After teasing a reveal of the next expansion for their popular city-building game, Cities Skylines, Paradox Interactive streamed out the reveal with a new trailer and some discussion of the features coming within it. Joined by people from Colossal Order, the expansion was revealed to be "Natural Disasters" with a trailer that said "That's a nice city you have there. Would be a shame if something... were to happen to it."
The disasters themselves will be a randomly-occurring event in-game, which will affect some part of the city and will require some pre-planning to try to minimise possible damage and then management of the immediate dealing with the disaster and the clean-up aftermath. Fortunately, for those of you who prefer to use Cities as a way to express yourself artistically with beautiful, well-structured cities; natural disasters will be something you can turn off from happening randomly and instead trigger manually if you wish to. That function will also be useful for video-makers as well I dare say.
So far the only disaster we know about for certain is the meteor strike we get to see in the trailer. There will be others coming, but Paradox and Colossal will be giving more details about them later in the year before release. As part of the new things coming to the game there is a focus mainly on city services, with the police, fire and others getting new helicopter vehicles to help deal with a disaster aftermath and an entire new city service will be added in the form of a disaster response force to get in and extract survivors in the immediate aftermath of a disaster.
Outside of the city service additions, there will also be a 'Scenarios' gamemode added in which you are given a task to complete with clear win and lose conditions set out. As part of that, the game will also get a Scenario Editor for players to create their own, which will be shareable through Steam Workshop and will be added to the game as a free update to everyone who has the base game, regardless of whether or not you buy the expansion. There were also hints at something that they were working with modders on for the future, as well as radio stations coming to Cities which we hope you'll be able to add your own music and audio streams to.
Natural Disasters is due to release sometime in the Winter 2016 period. Keep your eyes open for more information as we approach that time.
