Gallery: How 'Cities: Skylines' aims to dethrone SimCity Gallery Gallery: How 'Cities: Skylines' aims to dethrone SimCity + 14

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Mariina Hallikainen is the CEO of Finnish game studio Colossal Order, developer of transport management sim Cities in Motion. The upcoming Cities: Skylines will see the developer expand that foundation into a full city builder, one targeting hardcore fans of the genre with both an in-depth core game and modding tools released to the community on day one.

Hallikainen speaks with Wired.co.uk on how Skylines lets players control the world, giving the game over to the modding community straight away, and how her team wants to correct the mistakes of the most recent SimCity.


Wired.co.uk: How long has Cities: Skylines been planned?

Mariina Hallikainen: This is something we've wanted to make for a while. We started the company up in 2009, when we worked on the first two Cities in Motion games. We were super-happy doing that but we always wanted to do a big city builder game.

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We're in alpha at the moment, so there's plenty that we're going to improve but we're able to show the basic elements and features.

What makes Skylines stand out from other city builders?


One of the big things in this game is the map size. We want people to be able to build really huge, complex cities with up to a million people living there. You start with a 2x2km map tile, and as you unlock more areas, you can go up to nine of these. The entire area of the land is 5x5 tiles, so you get to choose if you want to follow the river, or maybe go up to the mountains. Nine is the maximum but it gives you variation within the same map. With the map editor you can create your own, so importing a higher-size map is possible.

Because the city can be really, really big, so we wanted you to have the option to name certain districts. The reason you might want to do this is that we have city policies. You get to set those either globally, or to each district [which affects] the gameplay.

You can limit water or power usage, if you want to save energy or fresh water.

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You can also budget each of the city services, for example if you have a lot of tourists coming in, you might want to make the buses run more frequently. The citizens age and the city evolves as you build, giving you a constant challenge that you need to optimise to their needs. For instance, if you have a low density residential area with elementary schools, families are going to move in and be happy there, so you maybe have different policies than in the city centre. If you're the kind of player that just wants to build, that's also possible. You don't have to go deep into those districts and policies, you'd be fine just building the city as you go.


Also, we don't have set goals or requests for the players, other than building the city, making it thrive and having the challenge of a growing city. Depending on the route you take, you get different monuments. These are kind of like in-game achievements, different monuments that measure your success, such as a futuristic stadium.

Cities in Motion was about pure transport management -- how has it been going from that to building up a full, active city?

Basically, we already had the map size and the road building tool. They are pretty much taken from Cities in Motion 2. We'd already transitioned to bigger maps than the first CiM. We had more flexible, not grid-based maps for world building. Adding all the city services in here is a big task to make it well balanced. But at least the traffic parts, which can usually be very, very difficult, we had covered!

City builders live or die on how players can manage the economy -- how will that work in Skylines?

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The economy is all about the tax income. How you play determines what people are willing to pay in taxes. Let's say you're building a city like Abu Dhabi, if their are oil resources on the map, you get a nice income if you favour the oil industry. It might not be making the people who live there extremely happy, but on the other hand they're still working there. For a tourist economy, it's about making your city attractive, increasing the land value, making sure the public transport works so that people can come in. How you'd get money from tourists would be if the high-density commercial areas are doing well, they are more willing to spend.

It comes down to which area are you favouring. Low density residential is for families, they appreciate certain services but as they get older, they start to want healthcare and similar services. There's still a lot of work to be done on that, this is requiring a lot of hours for the balancing and testing!

Can you have disasters affect the city?

Not yet, at least. We're going to have to see. We're putting all our effort into the modding tools and the core features, and hoping that in the future we get to expand from that. We're still a small team, so it's baby steps.

What did you learn from the reaction to the most recent

SimCity as to what the player base wants from city builders?

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Well, we really liked the original 90s games. We used to play these games when we were younger -- the 90s and early 2000s simulation games. It was the same thing with Cities in Motion, we loved Transport Tycoon, and we wanted to bring that kind of game to the modern day. This is a little bit of the same thing. We always wanted to make a city builder. When

SimCity was announced, we were like "OK, that's it, we're never going to be able to do anything with this!" Then, it didn't go exactly as they planned, probably, so we thought "there's still hope!" We don't like to be compared to the newest one; I think we're really like classic, old-school SimCity.

So no online requirements, as that game was criticised for?

No, this is a single player game, as I think it should be. I mean, I don't want anyone coming to MY town! It's all about you being mayor. You'll be able to share your stuff online, so you can still brag about your city, but people can't send you criminals or whatever. Through the Steam Workshop, we have all the mods, maps, even save games you can share with others. It is all for the community.

You've announced modding will a day one feature in

Skylines -- what's your reasoning for opening the game up immediately?

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We think modding and the community is really important for our games. We have added four different modding tools to this game and we're working on an API that actually lets players write their own code. They can actually make gameplay changes, and import their own assets. If you model for fun, you can actually create pretty much whatever you want and import it into the game. Building the city is also about making it cool and really pretty, so if you wanted to build a city centre with an old town vibe, what you could do is re-texture buildings and import the assets to the game. I'm pretty sure there will be someone planning a lot of things like that! I'm really excited to see when the game comes out, what people will be doing, if they'll create Gotham City or something!

Are you curating content, or will people be free to upload and share what they like?

Pretty free. It'll be shared via Steam Workshop, they can just put it there and then others are free to download it.

Are you prepared for a the inevitable onslaught of penis shaped buildings?

Actually, what happened to us is, when we had our first play test, one of the testers was basically building the roads in the shape of penises! So we were like "it's happened before it's even released!" Now we've seen it, we're good. [laughs]

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What's the interaction with the player community been like on previous Cities games?

On [publisher] Paradox Interactive's forums, we have a lot of communication with the community. There's really cool player exchanges going on, and the German forum for Cities in Motion is huge. We interact with them and they suggest a lot of what should be in the game, and we take on board their input.

It's really the players and community that are shaping the game, so we appreciate the feedback. We try to be as present as possible -- of course, there's always time limitations but it's basically me and Karoliina Korppoo, our lead designer, who answer the questions and take suggestions on board. For example, with Cities in Motion 2, most of the DLC are directly suggested from the community, and we actually make Player's Choice DLC now.

Given you're known for transport management, will there be a similar level of depth to that in Skylines?

Not quite. With buses, for instance, you have the depot that the buses come from, and then you place stops. Then the route will follow that as you're setting up the system. From the budget panel, you choose how frequent the service is -- the more money you put into public transport, the more efficiently it works.

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It's going to be buses, underground, trains, ships and planes.

Cities in Motion is a very niche game, it's for engineer-type simulation players. We want Skylines to be more approachable. We've put a lot of effort into streamlining, because we don't want to have that level of micromanagement where you go right down to set fare prices. This is about the city as a whole, not so much the citizens or the very fine details. But I'm pretty sure someone will mod it so it will look like Sims 3 or

Cities in Motion!

With such a hardcore fanbase for your earlier games, are you expecting much "fallout" that this isn't a new Cities in Motion?


I'm really looking forward to seeing what the community thinks of this, [but] I think some will be a little bummed out that this isn't Cities in Motion 3! They've been asking for that, like "when you do Cities in Motion 3, you have to have these things there..." They'll be pleased we still have a transport option here, including long distance outer connections which go to the cloud, between cities. That's so we can do things like airports and ship harbours, which they've been asking for in Cities in Motion for a long time. I'm super happy that we can push those elements here, to cater to those wishes.

Will you be doing a Cities in Motion 3, eventually?

Colossal Order is only nine people, so all of our team is on this at the moment. We're hiring more people because this is a really big project for us, so we are growing the company. I'm looking forward to working on Cities in Motion 3 in the future but Skylines takes all our time at the moment. I love that series though, and we have an excellent community and a lot of fans. Even though it's a very niche game, it's very important for us!