Cities: Skylines will have more decorative cities with Plazas & Promenades expansion

Another few months have rolled around, so for Colossal Order, that means it’s time to release yet another DLC for the seemingly never-ending Cities: Skylines.

The latest pack is titled Plazas & Promenades, and it aims to provide city builders with a wealth of new ways to breath new life into their settlements all in the vein of beautification and walkability for virtual citizens.

Take a hike, man (for your health)

While Cities: Skylines already features a robust AI traffic management system that handles all sorts of different vehicular movements, the Plazas & Promenades DLC puts the emphasis on the good old-fashioned way of getting around town: leg power.

Players will have the ability to create areas where cars are flat-out banned, including pedestrian streets and completely car-free areas.

These come with new policies you can  implement, such as zones where that limit cars to a 20 MPH speed limit on regular roads. There are also two other new policies: a sugar ban that benefits citizen health at the expense of happiness and a street music policy where performers are allowed to jam out in public, but they’ll create a new source of noise pollution.

Street scenes

The “plazas” part of the Plazas & Promenades expansion unsurprisingly introduces plazas for citizens to freely walk about and explore the three new special districts: offices, high-density residential areas and high-density commercial zones. Each zone comes with its own selection of 24 wall-to-wall buildings that sport modern designs.

There are also new city service buildings that can match the visual style of the pedestrian zones, which will have an effect on the happiness of the citizens.

Considering that there are modern cities where such designs have been implemented for years, this new pack will allow players to create much more realistic and dynamic cities. Throw in some camera mods to allow you to “walk” around the city from the street viewpoint, and this upcoming expansion becomes all the more interesting.

The DLC doesn’t have a release date yet, but it will cost the standard $14.99 USD. That’s been the case with past DLC for Cities: Skylines, the last of which was the Airports expansion from early this year. That brought with it an upgrade to the air travel system, allowing players to create their own custom airports, complete with original designs and layouts. Unfortunately, it didn’t sit that well with either myself or many players at large.

That said, judging by the comments underneath the reveal trailer for the Cities: Skylines Plazas & Promenades DLC, people seem to be rather excited for this one. Here’s hoping Colossal Order can deliver on what seems to be a truly dynamic shakeup to the aging sim’s gameplay formula.