After the developer Colossal Order announced that Cities: Skylines 2 would be getting some much-needed triage via dedicated, post-launch reworks, anyone playing the game is bound to have felt trepidation. Then, the Economy 2.0 dropped, and it appears to have panned out well enough.
It’s taken some time for the community to run Cities: Skylines 2‘s Economy 2.0 through its paces, but the good news is that Colossal Order is finally turning things around, from the looks of it. More updates are needed, of course, but the developer has turned Skylines 2 into a proper game at last, with the very real possibility of bankruptcy now looming over the players’ heads. It does sound weird when I write it out that way, I’ll give you that, but a city-builder with no risk of failure is hardly a city-builder, if you ask me. Here’s what the people think about Economy 2.0 so far.
Economy 2.0 update for Cities: Skylines 2 is a good start, but we need more
For starters, players can no longer coast off of government subsidies doing whatever they want in Cities: Skylines 2. Cities can, and will, come crashing down under their weight, and players have noticed that you are now essentially forced into building specialized, focused economies if you’re going after something specific. Before the update, earning money was effectively pointless as it was surprisingly difficult to go into the red, no matter what you did.
Just a few bad moves will send your cities into a death spiral now, depending on your difficulty settings and the builds you are going for. Without context, this might sound like a bad thing, but there was so little challenging content in the baseline Cities: Skylines 2 experience that something like this was sorely needed. With Economy 2.0 virtually every decision you make has some bearing on how you will be doing down the line, which shows that Colossal Order is finally on the right track.
Broadly, then, Cities: Skylines 2 is now much harder and therefore more enjoyable to play. This should give Colossal Order just the sort of basis it needs to keep pushing out more and more improvements, depending on what the community wants. It’ll be a steep climb, to be sure, but it finally feels like the players might be able to breathe a sigh of relief, now that there’s a semblance of an economy working against you under the hood.
So, it might be a bit early to say this but – knock on wood – Cities: Skylines 2 is finally on the right track. Some have even noticed some performance improvements, though I haven’t been able to corroborate as much on my end.
Performance 2.0 sometime down the line, perhaps? Whatever the case may be, the dreadful state of Cities: Skylines 2 on day one is now a thing of the past, and there’s hope for the future. It took a while, though, didn’t it?
