Cities Skylines 2: When Does It Release?

One of the most successful city building games of all time is finally getting its successor - Cities: Skylines II. Paradox Interactive summons the next age of city building simulations with a beautiful trailer. Check it out yourself:

But beware: This is not yet a gameplay trailer. Therefore, anything you see in this announcement could possibly be missing in the final game. Nevertheless, after all these years and dozens of DLCs, the wish lists of city building simulation fans are finally getting some movement again. In the trailer, Colossal Order mentions the release period of the game:

Cities: Skylines II will be released on PC on October 24, 2023. The release for PlayStation and Xbox has been postponed to spring 2024.

But what was it like in 2015, when C:S was released for the first time? Here you can re-watch the release trailer from 2015 for comparison:

Which Features Absolutely Have to be Included?

The expectations for Cities: Skylines II are of course extremely high. The success of the first part will make it even more difficult for part 2 to be accepted and played by the community.

There are now dozens of DLCs, thousands of mods and assets for part 1. And of course the players would like to see many of these modded features in the sequel. That is why it is extremely difficult for Colossal Order not to disappoint with C:S 2. So the developers have a mammoth task ahead of them.

Here are some features that the community has been asking for for years:

Multiplayer

Even if I don't want to praise SimCity 5, but this game had one thing: Multiplayer gameplay. In large regions, you and your friends could build several cities and let them trade and interact with each other.

In my opinion, this feature is absolutely necessary in Cities: Skylines 2 in order not to disappoint the community upfront.

Modular Service- and Industrial Buildings

I'll come back to SimCity 5 one last time, because EAs city building game is also one step ahead in this area. So I would like to briefly remind you again: In SC 5, modular police stations, schools, industrial buildings and so on were absolutely standard.

Meanwhile, in Cities: Skylines you always have to place one specific building, and five of them. That's why modular buildings are a heart's desire of the C:S community.

Changing Seasons

This feature was already clearly shown in the trailer. There you can see a city that alternates between spring, summer, autumn and winter as it develops. The changing seasons are to be expected in any case.

In the first part of Cities: Skylines, winter was only available via DLC. But that was it. The season only changed once you loaded a completely different city on a regular map. Winter maps remained exclusively frosty cold.

Road Editor Directly in the Game

Of course in C:S it is possible to place different roads. But quickly converting a lane of a road into an exclusive bus or bike lane was only possible via a corresponding, different street.

Especially in the individuality of the road design, the player was usually limited to existing DLCs and the workshop.

Better Automatic Road Markings and Real Acceleration Lanes

Here I come to talk about some mods, which in combination have led to realistic intersections. And this is simply not possible in C:S Vanilla (without mods)!

With these mods it is possible to adjust the course of the lanes as you wish, to move intersections, to provide them with additional road markings and much more.

These game changing mods include:

• Traffic Manager: President Edition
• Intersection Marking Tool
• Node Controller
• Network Multitool
• Move it

Planning Mode for Roads and Buildings

Yes, planning is actually part of urban development. However, there was never a blueprint mode in the first part of Cities: Skylines. But that would save players quite a bit of demolish-and-rebuild and a lot of ingame dollars.

The blueprint mode is definitely one of the easier features to implement and therefore a must in C:S 2!

As soon as there is something new about Cities: Skylines II, you will of course find out about it on Number13. So check back soon ;)