Paradox and Colossal Order Are Divorcing, and Cities: Skylines II Is the Unwanted Kid

After a year of unmitigated disaster, Colossal Order is walking away. The Cities: Skylines II mess is now somebody else's problem.

Well, I guess we just found the final tombstone for the Cities: Skylines II we were promised. Paradox and Colossal Order just put out the most "it's not you, it's me" corporate breakup announcement I've ever seen. After more than a decade of working together, they've "mutually decided to pursue independent paths." This is the business equivalent of "we're staying together for the kids," except now, they're not even doing that.

So What Happens to the Wreckage?

Colossal Order, the studio that built this entire broken franchise, is walking away. They're pushing out a "Bike Patch" and a beta for asset mods before the end of the year, and then they are gone.

Mariina Hallikainen, CO's CEO, is "excited to channel... passion into new projects." That's the most professional "fuck this, I'm out" I've ever read. They are escaping the burning building they set on fire, and honestly, good for them.

Meet the New Step-Dad

So who gets custody of this problem child? Paradox is keeping the Cities franchise, of course. And they're handing all development for CS2 over to one of their internal teams: Iceflake Studios.

Iceflake. The people who made Surviving the Aftermath.

Now, look. Surviving the Aftermath is... fine. It's a perfectly cromulent little city-builder. But this isn't a "fine" situation. This is a five-alarm-fire, core-engine-is-melted, simulation-is-a-lie disaster.

Colossal Order, the people who built the engine, couldn't fix it. And now Paradox is asking a completely different studio to come in, learn a decade's worth of somebody else's spaghetti code, and turn this corpse into a living, breathing game. This is not a rescue mission. This is a salvage operation, at best.

This Is the End of 'The Vision'

Iceflake's studio manager says he "can't wait to show you what we have planned." I'm sure he can't. But let's be adults here.

Whatever grand "vision" Colossal Order sold us, the deep simulation, the revolutionary new way to build cities, is dead. It's over. The original architects have fled the project.

The new team's job isn't to innovate. Their job is to patch the holes, stop the leaks, and maybe, maybe, make the game not run at 12 frames per second. Their job is to make this thing stable enough to sell us a few more DLCs before they finally turn the lights off.

The Cities: Skylines II we all wanted died a long time ago, probably on a whiteboard before the first line of broken code was written. This announcement is just the official obituary. Colossal Order is free. And the rest of us are stuck with the bill. What a goddamn mess.

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