Cities: Skylines 2 has been announced, and it’s fixing one of the major issues fans had with the very first game. Instead of restricting players to a small number of tiles, players will now be able to expand their city to cover the entire game board.
The first game, Cities: Skylines, released in 2015, was and still is a cult classic. But fans quickly found the original game’s limits on city growth to be way too restricting, and it’s not one Paradox is looking to repeat in the sequel. While the first game took place on a 9x9 "board" composed of 81 tiles, only 5x5 (25 tiles) could be built on, and even then, only 9 could be unlocked for your city. Modders were quick to lift those restrictions and open the whole map up, but it still rankled with many that this had to be done through mods.
Paradox hasn’t just lifted the limit in Cities: Skyline 2, it’s exploded it. Players will now be able to unlock all of the tiles on the map in the base game -- and the amount of those tiles is a pretty staggering 150 tiles, to boot. That’s a lot of room to expand and grow your city, and while the size of the tiles hasn’t been confirmed (and could be smaller than in the first game), it initially seems as if players will have a lot more freedom to grow and expand as they see fit.
Details on the rest of the game are fairly sparse, but achievement lists have also shown up for the game, giving us some key details. There’s an achievement for building on every single tile in a game -- a real challenge with 150 tiles to unlock -- and some odd ones that hint of some new cataclysmic additions to the game. "The Size of Golf Balls!" is awarded for experiencing a hailstorm, and "Things Are Not Looking Up" for experiencing a rat infestation, joining the more usual problems like forest fires and tornados. The achievements aren’t all downers though, and players will also get achievements for positive experiences, like building a city with entirely renewable energy sources.
Cities: Skylines 2 will release some time in 2023 for PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X.