The latest Cities: Skylines expansion Green Cities was announced last week in Gamescom 2017. The new expansion is all about making your city greener and it comes with loads of different options for the city services, policies and specializations to make your city’s carbon footprint smaller.
Gamescom 2017
Gamescom is a trade fair for video games held annually in Cologne, Germany, with over 350,000 guests across the full event this year. It is used by many video game developers to show off their upcoming games and the same goes with Paradox Interactive. The Green Cities was one of the expansions announced at Gamescom 2017 and I was representing Colossal Order at the event.
During my stay at Gamescom we did a bunch of demos of Green Cities for journalists from various news outlets together with Sandra from Paradox. We also did a few live streams where we introduced the key features of the expansion and explained how the changes in the expansion affect the gameplay.
In this series of Dev Diary posts we will tell you, what the most significant changes and additions are, but first, let’s have a look at the trailer.
Cities: Skylines - Green Cities
So, what Green Cities is all about? Sure it’s about adding options to the game that allow you to make your city environmentally friendly and control pollution better, but it’s more than just asset swaps or cosmetic changes. We wanted to change the gameplay in a way that building a greener city also changes the zoning dynamic, so that it offers the player meaningful agency when the new specializations, service buildings and policies are used. The Green Cities expansion includes 14 new city service buildings, 3 new distric specializations, 4 new policies, 3 new scenarios, 3 new maps and over 200 new building models and a 100 new assets.
We’ll go into details in the upcoming Dev Diary posts, but to give you a general idea of how things have changed I’ll give you a few examples.
New Specializations. The new Commercial Specialization, Organic and Local Produce allows your city to work with less industrial areas as the local businesses produce some of their products on their own. This reduces the need to produce and import goods to the Commercial Zones with this Specialization. The new Residential Specialization, Self-Sufficient Buildings, consume less electricity and produce less garbage. This reduces the stress on Electricity and Garbage city services. On the other hand they also produce less tax income, so you need to have your city’s economy in good shape before wide use of the Self-Sufficient Buildings is a viable option.
New Options for Energy Production. We have added three new renewable energy sources that add to the previous options. The new options add variety, but they also offer more advanced means of energy production with an increased energy output in comparison to the original options.
Noise Pollution Overhaul. With the new electric cars and biofuel busses we decided to make a big overhaul to the whole noise pollution system. As previously the noise pollution was largely based on the different road types – i.e. the bigger the road, the more it produced noise pollution – now we have a separate noise pollution value for each vehicle type. Obviously electric cars and biofuel vehicles produce less noise pollution. So, with this change it’s really relevant now where the traffic is and what kind of vehicles there are on the roads.
That’s all for now! As said, we will delve deeper into details in our upcoming Dev Diary posts. Let us know what you would like to know more about next.
Cheers,
Miska
Gamescom 2017
Gamescom is a trade fair for video games held annually in Cologne, Germany, with over 350,000 guests across the full event this year. It is used by many video game developers to show off their upcoming games and the same goes with Paradox Interactive. The Green Cities was one of the expansions announced at Gamescom 2017 and I was representing Colossal Order at the event.
During my stay at Gamescom we did a bunch of demos of Green Cities for journalists from various news outlets together with Sandra from Paradox. We also did a few live streams where we introduced the key features of the expansion and explained how the changes in the expansion affect the gameplay.
In this series of Dev Diary posts we will tell you, what the most significant changes and additions are, but first, let’s have a look at the trailer.
Cities: Skylines - Green Cities
So, what Green Cities is all about? Sure it’s about adding options to the game that allow you to make your city environmentally friendly and control pollution better, but it’s more than just asset swaps or cosmetic changes. We wanted to change the gameplay in a way that building a greener city also changes the zoning dynamic, so that it offers the player meaningful agency when the new specializations, service buildings and policies are used. The Green Cities expansion includes 14 new city service buildings, 3 new distric specializations, 4 new policies, 3 new scenarios, 3 new maps and over 200 new building models and a 100 new assets.
We’ll go into details in the upcoming Dev Diary posts, but to give you a general idea of how things have changed I’ll give you a few examples.
New Specializations. The new Commercial Specialization, Organic and Local Produce allows your city to work with less industrial areas as the local businesses produce some of their products on their own. This reduces the need to produce and import goods to the Commercial Zones with this Specialization. The new Residential Specialization, Self-Sufficient Buildings, consume less electricity and produce less garbage. This reduces the stress on Electricity and Garbage city services. On the other hand they also produce less tax income, so you need to have your city’s economy in good shape before wide use of the Self-Sufficient Buildings is a viable option.
New Options for Energy Production. We have added three new renewable energy sources that add to the previous options. The new options add variety, but they also offer more advanced means of energy production with an increased energy output in comparison to the original options.
Noise Pollution Overhaul. With the new electric cars and biofuel busses we decided to make a big overhaul to the whole noise pollution system. As previously the noise pollution was largely based on the different road types – i.e. the bigger the road, the more it produced noise pollution – now we have a separate noise pollution value for each vehicle type. Obviously electric cars and biofuel vehicles produce less noise pollution. So, with this change it’s really relevant now where the traffic is and what kind of vehicles there are on the roads.
That’s all for now! As said, we will delve deeper into details in our upcoming Dev Diary posts. Let us know what you would like to know more about next.
Cheers,
Miska
