The Journey to Launch | Cities: Skylines II

[Music] people are expecting us to create something absolutely amazing and they want it now and the pressure that comes from the business side of things is is quite a lot to handle and then there is the pressure from the fans oh oh no F in way oh it's City skylines too wo Let's go people didn't actually understand that we're not using anything from these skylines that we are actually building everything new we are trying to make a city building game that will last for a decade that will basically be a game that we can keep working on we can add to and will be something greater than City skylines can ever [Music] be my role uh in the beginning was to basically set up the studio get us funding and I did anything from the dishes to Community Management which is one of my favorite things to do I used to be the one in like Cities in Motion Forum checking what people are saying and um using that feedback to to help us uh with the vision of the game now we actually have dedicated people to do the Community Management so I don't have to do it anymore I still go in there every once in a while but the team had that dream that they they want to try and create the project of their dreams and um it just happened to be city building I I think people felt at that point that the market really is not there but we I don't know why but we felt that we would be kind of that target audience simulation G games like the genre exists and and it's been quiet for a while but but we felt that there is definitely uh a lot of people who are who are looking forward for these types of games it was just some young enthusiasm or something that we had let yeah let's go and and and try it out and do it we never anticipated the game to be so successful and it was very difficult for us to uh keep working on the game as the technology wasn't really supporting the things we wanted to achieve just like it's going to be like the chical relief interview there there would be a lot of footage for that at least endless amounts I'm actually the first employee at the company so yeah I have been here from almost the very beginning then when we start at City scolin one it was something around nine to 13 people and then after releasing the game we kind of like expanded the sequel talk started relatively early in the like the eight years since the the first game has been out we thought that we would stop after natural disasters so we had after snowfall and natural disasters and then the game would be complete we could move on to something new so we we never imagined that it would have over 6 DLCs how many does it have now I think there's over 60 DLCs for City Skyland which is [Music] crazy City skylines as we didn't think it would be that successful we were ill prepared to to have the technology in a state that uh the development could go on for years and years it's it's it's not a technical Masterpiece in that sense but it's a great game the thing with City Skylands 2o is that how we have built it now with the absolutely latest technology allows us to keep working on this game for the next 10 years if we want to not only like match the first game but then more we're like fighting against ourselves in a way because like we are our own worst competition basically you'll have that kind of like ax hanging above you at all time I think it was a very very exciting opportunity think about the situation that we were in that we had made a game that was massively successful and we have the opportunity to do it again take all the learnings uh from 10 years of of building a game and then uh make something new with that knowledge and fix all those things that kind of annoyed us I mean who gets to do that happy birthday City Sky it was 2018 when we signed the [Music] [Applause] [Music] sequel I have at times felt that this project is cursed because if things had gone as as we originally planned the game would have come out sometime 20 late 2020 early 2021 early that year I think it started to become apparent that it's not possible there were like technical difficulties that were not something that we could have helped because it was like third party problems basically with technology and with of course with simulation because the game is so complex there are so many moving parts that alone is it's a spider web in a way like you you you change something here or do some new thing and then suddenly like five things here just like burst into [Music] flames the the whole project is actually 3 years late it took us 3 years longer than we anticipated the simulation was never the big problem the the biggest problems we had were with technology but the simulation itself that's something we know how to make that like that that is the core of our skills we we make simulation [Music] games what's Marina like she's a person that is a very good leader like she's really good at getting people together and getting them to go specific way like um I think when she's involved like things go in the right Direction when you work in game development you see a lot of games in very early stages and games in early stages are not a pretty thing to behold I really dread playing very early development versions of games because it's so hard to tell if the end product will be fun because what they're not fun they're there to prove certain concept establish certain technical things and then the the a lot of the game design the balancing and everything happens quite late but when the game was in a state where we said okay now we passed Alpha I presented the game to a lot of Partners and that was super exciting when I found out like what's in the game like all the things that have been built in like the the the unemployment how it affects like um how people drive traffic through the city right and these kinds of things uh and that's when I like got really excited about the game as well before it was always like yes SK skylines 2 will be great but like you also can see it yet right because it's a pre-alpha version of the game game development is complicated in the sense that when you set out to do a task you don't know where the task will lead you like yes there's a buck and you need to fix the buck that's very easy but when you want to go from A to B you might have buck b that is created by fixing that buck so things are not linear they can be cascading out of control at some point uh because of some changes we did and fixing one issue uh the whole build had to be refactored which actually meant that um for uh for a few weeks there couldn't be any like real development and we as Paradox didn't actually see any new builds during that time because it just hadn't been refactor uh yet then when the refactoring was done it could finally be tested what was wrong and that introduced new issues so it's the there is no clear like just fix the issue and then everything will be great I worked on this project on and off for like I've been in the company for six years so almost six years um so this has it's not something that's like oh suddenly everything is coming [Music] together what state is the game in and is City skylines 2 releasing to PC too early [Music] I definitely suffered some issues with it and I will be honest it doesn't feel smooth when people are asking me like why was the game released now I feel like we ran out of time in a sense that with more time we wouldn't have anyway reached reasonable results um now that we have have that actual open direct communication with the players we have a huge amount of players that can actually point us those problem areas that we still have all the people in the community we've all been in the Discord together Co closser order Paradox have been in there and they've been listening this is another positive all of the issues that they're having is is something that we want to help them improve upon we have to just speak about these things like insanely candidly I'm hoping that the people took that as as positive affirmation that like wow they they're really trying because we really did try but yeah transparency was probably the most important thing to make people understand that yeah we're uh we see you and we're we're working hard the the community around city skyelines is the best uh one can have the people who have been been playing City skylines and have been following what what we do at Colossal order they know that we're not stopping here they know that we're here we're listening taking all the feedback all the suggestions and using that to keep working on the game and uh we want to hear from them they know that I've had nightmares about the release for months like seriously for months I woke up sweating like heart pounding I was so nervous and so excited and so terrified cuz I want everything to be perfect so of course I take everything too hard when they are not the feeling I had was the strongest like I understand I have a tremendous respect for for the community I have a TR tremendous respect for for players in general I think the opinions they have should not be like lightly discarded our history has always been that we we want to kind of like be close to the community the success of our games relies a lot on the community and how they you know play the game and figure things out there and how they add their own flavor to the game so for us now that the game is out now this is where the fun starts as we've seen with City skyelines we do our best work when we're actually doing it together with the community for us to be able to have this model where we actually ship a game and we keep working on it that really kind of Suits our way of of working to do it together with the community it's a completely different thing than kind of of in a in a [Music] cave we hoped for something better right to some extent I guess we also were blindsiding ourselves lying a little bit to ourselves how bad the issues were on the performance side and how many people will be affected by it right if you play a game like dead long in development you you start from something much worse and things get better and that might have blinded us a little bit to where it was at some point we worked with uh time constraints that the game had already been delayed uh by 3 years we overestimated how easy it would be to fix certain things and uh that basically cascaded down the road like when we when we did a tech review at the end of 2022 we said okay we can fix those things and and things will be great but then it's prioritization right like you have to fix certain things before other things like moding for example is a very good example where we had to prioritize more performance before moding can be addressed and be in the build because there's always been the plan to have moding in at the start of the release but unfortunately other things like the performance had to take a priority [Music] I think the performance issues it was actually a little bit surprising for me because not not because we wouldn't have tested the game but it was more about how on different individual setups there seemed to be issues that we weren't fully aware of and that was extremely unfortunate that actually made me question that what did we Overlook and how can we improve this in the future I'm the kind of person that I like to analyze the situation and and then try to learn from it and figure out how we can do better in the future because that's how I feel that everything in here at Colossal should be done constantly improving there's work to be done there we fully understand and recognize that let's let's not kid ourselves that we're in a great place with that but the the point here is that now that the game is out there we we we have so much data we have so much feedback that we can utilize let's use it and uh keep working on the game there was never during this project that I was worried about the game I was worried about the technology I was worried about our relationship with our publisher I was worried about the team how will they be able to handle the pressure but I was never ever worried that this game would not actually be fun play the game play is good and that's what I've been telling everybody the game play is good technology is something that we can keep working on we can fix those issues but if the game is not fun and the simulation sucks where do you go from there [Music] the release of City scance 2 was rough the the the expectations that had built up felt like they were impossible impossible to deal with having the absolutely wonderful perfect uh marketing campaign to follow that to follow the hype the expectation from the players me the feelings were mixed like the reviews so it was it it was really something that from from the kind of excitement to get the game out there uh to to have the extremely harsh feedback it's easy to kind of feel like we're drowning in some swamp because of the of the amount of the negativity that there is on release we didn't have the best version of the game ready in the sense that we still have to this this day we still have performance St that we need to work on and and you know bugs and stuff like that like the like the import export with the cargo stuff was like people were saying like the economy is fake and it's like oh the economy is not fake there's some bug that it's not working because it was working before but yeah of course you can't go and say that the people directly like no no you guys are totally wrong it works there's just a bug but it works regardless of that it was still exciting to see it go live I mean it's it's like a tiny little baby that is seeing the light of day for the first time even if the baby is ugly as then you know you still want to see it like pop out and then you know hit the ground running or face first I don't know but you know it's a it's it's our baby and it's kind of stumbled on on relase and maybe scraped its knee a little bit but with crutches it'll learn to walk and eventually run without them and maybe compete in the 100 meter HDs or something like [Music] [Applause] [Music] that we have been extremely motivated to to get the fixes to the players as fast as possible we had uh weekly patches um fixing various issues and we are now just continuing the work [Music] because we want to see the best version of City Skylands 2 and currently it's not there yet but we worked hard on the first game and you know after release we spent years bringing it to the best possible version that we could with the with the tech that we have for that game I don't see any reason why we wouldn't also do the same for this because we've already poured so much ourselves into this game it would be lunacy to not see the actual version the the vision of the game that we had in mind can't even imagine what it's going to look like in its final State like we haven't even opened the floodgates to mods yet and I am excited and [Laughter] [Music] scared you know in a couple months we will be happily playing the game and you know we have forgotten you know we'll look through it with rose tinted glasses a you remember the release H didn't go great but you know now fantastic so what we will be focusing on is is uh further performance improvements definitely definitely keeping an eye on that and making sure that people get to build big cities and have the game running smoothly with that um we are checking very uh carefully the bug reports we're getting from the from the community and acting upon those accordingly and uh one of the biggest and most important thing that we will be working on and or continue working on and will'll be working on early early next year is is the modding support that is near and dear to our hearts and we want to get get the support uh out there for the for the moders um and um yeah but before before we get to it we need to take a little bit of a breather so happy holidays to everybody

Channel: Cities: Skylines

Views: 85,378

Keywords: Cities Skylines, City Builder, Management, Sim, Simulation, Sim City, cities, transit, transportation, roads, trains, industry, industries, green cities, parklife, expansion, simulator, dlc, campus, after dark, snowfall, mass transit, urban planning, The Sims, Sims, paradox, paradox interactive, colossal order, traffic, simcity, City Skylines, City Sky Lines, Cities Sky Lines, sequel, cities skylines 2, cs2, cities 2, cities skylines II, cities2

Id: oULuIc9BkgE

Length: 21min 29sec (1289 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 18 2023