Cities: Skylines II, the struggling follow-up to the 2015 de-facto urban city builder is switching developers. Publisher Paradox Interactive is parting with developer Colossal Order.
The development reigns to Cities: Skylines II is now handed over to Iceflake Studio, a development team owned by Paradox that previously worked on Survive The Aftermath.
“We’re confident that the franchise will continue to thrive under Paradox’s leadership. As we move forward, we’re excited to channel our experience, creativity, and passion into new projects that align with our long-term vision.” Mariina Hallikainen, CEO of Colossal Order.
Cities: Skylines was Colossal Order’s big break. After making the Cities In Motion series, a logistics and transport simulator, the team went to make the city builder that effectively replaces the gold standard, SimCity. After the disappointment of SimCity (2013), fans of the series found a true successor to the urban city builder in Cities: Skylines, sporting big maps, free-flow road-building and an engrossing traffic simulation that makes players entangle and untangle spaghetti messes of road networks for hours on end.
The follow-up, Cities: Skylines II promises to be bigger in every way, with more in-depth simulation. But the launch was rife with issues, including how lacking the simulation aspects are. A console port was supposed to release in tandem with the main PC launch, but two years later, in remains to be seen.
Paradox has a habit of having different developers handle the same IP, sometime switching mid-way through development. The follow-up games to Magicka, Knights Of Pen & Paper and Surviving Mars were all made by different developers. Prison Architect was acquired and then switched to a different developer. The sequel, Prison Architect 2, had a delay which later involved a developer switch and still not released. And we all knew what happened with Vampire: The Masquerade- Bloodlines 2, which did ended up a released product under a new developer after a mid-development switch.
Cities: Skylines II will still be getting updates, with a roadmap of content still coming, though expect unannounced updates and fixes to come much later as Iceflake Studios take their time to get on top of a codebase from another company (which happens to be based in the same town of Tampere, Finland). The developer now handles the entire series, including ongoing support for Cities: Skylines, as well as upcoming expansions and the still-in-limbo console ports.
Hopefully Colossal Order can find its footing after losing their biggest project. But there is a good track record for past developers that worked with Paradox. Knights Of Pen & Paper devs went on to make the sentai-themed SRPG Chroma Squad, while the devs behind Magicka, Arrowhead Studios, eventually created Helldivers and its fantastic sequel.
Sources: Paradox Forum, Colossal Order