Cities Skylines traffic AI won’t get any better than it currently is, according to a developer response during a recent Cities Skylines Reddit AMA. After 3 years on the market, developer Colossal Order suggested the game’s problematic traffic system isn’t going to change.
Four members of the Cities Skylines development team took to Reddit yesterday afternoon to chat with players and answer questions as the game’s latest expansion, Cities Skylines Industries, went live. Bringing a massive overhaul to the original Industry Zoning feature, the expansion followed in the footsteps of other add-ons by enabling select new features like Toll Booths to the base game free of charge.
During the Q&A session, concerns over Cities Skylines traffic AI played a big role in the discussion. Reddit user Cpy asked the team whether they had any plans to upgrade and optimize the game for “more performance and more detailed simulation” and “smarter traffic”. Seemingly dodging the idea to further optimize in-game performance metrics to improve things like the game’s drastically reduced framerate in bigger cities, Colossal Order development team member Martsu eventually replied with, “The traffic is as smart as it gets.”
Responding to a question of what the dev team believes they could have done differently before releasing the original game, Martsu again brought up Cities Skylines traffic AI “since so many people complain” before explaining that they were “happy with it” at the time.
Further into the AMA session, when traffic was brought up yet again, game producer Emmi detailed the AI process of the in-game traffic system and the rules the game is coded to force traffic to follow. According to the developer, rules like “stop at red lights,” “don’t run over pedestrians,” and “do not rear-end the car in front” are all essentially disabled when the road in question isn’t in view.
So if your dire traffic situation sorts itself out while you panic over something else, chances are its because traffic laws were cast aside while you weren’t looking.
