I'm curious how much they'll pull over from the existing DLCs, the Plazas and Promenades pack does allow for pedestrian cities. But not in a European sense despite the dev being in Europe.
We could even begin with a concept of mixed zoning that's so standard in many world cities. The usual "stores on the street, apartments above" design.
(I was really surprised that actual USA is building cities the same way SimCity modeled - with complete separation between commercial and residental areas).
The limits of every simulation game come into play where they start to "cartoon" how the world actually works, which has always been the case with city builders in the Simcity mold. The approaches to traffic, crime, pollution etc all act in a way to give an impression of the real world while not really going deep into the subject and making the solutions be a bit lock-and-key, fitting our existing norms rather than presenting an emergent problem: a lot of times it comes down to building "expensive structure X" to solve your city's issues. The original Simcity is ultimately broken, speedrunner style, by reaching into the guts of the sim to realize that every zone just needs a token road or rail by it, not a connection, and therefore can be approached with a nonsensical pattern of disconnected structures.
I think Skylines did a good job of modelling complex traffic, but when I came back to it a month or two ago, I was disappointed by how much it felt like I was steered towards creating a "city of the past" and not engaging with any new technological or economic developments. Like, you can build an Amsterdam-like bike city in Skylines, with the appropriate DLC, but it's not modelled in a fine-grained way and just feels like you have magicked away commuter traffic by dumping bike lanes everywhere.
In the end, if I want to plan a city of the future, I should probably go back to drawing on graph paper like when I was 8 years old.
Well, I personally think that these sandbox games need a bit of suspension of disbelief and roleplay to be truly fun.
If you optimize the fun of the game by breaking it (and that's usually rather easy), you'll just... not have fun with it. This is why I personally prefer to avoid using broken strategies and set my own fun challenges to build themed cities.
Which is why I kinda wish there was more variety in Skylines - besides Vancouver, I also want to make messy cities like Shenzen or Bangkok, or London and maybe deal with local limits and idiosyncrasies.
One rather big cartooning, which the old Sim Cities did better, has to do with development over time. In the first Sim City you started in 1900. And although the implementation of any kind of historical progress was extremely limited (it took a while to get access to nuclear plants as I recall), my imagination did a lot of the work. (Listening to Dire Straits "Telegraph Road" helped too). And SC2000, the last I played, had a lot of progress elements and even the memorable "arcology" futuristic buildings.
In Cities: Skylines, you start in 2010 as I recall. Not only is it rather more implausible to start a city in the wilderness then than in 1900, but you have idiots tweeting at you - forever.
I'd love to see a city builder where the challenge wasn't about urban planning, but in adapting to a changing world. ("Then came the trains, then came the ore, then there was the hard times, then there was a war")
This was standard in US cities in the early 20th century (prior to 1920) before the value of the real estate (and taxes) and automobiles changed the model. Mixed use may be coming back-California recently passed a state law allowing for it, I believe . Here is one article on the topic of mixed-use:
And if you haven’t read anything by Jane Jacobs, it’s worthwhile checking out her books written (1950-1960) about the importance of city neighborhoods from the perspective of NYC urban dwellers.
