Cities Skylines 2 seasons are confirmed, meaning the city-building game will transition organically from summer to winter, something we’ve been hoping to see since CS1 first launched. Paradox and Colossal Order also confirm that one of the most aggravating Cities Skylines features, the dreaded death wave, is being removed, and offers some more details on Cities Skylines 2 roads. Combined with the revamped CS2 economy and landfill building mechanics that we’ve seen already, this is just another reason to get hyped for the Cities Skylines 2 release date.
Although the Cities Skylines DLC Snowfall gave us some lovely, wintry maps, and we also get some dynamic weather in the form of rainstorms, the original CS has never included fully organic seasons. With Cities Skylines 2, this is changing. As shown in the latest footage from Colossal Order, cities in CS2 will change throughout the in-game year, in parallel with the demands on your civil services.
In the summer months, we see road maintenance vehicles with open roofs and standard outfitting. In the winter, however, when roads get rougher, your maintenance vehicles are equipped with a snow plow. We already know a lot about Cities Skylines 2 roads – if they’re not properly maintained, it can lead to delays and road-traffic accidents, putting enormous strain on your overall traffic flow and citizen happiness.
Seasons, however, seem to introduce yet another extra wrinkle. Combined with the new Cities Skylines 2 economy, it seems that push for realism is present in every aspect of the game.
Similarly, one of the most frustrating features in Cities Skylines, the feared death wave, has apparently been addressed and removed. In the past, all of a sudden and without any cause, entire districts in Cities Skylines would suddenly become ghost towns, as your Cims promptly passed away en masse.
Though you might still face a strain on death care services in Cities Skylines 2 owing to disasters, fires, and building collapses, the buggy, unfair death wave is apparently a thing of the past. “We no longer have the ‘classic’ death waves that we had in Cities Skylines 1,” game designer Henri Haimakainen says. “Unless there is an actual house collapsing, the hearses don’t clog your streets. But if there is a disaster, you can absolutely expect that there is going to be a lot of buzzing in the street.”
There’s a lot of good stuff to seemingly look forward to with CS2, so make sure your PC is ready for the job with the full Cities Skylines 2 system requirements. You’ll also want to get yourself prepared by plotting things on the Cities Skylines 2 maps – those intricate highways are not going to design themselves.