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Last week we had some actual news for you: Cities: Skylines - Green Cities was announced at Gamescom! Our game designer Miska was in Cologne to show the new more sustainable expansion. If you didn't see the live stream on Thursday you can check it out here for a first look!

We will also start with a series of dev diaries this week where members of our dev team write about the paid expansion part as well as what the free update will bring to all the players. There's also new opportunities with modding as we open up the roads for modders to creating their own. The series will run all the way to the release of the expansion which will be later this year (Release date: TBA).

There's been a lot of conversation around the expansion after the announcement so here are a few answers to the most common questions about the expansion:

"Why Green Cities?"
- When bouncing around different ideas after Mass Transit that focused on different public transportation methods we started to talk about cars. Mainly electric ones and how it's interesting to follow how quickly these can be developed so that a) they make sense in Finland and b) are affordable for most. Then the discussion spiraled to new energy methods and sustainable cities and our artists got super inspired. So inspired actually that Green Cities expansion will come with over 350 new assets. This includes new specializations and options for the city services. And we'll go deeper to these in the dev diaries (with pics!).

"Does Green Cities come with zoneable parks?"
- No unfortunately it doesn't. However it seems that we have to give that request the higher ranking in the wishlist.

"Will you fix Traffic AI?"
- Once more and most likely not for the last time: No.

The team is hard at work implementing the rest of the features and finalizing the assets this week and soon we can move on to the Beta phase and bug fixing for Green Cities. And you know when entering Beta it's not that far away from the final product :)

So how does the Green Cities expansion sound to you? Will you save your cities or rather see them polluted an miserable? Whichever the answer have a great week everyone and we'll be back soon with the first dev diary for Green Cities.

Cheers,
Mariina
 
Last week we had some actual news for you: Cities: Skylines - Green Cities was announced at Gamescom! Our game designer Miska was in Cologne to show the new more sustainable expansion. If you didn't see the live stream on Thursday you can check it out here for a first look!

We will also start with a series of dev diaries this week where members of our dev team write about the paid expansion part as well as what the free update will bring to all the players. There's also new opportunities with modding as we open up the roads for modders to creating their own. The series will run all the way to the release of the expansion which will be later this year (Release date: TBA).

There's been a lot of conversation around the expansion after the announcement so here are a few answers to the most common questions about the expansion:

"Why Green Cities?"
- When bouncing around different ideas after Mass Transit that focused on different public transportation methods we started to talk about cars. Mainly electric ones and how it's interesting to follow how quickly these can be developed so that a) they make sense in Finland and b) are affordable for most. Then the discussion spiraled to new energy methods and sustainable cities and our artists got super inspired. So inspired actually that Green Cities expansion will come with over 350 new assets. This includes new specializations and options for the city services. And we'll go deeper to these in the dev diaries (with pics!).

"Does Green Cities come with zoneable parks?"
- No unfortunately it doesn't. However it seems that we have to give that request the higher ranking in the wishlist.

"Will you fix Traffic AI?"
- Once more and most likely not for the last time: No.

The team is hard at work implementing the rest of the features and finalizing the assets this week and soon we can move on to the Beta phase and bug fixing for Green Cities. And you know when entering Beta it's not that far away from the final product :)

So how does the Green Cities expansion sound to you? Will you save your cities or rather see them polluted an miserable? Whichever the answer have a great week everyone and we'll be back soon with the first dev diary for Green Cities.

Cheers,
Mariina

I'm so excited for this DLC! Mariina, will there be the ability to swap out the roadside trees in * with Decorative Trees road types? This is a feature which I've always hoped would make it to vanilla!

Also, I noticed there were a lot of new buildings with 'green' elements to them, such as rooftop gardens and small farm patches etc. Will these buildings also be available without the green enhancements?

Can't wait to green up my city :)
 
"Does Green Cities come with zoneable parks?"
- No unfortunately it doesn't. However it seems that we have to give that request the higher ranking in the wishlist.

This is really disappointing news.

I would respectfully suggest that the game's wishlist start to reflect more of what the fanbase is looking for and wanting. While the Green Cities expansion sounds fun and I'll likely purchase it, there are also other aspects, additions, and improvements to the game that people have been asking for since release. Some of these may not be feasibly possible, like the traffic AI improvement, but it seems like more and more any content released for Cities is stuff that most of the fanbase isn't really asking or looking for. This critique and suggestion only comes from a place of positivity on my side. I love Cities: Skylines and want both it and CO to be successful, but am becoming concerned with the direction that things are going and from my perspective at least, the lack of listening on the part of CO to what the community wants is a big part of that.
 
But what about soot covered, air quality non existent, oil in the ocean industrial cities!

A factory, a factory. My kingdom for a factory!

And a bit of maritime industry industry as well, after all, I want to be a captain of industry!
 
I like this idea, I'd hoped that it would change something about the industry. But I hope there are more specialization other than residential that I've seen. The recycling centre has me excited but the pollution around it is very large.

Hoping to hear more about the free features such as the road modding..
 
Kind of cool. I do like that you can set which districts have the green stuff, so you can at least have the illusion of fancy pants rich areas. I just hope there's an option to turn off the green buildings otherwise (I want some grungy less well off areas in my city!).
 
Just in case you haven't seen my post in this thread, I wish you would consider allowing parks with trees to act as a noise barrier in the same way that streets with trees do. I have gotten a large amount of likes for this suggestion. I, of course, know nothing about programming, but it seems to me that you have already coded for noise abatement with streets. Would it be impossible to apply this coding to parks with trees?
 
Will you fix Traffic AI?"
- Once more and most likely not for the last time: No.

Even if it's feasible or not, this attitude and kind of response is enough for me to not buy another game from you guys. I've seen a ton of reluctance to add any sort of mechanics to the game other than assets but I'm drawing the line here with this useless Green Cities and the silly Concerts cash grab. Even the decent expansions you did put out like After Dark and Mass Transit only ever achieved half of their potential, they could have had a lot more if you spent more time working on it other than coming up with lazy excuses constantly, and the community would have rewarded you for it.
 
"Does Green Cities come with zoneable parks?"
- No unfortunately it doesn't. However it seems that we have to give that request the higher ranking in the wishlist.

You totally should! In my opinion, this is the biggest shortcoming of the game right now. The parks don't even need to be zonable. Just make sure that any regions that contain placed roads/trees etc. generate recreation.

Even if it's feasible or not, this attitude and kind of response is enough for me to not buy another game from you guys. I've seen a ton of reluctance to add any sort of mechanics to the game other than assets but I'm drawing the line here with this useless Green Cities and the silly Concerts cash grab. Even the decent expansions you did put out like After Dark and Mass Transit only ever achieved half of their potential, they could have had a lot more if you spent more time working on it other than coming up with lazy excuses constantly, and the community would have rewarded you for it.

I am quite sure Mariina was trying to make a joke, referring to the fact that fixing these issues is exceedingly difficult on the computational budget of an average computer (even human drivers don't manage). Nordic humour can be a bit weird for outsiders (I'm not from there but I know enough Scandinavian ;) ).
 
I'm really excited about Green Cities - so far the new buildings look really great! And the recycling center is a really nice new option for trash management, which I'm looking forward to. I'm still hoping for added gameplay for this. While a complete theme like this is super nice, there's also some really nice potential in Green Cities to add some more gameplay and give us reasons to go green (or consequences for polluting a ton). I'd love to see the new specializations care in some regard about how green or how dirty the city. Can't wait to see more of this and hear what you guys have planned for us. :D
 
Glad to see you addressing feedback as for me it can really be the difference between a good and a bad company. My initial impressions of Green Cities are bad though. I just can't see the point. The whole "expansion" seems to be just new buildings, buildings and buildings. Finding a complete set of decent buildings on the Workshop can be tricky and in that sense Green Cities sounds good, but even then it's just a spiced up building pack for me. Surely it has some new stuff like the mentioned electic cars but their purpose is questionable as their only purpose seems to be lowering the noise levels.

This would have been the perfect opportunity for new game mechanics for pollution or beautification. Instead you seemed to think that new buildings would serve the same purpose more easily. Buildings that just basically make the pollution magically disappear. What's the drawback? A few hundred dollars/week from our massive surplus? What if you would have taken your time developing truly interesting things? An area selector for custom parks which could also work as a new tool to make freeform landfills, cemeteries, forestry industy, farms or maybe even parking lots? Air pollution that could be tackled with the decorated road options, new parks and the electric cars?

I also have to agree with @Sanny. With the expansions and especially with Green Cities you are leaving the impression that the game is done mechanics wise and the DLC are either building packs or half thought packs that had massive potential at best. With After Dark you promised us a better crime system, we got pretty much the same crime level statistics based simulation with a prison. With Snowfall you added winter maps but not seasons. And with Mass Transit you added some nice transport options and bridges but then again some of the transport options were blimps and cable cars(??) and we didn't get the much requested ability to select between different bridge styles for example. Bigger stuff like Traffic AI seems to be automatically out of question for you.

I hope you see my points. I will probably like Green Cities as an small addition but it will not clearly be the direction changer this game needs. In April I wrote this about Mass Transit and even got a bunch of agrees:
I'm disappointed by the stream of half baked DLC. They seem to continuously miss the memo and release stuff that hasn't been fully thought out.
Don't get me wrong, this expansion is much more to my liking than Snowfall or ND. Still the Skylines team seems to rush the DLC out as fast as possible with little actual effort on bringing bigger or more fleshed out features to the table.
I'm afraid nothing will change before the next full game release if even then.
 
Now before this turns into a Hearts of Iron 4 kind of argument here on the forums, Colossal Order has a business model which in turn is influenced by Paradox. They cannot do everything that all their fans want and they most likely won't make too many more DLCs. We all have to accept that Cities Skylines 2 will be a game coming soon, whether we like it or not.

Nonetheless, I do find that the content in these expansions to mirror those of Crusader Kings 2; good content, but so much potential wasted and ignored by the developers. Polution could have been re-done as well as having a new type of public transportation, but the devellopers have added very little to change the gameplay experience.

While companies such as Firaxis create 1-2 big expansions, the unfortunate alternative is many expansions with minimal content.
 
Now before this turns into a Hearts of Iron 4 kind of argument here on the forums, Colossal Order has a business model which in turn is influenced by Paradox. They cannot do everything that all their fans want and they most likely won't make too many more DLCs. We all have to accept that Cities Skylines 2 will be a game coming soon, whether we like it or not.

Nonetheless, I do find that the content in these expansions to mirror those of Crusader Kings 2; good content, but so much potential wasted and ignored by the developers. Polution could have been re-done as well as having a new type of public transportation, but the devellopers have added very little to change the gameplay experience.

While companies such as Firaxis create 1-2 big expansions, the unfortunate alternative is many expansions with minimal content.
I'm not very familiar with CK2 but the problem might be in every Paradox game that follows this DLC policy. In the end I'm pretty casual EUIV player myself (compared to a lot of people here) and I am maybe not just capable at realising how much potential is wasted in every DLC. My criticism here is of course also directed towards Paradox Interactive and their business models.
 
I'm not very familiar with CK2 but the problem might be in every Paradox game that follows this DLC policy. In the end I'm pretty casual EUIV player myself (compared to a lot of people here) and I am maybe not just capable at realising how much potential is wasted in every DLC. My criticism here is of course also directed towards Paradox Interactive and their business models.

If I'm not mistaken, there was a Russian (Moscovy?) themed DLC released for EUIV a while back; people were extremely disappointed by it when it launched, especially due to the bias towards the main Russian Principality and lack for other aspects. I think it's definitely a problem in all their games, although you would think that CO would have a little bit more freedom...

I think one of the problems is that "modding assets" are their excuse to not improve the game; example, the metro overhaul mod in Cities Skylines, or the various Pope mods in CK2.