Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/12/17/cities-skylines-currently-free-of-charge.html
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FYI It’s only free for 24 hours, not all of December. Grab it if you want it!
Deals ends tomorrow, December 18th at whatever time 11:00am EST is in your local timezone (unless Epic adjusts for timezones, I’m not sure)
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I love how I can spend hours alternating between a state of zen watching my city go and one of intense desire to tinker when I notice a problem.
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Yet another one of those situations in which I get a game for free but may never jump through the hoops to play it (in this case: downloading Epic Launcher)
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Epic are doing daily game giveaways for 15 days - this is today’s. It’ll be replaced tomorrow.
Pretty sure they don’t - the deals go live at 8 am Western time, so everyone has about 20 hours left (from time of commenting) to pick this up.
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Yeah, timezone awareness would require extra coding.
And anyone who’s used the Epic Game Store will know that they’re more of an “It built with only warnings! Quick - SHIP IT!” kind of company than a “let’s plan this properly and get it right first time” company…
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It’s not just a matter of coding - it would create all sorts of problems to have adjusted timezones (leaving aside the complexity of that - even US states in the same timezone don’t necessarily share times), as a person in one location is able to get access to deals that aren’t live elsewhere. It’s highly exploitable, especially as you could spoof your location fairly easily. The only reason you’d do something like that is if you have completely separate markets with different rules run independently (e.g. China). It just adds about a thousand things that could go wrong compared to just being able to flip a switch and have it go live, everywhere.
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Furthermore, as long as the thing runs for 24 hours (or multiples of 24 hours), it really doesn’t matter - everyone, everywhere in the world gets a 1am, a 1pm, a 6pm, and so on. Yeah, their clocks read different numbers when the thing starts and finishes, but … so?
What would be helpful is being super clear about which timezone the publicised start/stop time is connected to. GMT would be preferred, but any is ok given clarity.
(And while we’re on the subject of clarity, that reminds me: can e-commerce sites please start appending the currency being used as a matter of course already. Loads of countries use the $ indicator, and more than one use £. Coupled with some websites “intelligently” - but transparently - converting prices to local currency, it’s become super confusing trying to figure out how much something is actually going to cost :mad: )
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Bah, Windows-only on the epic store.
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Yeah, it doesn’t really, except that, say, a US website can point people to the giveaway in the morning, but elsewhere the news will be coming in the evening (perhaps when websites aren’t posting new articles), so the announcement can get lost. (I notice, with non-US-based gaming sites that I read daily, that often by the time they post something about a giveaway like this, it’s been active since the previous day, so if I read the site in the afternoon, it’ll already be over.) But that’s not really Epic’s issue at all.
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I don’t have the time to indulge in Cities: Skylines, but I have enjoyed this youtube channel that uses the sim as a tool for discussing historical city development and urban planning:
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In addition is should be noted that Epic has been giving a new game (or two!) away every week since it launched its storefront, but through to the end of the month they’re doing a new game every day. Generally the games they give away are actually good games as well, though they’re always going to be a few years long in the tooth.
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That’s alright, so is my laptop.
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…and maybe something the kids…
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Sure it doesn’t work under WINE?
It’s definitely a decent game, but at some point it becomes all about traffic management, and then I gave up.
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Oh no, you make that highway from Norway to South Korea work as an accessible 13-time-zone city, then you say you ‘tried the game.’ Just kidding, I can’t get progress in Cyberpunkland at TheVerge.com yet so can’t speak to it.
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That is like saying you played Total War that at a certain point it became all about the battle field so you gave up
But if by “traffic management” you mean cars, you already ran into the very historically correct mistake of making it all about cars. The key to good cities in RL and the game: Walkability, ciclebility, public transport - and only than car based traffic. Keep the roads free for those that need it by reducing the need for them in the first place.
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No, I mean traffic management. And your reply kind of reinforces my point. You can try to make it walkable, but it’s hard to do and literally becomes all about traffic. Car traffic. Foot traffic. Subway Traffic. Light rail traffic. I ended up spending most of my time in the game trying to deal with getting cars off the road so the waste management trucks can do their thing, and the ambulances can get where they need to so people don’t die in their homes and cause the neighbors to move out.
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