It\u2019s great time for anyone who likes to build cities. Surviving Mars brings harsh environments to the genre, as does recent hit Frostpunk, and both have stormed the Steam charts; while Cities: Skylines continues to sell, having alone shifted enough copies to fill most capital cities. Strategy games\u2019 city-building subgenre is flourishing, both commercially and creatively.<\/p>\n
The shadow of SimCity still looms large over the genre, though, like one of the game\u2019s own huge arcologies. However, with EA having moved away from the brand after 2013\u2019s iteration, it\u2019s left space for smaller developers to flourish. <\/p>\n
\u201cThings that aren’t big enough for the biggest publishers, are big enough for us, and Cities [Skylines] is an example of that,\u201d says Shams Jorjani, VP of Business Development at Paradox Interactive, publisher of the game. \u201cThose publishers find greener pastures, and that leaves space for us to grow.\u201d <\/p>\n
And without the traditionally dominant brand of the genre, it\u2019s Paradox that\u2019s benefited the most. So we catch up with the minds the publisher\u2019s two such titles: Cities: Skylines and Surviving Mars. <\/p>\n
LOCAL GOVERNMENT<\/strong><\/p>\n Skylines\u2019 developer Colossal Order name checks the EA-owned brand when we speak to them: \u201cSim City 4, that was the game we looked at and thought \u2018we want to make something like that\u2019, but bring it into the modern day,\u201d says CEO Mariina Hallikainen.<\/p>\n And being contemporary is key to Hallikainen, who sees that such simulations must reflect the world around us. \u201cThe beauty of it is, people want to create their own surrounding, how they see things running, how they want things to run, I think the evolution of simulation games happens with what’s happening in the world, it’s very realistic.\u201d<\/p>\n Though that wasn\u2019t how it started out though: \u201cI thought people would want to try building something you don’t see, possibly futuristic or from the past, but it seems for the asset creators in the community, they are making their own house, they are making the buildings they see everyday, they are building their own<\/em> cities.<\/p>\n \u201cThere’s a lot of different ways of doing it, but the majority really just look outside and translate that to the game, which was surprising to me, when you’re in a game you want to explore worlds but not in a city builder. Two guys from Berlin, they have been working on a realistic Berlin for months now. Trying to recreate what is actually happening.\u201d<\/p>\n COUNCIL AGENDA<\/strong><\/p>\n Of course, in this often intolerant age, not everyone always agrees on \u2018what is actually happening\u2019. A simulation of the way we live can generate disagreement on how we should live. <\/p>\n \u201cA game like this caters to a lot of different kinds of players, for us from the Nordic countries, we have these things we take as granted and these show in the game \u2013 we have same sex couples for instance, you can’t really see that, but it’s there in the simulation.\u201d <\/p>\n Other possible disagreements can occur around the staples of the genre, where a car-based transport system almost always gets gridlocked in the end, with such simulations preferring public transport for its greater efficiency. Not something that will go down well with Top Gear viewers.<\/p>\n It\u2019s also accepted in such games that polluting industries are a short term gain for long-term pain, while investing in education is usually the sensible option. \u201cI hope that the Finnish government would play our game and see that!\u201d exclaims Hallikainen. And the whole concept is built around top-down control, Hallikainen explains. <\/p>\n \u201cIf you think about city planning and city building games, they are kind of socialist, you collect taxes, you have services\u2026\u201d Which is exactly the kind of comment that could have some on the American right-wing reaching for the uninstall button. <\/p>\n Hallikainen is clear that they try for realism but that \u201cour point of view is reflected in the game.\u201d That said, it\u2019s \u201cnot full realism because that’s not fun.\u201d <\/p>\n HOUSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM<\/strong><\/p>\n Balancing realism and fun was a topic under intense discussion at Haemimont Games in recent months. It\u2019s latest title tasks players with setting up a colony on Mars, a city of sorts but under the most extreme conditions. That means when things goes wrong, they go wrong fast, and some players have struggled to get to grips with that.<\/p>\n Gabriel Dobrev, CEO, tells us \u201cIn Tropico you always have a country going on, it’s you’re more deciding what type of country you’re having. In Surviving Mars, at certain times, certain decisions are plain wrong, you don’t do that.\u201d And these are usually quickly followed by numerous fatalities. <\/p>\n We wonder whether Dobrev had set out to create something in the new \u2018survival-builder\u2019 sub-genre, also inhabited by the steampunk-styled Frostpunk, but that wasn\u2019t his reason. \u201cFor us it wasn’t a decision to go into a particular genre as much as the subject matter itself. You know on Mars that’s it’s a pretty rough place, just keeping going is a big thing.\u201d<\/p>\n Whatever the motivation, it provides a more game-like experience, with a pretty definite fail state when compared to most city-crafters. \u201cYou can definitely lose the game. And it’s not even easy to get it right,\u201d Dobrev admits and that has caused its own problems.<\/p>\n \u201cIt’s the best launch we\u2019ve ever had. So that’s a good thing,\u201d he tells us. \u201cAnd it’s almost the worst-rated game on Steam we ever had,\u201d he adds surprisingly. \u201cWhich is not to suggest that people don’t like the game, because they do, but they find a lot of little things that are not the way they expect them.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe thought: who wants to play tutorial? So let’s make this in-game system that will give you hints all the time. Which tries to figure out what you’re trying to do,\u201d he explains. As it turned out players found the combination of difficulty and the lack of an overview of the game\u2019s systems overwhelming \u2013 thus the negative feedback. The company is redesigning the system at present, with a series of five shorter tutorials that cover key concepts in the game as you progress. <\/p>\n Hallikainen has had similar issues, in Cities: Skylines: \u201cWe didn’t do the best job of the tutorial, we haven’t changed the system, but we’ve been making it clearer, adding stuff, it’s something that’s under development and improvement all the time. And with new features coming in we have to make sure people can get into those smoothly.\u201d<\/p>\n Skylines is of course more-forgiving than Mars, but the tutorial process and the game as a whole is becoming a victim of its own success, with large amounts of DLC available. \u201cThe more content we have the more difficult it gets to balance the game. It’s certainly something we need to put effort into,\u201d says Hallikainen.<\/p>\n \u201cWe will eventually be in situation where we just can’t possibly add more to the game, it’s not yet, we have Parklife going up now,\u201d which adds more options for parks, zoos and nature reserves, \u201cbut we’re not going to be able to do this forever, it’s still ongoing development, the game is now 3 years old, we hope to go on a couple of more.\u201d<\/p>\n COHERENT WORLDS<\/strong><\/p>\n All that extra content allows Cities: Skylines to offer an increasingly varied and realistic rendering of the modern city. And creating something believable and coherent is where Dobrev feels the whole strategy genre is headed.<\/p>\n \u201cBefore they were kind of gamey, they would get away with these weird things. For example a game like Civilization would be very hard to launch now because it’s abstract with its rules. Maybe you start playing as the Americans \u2013 but you have Abraham Lincoln in 2000 B.C. \u2013 and that’s something that\u2019s hard to pull off now.\u201d<\/p>\n He explains that the games themes and metaphors must be much more closely aligned to the subject matter. With worlds that fit neatly with the mechanics of the game, as they do in Surviving Mars and Frostpunk \u2013 even if they are to varying degrees fantastical settings.<\/p>\n \u201cEssentially you’re getting much more coherence of games around the themes that they are exploring and much more true to their core metaphors.\u201d<\/p>\n CONSOLE-ATION PRIZE<\/strong><\/p>\n Surviving Mars is unusual in that it launched simultaneously on console platforms as well as on PC. And it\u2019s not alone in this respect, with Frostpunk also coming to console in the future, and ports of Cities: Skylines also available.<\/p>\n \u201cYou know back ten years ago I was trying to sell the idea for a city builder for a console,\u201d Dobrev recalls. \u201cAnd everyone was like ‘there are no city builders for console’.\u201d<\/p>\n That\u2019s now changing, for numerous reasons. The higher resolution and larger screen sizes of modern TVs help. As does the relatively higher power and PC architecture of modern consoles. As Dobrev explains, their game targets PCs with a lower specification than the typical current-gen console anyway. <\/p>\n And Haemimont considered everything from the ground up for Surviving Mars. From \u201csimple stuff like the size of the fonts in the UI\u201d to quality of life improvements for controller users, be they on console or PC, such as making sure it\u2019s easy to select all the elements onscreen and in the UI.<\/p>\n Console gamers are more varied than before too. \u201cI think something is happening with the console audience. It\u2019s not just players who want this action type of gameplay, this is just a very versatile platform that you can play a variety of games. It’s nice to sit on your couch and relax and play the game.\u201d<\/p>\n And with backward-compatibility looking likely to become more common, titles with a relatively niche appeal can sell digitally well beyond their original target platforms lifespan.<\/p>\n Console is also a space that Cities: Skylines has long taken advantage of, although the small PC team doesn\u2019t have the capacity to take on the other versions, which are handled by publisher Paradox. \u201cThe passion is focusing on the PC experience, but I do see the value in the ports for console. I was really please when I tried the Xbox version,\u201d says Hallikainen.<\/p>\n Still the number of titles is limited: \u201cThere is a very small selection of such games on consoles. So I say that’s a good market,\u201d Dobrev tells us. \u201cWe’re very very happy with how the game is doing on consoles.\u201d<\/p>\n BUILD IT AND THEY WILL COME<\/strong><\/p>\n So there\u2019s a suburb\u2019s worth of keen developers making the city-builder their own. As well as the game\u2019s mentioned here there\u2019s close relations such as Frontier Development\u2019s Jurassic World: Evolution, Prison Architect and even Northgard, player love to build things and there are increasingly varied and wonderful worlds in which to build them. The future is bright, the future is building.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Surviving Mars and the long-running Cities Skylines are both selling faster than a new-build semi in the southeast, so is the city-building genre having a renaissance?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":22894,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1349],"tags":[2976,1374,1371,2975],"class_list":["post-22893","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","","category-development-news","tag-city-builders","tag-develop-newsletter-lead","tag-mcv-newsletter-lead","tag-paradox"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/mcvuk.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/cxiwtpw9bppyeqwwref2w-650-80.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mcvuk.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22893","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mcvuk.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mcvuk.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mcvuk.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mcvuk.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22893"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mcvuk.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22893\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29159,"href":"https:\/\/mcvuk.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22893\/revisions\/29159"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mcvuk.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22894"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mcvuk.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mcvuk.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mcvuk.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}