No multiplayer in Cities Skylines 2

[u/usman_923]

So Colossal Order have answered a few question which were submitted for month of March. The most intresting one was this one when asked if there will be mutiplayer in CS2? And the reply indicates for now there seem to be no multiplayer option as it would take too much time and resources.

https://preview.redd.it/0crbe54wnvra1.jpg?width=1920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0ba17c882b76c0faf0327bd2c3285d3bfc80f9df

[u/qtq_uwu]

Precisely this; as a casual programmer and game dev multiplayer requires a LOT of specific architecture to set up. It's very complicated, and if a game isn't designed for it from the ground up, it's (usually) not going to work. Usually games with both single and multiplayer have single player as an extension of multiplayer (think internal servers), not the other way around. While it's possible to add later (see Stardew Valley), it's rather difficult and not likely

[u/stdexception → u/qtq_uwu]

Depends what you want to do... Multiple players building in the same city would certainly be hard, but being able to have neighboring cities that are controlled by someone else (or even other cities of yours), and handle immigration, imports, exports, loans, etc. between these cities wouldn't require that much architecture work. If they already plan to have "regions" with multiple cities, I bet that could even be modded in.

[u/qtq_uwu → u/stdexception]

That is fair, the more involved the multiplayer implementation is the harder it'll be to add later. For instance you could have like building competitions where the only information that needs to be shared are certain stats. That implementation would probably be even easier than city regions. But if you want to all be working on the same city at the same time, that's difficult.

[u/dynedain → u/stdexception]

It’s very complicated to deal with “what is happening from my neighbors when my friends are offline”. It’s a huge technical problem even if it seems like it’s only a small number of factors. It’s deceptive, and is precisely why SimCity2013 was such a botched mess. Making the “simple” problem solvable forced them to make massive concessions around city size and gameplay.

[u/lazoric → u/stdexception]

It's actually the other way around. You can add multiple people to 1 game quite easily. People mod single player games all the time to do this quite well. (skyrim, Cities: skylines, Just cause 3, Open Transport Tycoon). Where it gets hard is trying to interconnect more like you say neighboring cities.