Man Forza Motorsports and Cities Skylines 2 came out within two weeks of each other, and I was so pumped for both. Thinking I'd have two genre-defining games to enjoy for years, it was definitely the most disappointing month of gaming for me.

As a comment on the article: yes, of course - the lack of all the things are symptoms of "this must release now". They fumbled it so badly, a new developer got put on it.

Literally missing the forest for the trees. You're building a city, not a yard. I don't think making the city look procedurally worn or whatever they mean is trivial either. Feels like complaining about the graphics in Minecraft... That's not the point of the game.

Frostpunk (only played first) did a decent job with this. It’s all coal fire power and heavy industrial buildings, very grounded and pragmatic, so it’s all dirty and loud and belching flames/smoke. It was somewhat obvious given the setting but regardless it works so well. The city feels very alive.

I don’t really think aesthetic details can create soul where there is no soul. Somehow I can’t imagine a world where games cost millions of dollars to produce yet also have soul mechanically injected by following some art director’s design-language protocol.

AI is going to be big here. You previously had to create a few art assets and reuse them. Cities has to be grids of blocks of buildings. You couldn't have an agent go and design a building that curved to the block perfectly. The slope couldn't have some stairs easily.

The author of this created these images with AI and that's exactly the solution for game makers. There may be base assets but AI is pretty damn good at contextually modifying them.

There was a big heyday a decade ago with town builders, like Banished, Farthest Frontier, Manor lords and a bunch of ancient history ones. It seems to have died out again the last few years. And I don't know any that replace simcity or cities skyline 1. The only city sim I play nowadays is Soviet Workers Republic, some combination of those words.

Maybe we'll get a million new city sims with the ai goldrush that have unique takes.

Think I gave up on actual city sims with massive scale.

Sim City on SNES felt like it had a soul. The music was fantastic. I was never great at it but the slow pace was super cozy to let play in the background.

Metropolis 1998 seems to understand this. Very excited for it.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2287430/Metropolis_1998/

Is “how hard would it be…” followed by an AI image going to be the new way to complain about games? Realistic textures, dynamic boundary rendering, etc would significantly increase the art cost and take a large bite out of the game performance budget for realistic aesthetics when the main audience draw is pushing the scale of the simulation.

> Does this look nice to you?

Yes, it does. It's exactly what I want my real life city to be like.

No plants growing everywhere completely out of control and invading perimeters they aren't supposed to be in. No cracked pavement that's just a rainfall away from being replaced with potholes.

Apparently, "soul" means a city that looks like it's unmaintained and teetering on the edge of a precipice, just about to be reclaimed by nature, a few years away from turning into the green urbanscape of The Last of Us.

The Division (both first and sequel) did such a good job having a worn/lived in feel to the city terrain. Wandering around the streets at night was such a fun experience. I need to go back and replay. The designers did such a good job.

In the past “why don’t games look like my mockup??” was annoying, but at least required some effort / talent. We didn’t know how good we had it.

I am fine with games showing an abstraction of the real world instead of simulating every detail. I am also fine with other games simulating every detail.

So basically we just need to make it more realistic. I agree.

Another reason SimCity 4 is still be best one of these to be made.

Cities: Skylines 2 is a particularly rough pick for this concept, since it's one of very few games I need frame generation to run even passably. LLMs seem plenty capable of tweaking existing assets to make a ton of variants, but actually displaying all of those performantly is then an engineering problem.

And without many variants, things like "splotchy wall apartment building" would get old so much faster when there's several square blocks of them instead of bizarrely pristine ones.

He is partly correct, but forgets about the polygon budget. The GPU is fast but not infinitely so. It has lots of texture memory, but not an infinite amount. Game developers have to balance graphical fidelity against the rendering time. They actually did a really bad job of this for Cities: Skylines 2 and it was a big reason why the game was so sluggish on release. Search for the story of the teeth for a particularly salient example.

Also that grand staircase should be something the player chooses to place, rather than something you get every time a path is sloped.

I booted Cities: Skylines II and opened HN to scroll while it loaded up, and the first headline I see is this ;-;

If we define soul as the visual artifacts of the history of the people involved then our search for perfection is going to leave us miserable.

I recall working on a sports game where they hired a new art director who had previously worked in Hollywood on visual effects for movies. One of my coworkers had a meeting where the new art director requested that the player's uniforms have cloth simulation in the dynamic cut scenes.

It was then necessary to explain the difference between pre-rendered scenes and real-time rendering budgets.

It often isn't a question about whether or not something can be done. In pre-rendered scenes, or screenshots, the budget is very different than in game. At whatever target frame-rate you choose, there is a finite amount of visual effects you can achieve. Spending that budget requires compromise.

It's easy to live in a fantasy world where you can demand no compromise. The hard thing is doing the most you possibly can given very real budgets and doing so with the people you have available. Not every studio is Rockstar with the ability to throw unlimited devs for several years at the problem.

The author seemed to be a little dismissive of mods in a game that fully expects most players to be playing with mods. Cities skylines 2 not only has a ton of detailing options but it has built-in modding which is what brings out this type of detail work.

Yes, by default it’s a little flat. But also, it’s a city builder. Most of the time you’re not zoomed in this close. And not all players intend to focus on these details.

If you spend a few minutes on YouTube seeking out some of the better cities skylines 2 content creators you’ll see a lot of really excellent detail work.

The problem with stairs might be getting people to negotiate them smoothly. The Sims (up to version 3, anyway) didn't want to deal with collisions on stairs, there's no animation for squeezing past or turning around, so Sims approaching stairs spend a lot of time slowly getting out of one another's way to decide who's going to use the stairs first, and waiting for other Sims to finish so that the next Sim can embark. If you throw a party in a house with stairs, some guests can spend the entire time stuck in the stair queue, and then they go home and complain that the party was no fun.