I just watched Sips' video about this game and it looks like everything I wanted Sim City 5 to be. While I wasn't as disappointed with Sim City 5 as some folks it did leave me feeling pretty empty. But after watching that video and a bunch of the trailers, Skylines seems like it would be right up my alley.

Unfortunately it doesn't come out til March 10th. It'll be a long wait. My only worry is performance issues. This game is made by the same team that made Cities in Motion 2 and I had some issues with that game.

Sips really sold me on the game. Kinda hoping he does more on it, it seems like a pretty cool city builder.

Looks a lot like Sim City 5. Only difference seems that the road controls are even jankier, you actually have to lay pipes/power lines and the areas become larger.

Not super, but Excited. I will check out the video you linked when I get home from work, thanks =)

I'm very interested in this. The problem is that, for all it's flaws, I really enjoyed SimCity 2013. While the scope of this looks amazing, I just worry it won't have the same kind of polish as a Maxis title. There's a certain amount of fine detail and "love" that shines through in their games that is missing from the more ambitious competitors.

This is only speculation and mostly from Sips video, but it seems way more robust than Sim City 5. Sips is... well frankly pretty bad at these sorts of games yet manages some how (though always entertaining) so it may not be as great as it could be.

My main thing in games like this is actually kind of RPing. Maybe that sounds weird, but I love the idea of building a little town and imagining all the little lives the people in it. One of the reasons I loved Banished so much. Sim City 5 didn't really scratch that itch so much. From the looks of it this game may.

Saw the video too. Looks really interesting! How will the city maps / regions interlink and how large can it get?

Rather than start a whole new thread about "sim" games, I will just add a recommendation for these.

Banished! is a city-building strategy game, you control a group of exiled travelers who decide to restart their lives in a new land. They have only the clothes on their backs and a cart filled with supplies from their homeland. The objective of the game is to keep the population alive and grow it into a successful culture. Options for feeding the people include hunting and gathering, agriculture, trade, and fishing. However, sustainable practices must be considered to survive in the long term. The game has been out for about a year and it is fairly well respected with good rating on Steam.

Anno Online has been out for about a year too. I played Anno for awhile and it good, but it is free to play and while not the worst "ftp" game out there it has all the little annoyances of a free to play game. The nice thing about Anno Online is that it looks pretty nice and it not too hard to play.

Super excited may be stretching it a little, but I'm certainly interested. Hoping this'll succeed with what SimCity 2013 and Cities XXL didn't.

I'll second Banished as a city builder that's verifiably rad.

I've never played a Cities game. But I really liked SimCity 2013. My only complaint was city size. If this lets me build big cities, I'm on board.

I've been excited about Cities: Skylines from the beginning partially because it looks good, partially because they can't do any worse than SimCity 5 and the Cities XL games.

This looks great.

The Cities XXXXXLLLL games are basically a scam at this point. They seem to keep releasing the same game, slapping another X on the box and charging full price for it.

This looks pretty great! Basically SimCity 2013 but bigger. I'll definitely keep an eye on it.

I've been keeping an eye on this game for months now. It looks great, very well made and they're basically saying all the right things at this point.

That said people need to know that this is made by a team of about 10 people. Just some food for thoughts that may help temper expectations a bit.

If the game turns out to be awesome then this is all the more impressive and i hope it will be because Sim City 4 is still the best city builder out there but it's so fucking old at this point.

@ertdaemon There is no concept of regions. You just have one map. Simcity 2013 maps are 4km². Cities Skylines are 36-100km². They force you to start out with a small square, then you purchase an additional 8 squares with your city funds.

Image from Reddit.

The real shame here is that it shares the first part of the title with Cities:XL and XXL.

I don't get why they couldn't have called it something else like just "Skylines".

apparently it's because it's a sequel to Cities in Motion. But, yeah, it's confusing with two different but similar franchises named Cities.

Having not really looked into this game much, I totally had assumed it was a sequel to Cities XL, and I'm probably not the only one.

I thought people were talking hot mess about this release because it didn't really do anything the game previously didn't do? Am I mixing this up with another game called Cities?

Yup, you're mixing it up with Cities XXL which was released a couple of weeks ago, which currently has overwhelmingly negative reviews on Steam (apparently no publication reviews yet).

@fisk0: OK, cool. I've been kind of wanting to play another SimCity styled game for a while now, but I actually thought of reinstalling Sim City since I never actually played my copy. The word of mouth was so terrible I never even installed my copy :| I heard from many people its pretty well a decent game now, but I don't know.

Well, it's a functional game that doesn't throw you back to the main menu every time your connection goes down or EA's servers are down for maintenance anymore, but you're still limited to an insanely small lot to build your city. That core design idea of making you split up your city into different laser focused ones is just nuts, and not in a good way. Having the game actively encourage you to make one city which is all police stations and hospitals, another which is all garbage dumps and recycling plants and another one for housing kinda goes against what I thought was the whole idea of a city management game like the old SimCities were.

@fisk0: Well...maybe I won't install SimCity after all, lol.

@sammo21:

Don't let the Min-Max type players dissuade you. Sure, But for a game that has a joyful, natural sense of city building and simulation, it's very well made. As small as the lots are, you're still able to make amazing little self-sufficient cities within them. It's not ideal, but it's hardly the worst thing ever like some will position it as. The look and feel of the game should also be praised.

Then again, if you're looking for a hard management game with very strictly defined rules, then perhaps it's not for you.

Haha. Either way, I ended up putting 100 or so hours into it, so there must be something there. As I said earlier in the thread, as ambitious as Skylines is, it'll be hard for them to capture the same sort of feel as SimCity 2013.

I'm really looking forward to this. I loved being able to watch the citizens running around doing their thing in CiM and scratched a certain itch to play around with the transport network and watch their daily routine alter. The one thing I really wanted in CiM was to be able to start from a less well developed city and watch as time and my planning shape what it becomes, rather than starting with a huge metropolis straight away.

Hopefully this game is running a sufficiently interesting simulation, and it looks like it does from videos, that problems will naturally occur as you play so you don't just end up plopping down fixed ratios of each zone and it grows more naturally.

Can confirm, I too thought it was from the Cities XL line of games.

Here's a stream archive with some dev commentary.

@chromium: thanks for that!

I know the devs keep stressing the modding angle. Will be interested to see how far people take it

Cities XXL is by most accounts absolute trash, hopefully this game only shares the name.

Also, how is that not a copyright issue? Cities: Skylines, Cities XXL, pretty freaking close, definite brand confusion.

I really want a small town or village simulator. Does anyone know a good & newish one. Hey I like cities just fine, but I woudl like something a bit more intimate on a smaller scale with more buildings and choices at that smaller scale. Anno Online does some of that at the start, but it is hard to just run your village at a small scale for long....all these games work on ever expanding, ever increasing growth.

I would love a game that was Town Sim and Sims combined. One where you can work on the macro scale of the village and at the micro scale of one household in Sims fashion.

@monkeyking1969: You might like Banished on Steam. Everyone I know who has played it really enjoys it.

@monkeyking1969: Banished does, indeed, sound more of what you're looking for then. (It's fantastic too.) I will say though, supposedly you'll be able to make small towns and suburban areas. Not just big major cities. They also simulate all the people (up to 1mil) and you could supposedly follow them around on their day-to-day lives.

But for right Banished seems your best bet.

@monkeyking1969: Definitely check out Banished. You might also enjoy something like Grand Ages:Rome, or the earlier Anno games.

@otakugamer: Yeah, he's pretty cool. Very funny guy. All his main solo series are great. Skyrim is a classic. His current series on Fallout 1 and Grim Fandango are both fantastic. He also did a series on Sim City 5, Banished, and a bunch of other city building type games.

I think I might buy this now!! Just saw a video that sort of convinced me... then i saw how big the map can be and I was amazed. This game has mostly all the things that i hoped sim city would achieve.

Bigger maps, a map editor, mod support

I'm surprised there's not more buzz hitting these forums, the publisher sent out a lot of streamer copies in the past week. A Paradox marketing guy spent just about the entire weekend on Twitch fussing over overly complicated traffic interchanges while answering questions about the game. There's enough streamer copies out there you have your choice of personality if you don't want to hear the company line either.

The agent stuff appears fairly well done to the tune that traffic management becomes the point of the game after your city gets to be a modest size. Most of the implication of the agents is relatively simple iterations on SimCity style upgrades if plots have access to certain services or shuttering if they can't get serviced and becomes an Impressions style city builder writ on the scale of SimCity. But there has also been some emergent stuff showing up, like traffic jams causing exponentially escalating plagues because hearses can't remove bodies from houses, causing neighbors to get sick, who can't be serviced by ambulances because of the hearse traffic, so they die too and require even more hearses that can't make it through traffic and so on. Its hard to understand the feel of the gameplay just from streams but it looks like there's enough to do between chasing utopias and attempting to cause your own man made disaster.

Saw a couple videos about this yesterday and have pre-purchased it on Steam. Looks really really good. Can't wait to play it when I get back from work tomorrow :D.

Yeah, pretty sure I'm gonna buy this on release. It looks too good to not support.

Got it pre-ordered on GreenManGaming, hope I get the code early tomorrow. Probably won't get the code until later in the day, but at least I got Wednesday off work. Really looking forward to it, been watching some of the streams and videos.

I've been watching Northernlion play this over the last few days. It looks almost like a carbon copy of Simcity (which I can get behind) without any of the massive drawbacks (which I can totally get behind).

I preordered it a few minutes ago.

Yeah, really looking forward to this. I skipped SimCity a couple of years back so its been a while since I have played a city building game but this looks really neat. Luke Plunkett has a good video on Kotaku that interested me despite some flaws he pointed out. This and Hotline Miami 2 make for an exciting day tomorrow.

Kept up with watching Sips play (he made a second town area with all one-way roads on accident, kinda hilarious as nothing can ever leave), and a few others. It really does seem like a good, relaxing city builder. More than likely going to get it tomorrow.

I like that you can rename basically everything (even peoples' dogs). That's pretty silly.

I am super pumped for this. I highly anticipated SimCity 5 - what a let down (I liked the editable buildings though). Expect to get no cover from GB. Saw a lot of quill18s videos. Non-surprisingly they go hardcore on the road tools.

Do I need to say any more?

back in the day i should have been worried when none of simcity's videos showed the cities zoomed out.

this is a purdy looking game.

I played a lot of this game over the weekend (was lucky to get an early review copy for a website I write for), and it is great. If you were let down by the Sim City remake, you'll be really happy with Skylines.

So pumped for this tomorrow!

@tuxfool: That's pretty awesome. Well, not for the little digital people.