Upcoming Birthday & State of Asset Editor and Console

[Cities: Skylines Official]

Wrapping up our World Tour & Looking Ahead

We’ve just released our eighth and final Region Pack, marking the last stop on our world tour – for now at least! While we still have a few travel tips to share and a contest to conclude, our final stop in the Northeast USA concludes this series. Over the past months, 31 talented creators have worked hard to bring you assets from all corners of the world, and it’s been incredible to see the creativity these packs have inspired. Thank you for joining us on this trip around the globe!

As we wrap up this journey, we’re looking ahead. Our birthday is just around the corner and we have a little something for our players to look forward to. But with that in mind, we want to provide a brief update on the status of the console version and Asset Editor for Cities: Skylines II – you’ll find more details below.

For now, thank you for being part of this journey; we can’t wait to celebrate 10 incredible years of Cities with you – so be sure to tune in on March 10th!

/ The Cities: Skylines Team

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Console
We continue to make steady progress on the console version, and our core focus has been on further improving performance and stability. However, despite these advancements, we have more things we need to address before we reach the level of quality and the experience we want for you as our players.

We know many of you are eagerly awaiting the console release, but to set expectations clearly: we will not have a release before summer. We want to avoid any premature estimates and instead commit to providing you with reliable information when we’re closer to a launch-ready state.

Our goal remains unchanged: to bring Cities: Skylines II to console in the best possible shape.

Asset Editor
The implementation of the Asset Editor has proven more technically challenging than initially anticipated due to the hefty amounts of built-in assets affected by the changes, but it is moving forward. Our focus is currently on removing Unity dependencies so we can provide a smoother, more responsive, and more reliable loading of the assets - both during loading screens and when changing playsets in Paradox Mods UI. Without this, the game freezes for extended periods of time and can become unstable. We want to support subscriptions to large amounts of assets with minimal performance side effects.
We are also making the importing and baking of assets more asynchronous to reduce identifier conflicts with serialization. Assets created on different machines can easily cause these, resulting in the game getting confused about what assets it is actually trying to load.

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Rest assured that we’re committed to solving these challenges, and our dedicated team is actively making progress to overcome them. We know how much custom assets mean to you and, honestly, to us, too, and we will continue to keep you informed of our progress as soon as we have something more concrete to share.

We appreciate your patience and enthusiasm, and we will share more updates as we continue shaping the future of Cities: Skylines together. Stay tuned and we’ll be back next week with our anniversary celebration!

 

[hello box]

 

[eduardobenedi]

Just like you said that the console launch won't happen before summer, can you give us any guidance for the asset editor?
On the other hand, I'm glad that work is being done to make the game run more smoothly and with plans for the future.

 

[edx173]

Weren't you supposed to launch an expansion (ports and bridges) in the first quarter of the year, or is that too going to be delayed? I do not understand the policy of giving as little information as possible.

 

[Spyheros34]

WE LOVE YOU PARADOX

 

[NichEvs]

Weren't you supposed to launch an expansion (ports and bridges) in the first quarter of the year, or is that too going to be delayed? I do not understand the policy of giving as little information as possible.

It might be delayed hopefully as it means more time for fixing CS2 bugs and maybe making the DLC better long term

 

[edx173]

It might be delayed hopefully as it means more time for fixing CS2 bugs and maybe making the DLC better long term

The problem is that they've been trying to fix the game for more than a year, and the ones that are left....

 

[NichEvs]

Are what??
What's left?

 

[UsmanSyed]

I don't want to sound rude or anything like that, but I don't see console release happening this year.

 

[ToudCS]

Thanks for the update. Please be more active on the forum with us

 

[NichEvs]

I don't want to sound rude or anything like that, but I don't see console release happening this year.

Probably add the DLC into the list, for good measure

 

[Victorhgoli]

Will we have a new game update patch by the anniversary?

 

[Sacavain]

I appreciate the information provided. It's always better than months of silence.
Of course, it would be nice to have an end in sight regarding this feature that was supposed to come soon after release but hey, if it was as simple as flipping a switch, it would have been done already.

While I don't doubt the resolve of CO to bring this feature alive, I truly hope there will be enough player to enjoy it in the end.
Good luck!

 

[Angius]

Guys, I don't think asset editor will be done by the anniversary...

Glad we got some communication at least, but it's not quite what I was hoping for. It's basically just a reiteration of "sometime in the future ig, dunno when ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"

 

[Arathir]

Weren't you supposed to launch an expansion (ports and bridges) in the first quarter of the year, or is that too going to be delayed? I do not understand the policy of giving as little information as possible.

On Steam, the release date was set to Q2 2025 last September (Sept 17, 2024, according to SteamDB) so I assume it is still planned for Q2

 

[empiiey]

Weren't you supposed to launch an expansion (ports and bridges) in the first quarter of the year, or is that too going to be delayed? I do not understand the policy of giving as little information as possible.

That was delayed a long time ago to the second quarter of 2025

 

[stumpy2233]

My question is why, going forward, should I play this game?

It's still a bit janky and frustrating. It's obviously not in a place I enjoy and the asset editor was a massive decoration tool that I used in the original and this just isn't up to scratch.

I want to love this game. I want it to be successful. Hell, I'd love a Hello Games NMS resurrection where it becomes incredible.

But right now I regret spending my money and I won't spend anymore, on this or other Paradox games because its just not a good game still.

 

[Rell419]

So I'm curious, how is the progress on console, ie. is it 70% up to standards etc, just would like a bit more detail on its progress that's all

 

[Civ5rako]

tldr: this has to be a joke.

We’ve just released our eighth and final Region Pack, marking the last stop on our world tour – for now at least! While we still have a few travel tips to share and a contest to conclude, our final stop in the Northeast USA concludes this series. Over the past months, 31 talented creators have worked hard to bring you assets from all corners of the world, and it’s been incredible to see the creativity these packs have inspired. Thank you for joining us on this trip around the globe!

Great.
But what about fixing those asset packs?
Just to keep you in the loop: the UK pack kills residential demand, the Japan pack causes artifacts all over the map, the last pack (whatever it was) has corrupted building cranes.
8 packs have been released, and 3 of them are faulty. That's quite a margin, don't you think?

For now, thank you for being part of this journey; we can’t wait to celebrate 10 incredible years of Cities with you – so be sure to tune in on March 10th!

Now, I understand that old habits die hard but please spare us that marketing talk, will you?
The last years have NOT been incredible. At least not for buyers of CS2. They are still waiting for a lot of initially promised content, they are facing bugs, strange side effects, crashes and again, corrupted "official" mods (aka asset packs).

Thinking of it again... yes, maybe you are right. To quite some degree that in fact is incredible.

Console
We continue to make steady progress on the console version, and our core focus has been on further improving performance and stability. However, despite these advancements, we have more things we need to address before we reach the level of quality and the experience we want for you as our players.

Let me translate that into English: "We have more things we need to address before we can dare selling it."

Asset Editor
The implementation of the Asset Editor has proven more technically challenging than initially anticipated due to the hefty amounts of built-in assets affected by the changes, but it is moving forward. Our focus is currently on removing Unity dependencies so we can provide a smoother, more responsive, and more reliable loading of the assets - both during loading screens and when changing playsets in Paradox Mods UI. Without this, the game freezes for extended periods of time and can become unstable. We want to support subscriptions to large amounts of assets with minimal performance side effects.
We are also making the importing and baking of assets more asynchronous to reduce identifier conflicts with serialization. Assets created on different machines can easily cause these, resulting in the game getting confused about what assets it is actually trying to load.

So, the asset editor is still in a state in which you cannot give any timeline?
How long do you expect players to wait for something they have been promised to get literally years ago already?

We appreciate your patience and enthusiasm, and we will share more updates as we continue shaping the future of Cities: Skylines together.

Very nice that you have put that even in bold.
It doesn't help the ones who don't see much of a future for CS2 though.

 

[jddoesgaming]

I think fixing the issues they're describing with the asset editor before releasing it is a good thing actually. The freezing issue they're talking about is apparent with the region packs and doesn't actually have anything to do with the editor itself. Imagine they released the editor, people start using it, and then oops! We have to break all the assets because things load badly. It would be an absolute catastrophe. It sounds like they have to refactor every asset that's been released thus far, likely including the thousands of region pack assets. Obviously, it's another tick in the "game released too early" box, but it is actually disaster averted as the issue would just continue to snowball even with officially released content.

As for console, I am firmly of the belief that trying to build out the console and PC version at the same time is why we're in this mess in the first place as the attention was too divided.

Anyway, I thank the CO team for their openness and update and look forward to more of them.