Is it fair to say Cities: Skylines 2’s development has been incredibly messy? I’d say it’s fair, after all, the game has completely shifted developers in the past few months, that doesn’t sound like smooth sailing to me. In the nearly three years since it was released, the city builder still has plenty of issues to deal with, perhaps a symptom of a more industry wide problem. But in a recent interview, Mariina Hallikainen, CEO of the game’s now former developer Colossal Order, has spoken about the specific difficulties the studio faced with the engine the game was built in, Unity.
“We completely overestimated the engine’s capabilities at the beginning of the project,” Hallikainen told PC Gamer, explaining that when the developer “started to work on the sequel, we very much built all the plans toward features that were not finalized in the engine. So, we basically wanted to future-proof the game. We were all the time thinking that we will be working on this game for possibly up to 10 years, post launch.”
According to Hallikainen, as they looked into the technology offered by Unity, doing so ended up being a poor choice due to the fact that many of the supposedly useful features didn’t actually do what they said they would. “We ended up in a situation in the development where we had to build much more things to either replace missing features or something that [wasn’t] working. This was something that we very much now understand, that our mistake was to bank on something that was not yet proven, and that was a huge hindrance throughout the development of Cities: Skylines 2.”
One thing Hallikainen notes is that she, at the very least, takes no issue with Unity itself, saying the studio has a “great relationship” with the engine developed. “Overall, what I absolutely want people to understand is that everyone at Colossal Order, Paradox, Unity, we all did the best we could under the circumstances.”
Colossal Order are currently at work on something new, too, but the only thing Hallikainen said about it is that it’s a simulation game, and it’s being made for PC using Unity. Bit of a fork found in kitchen kind of situation, but hey ho, that’s marketing!
