A Cities: Skylines expansion will be unveiled at Gamescom
Did you know the developer was initially "devastated" by SimCity's existence?
A Cities: Skylines expansion will be unveiled in early August at Gamescom, developer Colossal Order has revealed.
"We'll have a big expansion and release both free and paid updates, all of which we'll be revealing at Gamescom," company boss Mariina Hallikainen told TechRadar.
Gamescom takes place 5th-9th August in Cologne, Germany.
That snippet of interview goodness airs alongside a patch for the game. Update 1.1.1B adds 30 new buildings, auto save, tons of bug fixes, and pedestrian tunnels.
Cities: Skylines was the city builder that flourished as SimCity floundered. It's a tiny production by comparison - there were only nine people at the ironically named Colossal Order studio - but it worked, and modders were invited to the party too. As a result, Cities Skylines was the underdog breakout hit, building to 1m sales in a month. Data-scraper SteamSpy puts the owner-total at 1.3 million today.
Colossal Order made Cities in Motion in 2011, and a sequel in 2013, and by that time the small studio felt confident enough to tackle a proper city builder, Hallikainen went on to add. But then a new Sim-"Goliath"-City was announced. "We thought they were going to build this fantastic game and leave no room for competition!
"We were quite devastated and wondered what type of sequel we were going to make to Cities In Motion 2," she said, "but that all changed after SimCity's launch. We began to notice that there might be room for another city builder, and our publisher was like 'your idea's fantastic, let's do this!'."
It wasn't simply a 'quick let's capitalise' affair - the vision for the game was already apparently set in stone. Otherwise, the team kept it relatively simple and achievable, and it handsomely paid off.
Today Colossal Order is 14 people, and it sounds like the studio is happy adding to Cities Skylines for a while yet. "As long as we possibly and technically can while people enjoy playing the game," Hallikainen said. "The point where we have to move on to a sequel is when the technology is in such a state that it doesn't make any sense to continue working on Cities: Skylines.
"I'm hoping that will be some years in the future because there's so many ideas we want to add to the game before going there."
