Cities: Skylines Can Now Be More Realistic Than Ever

Cities: Skylines is an impossibly engaging city-building game, and it's getting its very first expansion pack. 

This might sound a little silly, but hear me out. VG247 reports the expansion will add a day-and-night cycle to the normally perpetually daylight cities you curate and maintain, and that sounds extremely awesome. 

It's the main feature you'll be seeing in the upcoming expansion, but that's huge for Cities: Skylines, which has up until now forced inhabitants to hang out in the daytime forever. Don't underestimate how completely awesome this new update is. 

But that's not all you can expect to see from it. The day and night cycle will be included in a free update for players from Paradox Interactive, but extra features will be included in paid DLC that has yet to be given a release date. 

In addition to opening up the night life for the tenants of your cities, commercial areas will now be able to open up to "leisure activities," so your little sim townsfolk can go out and hang out and have fun rather than going to work, going home, and working themselves to death like so many of us do in real life and even in our sim games. Leisure areas become more active at night, but they'll behave just like regular commercial areas during the day. 

You'll be able to create beach areas as well, including restaurants, fishing tours with small marinas and shorelines, and invite your city-dwellers to hang out on the beach for more social activities. But don't worry about crime rates rising from all of this. Criminals are included in all the expansion fun, too. They'll be taken to prison from police buildings, and other expanded transportation services will be available for you as well. You'll have a taxi service, an international airport, metro station, bus terminal, and more to make getting around your (hopefully) massive city much easier. 

And with transportation options comes transportation itself. Bike lanes, bikes, and bike ways will be implemented for citizens who want a faster way to get around but aren't able to get to cars. Aren't you a caring and benevolent city builder for your adorable little Cities: Skylines sims buddies? This may all sound rather mundane, but that's exactly why people are drawn to this game. It's an interesting study of virtual life, for one thing. If you don't build your city correctly, sometimes you'll end up with abandoned buildings simply because the virtual inhabitants didn't think the path you built to them sufficed. It can be hilarious and depressing, but so much fun. 

Paradox Interactive will be releasing more information about the upcoming expansion, including a price and what else we can expect from it, in the coming weeks. Cities: Skylines is an excellent sim game, and I'm looking forward to more out of it.