and still no official multiplayer
Is multiplayer expected?
No lol and I don’t think many people are putting that as prio on their feature wish list. It’s already a resource intensive game, and there is a lot of room for improvement, as they’ve been showing off with these vids lately.
And multiplayer sounds gimmicky anyway
I hadn’t thought about it, as the only experience with “multiplayer” I’ve ever had in city management games was with Simcity 2013 which… ahem. We can do without. However a factorio-like experience where multiple friends can work together on the same city does sound fun.
But yeah given how resource-intensive even the first C:S still is in big cities, I don’t see that happening as a seamless experience would almost certainly require a complete re-architecture of the simulation engine, nevermind the fact that more people implies bigger cities implies more resources that must be dedicated to simulation (nevermind the netcode overhead, which might not be negligible with tens of thousands of entities to keep track of).
They already greatly increased map size in this version, which concerns me with performance as my previous build already slowed down simulation speed significantly in mid-sized cities, especially with traffic mods. Presumably they’ve added some architectural changes to better parallelize the simulation on many-core CPUs.
There are several people in my friend group that want to play together in one map, but the 3rd party mod for the original game has many bugs.
As it should be.
I guess it could be cool to view/link cities, but I don’t see much value beyond that. If that’s wanted, it could be added pretty easily later on.
But if you want multiple people modifying the same city, I fear there would be too many issues that the sim would have to be more shallow. You’d need to target the lowest common denominator so the MP experience is consistent across hardware, and then you’d only get the performance of that lowest common denominator to keep things in sync. It seems they’re going for more depth in the sim and more performance, so adding in MP would go against that.
