CO Word of the Week #7

It’s time for the last CO Word of the Week this year. Next week we’ll start our holidays and will be away for a few weeks. But before the holidays there’s still time for the last patch, which is planned to go out this week. We will of course have full patch notes for you when it releases, but in the meantime, I can give you a sneak peek at what’s included. On the performance side of things, the patch adds the level of detail models for characters and improves the geometry layout for all assets. This won’t be the last update to performance, it takes us one more step towards our goals.

As promised, we’ve also managed to include a bunch of gameplay fixes and improvements. The patch changes how money is calculated and shown in your city. We hear your feedback and hope these improvements make the budget more transparent and easier to determine what new services your city can afford. We’re grateful for all the feedback you have shared, and we’ll continue to keep an eye on things to understand how things feel after the patch. We’ve also improved how vehicles change lanes, fixed situations where the resource amount stored would end up as a negative value, and added the line color to ships and cargo trains so you can easily see which lines they belong to.

The patch also includes a little holiday gift in the form of two new maps that were the result of internal testing of the Map Editor. There are still a few things missing from the Map Editor for it to be fully functional, like proper preview images showing off your amazing new maps, but we’re making good progress. I can’t wait to see what kind of maps you create! In the meantime, here’s the brief I gave the designers for the new maps based on some feedback we’ve gotten:

Land of the Eternal Sun
As the name suggests this area basks in the glory of the eternal sun. With literally no rain and steady warm temperatures this is an ideal choice for those looking to build with minimal input from the seasons.

Flatland
Hills, slopes, mountains? No thanks, I'd rather stay leveled. No need for contour lines on this land!

To my great disappointment, the designers changed both the names and the descriptions of the maps to “better fit the existing style” of the game. So Sunshine Peninsula and Corral Riches are the names of the new maps when you start a new game. Let us know what you think about them!

And then, as promised, let’s go over what our plans for Cities: Skylines II in 2024 are:

Modding
Bringing the mod support to the game is a high priority. This includes the map editor, code modding support, and the asset editor. The asset editor is the part that is most behind the schedule, but we will continue to work on it in January. We’ll be releasing Development Diaries related to the modding, and run an early access program for modders to try the tools before their release. Check out the previous WoW to sign up if you haven’t already!

Consoles
The console versions of the game were delayed and we’re working hard to get the performance and the stability up to par so we can bring the game on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. The console versions will also have the modding tools (minus code modding) present on release so the players on console will also be able to create maps and add custom assets.

Expansion Pass
The DLC production is currently on hold and waiting for the higher priority work to be completed, but progress has already been made on the first Asset Pack, Content Creator Packs, and Radio Stations. CCPs are of course created by some of our favorite content creators in the community and the content for the radio is produced by Paradox.

Performance and bug fixing
While we’ve progressed quite a bit on the performance and bug fixing we’re still not satisfied and will continue to improve the quality of the game based on our internal findings and your bug reports and crash logs. To be honest, this is work that we’ll continue throughout the lifetime of the game, as I believe there’s always something we can improve upon, but the biggest remaining offenders should be sorted out during the spring.

Your suggestions/feedback
We'll be taking your suggestions and feedback on board regarding new content, features, and quality-of-life improvements that are not classified as bugs. Your feedback matters and we’ll be drawing inspiration from it for the lifetime of the project, just like we did for Cities: Skylines, so let’s keep the discussions going!

That is the current list of priorities we’ll have in 2024, though we will of course continue to keep an eye on your feedback and adjust our priorities as needed, especially when it comes to performance. We hope to bring you the features and missing platforms as soon as possible, and we’ll announce timelines as we get closer to each release so keep an eye on the CO Word of the Week in the new year for the latest news.

Next week there will be something to round up the year, but this little blog is taking a break until January 15th. I wish everyone lovely holidays and I look very much forward to getting back to work in the New Year!

Sincerely,
Mariina