Once a week, the Paradox Interactive-owned developer Colossal Order gives an update on the status of Cities: Skylines II's ongoing post-launch development. Today's blog post from Colossal Order CEO Mariina Hallikainen touched on the upcoming modding tools, changes to update cadence, and modding on consoles.
The modding tools, dubbed the Editor, is first planned to drop with a few features, with the studio planning to update it with more options and abilities following launch. The initial release will carry a custom map maker and a code editor. An asset importer is also in the works, which would also allow the previously announced Paradox Mods platform and the creator-made Region Pack assets to launch.
As for when players can expect the initial launch of the Editor, Hallikainen says, "it will take a couple of months to get the Editor in a shape where we can release it." However, this is only an estimate, meaning it may take longer for the highly-anticipated modding tools to finally arrive for PC players.
On the console side, the same Editor will be available at launch in 2024, but code modding and asset importing will not be available due to Microsoft and Sony platform restrictions.
Meanwhile, Hallikainen said to expect another hotfix for Cities: Skylines II soon, but unfortunately, weekly patches will no longer be a thing afterward. This is due to the developer focusing on resolving the major performance issues plaguing the game.
"The workload is significant and unfortunately, there is no silver bullet to improve the performance at once, instead, it requires several tasks completed before we are happy with it," she adds. "This results in less frequent updates so we won't have weekly patches going forward."
Fixing assets' level of detail (LOD) issues and GPU performance is apparently the target of Colossal Order going forward. Again, there are no firm launch dates for these fixes. The studio also confirmed recently that no premium DLC will be offered until the game meets its performance targets, which involves letting players reach at least 30FPS in the massive city builder.
