Cities: Skylines 2 is removing the original game's agent limit, freeing players from a massive limitation and allowing them to truly melt their gaming machines.
"As a major improvement to the first game in the series, Cities: Skylines 2 doesn’t feature hard limits for agents moving about in the city," developer Colossal Order wrote in a recent dev diary. "Overall, the performance of the simulation and pathfinding is vastly improved which means larger populations are possible. The only real limits to the simulation are the hardware limitations on the platform running the game."
'Agents' in the Cities: Skylines parlance are essentially just simulations of individual people or services in your city, whether that's a pedestrian walking to work or a garbage truck picking up trash in the afternoon. The original game had a hard limit of 65,536 individual citizen agents running around your city, and that limitation was directly tied with the game's programming in a way that made it effectively impossible to mod out. While you could have a much higher population than that, you could only see a fraction of those people simulated at a time.
As one Reddit user puts it, now "you will know the limit when the game crashes." PC players are already talking about hardware upgrades - "RIP to my CPU" as another commenter puts it - especially as the devs say traffic pathfinding calculations now take full advantage of multicore CPUs. Remember that Cities: Skylines 2 is coming to PS5 and Xbox Series X and S, too, so we're going to have a real interesting way to put the consoles through their paces.
Cities: Skylines 2 is looking like a crowd-pleaser so far, with even the most simple quality-of-life features smartly addressing the concerns of longtime fans. The game is due to hit PC and current-gen consoles (minus Switch) on October 24, and will be available day one on Xbox Game Pass.
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