Above: Cities: Skylines screenshot courtesy Paradox.I've been a fan of Cities: Skylines since it came careening onto the scene back in 2015. The game ticked all the boxes that I enjoyed about these kinds of games but with one crucial error: all transit that wasn't a car was terrible. Thankfully, Mass Transit, an expansion geared toward making blimps, trains, and boats viable in the game, has been announced for May 18, 2017.I'm not trying disparage what Cities: Skylines was already doing in the transit arena. Like many people, I play city creator games in a few different ways. One way is just designing the most fun-looking city possible (there's a cottage industry of videos for that if you're interested). Another way is just making the most efficient city possible, where every block levels up to the maximum amount and my population grows at an exponential rate no matter what the cost.Both my design ambitions and my desire to watch buildings turn green with happiness have always been hurt by the lack of good mass transit options in Skylines. While the game has always had busses and subways, they never seemed to work the way I wanted them to, and I usually just defaulted to spamming bus stops on every block so that the people who lived there would be happy that they theoretically had access to an unusable and clunky bus system.It looks like Mass Transit is finally going to take the movement of lots of people from place to place seriously within the Skylines game system, and I think that every player is probably looking forward to all the different ways to cram people efficiently into vehicles that neatly take them from one point to the other.However, the developers should be forewarned: Putting a monorail in your game without also adding in some kind of huckster monorail architect would be a grave error.
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