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City building games have a Soul Problem pt.2

Despite my disappointment with Cities: Skylines 2, I keep coming back to the game from time to time. I can't even control it. It's like a deep inner need. When we were kids we played with toy cars on those felt mats with painted little cities, or when we had more industrial aspirations, we'd go outside in the dirt creating construction sites with tunnels and bridges right next to mom's rose bushes. Some of us had that one uncle who decided to turn the playroom into a miniature modeling world with trains, tunnels, and stations. I think a little tangle of my younger self's fantasies turns into a need to launch Cities: Skylines and build a living city.

In the previous article, I dealt with the genre more broadly and explored some ideas that sparked (mostly on Reddit) very interesting discussions. I talked more about the simulation and less about the aesthetics. Today, my text won't be technical at all; instead, it will tackle aesthetics and how much they disappoint me every time I gaze at my city.

Surfaces are all square and flat

Everything is square and unnatural. Looking at a random part of my city, I was trying to figure out why it's so ugly. What is it that makes me want to press alt+f4?

Here we see a spot where the sidewalk, some tiles from a building, and the grass meet.

In-game screenshot of Cities: Skylines 2 showing rigid, perfectly straight square seams where sidewalk, grass, and building tiles meet.

Does this look nice to you? How hard would it be for it to look like this:

Edited visual concept showing organic, blended transitions and natural edge detailing where grass meets paved surfaces.

I know someone can achieve similar and better results with mods and decals. But for most of us, it's just not realistic to spend 40 hours micro-managing every single corner of the city. And if you don't put in those hours, everything feels lifeless.

Default Cities: Skylines 2 street view showing a plain, sterile urban corner lacking surface detail.

Proposed visual improvement for a street corner, adding procedural detail, ground clutter, and realistic texture blending.

Also, something I truly enjoy in these games is being able to just stare at the city and see what the algorithm has generated. To be surprised. If I sit there and hand-paint every little corner, that "magic" is lost.

Neurotic cleanliness

As I just said, one of the reasons I build my city is so I can later go and gaze at random corners. It's the same when I take walks in downtown Athens; I look for charming little sides of the city. Not necessarily beautiful, not clean, but scenes that tell a story. In this game, everything is "sanitized" to the point of neurosis.

In-game view of a pristine, perfectly clean urban street in Cities: Skylines 2 with no visible wear or grime.

Mockup of the urban street with added surface wear, subtle dirt, and realistic pavement weathering.

Look how much difference these small textures can do to the overall atmosphere.

Default Cities: Skylines 2 cityscape scene featuring spotless, uniform architecture and sterile public space.

Enhanced visual concept showing character-filled urban space with lived-in details and subtle atmospheric grit.

What's the deal with stairs?

For some reason, the game has beef with stairs. Can we get some stairs? Something I would do if I were a designer for the game, is look at 100 photos of real cities and note down some of the things that make them up. Like:

In-game screenshot showing awkward elevation changes and steep ground slopes without pedestrian stairs in Cities: Skylines 2.

Conceptual mockup showing outdoor stairs and terraced steps smoothly connecting elevated terrain.

Organic shapes

I don't know what your neighborhood is like, but in mine, maybe 1 in 50 houses is that clean and organized. Most have damp spots, weeds, abandoned toys in the garden, clothes hanging out to dry on the balcony.

In-game residential area in Cities: Skylines 2 with perfectly manicured, uniform green square lawns and sterile balconies.

Visual improvement showing organic residential yards with overgrown weeds, damp patches, hanging laundry, and varied foliage.

Some have rusted railings. Even the well-kept ones have let nature do its thing in some corners. And nature's thing isn't perfectly green squares.

Poor and abandoned houses

Unfortunately, every real city has poor areas with abandoned houses or ones in very bad shape. This is another aesthetic element that offers both realism and usable feedback. You shouldn't have to open the stats panel to see where a problem lies. By just gazing at your city, the landscape could and should speak for itself.

Default Cities: Skylines 2 neighborhood displaying clean, uniform buildings regardless of land value or area degradation.

Edited visual concept illustrating degraded and abandoned houses with weathered facades and visual cues of urban decay.

I hope that future city building games or CS2 DLCs will focus on adding some soul and character to city building. Until then, we have to rely on our Bob Ross instincts.

Discussions:

AI Disclosure: Artificial intelligence was used exclusively for proofreading, generating descriptive image alt texts, and creating the "improved" visual concepts.