I'm just going to close my eyes for six months and check in with C:S again then. I can do fun things with it, especially in the area of roads, but the game is 5% worthwhile and 95% potential right now. I think the community and the developer, given some time, will sort that situation out.
In the meantime, I'm thinking that it is a timewaster. A beautiful one, and clearly "the next big thing," but it's just not there for me yet, in that it only has a small fraction of the richness that is SC4. Scale is just one of the major problems right now. Six months from now my guess is that a lot of this sort of stuff will be addressed.
OK, I said that on March 30th. And then I cheated. I didn't wait six months. I waited five.
I'll move my worthwhile/potential assessment to 80% worthwhile and unlimited potential. That's because of a) developer attitude and b) moddability. I've remarked elsewhere that Colossal Order might not have realized how wide it opened this game up to the custom content community. There are incredible things being done.
So I've started a city journal. You can
take a look at it here [linkie] if you would want to. Yes, it is at Simtropolis. What does that mean? Nothing, as far as I am concerned. To me, SC4D is and will always be an SC4 site. If there is truly some interest in having me port posts over here, feel free to let me know, but I don't want to just butt in as if I would feel some sense of entitlement. Please do comment wherever you wind up seeing it, though. I miss hanging around with so many good friends.
Back to the March post- I said that C:S is "clearly the next big thing." If anything, I am even more convinced of that now. The next six months to a year will tell the story. If upcoming updates continue to add good new content and expand the game's scope and depth, Cities: Skylines is SC4Next, end of story. If those updates, though, start breaking important mods with regularity and just seem calculated to churn the game for a few more bucks in profit, that will not be a good thing.
So we'll see. Things are looking pretty good right now, though.
David