The Way Forward, an update from the team behind Cities: Skylines

[Cities: Skylines Official]

Dear Cities fans,

We see and understand the disappointment many of you have expressed after the release of Cities: Skylines II and the recent release of Beach Properties. We asked for your patience and support, and you’ve shown those. In return, we let you down. We thought we could make up for the shortcomings of the game in a timeframe that was unrealistic, and rushed out a DLC that should not have been published in its current form. For all this, we are truly sorry. When we’ve made statements like this one before, it’s included a pledge to keep making improvements, and while we are working on these updates, they haven’t happened at a speed or magnitude that is acceptable, and it pains us that we've now lost the trust of many of you. We want to do better.

The very first thing we’re doing is to compensate those who purchased Beach Properties. We will change the pack to be a free addition to the game, refund it to the extent possible, and provide additional content within the Ultimate Edition. Unfortunately, it will not be possible to offer refunds for Ultimate Edition buyers. This is due to the distribution of the Ultimate Edition across digital and physical storefronts, which create significant complexities for executing a partial refund. We realize that this is far from ideal, especially given the dedication those who have stayed with us since launch have shown. We are committed to repaying that loyalty, and therefore, we will compensate Ultimate Edition holders by adding 3 Creator Packs and 3 Radio Stations which, together, sum up to a value of USD 39.99. This solution hopefully ensures that you, regardless of purchase method, feel you receive fair compensation.

Looking ahead, we also want to make immediate and meaningful changes in the way we approach the game’s development and our communication with you. Firstly, this means a complete focus on improving the base game and modding tools, and secondly, we want to better involve you, the community, as we choose our priorities going forward. We will focus on additional free patches and game updates in the coming months before Colossal Order spends time on new paid content, resulting in a move of the Bridges and Ports Expansion to 2025. In addition, the aforementioned Creator Packs are being produced independently, and will not take any focus away from the work on improving the game. To make sure we focus on the right things, we’re putting together an advisory meeting, where a small group of player representatives, together with Colossal Order and Paradox Interactive, will discuss the development plan for this year. The people in this group are chosen for the size of their following within the community to represent as many people as possible. The teams from Colossal Order and Paradox Interactive will provide them with full transparency and answer any questions and critiques voiced. Our hope is that together with you, our community, we can make sure that we do not repeat the same mistakes we have made in the past and bring this game into a bright future.

We also want to address the pending Console release. As you know, our plan was to release in Spring of this year. We have been hesitant to communicate an actual release window because of the uncertainty we are facing, and to not make further promises we might not be able to keep. We have been struggling to get Cities: Skylines II to the necessary level of optimization for a console release, but are now hopeful that an upcoming build delivery in April will demonstrate sufficient progress for us to progress with a release candidate, and then a release build targeted for October. Before we have seen and evaluated the progress made in these builds however, we will not be able to confirm the release date, and even then, some uncertainty always remains. Our ambition is to deliver the experience that you all deserved at launch, but it will take time. It’s important to note that the team working on the console release operates separately from our PC development team, so it will be progressing without splitting our focus or time.

In closing, we want to reaffirm our dedication to making Cities: Skylines II the best city builder it can be. We appreciate your support and feedback, and hope we can regain your trust going forward. It’s our responsibility to earn it, and we hope these actions are a first step in the right direction.
We are deeply grateful for your continued passion for our game. Please stay tuned for further updates on the game and the refund process, and thank you for being a part of our community.

Sincerely,
Mariina Hallikainen
CEO, Colossal Order

Mattias Lilja
Deputy CEO, Paradox Interactive

---

We have created an FAQ Page with information on how your refunds will be processed and further information about release timelines.

 

[Cities: Skylines Official]

That;s cool and all-but while "content creators" may be the front facing ambassadors of the game, they tend to have very high end systems and their play style is generally made for an audience, and might not be the PC system, play style or city goals that individual players might do when they fire up the game. Please consider that.

That is something that we will continue to think about, thanks for bringing it up!

 

[SimNationJan]

Focusing on the fleshing out the base game, including modding tools. Thank you. Concerning the ultimate edition, is that 3 extra content packs & radios on top of the 2 included? So 5 packs & 5 stations altogether?

Yes the new Content Creator Packs are a replacement for Beach Properties, and are separate from the ones already announced as part of Ultimate Edition

 

[Cities: Skylines Official]

Focusing on the fleshing out the base game, including modding tools. Thank you. Concerning the ultimate edition, is that 3 extra content packs & radios on top of the 2 included? So 5 packs & 5 stations altogether?

Yes, you're correct, three ADDITIONAL Content Packs and Radio Stations.

 

[Cities: Skylines Official]

I know yall have a lot on your plates already but is there any info on Geforce Now users? Can't use code mods still, and i keep saying it would be great if we could upload screenshots taken with the screenshot tool through pdx mods or something. Considering the requirements for running this game, I can only really practically play on geforce now, and I think there are a lot of us out there with mid/low range pcs who would appreciate some consideration paid to this platform. Just want to say that, despite its problems, Steam workshop does work on geforce now.

We have been working with Nvidia to work towards a solution for this, we would love to see mods on GFN! While we can't provide any update on this at the moment, know that we want to make it happen!

 

[Cities: Skylines Official]

First step in making immediate and meaningful changes to your communication with us the community is increasing dev visibility and engagement on the forum.
-Current thread posts: 182
-Current thread dev responses: 3
Your devs are currently replying to less than 2% of posts? Does not seem to be very immediate or meaningful to me.

While most of the comments under the thread have not yet received an answer, we are liking and will answer some more as more questions have come in during the night and during Friday!

Lastly I would just like to leave you on this note. You announce that "We will change the Beach Properties pack to be a free addition to the game". You could have done this already and made the announcement with the change going live at the same time. Missed opportunity and the community doesn't even have a date of when it will be made free to play.

We would have loved to be able to do this, and it takes a longer time than most would guess to be able to send out an update, and we thought it was important to announce the updated timeline and inform about our decision on the refund ASAP.

 

[Cities: Skylines Official]

? Will the next creator packs (including those given in compensation) have a similar content/price ratio than Beach Properties? If so, it's true that 39.99 is probably overpriced. 19.99 would be ideal, 29.99 understandable. 39.99 feels like too much (as other people said, with that you can buy a full game). Howether if they include more content than Beach Properties, then it could be great.

We haven't announced the Creator Packs content yet or their price; we think, and hope that you will agree when we are able to announce it, that you will feel it is fair compensation.

? Speaking of those creator packs, will you stop to advertise different levels of the same asset as multiple assets? This felt particularly misleading to a lot of us, so I strongly hope it was the last time.

This is how we count the amount of assets since they are technically different in their values and their visual appearance with different props and surfaces. While this is unlikely to change, we can strive to clarify what we mean by that in the future!

? I strongly hope Paradox & CO will not try to use the Advisory Meeting as PR by trying to control the narrative or censoring free speech from players representatives. If it becomes just another marketing tool, a lot of players, myself included, will most likely be disapointed again. We expect honesty and transparency.

? Please no professional influencers as "players representatives". It's not a matter of who exactly, Biffa, CPP or whoever would be more or less the same. Please choose actual players, not youtubers.

So do we! The aim is not to use them "as PR", but to make both them and the community feel more seen and listened to by having more representation that's able to speak directly to the team. We will not exclude large influencers when we feel that they have great opportunities to collect so much feedback from their community, but that does not mean that we will only have influencers on this panel. The comments about this have proven that that is something that the community wants, and we will work on trying to facilitate this.

? Can we expect more engagement from CO on bug reports and suggestions threads?

While CO is hard at work and doesn't have the ability to interact as much as they used to on the forums, we've recently (like this week) set up a process that should allow for much more interaction than there currently is!

? When can we expect the next free patch/update? (no need for an exact date if you don't have one, but an estimation would be great)

As mentioned in the FAQ, we have the next update in about two weeks!

? Will you stop adding trees and other map-detailing resources to the next Creator Packs? A lot of people have clearly expressed why this is a problem, and would appreciate to know if you understand and agree

In the past (for Cities: Skylines(1)), we have always added the trees to the free update alongside the Creator Packs, and we have noticed that this is something that we should continue with.

? Following the "no beach" drama, will the game include proper beaches someday? If so, is this already planned or not yet?

That is not something that we can share, but we will be much more clear in our marketing what future Asset Packs will include and what they wont include.

? And while I'm at it, any hint on a estimation for bikes and stairs?

Also not something that we can share, but we can share that bikes are high up on the list of features we'd like to add!

 

[Cities: Skylines Official]

And I still see no mention of an expected timeframe or even effort to include modern upscaling methods in the still heaviest to run game I have ever seen. Is that altogether abandoned?

Not abandoned at all, we're working with this internally and with our partners to try to use all available optimization opportunities!

 

[Cities: Skylines Official]

Finally taking some responsibility, pushing DLC and putting focus on fixing the base game! This is what players want to see. I've said it since the release, this game needs 6 to 12 more months development time at minimum.

But wow, the technical side/ code and optimization issues must be insanely bad! They didn't use the word, but basically what we have here is going back to a EA situation. It's still up in the air how CS:2 will turn out but this step could possibly save the game. But oh boy, does CO have their work cut out for them!

@CO & PD: You've talked the talk. Now I hope you can walk the walk.

We will walk our walkiest!

 

[Cities: Skylines Official]

Humble suggestion for which YouTuber select for the brainstorming meeting (not sponsoring CS2 and dropped as soon as it was not playable, but however with vast experience on many city buildings games which may bring fresh air):

- IlGattoSulTubo
https://m.twitch.tv/ilgattosultubo https://youtube.com/@ilGattoSulTubo?si=bi3Q5jB-k6R-c90J

- ParliamodiVideogiochi

Parliamo di Videogiochi

Benvenuti su PARLIAMO DI VIDEOGIOCHI, che si parli di Giochi da Sala anni 70 o Realtà Virtuale, che si trattino Giochi Seri o Giochi Brutti, il videogioco è bello e va esplorato in ogni sua forma e aspetto!

youtube.com

Thank you!

It's always harder for us to find creators outside of the languages we speak, so thanks for this!

 

[Cities: Skylines Official]

I and others do appreciate the transparency shown finally. However, having been a console edition ultimate early access purchaser who wasn't offered any compensation for the handling of the release, I'm finding the offer of free DLCs a bit of a kick in the teeth. Unless of course it is going to also apply to the console community when you finally do get it released, which I think we deserve at least!

The three Creator Packs and three Radio Stations will be made available for all Ultimate Edition owners, the console included.

 

[Cities: Skylines Official]

Now we need more mods to show up like the traffic lights that for me are essential (which were in Thunderstorm mods) and the core game being balanced and fixed.

While we can't make mod creators upload their mods to PDXMods, we have seen many mods transferred there from Thunderstorm. Hopefully, all your faves will arrive one day!

 

[Cities: Skylines Official]

Also, why do we now have a new "Cities Skylines Official" account, replacing the dead silent co_avanya and co_martsu Colossal Order accounts. This new account, users cant view the message history to easily see official responses given to the community? Its been disabled, any other user account on these forums has this enabled by default, why?

Those are the personal accounts of CO employees, and this is the collaborative account for the Cities team. We will look into why you're unable to see our message history and fix that ASAP!

 

[Cities: Skylines Official]

How about the Region pack?
Can it be also count as the Content Creator Packs

The region packs are not the same as Content Packs. The region packs are awaiting the Asset Editor and will then be made public (for free as promised of course) on PDXMods.

 

[co_avanya]

Hi everyone! I just wanted to pop in and address a few points that I can answer.

CO activity on the forum
Our focus is and has always been game development, which means the vast majority of our team work directly on the game. Our "community team" consists of Mariina, our CEO, Emmi, our producer, and me, the community manager (yes, we just have me on the CO side of things ^^). Mariina and Emmi have been fully focused on making sure development is as smooth as possible, while I've been digging into all the great feedback you have shared with us. With me as our only full-time community team member, we've prioritized making sure we understand and keep track of the feedback (both positive and negative) that you have shared as it's so incredibly helpful and valuable to our process.

Feedback
This leads me to concerns that the advisory meeting could lead to us only considering feedback from a narrow playstyle or group. While I can't promise we don't miss anything, I can assure you that we go through a lot of feedback from this forum, our social media channels, YouTube videos (and not just the largest creators), reddit, our modding beta group, and emails we receive. And on top of what we collect ourselves, the community team at Paradox shares valuable feedback they come across on their channels. I'm excited to see what the advisory meeting leads to, but whether we get confirmation that feedback we have already received is important, or new valuable points are raised, I'm sure it will help us understand what is important for your enjoyment of the game.

So while I haven't been replying much lately, I have been lurking and will continue to do so, popping in to answer questions when I can. ^^

 

[co_avanya]

Is there a reason why we went days with the early-posted refund post with people theorizing rampantly about what was going on and whether it was real or a hoax or if the forums had been compromised instead of just having someone from PDX or CO pop in and say "Don't worry, it's nothing malicious, we'll have an announcement later this week"?

We don't comment on leaks, real or fake, and I imagine that Paradox has a similar policy. If a leak happens, it's usually information that isn't ready to be shared with the public. Maybe everyone who needs to approve it hasn't done so yet, maybe there are still uncertainties about the details that need to be determined. There can be a lot of reasons why, and those reasons usually also mean we can't comment on something until all boxes are ticked. For fake leaks, we don't comment as that would have the same effect as confirming the real ones.

As I work for Colossal Order I can't comment on what policies Paradox has in case of malicious activity and at what point they'd caution you, but as a general rule of thumb, if you are the least bit uncertain about any email containing links, always go to the main site itself and navigate to where the content would be.

As a software engineer I am still mystified why we still don't have the assets we were promised from the creators that Colossal Order is directly working with. (E.g., the region packs) I well know that it can take a long time before enough bugs are ironed out to release a piece of software for public use, but I see no reason that an alpha release couldn't have been thrown together rather quickly. They must have had some sort of pipeline for getting asset files from the artists they employ into the build system for integration with the game code before initial release. I understand that such a pipeline for internal use may be very janky and unsuitable for any external use, but slapping together a website for a small number of trusted users to send files to Colossal Order for import into the game can't be more than a couple weeks development time for a single developer. What on Earth is the hold-up?

The short explanation is that the Editor needs to import and package asset files in a way that does not require having Unity installed and access to the project itself, and the file format needs to be future-proof so assets created with the Editor are functional down the line too. As the Region Packs are to be released on Paradox Mods, they need this before they can released, while we can directly implement assets for DLCs.

While working on the asset import and saving, we've encountered some frustrating technical issues, that have caused the work to take significantly longer than we had expected.

Hi Mariina!

Thanks for the update. I've been quite patient with CO regarding the CS2 release. I am not as unsatisfied as other people are, but I understand that a lot of people have problems with the game and I don't want to discount anyone's concerns. That being said, I do have one request. Many of us have been making assets in preparation for assets to finally be able to be loaded into the game. I know that there are some guidelines around asset creation on the wiki, but I was wondering if it would be able to get more detailed information about asset creation and expectations around our models. Or release asset creators who have been working closely with CO for CCPs and the regional asset packs from their NDAs (or at least portions of the NDA specifically regarding asset creation) so they are free to discuss asset creation with the rest of the community.

I know there are a lot of us who are ready to pull the trigger as soon as asset importing is available, and it would make the process a lot smoother for those of us who aren't in the beta if we were able to get more information.

Could you elaborate on what information is missing/wanted from the guidelines? I'd be happy to look into what else we can share from our side. As for the creators we work more closely with, they're already allowed to share tips or guidance on how to create assets for Cities: Skylines II, though I of course cannot comment on how much time they might have to do so.

 

[co_avanya]

This is extremely unprofessional (not you personally, but as a response from a company). The security of your customers is your responsibility. This is extremely disappointing.

EDIT: You are basically telling customers to classify any e-mail from your company as spam, as you are not guaranteeing the integrity of your platform, and it may be used to spread malware or phishing attacks. If enough people using clients such as Gmail and Outlook classify you as spam, their algorithms will catch up, and none of your e-mails will reach a customer again. This is a terrible, terrible practice.

EDIT2: please like here https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/serious-concern-about-forum-security.1669634/ this is a serious security concern for every forum user.

You will not get emails from Colossal Order (that would be something@colossalorder.fi btw) unless you have reached out to us through email. We don't have any automated notifications that you can sign up for, so if you do indeed receive an email from us unprompted, then yes, you should treat it with caution because that would be extremely unlikely to happen. This is of course different with Paradox, but as I do not work for them, I cannot answer for them.

Hi Avanya,

It looks like there has been even more information added to the wiki since I last checked. I guess one of my main gripes with the wiki is specified triangle counts. For zoned assets, it says triangles can be anywhere from 3000-95000 tris. That's obviously very broad. Can we maybe get more examples of specific triangle counts for zoned assets? Like typical tris for level 5 low residential? Typical tris for level 5 office, etc. I've been modeling some low-density residential assets to be added as soon as asset importing becomes available, but want to know like typical tris counts to make sure I'm not going over, or possible if I can even add more tris. I'm being very conservative right now with my modeling because I don't want to overdo it, but having more info about it would be helpful.

I'll look into adding some examples to the wiki, but for low density residential I believe our models average around 8000 triangles and we tried to avoid going over 15000 triangles for the most complex ones. Complexity of course depends on the style of buildings you're making - some architectural styles naturally result in lower or higher triangle counts, but as a general rule of thumb, we recommend having most of the buildings in a zone type around the same average with a few high or low outliers. I hope that helps for now.

Can you elaborate why CO didn’t want to just patch the content creators packs in the game, since this was promised coming soon in the release week. Especially given the fact that asset variety is still a big problem for the community in the game.

Wouldn’t an exception for these packs have been much better for the game, the players and the community as a whole. They are free anyway. That way there would have been a lot less pressure for the mod platform and asset editor as well

This sounds like a big missed opportunity. With the beach properties you showed that patching assets in the game is a possibility. So I am wondering why you didn’t do that for the asset packs. That was low hanging fruit.

The contracts are between the creators and Paradox, so I can't comment on whether they would allow for such a change. I imagine that they differ in some ways from the Creator Pack contracts. But if the Region Packs were to be implemented as Creator Packs instead of being released to Paradox Mods, then it would require development time from us. 2500 is not an insignificant amount of assets to implement.

 

[co_avanya]

Thank you for taking the time to answer this question. This raises another question about the 2500 number

Are these the total number of unique growable assets or is the same asset rotated, with an extra balcony or another roof color counted as 1 extra asset everytime?

I am asking this because the marketing for beach DLC was very deceptive with those numbers, making things way larger then it was in reality leading to you know what….

It may be good to set expectations right for the 2500 assets as well, which are for a lot of the community the holy grail and saviour of the game short term.

I don't have that answer sorry. We're not directly involved in the Region Packs, so I'm not sure what has been created (I'm also very curious to see them!), but if I were to make a guess, I'd imagine that the marketing team at Paradox have counted them the same way they counted assets for Beach Properties (and all the DLCs for the original Cities: Skylines for that matter), so I'd set my expectations accordingly. Though I'm sure we'll get some more peeks at what's coming when the asset import is ready.

 

[co_avanya]

Did an e-mail about the game from your company get sent out to people from an official account? (CO vs PDX address is not my problem, it is related to your game, you figure out your internal problems) Was it done by a malicious third party or was it a blunder? I think this is a perfectly legitimate question that deserve a proper answer. If it was malicious this is very concerning, if it was a blunder do say so.

There was no malicious activity, and as far as I know, the email that was sent out is the automated notification you can sign up for by clicking the "Follow" button at the top of the forum. Beyond that, I don't have the answers to what happened or why, sorry!

 

[Cities: Skylines Official]

Is there a reason why we went days with the early-posted refund post with people theorizing rampantly about what was going on and whether it was real or a hoax or if the forums had been compromised instead of just having someone from PDX or CO pop in and say "Don't worry, it's nothing malicious, we'll have an announcement later this week"?

Unfortunately for all of us, it was an email that went out way too early. At the moment we think that it was a technical error on the forum that sent out an early draft of the post. Because of the very technical complexity of the refund procedure, we were still waiting for answers from our partners to post the full announcement. We couldn't confirm that an announcement was coming because of this and chose to neither confirm nor deny.

It's unfortunate that we couldn't still people's minds in the fact that it wasn't malicious, and each day that we had to wait for all of the information that we needed from our partners fanned the flames and caused unnecessary uncertainty and stress.

While we still haven't been able to nail down exactly how it happened, we are looking into the forum backend to hopefully avoid this in the future.