Revelling In The Nightlife Of Cities: Skylines’ After Dark Expansion

Cities: Skylines is a very easy game to recommend to fans of city builders. It’s the first game in a long time to manage to capture the essence of the genre and create something that lets players build cities of the scope and scale that they desire. Yet, even with the prominent flaws of the latest SimCity game and Cities XXL – not a related game despite the overly similar title – Skylines was something of a surprise success.

Though they had always planned to bring a variety of updates to the game, both free and paid for, it’s this player base and community which has been built up around it that has helped to shape what they’re bringing to the game in its first major expansion, After Dark. This is an expansion designed to give the community new tools and options that they simply can’t make for themselves using the game’s modding tools.

As you might be able to guess, the eternally sunny daytime of Skylines is about to be replaced by a day-night cycle that plunges the city into darkness. As the sun sets, the lights flicker on across the city, dramatically changing the way the game looks in quite a gorgeous fashion.

Time passes rather quickly in the game, with days ticking by at quite a rapid rate, but the setting of the sun and rising of the moon doesn’t sync up with this for some rather obvious reasons. Firstly, it would flip between night and day at a quite alarming speed, but keeping that transition at a slower speed gives them the opportunity to add some intriguing new gameplay ideas into the mix.

While the day-night cycle itself will be added as a free patch to all players, much of the gameplay associated with it will be brought as part of the expansion pack, priced similarly to other Paradox expansions. It goes far beyond simply adding new zoning options and a few nightclub models – though those will also be a part of it – to create an actual divide between daytime and night time gameplay.

The population of your city will act differently during the night, with more people at home rather than at work or travelling, meaning there’s less traffic on the streets and fewer traffic flow problems to deal with. However, while that’s partially true, there are also more revellers eager to make use of public transport to get to where the hottest clubs and attractions are and have a bit of a good time.

Public transport is getting a number of improvements to help cater to this, with a new taxi system added to the city services – I’m assuming that an Uber-like organisation will arrive in a future DLC pack – bikes and bike lanes for those who prefer pedal power, and there are new buildings like a bus terminal, larger multi-runway airports and combination train stations and shipping ports, all of which solve specific but oft heard complaints in the community.

Perhaps most integral to the expansion is the separate budget for night and day, to let you cater to the city’s changing demands. You might want to put more buses on the streets to handle more revellers, or make use of the quieter roads to get your fleet of garbage trucks clearing the backlog without getting stuck. One thing’s for sure, and that’s a need for more coppers doing the rounds.

You see, it turns out that criminals prefer to act under cover of darkness, and so burglaries will be more prevalent at night time. Obviously, you want your bobbies to be ready to spring into action and catch them as soon as possible, but CO weren’t particularly happy with the inane simplicity of simply throwing more police stations at the problem. After all, criminals should be sent to jail, and so comes the addition of prisons where you can lock up your city’s wrong ‘uns.

After Dark is perhaps a slightly sprawling response to many of the community’s wishes, but that’s exactly what it needs to be. The only thing missing from what I saw was a city theme based off Tokyo, Hong Kong or any of the other major cities famous for neon heavy lighting, which would look quite stunning at night. Thankfully, Colossal Order are already experimenting with this, but my second request for a seedy 1970s New York theme and a less wholesome interpretation of a city after dark didn’t seem to be on their to-do list. Personally, I think they’re missing a trick with that one, but perhaps this one’s best left to the modders…

Of course, with the surprise announcement of Cities: Skylines for Xbox One during Microsoft’s conference, I did ask for more details, but for now Paradox and Colossal Order are staying tight lipped on what that will entail.