Cities: Skylines - a city-builder inspired by "old school" games such as Transport Tycoon - will give players the freedom to customise their games through extensive mod support at launch and beyond.

Developer Colossal Order will allow assets and props - including individual houses and buildings - as well as entire maps to be imported for the creation of personalised cities.

Paradox Interactive



The team will also work with the modding community so they can help shape the game's inner workings to their liking.

"This is something we're quite excited about. With the modding tools, there's actually quite a lot of things you can do," studio CEO Mariina Hallikainen told Digital Spy. "You can create your own maps with the map editor, and follow realistic landscapes.

"We're trying to expose values so people can make their own localisation files, tweak gameplay values to make different kinds of balances to the game.

"That's something the modding can bring - and we're very motivated in working with the community. Even after the game is released, I think the modding tool is something that's most important to keep developing. How the modding system works is that we'd work closely with the modders, because we would first need to understand what to do, so can expose the right values.

"For now, we're trying to guess what people want to do, but I'm pretty sure somebody's going to be like, 'We want to do this!' and it'll be, 'Of course, we didn't think of that'. We then need to expose that and patch it in. It's really something we're looking forward to working on."

Paradox Interactive



For example, the game has a "hard limit" of 36 square km for a city size - which can be broken up into customisable districts with their own regulations. Though Hallikainen insists players "can do a lot with that", committed modders can try and go beyond that.

"If a modder goes and breaks that, we can't do anything about it," she said. "But then you better have a super computer."

Hallikainen added: "For us, the important part is that you have freedom - creating your own challenges, making it so that it caters for your needs as a player, giving you enough space, having things to do and the modding, so you have the freedom to make your own [game].

"I think that's one of those beautiful things in the really old classic games - there were always these really strong communities around them. I think the modding is a big part of that."

Paradox Interactive



While Cities: Skylines will use Steam Workshop for sharing mods, it is strictly a single-player game with no multiplayer features, which Hallikainen believes doesn't work as well for a game like this.

"Multiplayer games are a completely different thing, I think," Hallikainen said. "Magicka is a multiplayer game. That's the kind of thing you pick it up, you play with your friends for a short period of time, then you move on, or have another match.

"In a simulation game, you want to spend tens of hours, hundreds of hours, creating your baby, basically. You don't want anybody else to come and mess with that."

Hallikainen also discussed how the team was almost deterred by the announcement of SimCity, which they thought would be the "next great city builder".

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"After making Cities in Motion 1 and 2, [Paradox has] totally supported us taking on a city-building project, even though there was the scary news earlier when EA and Maxis actually announced that they're going to be making a new SimCity.

"Everybody at the office was like, 'No! Now they're going to make the next grand, great city builder'. We were thinking that it's been so long since SimCity 4 that we dared to think [to] take on this huge task. They were pretty sure that, OK, we're going to have to figure out something else to make.

"Luckily after the release [of SimCity] it didn't look so grim after all for us to take a stab at it. This is basically the result of what we've been working on now."

Paradox Interactive



Hallikainen added: "We were seriously thinking that there is no market to make a city builder after the new SimCity's out. It's going to be the new SimCity 4. Everybody's going to play it, nobody's going to give a crap if some 13 people from Finland actually make a city-building game.

"We were really thinking, 'OK, this is not going to happen for us'. That's why when it wasn't such a success like we anticipated, it became clear also to us and Paradox that we still have a viable idea here. They've been great in supporting us in this, and we're super happy to be working on this game."

Set to debut in early 2015, Cities: Skylines will follow a similar development and business model as Paradox's strategy games, releasing a core product and expanding upon it with regular expansion packs.

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