In the wake of the downfall of EA’s SimCity series, Colossal Order and Paradox Interactive released Cities: Skylines in 2015 to universal praise. Unfortunately, last year’s sequel suffers from a number of issues – even almost a year after launch. With Cities Skylines II nearing its first anniversary, the team are reflecting on what went wrong.
In a recent interview with PCGamesN, Paradox Interactive’s deputy CEO Mattias Lilja and chief creative officer Henrik Fåhraeus spoke on the past year of Skylines, saying:
“Cities 2 has had a tough launch. Whether that opens up [opportunities] for others or not, we want to make sure we give the fans the game that they deserve – that’s the thing we can do. But as you said, it’s a space with more actors in it. We don’t dominate that [genre] like we do with grand strategy, so I would [agree] that it’s a more vulnerable position to have, of course.”
Admitting some of their own faults with the game’s current state, Fåhraeus added “If you want to look at something common to Cities 2 and Victoria 3, I guess it would be that we saw some flaws for the games before release, but we didn’t really think that it was that serious.”
As with the first game, Colossal Order and Paradox Interactive will continue to work on Cities Skylines II, with Fåhraeus concluding “But I think the good thing is that our whole philosophy for our games [at Paradox] is that they’re going to live a long time. And we are going to make these games great. I think we have a very positive trend on Cities 2 and Victoria 3, and hopefully we’ll just continue in that direction.”
Back in July, Paradox announced that the promised console release of Cities Skylines II would not be arriving in October as previously claimed, instead coming out at an unknown point in the future. Hopefully they refrain from launching the console versions until they are fully ready.
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KitGuru says: What do you think of the current state of Cities Skylines II? Can the team regain your trust? Let us know down below.