As pretty as Cities: Skylines is, getting a read on your city's problems can take some digging. While traffic jams are immediately visible, prompting you to start reorganising the layout of your streets and bypasses, other issues only make themselves known when you switch on overlays or bring up a stats screen. Changing that is one developer Iceflake Studios aims for colourful plastic brick-based spinoff Lego Skylines.

"If there's an issue, it should be visible in the world," game director Lasse Liljedahl tells me. "Everything that you need to worry about or manage is something you should see while zooming in and zooming out and not digging deep in statistics or information screens. That's the goal."

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Being a pope is a stressful job. That's true today, but imagine heading up the Roman Catholic Church in the 11th century. Back then, the leader of the Catholic Church didn't have access to a bubble car or a social media team. The good news is, when Crusader Kings 3's next expansion, By God Alone, launches at the end of September, I know how to help my pope relax after a long day: polyamory.

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You probably don't need me to recap the difficult life Cities: Skylines 2 has had since hitting the streets in 2023. Plagued by performance issues and prompting questions over whether its additions made it a worthy sequel right out of the gate, thus followed years of tweaks aiming to undo the damage. Eventually, original developers Colossal Order handed over the game and series' reins to Iceflake Studios, with Paradox Interactive staying on as publishers.

The latter two have now revealed the next game in the Skylines series - a brick-built city builder dubbed Lego Skylines. It's not a bad name, but surely they could have gone with Lego Cities.

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Update 25/08: Paradox have officially announced Afterworld with a story trailer - read more about it here.

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What is happening across the Paradox Universe? So the publishers behind strategy stalwarts like Crusader Kings 3 and Europa Universalis 4 asked in a post to the socials the other day, which promised all will be revealed on August 25th at Gamescom. Unfortunately for those best laid plans, the name of the game in question looks to have leaked via Paradox's forum of all places. Assuming the leaks prove accurate, it's a post-apocalyptic survival strategiser called Afterworld.

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Lo, a new power rose in the East. The warlord Michael of Jordan united the people of Chicago under the crest of the bull, then with his general Scottie of Pippen and the triangular religion of bishop Phil of Jackson, conquered the whole realm. Alas, those feeble heirs who inherited Michael's fiefdom upon his passing into retirement failed to retain all he'd won, and soon kings named Kobe of Bryant and LeBron of James vied for supremacy. This, I assume, is how a playthrough of NBA 2K27's new MyNBA Legacy mode might go, given it seems to have taken cues from Crusader Kings 3's multi-generation dynasty-crafting.

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Who knows when or if BioWare'll ever be allowed to make a follow-up to Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Whatever ends up being the future of a series EA've left in a rather ambiguous place, a group of Crusader Kings 3 modders have stepped up to make a Dragon Age total conversion that lets folks play out a bit of their own kingdom-battling history in Thedas.

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