For me the problem with AW, more than the boring gameplay loop, is the weird episodic format they shoehorned into it. You’d just be getting into the groove of the game, used to the annoying combat and stealth and such, and then it yanks you out of it and you have to watch an end of episode cutscene, and then a new episode cutscene, just to continue on
Control is awesome. I was hoping AW2 would be more like control, but from what we’ve seen in the media that doesn’t seem to be the case. Still holding out hope
Considering skylines is basically the only surviving city sim franchise, not much. But city sims have always had difficulty with performance. Sim city 4 was notorious for how badly it performed in hardware, even to this day
All the people I’ve seen playing it don’t seem to show any specific way to do mixed use, so if it does exist it’s probably just a thing that happens automatically on high density housing units
I really hope its good. From the YT videos I’ve seen of people who got it early, it looks great.
But I still have a little bit of hesitation about how the roads continue to work. They’re still mostly “plop a road of X type”, and upgrades you just either connect in, or plop on top of an existing road. Finessing lane changes, i.e. merges or adding a new lane, still looks to be mostly an issue of getting the game to do what you want. If you sat me down and asked me to do a fun game based way of drawing road and other networks, I’d probably go with something loosely similar to how OpenStreetMap represents roads, but with more graphical flair. Roads are just collections of points, in whats called a “way.” You can set attributes on a way, which are things such as lanes, speed, lighting, material, etc. For a game, you could basically draw a line of where you want the road, and then set how many lanes it is, and see that footprint, before you apply it. Also lets you do things like take a 5 lane road and split it up into a big mess, so you can make abominations like the hi-5 in Texas, or even things as simple as diverging diamond or SPUI. Not sure if thats possible in CS2, I haven’t seen any youtubers do it. Getting them working in CS1 was possible, but required a ton of mods.
Maybe I’m overthinking it, and maybe the CS2 approach is better. I’ll have to get my hands on it to try it.
As for zoning, its okay, but I wish we’d really start to see some divorce from what SimCity invented back in 1989, and allow for more granular mixed-use zoning. I want apartment buildings that have light commercial at the ground floor, like you see in basically every major city
Also really hoping that it has proper M+KB on xbox. Starfield doesn’t, and it leaves whole sections of the game essentially broking (i.e. crafting 99 items requires you to press RB a shitload)