The big difference between any Sim City game and Cities Skylines is Cities Skylines has an extremely in-depth traffic simulation that actually punishes bad road design and encourages non-car modes of transit. Meanwhile Sim City always made nods to traffic, it never bothered with actual per person routing where you can focus on tweaking a single intersection for hours trying to get it to flow nicely
SimCity was released in 1989. It’s essentially the same game as Cities Skylines.
Absolutely isn’t the same.
You can see design evolution. It wouldn’t be too hard to describe C:S as Sim City 5.
Same genre for sure, totally different game in how it functions. It’s like saying Quake is the same as Call of Duty because you shoot things.
C:S had a lot of similarities to the Sim City that was released as its contemporary.
SimCity: open-ended city building game.
Cities Skylines: open-ended city building game.
Call of duty: first person shooter
Doom 1993: first person shooter
They are essentially the same game!
The big difference between any Sim City game and Cities Skylines is Cities Skylines has an extremely in-depth traffic simulation that actually punishes bad road design and encourages non-car modes of transit. Meanwhile Sim City always made nods to traffic, it never bothered with actual per person routing where you can focus on tweaking a single intersection for hours trying to get it to flow nicely
One thing SimCity (except 2013) has is much better city management system. In C:S it feels almost trivial compared to SimCity.