Cities: Skylines 2 is set to add overwhelming amounts of realism to the title, and just yesterday Paradox Interactive revealed some of those specific features coming.
In an ongoing series of videos from Paradox Interactive teasing some of the new features to Cities 2, the video posted yesterday highlighted some crucial city services that help contribute to a thriving city. Telecom infrastructure is a brand new service that will be vital to boosting a city’s economy, along with increasing growth and expansion. However, outages can strike at any given time causing full-scale blackouts, negatively affecting the economy, and driving citizens to move out. It’s incumbent on the player to intervene as soon as possible to alleviate the situation and its negative impacts.
Other city services that have been expanded upon in Cities 2 include garbage disposal, where players can set a zoned area for a landfill to pile up. Previously, in Cities: Skylines, garbage dumps simply acted as a placable building service, where garbage naturally accumulated to the surrounding area of the garbage dump.
Another addition to Cities: Skylines 2 is upgradable buildings. As noted in the video, Cities: Skylines simply required players to plop down the same building such as a school or hospital to increase the coverage and availability of the respective service. This has been largely ditched in Cities 2, where schools, hospitals, police stations, and more can all be upgraded and expanded upon. The feature seems to be taken right from the playbook of 2013’s SimCity which utilized upgradable buildings as a key role in a city’s growth— Cities: Skylines successfully took the place of the failed SimCity reboot within the city building genre.
Alongside today’s video overview of some of the new features, came a lengthier blog post from Paradox Interactive outlining even more specific city services. Some other new services include a fire watch tower, emergency shelters, a prison along with prison labor, administrative offices, and postal services.
Paradox Interactive has been revealing more content and improvements that’ll be coming to Cities: Skylines 2, each week. Much more content is yet to be revealed, only increasing the hype for the sequel to one of the best city builders out there.
Cities: Skylines 2 is set to release October 24th, 2023 on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S.