Literally after the announcement, speculations have surfaced that Cities Skylines 2 will get a new engine, which will be Unreal Engine 5. For now, the developers have confirmed that the Cities Skylines 2 will be based on Unity. More about it in my article.
Why and who is the source and what would it mean if Cities Skylines 2 changed the engine for us gamers? And will it get a little more complicated?
If you want more Cities Skylines 2 content, you should dive into my trailer analysis, check out the release date or the published pricing model. Will the new CS 2 run on your PC? I think that probably will – in any case, check the system requirements!
If you want to see gameplay in the engine, you should check out this trailer:
Cities Skylines 2 will be Unity Based
Ok, we were fooled and the hype around Cities Skylines 2 and the Unreal Engine was just another “internet hype”. The Colossal Order confirmed on March 7 that Cities Skylines 2 will be “Unity based”. The source in this case is one of the tweets. See for yourself.
And if you read my detailed analysis, you can see the speculation – that there won’t be Epic Games logo on the trailer, and if the game is Unreal, we should be glad the logo is there – but it’s not. So Colossal Order will stay on Unity.
And we can probably be sure that part of the trailer was created in Unreal Engine (because of the gas station – which looks real). More about speculations and the hype below.
If you are interested, check Cities Skylines 2 Leaks or Feature wishlist. If you want to be the first to get information about Cities Skylines 2, leave your e-mail above and I will write you every important news about Cities Skylines 2.
Source of information about UE5
YouTuber City Planners Plays has the best points about Unreal Engine 5 and Cities Skylines 2. In the image/video below, you can see one shot from the trailer, which shows us one gas station…
… but this gas station looks similar to one of the gas stations available on the Unreal Engine marketplace. Below you can see one of the image. As you can see, they look pretty similar, don’t they? This should mean that the new Cities Skylines 2 will be in the new Unreal Engine. But it could also mean that…
… that we’ll be fooled. The trailer looks great, realistic with lots of detail, but it doesn’t have gameplay footage. So it could mean that it’s just a decoy and we could all really get hooked. If the trailer isn’t gameplay than what we see could be anything else, such as CGI. It is also possible that the trailer could be pre-rendered in Unreal Engine 5 to speed up the process.
We will know more when we get the gameplay trailer which will be in game.
After that, we might find out if Cities Skylines will be in UE5.
More about Cities Skylines 2 | More about wishes for Cities Skylines 2
What should Unreal Engine 5 mean for Cities Skylines 2?
So far, the community seems to be afraid of the Unreal Engine and that modding will be worse and more difficult. But Unreal Engine 5 will have a bigger community than the custom engine and there could be more advanced articles with tips. One would expect the learning curve to be fast and it might not actually be that bad, but I don’t really know the details.
For example, Hearts of Iron 4 runs on a custom engine that is more tailored to the game itself. Paradox will therefore have more experience with it. But then again, on the other hand, we can expect Cities Skylines 2 to be more 3D and perhaps boast graphics of something more complex. And maybe it will end up being something that’s based on Unreal Engine 5 and will be purely a Colossal Order thing.
I’m not an expert in this field and I would be glad for any advice.
Why not custom engine?
It might be a good question why Cities Skylines 2 doesn’t get its own engine. I think the Unreal Engine is more focused on FPS games. I don’t know enough strategy games that were made in the Unreal Engine. For developers that engine might have good parts about multiplatform development / optimization that a lot of features will still be implemented, so developers might have more room to develop features.
You can see in the image below that there is a lot of detail in theUnreal Engine that should be a great start to development. But…
… I think Cities Skylines will have more important parts than looks. It will need an advanced layer of AI to provide deep simulations of the lives of your citizens. There will be more layers from above rather than from a first person perspective. If the Unreal Engine will be better than a custom engine I don’t know.
So I’m actually not sure if Cities Skylines 2 will be a part of the Unreal Engine. Well if you remember the trailer, we didn’t see the Epic Store logo (if I’m not mistaken). And if it was in the Unreal Engine, they’d have to work with Epic Games, right?
Anyway, it will be interesting to see further developments. Fans are already passionately discussing. So I’m curious to see how this plays out. Anyway, the next trailer will tell us more.
More about Cities Skylines 2 in our articles: All we know about Cities Skylines 2, All leaks about Cities Skylines 2, Gameplay snippets, Release date of Cities Skylines 2, System requirements, Cities Skylines 2 prices.
