Yet another Hacker News

City building games have a Soul Problem pt.2

41 points lexx 1 hour ago 29 comments

ervine 27 minutes ago | parent

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.

esikich 27 minutes ago | parent

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.

dwroberts 25 minutes ago | parent

Also the visuals can be misunderstood to be communicating something - e.g. the dirty walls - does that mean my city is bad in some way? Is crime increasing or is the wall being stained by pollution?

You can't just make stuff 'look nice' without affecting how the player behaves

Forgeties79 24 minutes ago | parent

If you’re playing a city builder to min/max but want it somewhat grounded in reality then you have to accept it isn’t an Apple Store on every block IMO. If you want perfect symmetry and cleanliness that’s valid too but it’s the default for most games, so I think they make some good points.

Forgeties79 25 minutes ago | parent

A city builder is a lot of different things to a lot of people. Some people want to feel like their creation is “alive,” and varying degrees of wear and tear can achieve that. It makes the city feel lived in. I wouldn’t say it’s my highest priority but I’d say it’s definitely a valid one.

bigstrat2003 20 minutes ago | parent

Also, it's very much a matter of taste. I like the pristine look. I have real life if I want to see dingy, worn down buildings and yards. I don't want that in my fantasy city.

tikhonj 14 minutes ago | parent

Part of the author's point is that the way the city "feels" is not just part of the game but, for them and for a subset of other players, a key part of the game. We're talking about how to make a city simulator have more verisimilitude with the cities you are simulating!

grobibi 10 minutes ago | parent

But if you miss the trees for the forest it's bad too. I wouldn't want a building to be represented by a box that says (office) even if it made for a better simulation. Nevermind I just remembered how much time I soent playing dwarf fortress.

I had an argument at one point, honest!

Forgeties79 26 minutes ago | parent

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.

pferde 12 minutes ago | parent

Also the paths in the snow that are gradually disappearing when left unused.

binary132 25 minutes ago | parent

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.

throooooo 19 minutes ago | parent

This makes no sense to me. There are plenty of games that feel soulful and alive, even gave that are 40+ years old with meager graphics have managed it.

delusional 5 minutes ago | parent

i think he's saying that you can't add the soul, and that soul can't be boiled down to "the graphics are uninteresting".

AnotherGoodName 20 minutes ago | parent

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.

swozey 19 minutes ago | parent

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.

ervine 13 minutes ago | parent

Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic! That's actually the best one available if you're more interested in the simulation than the aesthetics, even with the jank.

margalabargala 6 minutes ago | parent

Manor Lords was only released early access in 2024, and has been 99% hype. The developer put in the bare minimum to gameplay then spent months and months on random visual stuff like "walk through your town in 3d" mode. It's only recently that it became remotely worthwhile.

It's not an example of the heyday of townbuilders except inasmuch as the existence of the heyday enabled a borderline grift.

pcdoodle1 16 minutes ago | parent

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.

grobibi 14 minutes ago | parent

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

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

yolo3000 9 minutes ago | parent

Looks like Transport Tycoon

destrolas 13 minutes ago | parent

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.

matheusmoreira 9 minutes ago | parent

> 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 filling up with potholes.

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