Cities Skylines 2 is going deep on the details when it comes to roads, traffic, and how your citizens behave when they’re behind the wheel. We’ve already seen the new roundabouts, highway-building options, and – finally – parking lots and on-off ramps, but there is even more on offer in Cities Skylines 2 when it comes to managing your traffic flow, with Paradox and Colossal Order sharing fresh info ahead of the full Cities Skylines 2 release date. It looks promising, but casting a careful (and perhaps rather pedantic) eye across the latest footage of the city-building game, we’ve also spotted a couple of potential sore points.
Cities Skylines 2 road and traffic management is going to be much easier than in the original CS, thanks to a new, dedicated roundabout function, as well as the option to drag and drop perfectly symmetrical city blocks with just one click. On top of that, however, we’ve got even more details on how driving, parking, and even accidents will function in CS2, revealing some amazing new details, but also some probable issues.
First up, we now know that although parking lots have been added for Cities Skylines 2, not every adult citizen will own and use a car, potentially helping with congestion. Paradox and Colossal Order also confirm that pathfinding will be affected by varying speed limits on inner-city roads and highways, and that road maintenance vehicles and snowplows will be required to keep traffic moving.
“Citizens need to find a place to park their cars, if they have one,” Colossal Order community manager Samantha Woods explains. “Unfortunately, we will not have bicycles at release. Speed limits affect pathfinding [and] are tied to road type. We have maintenance vehicles and snowplows. And traffic accidents are indeed a thing now.”
Now, we’ll come back to traffic accidents in a moment, but when it comes to pathfinding and traffic lanes, Cities Skylines 2 seems to include a useful – but not entirely attractive – visual tool. If you take a look at the image below from the latest road tools trailer, you can see how the trajectory of vehicles and flow of traffic is indicated using white lines that superficially represent wear:
Although this will allow you to better read and control traffic lanes, it could potentially leave your roads looking a bit smeared and artificial, and seems like something that will be addressed by mods soon after release.
In terms of traffic accidents, there’s something else, very hidden in the latest Cities Skylines 2 trailer, that suggests exactly how these might affect traffic flow – and potentially bring back an aggravating, realism-breaking feature from the original game. As observed by Reddit user ‘EEMon,’ if you zoom in during the road tools trailer’s opening, you can actually see an RTA occurring on the highway.
The car accident in the Road Tool trailer
by u/EEMon13456 in CitiesSkylines
On the one hand, we see cars slowing down and intelligently steering around the accident, preventing a potential traffic jam. On the other hand, we can also see that, if they’ve been waiting beyond a certain amount of time, cars simply disappear, just like they do in Cities Skylines when they’ve spent ‘too long’ trying to reach a destination.
Combined with the odd angles of houses in Cities Skylines 2, it seems like there will be a few things for mods to look into when the game finally drops. But overall, everything we’ve heard so far has been fantastic, with Colossal Order and Paradox delivering a range of tools and new options that we’ve been wanting for years.
Ahead of launch day, make sure your rig is ready with the full Cities Skylines 2 system requirements. You might also want to try some of the other best management games on PC.