• vivadanang@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    arrow-down
    3
    ·
    11 months ago

    I’m curious from a gamedev perspective why you think any of the mechanics are sacrosanct - all economies are fake. they depend on mutual agreement of arbitrary values and systems.

    • Encrypt-Keeper@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      11 months ago

      Because the economy is the basis for the rest of the simulation. It’s not something you can just refactor in a DLC, you’d have to practically rebuild the game from the ground up around it. Which isn’t technically impossible, but the likelihood of it happening are slim to none. The proof of this is CO’s last game Cities Skylines, and in fact the very existence of CS2. They added snow and snow related services in a DLC, but they couldn’t/wouldn’t implement it into the base game, or even implement it into existing maps. Then they released the industries DLC which overhauled industry mechanics, but when they released DLCs later that added new industries, they couldn’t / wouldn’t integrate them with the same system used in the industries DLC. And those were incremental new features, not total rewrites of how the city’s economy works. Half the reason Cities Skylines 2 exists is so they could actually roll all the changes made over the years by DLC into the actual base game. CS2 is little more than a refactor at this stage.

      And the economy isn’t fake in the same way all economies are fake. It’s fake in that it seemingly doesn’t exist. There are numbers and graphs and features in the game’s UI that don’t actually correlate to existing parts of the simulation. At least, that’s the way it appears, given extensive testing by the community. The developers have insisted these mechanics do exist, they’re just broken. We’ll have to wait and see, which is what I’m doing.

      • vivadanang@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        arrow-down
        3
        ·
        11 months ago

        but it’s not. CS has an economy, but the entire simulation runs alongside it, not on it.

        I think you think you know a lot more about game dev than you actually do.

        • Encrypt-Keeper@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          edit-2
          11 months ago

          Cities Skylines simulation didn’t have an economy to run on, correct. But CS2 allegedly does run on its economy, that’s the entire point, whether or not it does so. Thats is CS2’s big differentiator between itself and CS1. It’s their highlight feature and centerpiece of their marketing prior to release.

          Either CS2’s simulation is powered by its economy, or it isn’t. If it is, then it will work fine once they will fix whatever is allegedly broken. If it isn’t, then the development team lied and the odds that they will at some point in time refactor the entire simulation to fundamentally change how it works are slim to none, and we know that because over CS1’s entire lifespan they never bothered to do this for even simple mechanics like snowfall, much less the entire economy simulation.

          What you believe is technologically possible is irrelevant, when we have almost a decade of Colossal Order history to inform us on what will happen lol. I think you’re vastly overestimating the value of what you consider your game dev experience when talking about this company.