City building games have a Soul Problem pt.2

Alex Lingris criticizes Cities: Skylines 2 for feeling lifeless and visually sterile despite its simulation depth, tracing his frustration back to childhood impulses to build miniatures. Rather than technical simulation issues, the focus is on aesthetics: perfectly square, unnaturally sharp seams between sidewalks, grass, and buildings; an obsessive cleanliness that erases wear, grime and human clutter; a baffling scarcity of stairs and terraced connections; and a lack of organic variation in yards, facades and street-level details. Specific missing elements listed include potholes, trash, cables, graffiti, scaffolding, and traces of past uses - details that give real cities character and tell stories without consulting menus.

The central argument is that these visual shortcomings undermine the genre’s emotional payoff because most players can’t - or shouldn’t have to - spend dozens of hours hand-painting every corner with mods. Lingris calls for engine-level solutions: procedural texture blending, ground clutter, realistic weathering, pedestrian stairways, and visual indicators of decay so problems are readable at a glance. He suggests such changes would restore surprise and “soul” to city-building, and notes that community discussion and AI-assisted proofreading/images accompanied his piece.