, he spent a year building the sprawling Skyrim mod Falskaar as a means of showcasing his talents, and in turn received a wealth of press coverage. He now works full-time at Bungie after securing a job off the back of his hard work—his resume also includes the ambitious Fallout 3 mod Project Genesis—and is proud of his modest roots. "If one thing is for certain it's that it has given me some incredible perspective when I play and look at other games coming out in the industry."
Today, Colossal Order and Paradox's city-building sim Cities: Skylines has one of the most prolific modding communities across all genres. Its Steam workshop page alone boasts well over a hundred thousand mods, and the number of keen enthusiasts flooding its forums is steadily growing with each passing update, expansion and portion of DLC. While for the majority modding serves as a vehicle to make existing games better, more cases like Velicky's distinguished example are coming to the fore.
For that first hockey game, my teammate was so starstruck.
For Bryan "Gula" Shannon, modding Cities: Skylines was something he stumbled into. After successfully completing a game design course at Florida's Ringling College of Art and Design, the self-confessed city-builder obsessee interned at Maxis and was thereafter offered his dream job: full-time employment to work on 2013's then unreleased SimCity. The beleaguered city-crafting sim's inauspicious launch however resulted in Shannon parting ways with Maxis shortly after, and, amid the chaos of supporting his girlfriend and her mother following complications with surgery, led to him finding solace in designing Cities: Skylines mods.
What started out small and working for free would eventually see Shannon establishing a Patreon, where those interested could allocate donations towards each Cities asset Shannon created—something up to this point he was doing for free. "This was before the whole thing began," he says of when he identified a market for making money from modding. Far from reskins, Shannon's work is built from scratch and he was one of the first to upload buildings following the launch of the game's modding tools.
"My girlfriend was a Twitch streamer for a while when I was working," he continues. "She's actually working at BioWare right now and is doing the same things that I do, creating 3D assets and building worlds and stuff like that. Before that, when she was looking for a job, I'd noticed people were donating money. I'd also noticed other people were making money for creating assets for games and I thought it was a way that I could support this same idea. I was getting like $8 per asset and this was like a free chipotle burrito! I was happy with that.
"I then made a joke with my girlfriend: wouldn't it be funny if Kotaku reached out to me to do an article, and literally the next morning when I woke up I had an interview request. I did the interview and the very next day I'd jumped to $575 per asset—and this was almost overnight. I thought myself, 'alright, I guess this is a serious thing now.' From there it hardly stopped—I think it peaked at about $875 or $890 or something—and that was life for a short while."
After interviewing with Bungie and then Hi-Rez Studios off the back of his Cities: Skylines input, Shannon landed a job at Arkane and has spent the last year working on the Dishonored 2 developer's incoming sci-fi shooter Prey. "When I first got onto the team it was supposed to be a surprise," says Shannon. "But I'd done a little bit of research and I think in a way if you had dug around in some forums you could sort of see what they were working on. The most astounding thing to me is when I first got there the game felt done."
Prey is due May 5, 2017 and if Phil and James' early impressions are anything to go by, Arkane could be onto something special. Shannon adds: "Our level designers are great. I'm working with people who've worked on Deus Ex and BioShock and things like that. I loved those games and to be able to work and support those guys is brilliant. They come up with an idea and I have to make it look pretty is the path I'm on just now."
Building new lives
Matt "Shroomblaze" Crux is a household name within the Cities: Skylines mod scene. Having built close to 450 buildings, fixes, and assets his catalogue boasts everything from towering skyscrapers to centimetre-high Boletus mushrooms, and his Steam Workshop follower count exceeds 4,300 people. Raised on consoles such as the NES, its Super successor, the PlayStation 2 and the N64, Crux latterly graduated to PC by way of SimCity 2000, The Sims and The Sims Online. He eventually discovered World of Warcraft—a game he reckons has since stolen ten years of life, and accentuated a five year depression. Cities: Skylines let him break free of a disheartening cycle.
"Four years prior to discovering Cities my family threw out paintings that I'd been working on, because they're very Christian and they thought I was being evil or demonic. They said I was too new age," Crux tells me. "In turn, for four years I went through an endless circle of depression, watching TV, playing WoW, not doing much in my room. Cities finally let me see my creative side, it let me be more creative again, it let me mod and let me start to get into being an artist again. It let me return to having fun."
At the time, Crux had no prior 3D modeling or modding experience, but quickly noticed how active the Cities community was in this regard. He decided to teach himself how to craft props and items by virtue of friendly Q&A within the game's forums and a great deal of trial and error. The end products spoke for themselves: pretty in-game effects that other folk could and, crucially, sought to add to their games—in turn giving Crux a distinct sense of purpose.
"The fact that I could make colourful objects that I can not only use in my game but can also help people have better games really helped lift my depression. I liked the comments, the appreciation for what I was doing, the fact that this gave me worth," he adds. "Before that, I felt like I was worthless, that nobody cared for me. My whole family, I felt, didn't give a shit about me and so it felt like I was doing something worthwhile. I was back doing my art again and I was also aware I was helping other people make their games better. I loved making little things for the city and in turn seeing them come to life, especially vehicles, where I'd make a 3D object and then watch it drive around. Yeah, I loved bringing things to life."
The more Crux produced, the faster his profile grew within the Cities' community, to the point where his inbox was full of player requests for what to craft next. This level of interest did not go unnoticed by developer Colossal Order and publisher Paradox, who last year—out of the blue—reached out and asked Crux to work with them as part of a community-sourced project.
Cities finally let me see my creative side and let me start being an artist again. It let me return to having fun.
Working from home in Phoenix, Arizona, the result was last year's Art Deco pack—a project which saw Colossal and Paradox covering Crux's production costs, and also splitting sales revenue with the creator once the DLC was released.
"When I first got the email, I saw it and didn't respond for an entire week," says Crux. "In my state, in my depression, I felt like I had a lot of negative energies in my head. I thought I shouldn't even contact them, but after a week, I thought: let's see what they have to say. When I eventually found out about all the details, I was like, woah, this is great!"
Crux says it'd have been a "travesty" had he decided to ignore the email, not just from a financial perspective, but also because he believes taking on the Art Deco project helped him conquer his depression and rediscover his creative side. While he's since scaled back his Cities modding involvement to focus on his artwork, by crafting miniature versions of his real-life artwork and designing in-game easels Crux has found the perfect way to combine both of his life's passions.
Shannon's path is perhaps more orthodox, but nevertheless owes much to the Cities: Skylines mod scene. He tells me he can't express how happy he is working at Arkane—something he describes as "a very, very, very positive experience"—and that he wouldn't have landed where he is now without the city-builder.
As a community, Shannon reckons it's second to none and is brimming with novel anecdotes and warm stories of teamwork and camaraderie. With this in mind, he recalls just how taken aback an amateur ice hockey teammate was upon discovering the esteemed Cities: Skylines modder 'Gula' was in fact Shannon himself. He laughs: "For that first game, my teammate was so starstruck."
Crux echoes a similar line, suggesting the overarching desire to build has a metaphorical effect on the community itself. "There are so many games out there that are destructive and Cities is the opposite," he says. "In those games it's all about conflict and nasty exchanges, there's so much negativity and it becomes hateful. The community in Cities is very positive and it's a creative platform to express who are you and a chance to be artistic. As a modder, the community is so supportive: the coders, the modellers, they all come together.
"If you're thinking about becoming a Cities modder, I for one absolutely support people doing that because it's a fun thing that creates great bonds between people—something which feels rare in videogames today."
I promise the rhyming in the following Cities: Skylines Mass Transit announcement trailer is better than my poor attempt in the strapline above. Due at some point later this year, the city builder's next expansion promises to deliver new forms of transportation to its bounds—by land, sea and air—as well as new transit service buildings, new mass transit hubs, new scenarios, new landmarks, and new road types.
Let's have a gander at that trailer:
Besides promising a range of new transit options—including ferries, blimps, cable cars, and monorails—Mass Transit gives mayor-players the chance to generate extra income by way of fares and journey ticketing.
The aforementioned transit hubs serve to tie your services together, "letting citizens change rail lines in one building, or hop from the bus onto the ferry, or even find their way through a sprawling monorail-train-metro station." Likewise, new scenarios will centre around solving traffic problems and adding new transit systems—something the game is already being used to help design in real life.
"New road types, bridges and canals adds variety to your city, and new ways to solve its challenges," says publisher Paradox. "Become an expert in traffic flow, and then use that knowledge to improve your city."
As is often the case with Cities: Skylines' premium expansions, the base game will receive a coinciding free update—the latest of which introduces "mod-inspired features" to traffic management, and the oft-requested ability to name roads. Furthermore, the update will bring with it new unique buildings, policies, achievements, and, crucially hats.
Cities: Skylines' Mass Transit expansion is "coming soon."
Cities: Skyline is Paradox and Colossal Order's "modern take on the classic city building simulation" that has by all means eclipsed the once dominant SimCity series. It enjoys a thriving modding community, boasts a wealth of neat official updates—not least its most recent Natural Disasters expansion—and is even being used to help build a real-life city district in Sweden. It's also going for less than a tenner until Friday, February 10.
As part of Steam's recurring Midweek Madness sale, Cities: Skylines is subject to a limited time 75 percent discount, dropping its Deluxe Edition price tag to £7.49/$9.99. (With a 66 percent reduction, its standard edition is going for £7.81/$10.19.)
Complimentary of its AI, although not afraid to call out its handful of flaws, Chris scored Cities a healthy 86 in his 2015 review. Here's an excerpt from that that:
"At times, Skylines is intensely satisfying, such as when solving a troublesome traffic snarl or when all the buildings in a district begin leveling up because you've provided the right combination of services and amenities. It's often soothing, like when flying the free camera around or peering down at the tiny NPCs living in your creation.
"It can also be terrifically tense, like when you realize your industrial zone has poisoned the groundwater of a residential area or when a power grid gets overloaded and you've got no money to add a new plant. The citizens of Skylines are pretty tolerant, but let them suffer too long and they'll abandon you in droves."
Steam's Cities: Skylines Midweek Madness deal is live now through 10am PT/6pm GMT Friday, February 10.
There are natural disasters, and man-made ones. In Part 1, my Santa City was struck by a meteor, and in Part 2 I struggled to begin the rebuilding process. But as I'm busy trying to salvage my city I wind up killing almost as many citizens as those horrific acts of nature. Trying to keep my city condensed for maximum efficiency, I discover I've placed water tanks too close to my industrial areas, meaning the town's water supply has been tainted.
I've got a mass extinction event of my own making. I've poisoned every house in town. Nearly every single residence has a corpse in it. This is, as we say: bad.
Meanwhile, how's my second Santa doing? Well, the rebuilding and poisoning process has taken quite a bit of time, and Santa Mk. 2 is already retired and hobbling around town with a cane. I am pleased to see, at least, that he's spending his winter years in Snowman Park. Feels like a Santa thing to do.
Once I've cleaned up all the fresh corpses and moved the water tanks to a safer spot, things begin to turn around. My population grows to a few thousand citizens, which is good, but it also signals to the game that it's time to start sending natural disasters my way once more.
The fates are kinder this time, however. A sinkhole opens up, but it's in the ocean, doing no damage to anything except perhaps some unlucky fish. Another sinkhole strikes, but it's just on the edge of the shore, and while it takes out my water line it's an easy fix to get everyone's plumbing working again. Before long, my city has begun to grow properly, and as I've rebuilt it efficiently I'm soon flush with cash and able to buy early warning systems.
A deep space dish will give me advance warning of giant rocks headed my way. An offshore buoy will detect tsunamis before they happen. I've got weather detection systems and a radio tower to give citizens a heads-up about when they should put their heads down.
And sure, a tornado rakes its way through my city, killing 985 people and destroying over 100 buildings, but I've got the cash to recover quickly and none of the dead people are Santa so it's not that bad. Then an earthquake comes along and kills 407 more people, wrecking 84 more buildings, but again, Santa is spared. We even have a tsunami, but it only kills 40 non-Santas as it rolls along the coastline. I'm taking everything nature is throwing at me and rolling with the punches. My city keeps growing.
I do lose a few Santas, however, though none to disasters. One dies of old age, and is replaced by his kid, who moves away to another city (tough to blame him). I assign another Santa who was living in the same house, but he moves away as well. Soon I'm on my sixth Santa, who also dies of old age, so I assign a 7th.
My biggest problems is that I'm running out of room on my single map tile, which is half ocean. I convert low density residential and commercial areas to high density and watch towers spring up. The craters and earthquake scars that litter my map are now crisscrossed with roads and filled with homes and parks. You can barely see the evidence of the mass carnage that has taken place.
I'm slowly inching toward my goal of 20,000 citizens, and one living Santa, who by the way is now living in a pine-green highrise.
At a population of 19,119, another disaster hits. This time, it's an earthquake. As I idly scroll across the map to see how close it is to Santa's house, I see something incredibly alarming. I'm no seismologist, but I'd place the epicenter of the quake directly under Santa's home. The earth shakes and shakes. Houses next to Santa's high rise begin crumbling. Santa's house begins to shimmy.
And Santa is home. I can't do anything but sit and watch.
I'm not sure I can put into words how it feels to watch Santa's house collapse into rubble with Santa himself (well, his seventh self) inside. I guess I'll describe it like this: ah, crap.
Merry Christmas. And if Santa doesn't bring you any presents this year, I guess you know who to blame.
In Part 1 of this diary, I named a citizen Santa and set up a town around him, with the plan of trying to protect the jolly old elf from Cities: Skylines' Natural Disasters DLC. Also in Part 1, that town got wiped out by a meteor strike.
When I say wiped out, I mean it. It's almost entirely gone. Huge swaths of commercial and residential areas are now piles of rubble. My hulking Disaster Response Unit located just a block from Santa's house? It's been obliterated by the disaster. That means there's no one left alive to look for anyone left alive, and the people who are supposed to clean up the rubble are all buried under rubble. As mayor of Santa City, I can officially state that Christmas is cancelled.
But Santa did survive—somehow. His house sits on the very, very edge of the meteor's blast radius. I'm both happy and amazed that Santa's house is still standing, but there are two little problems. First, the house is on fire, and second, Santa is still inside. Despite the emergency shelter next door and the evacuation buses circling the block, Santa hasn't escaped to safety.
While I watch, waiting for fire trucks that never come, I notice Santa suddenly vanishes from the house. It's not elven magic or flying reindeer, he's simply moved out and into another house, on the other side of the city (I can keep tabs on him thanks to the handy Favorite Cims mod). Just in the St. Nick of time, too: his original house continues to burn a few moments longer, then collapses.
The aftermath of the meteor: 109 buildings destroyed, 449 citizens dead. What's left of the city is in major trouble. I have to clear ruined buildings and roads manually, and rebuild all my services, like police, fire, and schools. Not for the whole city, of course, just for the area surrounding Santa's new home. I also plop down a new Disaster Response Unit, right across the street from his new pad, which I name North Pole West.
While I'm slowly cleaning up, another meteor arrives. Thankfully, this one strikes the coast, where it only takes out some water lines and a wind turbine. Now I have two massive craters and a chasm from the earthquake. The map is covered with scars.
What's worse is that having rebuilt so many services to protect Santa, I'm now out of money, and I'm operating at a loss. I'm slashing budgets left and right, meaning that half my city is in a blackout from the disaster and the other half is in a blackout from a poorly funded power department. The problem is mostly utilities. All those water lines that aren't serving citizens anymore (because the citizens are dead) still require upkeep in the budget. To save the city I'm going to have to rip it apart, delete almost everything that costs me money, and start rebuilding slowly and efficiently.
I bulldoze, well, just about everything except a small sliver of residences and industrial areas. Every unneeded inch of water pipe is removed. As I cut off citizens from power and services, things get bad. Toilets overflow. Trucks can't make deliveries. Crime goes through the roof. Some asshole even commits a crime at the snow dump, which is a dump for snow. It's literally just a big box of snow! I could understand someone committing crime at a garbage dump (and someone is committing crime at the garbage dump, now that I look) because even garbage has a little bit of value. But a snow dump? That's desperation. Yet, my box of snow has attracted snow crimes.
Santa abruptly moves from his current house (which has no electricity and is overflowing with sewage and garbage) into a new one in the very small section of town that's still functioning properly. I name his house North Pole: New Beginnings, adding a smiley face because I'm feeling the need for optimism. Santa is 83 now, by the way, and I fear not long for this world.
It seems like the game won't throw disasters at you if you have a low population, which is good. It'll give me some time to rebuild. And I'm going to need that time. My population has plummeted to 113 people, meaning the corpses of the meteor strike now outnumber the living.
Thankfully, there's a Christmas miracle. I'm offered a bailout after going bankrupt. A cool $50,000 to rebuild the smoking crater of death that is Santa City. With this bit of cash, I slowly and carefully begin rebuilding. I'm not sure I can call it progress: the population remains at only a few hundred citizens, my budget is still shoestring, and the most activity I see on my chilly streets is a single donut truck making the rounds.
And, in sadder news, my original Santa has died at the age of 95. I watch as he's picked up and deposited in the cemetery, pour some eggnog on his grave, check to see his heir in is place, and get back to work.
Tomorrow, in Part 3: Can the town, and my new Santa, be saved?
Best of all, since Skylines let you rename things, I can pick a citizen, rename him Santa, rename his house The North Pole, and rename his workplace Santa's Workshop. And, with the Natural Disasters DLC installed and cranked as high as it will go, I can see if I can protect my new Santa from dying as the result of earthquakes, tsunamis, tornadoes, and meteor strikes! It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas, provided Christmas explodes a lot.
My rules are to only use a single square of map: it would be easy to mitigate disaster by buying additional map tiles and leaving them empty, increasing the chances of disasters hitting unpopulated areas. I'm not using any money cheats, and I'll play until my city reaches a population of 20,000 residents, otherwise known as a Capital City, or until Santa is killed in a natural disaster. (If Santa dies of natural causes, I'll replace him with an heir.)
I begin my game. Before long, houses begin springing up, and before longer, I spot one of the modded homes with holiday decorations. Living within are a family of five, so I name one adult Santa Claus and one Mrs. Claus, before noticing both of the adults are men. So, I change Mrs. Claus to Mr. Claus.
My chosen Santa is 33, uneducated, and works at a factory called Garments Unlimited, which I quickly rename to Santa's Workshop. I watch him drive to and from work in a red sports car—I guess Santa is doing OK for himself—then set about my task: protecting him from natural disasters at all costs. I build an emergency shelter right next door to his house, and lay out an evacuation route that will ensure a bus will pick him and his family up (at the expense of everyone else in the city) and bring him to the nearby shelter when disaster strikes.
Roughly fifteen seconds after I've got the shelter in place, the town's first disaster occurs. I'm notified that a sinkhole is "about to happen." It's alarming, really. I'd been thinking about fires and storms and earthquakes, but a sinkhole? That could swallow up Santa, his family, and his house in one gulp.
Thankfully, it only swallows up some commercial properties about eight blocks away. Three buildings succumb, and 22 people are killed. None of them are magical toy-delivering elves, however, just non-enchanted normals. Whew!
As I continue building my city, I check in on Santa periodically, at one point finding him sitting outside a convenience store looking at his phone. See, Santa is just like us.
Sadly, I've paid so much attention to Santa's happiness and preservation by building parks, a doctor's office, a fire station, and police station all within a block of him, that his home levels up. That means it no longer has Christmas lights all over it, which feels quite a bit less festive. On the plus side, I build the massive Disaster Response Unit right behind his house. I also make a tiny district just for Santa's home, so I can assign it—and thus him—rescue chopper priority. With all these protective services surrounding St. Nick, I feel confident that I'm poised to whisk him to safety when something goes wrong.
There's one thing I can't protect against, however: Santa is getting older due to the curse of time. Years have passed while I've been growing my city, and he's already 65 and retired from the Workshop. I choose Piper, his eldest child, to serve as Santa Jr.
Another disaster strikes. This time it's an earthquake. Again, it's a good distance away from Santa's house, but it causes several fires throughout the city, a few buildings collapse, and a great chasm scars the earth. A few minutes later, observant mayor that I am, I notice that every single house in town has raw sewage backing up into it: the quake broke the pipes leading to the river where I festively dump the town's collective poop water. It's a quick fix. The earthquake, by the way, destroyed 12 buildings and killed 35 people.
Just as I've got everyone's toilets working properly again, a house catches fire. It's right outside the Disaster Response Unit building, directly across the street from Santa's house. The fire department is still putting out fires from the earthquake, and I don't want to take chances, so I activate the emergency shelter. Santa himself is visiting a convenience store at the time so he misses the bus, but at least this gives me a chance to see how his children react in a crisis.
Piper, Santa's heir, reacts by moving completely out of town. I quickly assign Santa's son Charles as the new heir by changing his name to Santa Jr. 2, but I notice he stays home during the emergency, rather than walking thirty feet to the shelter. That won't do. I rename him Idiot Santa Failure Jr., and instead tap Santa's other son, 20-year-old Raymond, the duties of heir, since he is wise enough to head to the shelter.
So far, I'm feeling pretty confident. Santa is aging, but safe, and I've got a backup with a good head on his shoulders. My town is steadily growing and I'm doing well with my buget. I feel like I've reached 'not a creature is stirring' levels of comfort in my city.
That's when the meteor hits.
Ho-ho-oh-no. Tomorrow, in Part 2, we'll dig through the rubble to see just how bad things suddenly got for Santa City.
Norra Djurgårdstaden is an area in central Stockholm that’s currently undergoing substantial urban redevelopment. The Swedish Building Service, Svensk Byggtjänst, has partnered with city officials and, with a focus on long-term sustainability, the on-going initiative plans to add 12,000 new homes and 35,000 workspaces to the region in a bid to offset its ever-increasing population. How does this relate to the world of videogames? City-building simulator Cities: Skylinesis at the forefront of the project.
By simulating real-life environments and scenarios in-game, Paradox and Colossal Order’s city-builder is being used by real-world city planners to explore ways to support the needs of the new district’s residents. “Norra Djurgårdstaden is seeking new ways of engaging people that are normally not involved in the discussions of the future of our city, and how to plan for its desired direction,” says project director Staffan Lorentz. “Games can be an entry port for a new group having a real say and having new ways of looking at things.”
That’s where Cities: Skylines comes in. By way of three weekend-long workshops, Stockholm city officials have joined Swedish Building Service representatives, Paradox and Colossal Order developers, and members of the public to discuss how the proposed district will look and function once development is complete. Special considerations such as environmental schemes to reduce fossil fuel consumption and the installation of surplus cycle lanes and public transport routes have been flagged as top priority, thus these scenarios have been applied and tested in-game to see how they might play out in reality.
As such, the district in its entirety has been mapped out both via a scaled physical model and within Cities: Skylines—with city planners applying and reapplying digital iterations of the area following visits to and from the real-world building site itself. Without prior training, technical blueprints mean very little to the average citizen. Therefore the point of the coinciding workshops is to showcase the scheme in earnest—fully realised in three dimensions against relatable surroundings—which in turn serves to help the learning process.
“I think the most exciting part about all of this is that it isn’t just a PR stunt,” says Paradox’s COO Susana Meza. “Actually, people are genuinely wanting to solve some of the problems and issues that might arise when city planning in this day and age, but also innovate around it. The fact they have the people who’re are actually making the decisions, sitting on the budget, involved in this and using a new medium I think is extremely cool—but also brave.”
Using games as a public consultation tool is something the Swedish Building Service is already familiar with, having collaborated with Mojang and the United Nations in 2012. Named Block By Block, this project was a similar city-building scheme that used Minecraft to encourage fresh perspectives and helped citizens have a say in the reconstruction process of their own neighbourhoods. The Norra Djurgårdstaden project, on the other hand, operates on a grander scale and therefore marks a more sophisticated collaboration between city development and videogames.
Yet Cities: Skylines in its vanilla state isn’t without its limitations, and to this end renowned Cities modder Alexander Oberroither was flown in from Austria to attend the last workshop. Here, he explained how the game might better portray reality with the use of additional user-made mods beyond the base game. “I see potential in Cities: Skylines being used for a lot of different things in real life, and this workshop fulfilled its purpose in allowing us to find out which direction the project is going,” says Oberroither. “I really enjoyed my three days [taking part]. I learned a lot and I hope that I can make use of it when I start studying spatial planning at the university in October.”
In light of the most recent workshop, the Swedish Building Service plans to review its findings and decide how Cities: Skylines can best be used in pushing the project forward. When the time comes, no matter how close the game’s interpretation is to the project’s final incarnation, the ways in which Cities: Skylines has been used to help visualise proposals, discuss city functions, and, ultimately, design buildings is quite remarkable and is something which could pave the way for similar ventures down the line.
“I think that today most people have an association with games, be that yourself or your kids playing with them, most people are exposed to games in one way or another,” adds Meza. “As such, it’s a super powerful medium to do something more beyond providing entertainment. I think we’ve just scraped the surface. Games are something everyone is talking about now—we have every possibility to make an impact.”
In the case of Norra Djurgårdstaden, its residents are the ones who’ll be impacted the most. “Engaging citizens is part of the future,” says Norra Djurgårdstaden local Ann Edberg. “It’s fantastic to be able to participate in the creation of a new part of Stockholm during its development process, rather than just experience it once it’s done.”
Photos for this feature by Pelle Jansson/Cowmob Photography.
You might be surprised to learn that being a good mayor is not entirely compatible with being a wrathful supreme deity. Case in point: The Cities: Skylines Natural Disasters DLC that went live today, adding "new systems for disaster alerts and responses," and of course the disasters themselves, including earthquakes, tornadoes, forest fires, and, somehow, worse. Disasters can strike through simple bad luck, or they can come about for more sinister reasons.
"More sinister reasons" of course means you, because if there's one thing more fun than building up a thriving, modern metropolis, it's calling forth great burning balls of rock from the sky to smash it all to pieces. But whether it happens through vengeful whim or the vagaries of fate, once the carnage has begun you can choose to stand back and watch, or help with the effort to keep the lights on and the traffic moving.
The Natural Disasters expansion includes five pre-made scenarios with custom game objectives, an emergency broadcast network to help spread the bad news, and new hats for Chirper, the in-game social media mascot. There's also a Natural Disasters Scenario expansion to the regular scenario editor, which is free for everyone.
Naturally, no disaster is complete without Chris Livingston, and he's been playing with the expansion over the past few days. Find out what he thinks about it here.
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The Cities: Skylines community has been clamoring for disasters since day one, and this week they're finally getting their wish in the form of tornadoes, tsunamis, sinkholes, earthquakes, meteor strikes, and more. But the Natural Disasters expansion doesn't just give you fun ways to lay waste to your cities, it also provides the tools to save your residents with early warning systems, emergency shelters, and disaster response teams. I've been playing with the expansion the past few days, and both the disasters and the tools you're given to deal with them are good fun.
First, though: senseless destruction! There are a few different ways to play with disasters, but the easiest is by firing them off manually. Simply pick one from the new menu, target a section of your city, click, and wait a couple in-game days. Or, pick a bunch of them and blanket your city in impending doom. You can also enable them to strike randomly while you play, and there's a slider to adjust the frequency of the disasters.
The disasters are all nicely rendered and fun to watch in a horrifying sort of way. Tornadoes will weave a path from one side of the map to the other, pulling apart houses, yanking vehicles and pedestrians into the air, and leaving behind a trail of wreckage. Meteors create a huge blast, fling debris into the sky, and leave behind a charred impact crater. Tsunamis will slosh around in the ocean for a while, then slowly but brutally creep ashore, submerging everything in their path. Earthquakes and sinkholes will cause buildings to collapse, and there's even a disaster that will simply make a building collapse on its own.
Some disasters cause others. An earthquake will do damage, but if it's near water it may also cause a tsunami. Meteors and lightning strikes will cause fires. If your power plant or water systems are destroyed or damaged, you'll have to contend with blackouts and sewage problems as well as the event that caused them. If you like destroying the things you build, these disasters can lay waste to your creations quickly and efficiently while you watch in either horror or happiness.
If you're not content simply blowing things up and killing people, there are measures you can put in place to mitigate the disaster. To protect your city from tsunamis, you can build sea walls. Add a deep space radar dish to look for approaching asteroids, weather detection equipment to warn you of lightning storms, buoys to detect tsunamis, and radio towers to make sure your citizens can be alerted in time. And for all disasters, you can build a huge emergency response team headquarters, which will dispatch choppers to search for survivors and turn rubble into buildable areas so you don't have to spend days clicking ruins with your bulldozer tools before rebuilding. Thank god.
You'll also want to set up emergency shelters for your citizens to flee to (if you like your citizens, that is). These buildings can protect your population, but they still need management: make sure they're in an area accessible by industrial zones to keep them stocked with food and goods, because even after the disaster residents may need to remain there if their homes have been destroyed. You can even create evacuation routes in your neighborhoods in a similar fashion to how you draw bus lines. It's an enjoyable extra layer of management when it could have easily just been a building you drop into place and forget about, and it's fun to see how well you've planned ahead when a disaster finally lands on your city.
Even if you don't buy Natural Disasters, there's a nice free goodie for the base game: the scenario editor. You can set conditions for a city, and trigger an effect when those conditions are met, like a cash reward for hitting a certain population count or a fine if your citizens aren't healthy enough. If you've bought the Disasters expansion, you can make baffling scenarios as well, like triggering an earthquake once 10,000 citizens have ridden the bus or unleashing a tsunami if you take out too many loans (or, even more confusingly, if you haven't taken out enough loans). I've only been tinkering with it, but I already can sense some fun to be had there, since you can share these scenarios with your friends.
Disasters have been greatly missed from Colossal Order's city-building sim, and I'm happy they've finally arrived even such a long time after the base game was released. Whether you're simply into senseless destruction or an additional management challenge, I think it's a nice addition. Best of all, now we get to see what modders will do with the new material. I'm hoping Godzilla, The Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, or giant Zoidberg will join the collection of city-smashing disasters.
