Cities: Skylines 2 finally launches this October, and it's coming to Game Pass

The Cities: Skylines 2 release date is officially set for October 24, 2023, and it will be available on day one via Xbox Game Pass.

The Xbox Games Showcase trailer showed off quite a bit of city-building action, and fans are already starting to pick apart some particularly impressive improvements over the original game. For example, intersections now appear to auto-generate when you lay a new road over top of an existing one, and you can automatically build grids of roads, too.

We get a look at modular buildings, and a hint that utility connections are now under roads by default. There's air pollution to contend with, and it looks like a new wind simulation system will have an effect on it. It appears that seasons are here, too, given the snow we see at the end of the trailer.

Cities: Skylines 2 is set to launch simultaneously across Xbox Series X and S, PC, and PS5 on October 24. You'll be able to play it across both Xbox and PC on day one with Game Pass, but if you prefer to buy your games outright, you can get an extra set of landmark buildings and a Tampere map as a pre-order bonus.

The standard edition of CS2 is priced at $49.99 USD. The Ultimate Edition ups the price to $89.99, and gets you the expansion pass, with a Bridges and Ports expansion, plus a load of smaller additions, including an instant unlock for the San Francisco set with the game launches. You'll also get a Beach Properties asset pack, two content creator packs, and three radio stations coming in the months following the game's release.

Check the out details from the Starfield Direct too if you missed today's show.

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Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.