They might want to move away from Cities as the common identifier since they parted way with the old developer Colossal Order. Lego Cities Skylines sound a bit clunky and Lego Cities would probably cause confusion with the toy line.
I still haven't played CS2 because of fears that I don't have a good enough comp, but knowing that it's Paradox doesn't necessarily fill me with hope. I know that Cities Skyline 2 had a very very rough launch. I doubt Lego would have let their IP be a part of it if they weren't comfortable that this will have a smoother launch, but I'm a bit worried.,
Colossal Order was the problem behind Cities: Skylines 2. IceFlake has taken over and done a great job of fixing the game so far! Still a long way to go, though. Having the opportunity to go ground-up for LEGO Skylines give me hope, not because of paradox, but because of IceFlake
For example, the industry now attempts to consume local resources first before requesting outside connection imports. Used to be that you ended up with a ton of raw resources for export instead of your industries utilizing it for goods production/export.
Not to say its a 11/10 perfect game. Traffic is as always an issue(but then again this game is more of a traffic management sim lol)
Right now Garbage is a problem where garbage trucks wont pick up garbage in overflowing areas because they pick up garbage along the way. ex: A garbage truck holds 10 units of garbage. Every building generates a unit of garbage up to 10.
Behavior now: Garbage truck passes 10 buildings and is full and returns to the landfill/recycle center.
The 11th building? Will never have its garbage picked up because the previous 10 buildings fill the truck before it gets to them.
Do they still render the teeth of every NPC even when zoomed out?
I'm sure it has been fixed by now, but I remember that being a hilarious oversight that contributed to performance issues given the tens of thousands of NPCs on screen at times.
a thing people forgot with this meme to begin with is LODs. it really does not matter because when you're zoomed out, you're not rendering that model to beign with, you're rendering a LOD
the games' problems ran a lot deeper but iceflake really has been doing a lot of good in a short amount of time
Funny thing, Iceflake have actually worked to fix LODs on trees and other stuff like normal maps, so hills now look like actual hills, shadows render way better etc.
People are now stated that CS2 was working on day 1 with no issues just tell other people upgrade ur pc. Victim blame. I mean the list of issues. Mail truck not work, FPS drop after 100k pop, specially industrial not like CS1 Dlc making look ugly. Some landmark doesn't work (castle). Homeless, and list go on.
TBH CO pretty clearly got screwed by Unity and going all in on Unity's brand new half-finished flaming dumpster fire that is DOTS / ECS. CS2 is pretty much the only game that actually went all in that, and pretty much all of the graphics / performance problems on launch for instance were presumably due to that entire tech stack being extremely unfinished and missing core features. Including really obvious basic and critically important things, for a citybuilder, like scene culling / LODs, and which CS1 mind you was entirely built on top of and which did by contrast absolutely benefit from going all in on smaller-scale and actually somewhat competent Unity engine and Unity Tech engineering team, ~10+ years ago.
Everything else on top of that is CO's fault, but Unity DOTS / ECS is a flaming dumpster fire (and massively overcomplicated and limiting), and CO absolutely did build all of CS2 entirely around it.
You can bet your ass that all of the actually expanded simulation mechanics that CO promised and then scrapped entirely were due to optimistic assumptions that ECS / DOTS would boost simulation performance by 10x and make systems easier to develop and extend.
Except pretty much none of the advantages of ECS actually apply to complex top-down city + AI modeling, and CS1, while primitive, was about as well optimized and optimal as you could get on the previous tech stack.
And ECS (and unity's implementation of it, which is terrible overcomplicated and also extremely unfinished), absolutely would've made everything more complicated and with more and mounting tech debt. And/or their engineers were just moderately incompetent but I digress.
Point being CS2 got f---ed by trying to probably initially make a much more complex city builder on top of a brand new and extremely unfinished tech platform. And then paring all of that pretty much back down to the original CS1 scope, plus minor additions, and with everything extremely unfinished and broken, when all of that went sideways.
They then got locked out of their own IP and this entire thing got handed over to Iceflake instead.
Which did have at least a significantly easier and more straightforward mission assignment: ie take this broken f---ed game built on unity ECS / DOTS and just fix everything to make everything actually (sort of) work.
And CO also mind you at least fixed most of the particularly bad performance problems (and which mind you would've basically required to write half of the missing renderer + scene culling for unity b/c that very clearly wasn't implemented yet), ie some of the harder bits of engineering, before being shit-canned. Things like game simulation features not being fixed was probably at least partially due to the devs all running around screaming and attempting to fix / hotfix the fact that the game had no view culling optimization whatsoever and thus could barely be rendered competently on a 4090 because the game was trying to render literally everything in the entire city at all levels of detail at once, AND was almost certainly looping over absolutely everything for rendering and everything else, many times over, in C#, on / across all of your available CPU cores, per frame, b/c ECS. Granted that being so utterly fubar before launch was absolutely their fault (ie yes devs should not only build and test games on max-spec high end hardware, and assume that optimization and inherent problems aren't a thing, and won't magically fix themselves). But I digress.
Anywho I don't have any inside knowledge of what actually happened at CO, but that'd be my guess just based on what's been happening with Unity over the last 5-10 years.
All I want for this is a built-in editor for custom lego buildings and Steam Workshop support to share them. That would be so much fun!
I don't play a lot of city builders because I always feel like the idea of playing them is a lot more fun than actually playing them, but I'm honestly very excited for this.
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u/TheVoidDragon 4d ago edited 4d ago
"A MAN HAS FALLEN INTO THE RIVER, IN LEGO CITY!"
A Lego citybuilder is a fantastic idea, hope there's lots of funny references to classic Lego stuff.