Cities: Skyline is out to satisfy where SimCity couldn't

[Administrator]

There's something of a size mismatch happening here. Colossal Order tells me it can give its players 36 square kilometres of space to build their cities in, 36 square kilometres in which they can expand and enlarge, spread and sprawl. That's enough space for suburbs, commuter towns and even arable land. In contrast, last year's SimCity only provided a couple of square kilometres and, in spite of the efforts of all the pages of team members listed in its credits (a number possibly higher if you consider that credits often only list staff present when a title ships), what happened within those city limits didn't always make sense. Colossal Order is confident it can make a larger, more coherent and more customisable city-building game with, well... nine people.
"To be fair, we are hiring!" says Mariina Hallikainen, Colossal's CEO, who also points out that many art duties have been outsourced. "But yes, we are nine people here and this is a really, really ambitious project for us." It's something of a passion project, too. Colossal, known for the Cities in Motion series of infrastructure management games, has long wanted to make a game about building more than just roads and railways. "We've always, always thought that this is what we'd end up doing," continues Hallikainen. "For years I've been telling Paradox [their publisher] that they needed to give us enough money to make a bigger game than Cities in Motion. Now, they finally have."
While Cities: Skylines isn't just an attempt to exploit the hole in the market left by an irrational SimCity, both Colossal and Paradox are well aware of the failings of the latest in Maxis' usually polished series and know that there's an opportunity to be seized. The game's reveal trailer has that same perkiness to its music and that same romanticisation of suburbia that Maxis are known for, while a coy nod to SimCity's initial demand that players always be online is found in the simple, final boast "Play offline." Never one to equivocate, this point was driven home by Paradox's VP of acquisitions, Shams Jorjani in a recent Reddit AMA: "Thankfully advances in technology have enabled us to do all city management calculations locally on your PC. We don't have to do them in the cloud any more which, you know, was the ONLY way to do it a few years ago."
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