'Cities: Skylines' Release Date, News: Hit City-Building PC Game to Arrive in Xbox One Soon
Microsoft just announced that the famous city-building PC game "Cities: Skyline" is about to get its Xbox One debut.
After the PC success of "Cities: Skylines," developer Colossal Order and game publisher Paradox Interactive is now working on an upcoming Xbox One version of the city-building simulation game.
The game became famous for giving its players a taste of what it's like to strategically plan out an entire city. Gamers can also engage in some urban planning since it involves creating public transportation, providing public services, collecting taxes, and more.
Get Our Latest News for FREE
According to the announcement by "Cities: Skylines" lead producer Niklas Lundström which was posted through Xbox Wire on Thursday: "After the success of Cities: Skylines on PC, there was a strong desire to take on the challenge of bringing this game from PC to console. We figured the typical Skylines player doesn't necessarily need to be sitting in front of a computer screen, mouse and keyboard at the ready to build fun, beautiful, crazy, creative and bustling cities; it can be perfectly suited for doing all of that from the comfort of your living-room couch."
Lundström also shared that the challenge of porting the game mainly revolved on adapting its features and mechanism to using console controllers rather than the keyboard and mouse setup used in PC gaming.
The game's lead producer further explained that they needed to focus on how the game is going to be played "from a moving mouse to a snappier point-to-point navigation of the UI, including radial menus and dedicated Xbox One controller button prompts."
Apart from the controller aspect, the developers have also worked greatly on fine-tuning the game's user interface that includes adjusting the user interface size to make it feel natural when played on Xbox One and "to reflect this new mode of input" without losing the familiar engaging nature of "Cities: Skylines."
Since its release in March 2015 on Microsoft Windows, OS X, and Linux, the game garnered positive feedback and fairly high ratings from various gaming news and review outlets. Within a year, there were two million copies of "Cities: Skylines" sold globally while its Metacritic rating currently stands at 85 over 100.
The game feels real and is so engaging that it was actually used in real-life urban planning back at publisher Paradox Interactive's homeland of Stockholm, Sweden, as featured in a documentary titled "My Urban Playground." At the 2-minute mark of the video above, it was explained how "Cities: Skylines" was utilized in designing the city's new transportation system.
"Cities: Skylines" is slated to arrive on Xbox One this spring.
