I can't believe that we've been investing on DLC's for years and now you make a new version and all investment goes to nothing and we loose all features we had and get a vanilla game with only upgraded AI, UI and graphics.
Now we all know what will happen upon release, no customizable airports, no customization industries, no customizable parks and there we go again buy every DLC with features we already had in the previous version.
You should upgrade your development, no one makes games like this anymore, games are live services that can be upgraded without the user losing their progress and their investment.
This is likely to be a long post, so I apologize in advance for my English.
To be honest, the game is outdated. Thanks to the mods, it doesn't feel so bad. But we have been limited to 9 tiles for 8 years, or 25/81 with mods. We are limited to small cities because of optimization problems, I mean the population. And if you build a city that specializes in industry, you can simply exceed the limit of cars on the map. We also have some limitations that each road is not modular. There cannot be a tram and a trolleybus on the same road. I realize that this is not useful to many people, but it's still strange. Pedestrian paths are very strangely connected to roads. We have no textures of tunnels. The economy and public transportation are very much simplified. Despite these shortcomings, this game is still the best of the genre on the market right now. I want to thank the developers. I think there were 13 people in the company in 2015. I hope I'm not mistaken. Such a small group of people managed to write the logic for the game that when you build an exact copy of a city in the game, it behaves almost exactly as it does in real life. It's just an incredible job. Thanks to the developers for such a great game.
You say we are missing out on all the opportunities. I am, of course, skeptical about the product at release. Because of Paradox Interactive's policy and my personal situation. But I think we will get more opportunities than we will lose. The following is my theory and dreams, so everything may be different. I'm just giving an example of an opposing opinion
First of all, we have to get a bigger scale. Well, it would be stupid if we were stuck with 25 tiles and a city with up to 60k people for a comfortable game. It is unknown how much bigger it will become, but it should definitely be bigger.
Thanks to the new version of the Unity engine, we will get better optimization, thanks to the experience of developers and new technologies that should help them. Thanks to this, we will be able to build larger cities. I hope so, otherwise it's sad.
If we take the DLC that has already been released, we have :
After Dark.
Snowfall
Natural Disasters
Mass Transit
Green Cities
Parklife
Industries
Campus
Sunset Harbor
Airports
Plazas and Promenades
Financial Districts (I know it's Flavor packs, but come on)
WARNING, this is my subjective opinion
Of the good ones, I would highlight : Parklife, Green Cities, After Dark.
Situational: Mass Transit, Natural Disasters, Snowfall, Campus, Airports, Plazas and Promenades.
The ones I don't like: Sunset Harbor, Financial Districts, Industries.
Okay. Personally, how I see the situation. Judging by the leaks to the main game, we will definitely get Snowfall, Natural Disasters, and possibly partially Green Cities and After Dark. Perhaps some of them will not be fully transferred to the main game, but this is at least four add-ons. It also seems to me that they have an emphasis on modularity. Otherwise, we'll get a remaster, just a more powerful one. Well, that's a bit of an exaggeration, but that's how it is.
Mass Transit will be re-released in any case, because it's just a lot of public transportation. Moreover, most of it is highly situational. I liked the Campus and Airports system. I doubt that we will have a similar system at the beginning of the game, but I would even be happy with a DLC with such large modular airports, ports and train stations. The campus probably won't be in the game from the beginning either. Plazas and Promenades, in the trailer of the game we have the style of the United States. So far I can judge that we will not get the mechanics of pedestrian zones at the beginning of the game. . And I want to note that this mechanic is not very well done in CS. The fact that you need to draw zones that cannot intersect with a park or campus is stupid.
Now I'll move on to the DLCs that I don't like: Financial Districts is a very poorly developed investment theme, I generally hope that in CS2 the game's economy will be on a different level. Now I don't even want to play outside the sandbox. Because there is almost no challenge there. I don't like the concept of Industries. These industrial zones don't look realistic. Yes, there are some good mechanics that are well done, but the industrial areas themselves, they are strange. Farms and forests suffer the most from this. That's why I expect a complete redesign of this DLC in CS2. I'll be happy to buy it separately if they make a realistic industry. Farms and forests that you choose the shape and length of, not just rectangles by the road. To make the mining industry like in life, there should be a huge quarry where mechanical monsters work. And the rest of the production, which is attached to large factories, does not look any better. When you look at real industrial areas, you realize that you can't do that in CS without mods. Sunset Harbor, I'd like to keep silent, but I'll say it briefly. There is a dish called Solyanka. They throw all kinds of food in there and cook it in water. That's how Solyanka comes out. This DLC is the same way, they crammed a lot of stuff in and did it badly, in my opinion. I'm especially offended by the trolleybuses. I hope there will be no more DLC like this.
I have written all this down and I want to mention one more detail. There is no gas in the game. I don't know about the US, but in Europe, gas is definitely used in many places. This is generally a problem with many games, they ignore this resource. I also want to mention that CS has a terribly realized power grid. It is simplified as much as possible. Thanks to the eastern neighbor of my country, I had to learn a lot about power grids. I am not saying to make an identical complex system in the game. I'll start with the power line network. It's terrible. Apart from the fact that it doesn't look aesthetically pleasing, because there are no transformers. So we have no small options and cannot transmit electricity through cables underground.
The power plants themselves. Have you ever seen what coal, gas or liquid-fueled power plants look like? These are huge complexes that require a lot of water and a lot of people in addition to fuel. In Ukraine, for example, there is often a town near a power plant. It exists only to keep the power plant running. Could the developers have realized eco-friendly energy better? No, they didn't. In SimCity 2013 it is much better done. In CS, it's some incredible thing that works without interruption. Windmills have to depend on the wind season. Solar panels are not present in the game at all. Geothermal power plants can be placed anywhere. Hydrogen energy is not in the game either. Nuclear power is a joke in the game. It is essentially non-existent. Hydroelectric power plants are the only ones that are made more or less normally. I doubt that we will get a well-developed power grid in the basic version of the game, but I hope at least for DLC
I have already written quite a bit of text, so I want to summarize. Despite the fact that this game is currently the best in its genre. We have a lot of problems. Which simply cannot be solved on the version of Unity that the game uses. This game needs an update. So some DLC is not included in the main game, this is Paradox's policy. But according to the little information we have, some things will be in the game right away. Also, the new version of the engine provides new opportunities for developers, modders, and us players. So I think it would be better to have a part 2, because all the problems I mentioned above are most likely related to the limitations that were not thought out back in 2015. And now the developers, thanks to the new version of Unity and their experience, have to fix it. Otherwise, it's a fiasco.
Once again, I apologize for my English and wish you a good wait for CS2 news.
.png){kind=avatar}
