City Corner #9 - Happy Six Months!

Hello Mayors!

Six months ago, we at Iceflake Studios took the mantle of development of Cities: Skylines II. Since then, our primary goals have been to improve the game, address long-standing issues, and build a stronger foundation, so we can optimize and develop the game well into the future.

Working on this game for the short time that we have has been very satisfying. We have been very busy, but the rewards have made it all worthwhile. Taking on a big project like Cities: Skylines II might have been daunting at first, but all the great feedback we have received, along with the kind words and communication from the community, has made the experience even more enjoyable and rewarding.

In this City Corner, we are taking a look back at what we’ve accomplished during these first six months, and highlighting some of the biggest improvements that have made their way into the game.

Our first major update, First Frost, focused on both the simulation and the overall player experience. We tackled several long-standing issues, like, for example, the death waves. We also rebalanced bicycle usage, improved nighttime visibility, updated weather and fog systems, and introduced the Color Customization tool, which gave you a first taste of customizing the appearance of your cities. Alongside these, we updated the UI, improved the landscaping tools such as terraforming, and gave you more freedom with tree placement.

The updates that followed continued that work across multiple areas of the game. In the Anniversary Update, we introduced one of the community's most requested features: the ability to toggle road zoning, giving players greater control over how and where development occurs. We also added our first new asset, the Iceflake Arena, expanded gameplay options, and introduced the in-game Encyclopedia, making it easier for both new and experienced players to find information about the game's systems.

As spring progressed, our focus shifted toward improving city management and player control. Our fourth patch, Spring Cleaning, introduced the Historic Building option, allowing players to preserve buildings they wanted to keep from being upgraded. We also gave more freedom to customize your UI by adding transparency and scaling options, which were both suggested by you immediately after the release of the new UI. We also continued working together with the Paradox Mods team, giving better mod management and download systems.

Morning Dew continued our work on quality-of-life improvements. We expanded asset filtering options, improved several creator-focused workflows, refined tool behavior, and addressed visual issues affecting shadow rendering. While smaller in scope than some previous updates, Morning Dew focused on smoothing out everyday city-building and addressing issues reported by the community.

Most recently, we had Summer Solstice, which focused on improving both the visual quality of the game and some of its underlying simulation systems. This patch introduced a complete rework of terrain rendering, improved terrain shading, depth perception, and overall landscape quality. We also added terrain painting tools, which allowed you to paint and blend terrain textures directly in-game and in the Editor.

Of course, all of these updates included fixes and improvements across the simulation, performance, and stability as well. For example, with Spring Cleaning, we introduced our Benchmarking tool, which marked the first steps towards making the performance of the game better for everyone. Some of these changes, like the improvements on traffic pathfinding introduced in Morning Dew, are not always immediately noticeable and might even work behind the scenes, but they still have an effect on the overall performance and simulation.

Since we’re all here and we love our numbers and charts, let’s look at some statistics, shall we! Starting from January up until now, we have fixed 200+ bugs and added 40+ new features and improvements! To elaborate, we wanted to show you a chart on how these bug fixes and improvements have been divided between different aspects of the game.

A pie chart of the fixed bugs and what their focus has been.

As you can see from the pie chart above, most of these fixes have been focusing on the UI and Interface, with a large chunk focusing on the gameplay and simulation as well. A good example of these fixes includes the various icon and UI bugs, but also stuck citizens, demand bars not filling correctly, and shadow flickering.

New features and improvements in a pie chart.

When it comes to new features, you can see that the biggest chunk here has gone into the UI and visual improvements. The new features in the chart include, but are not limited to, the Historic Building option, Benchmark tool, the Encyclopedia and Iceflake Arena, whereas the improvements in the chart include the Education system rebalancing, cycling policy adjustments, and performance optimizations.

As mentioned before, we will continue working on the different aspects mentioned in both of these charts, but also wish to dive even deeper into these themes when the time is right.

As the summer is slowly reaching its zenith and coming to an end here in Finland, we are already working toward the next updates. While our next patch will not be as content-heavy, it will still include bug fixes and a few tweaks to the simulation. As per usual, we will get into all the details about the next update in a future City Corner dedicated to the patch itself! Looking into the horizon, we have also been working on our first DLC - we will tell you more about it at a later date when we are ready!

We’re so excited for you to be along for the journey; here’s to another 6 months, 1 year, and further into the future!