New Cities Skylines 2 DLC Park Adventures is set to be released by the end of 2026, and it’s a promising-sounding upgrade to the gradually recovering city builder. Developer Iceflake Studios, now approaching a year in charge since taking over from Colossal Order, is planning an expansion that will let you build all manner of entertainment and leisure spaces around your neighborhoods. While that’s already good news, the studio also wants to make clear that “a lot of work we have been doing is coming to the base game as well,” and that includes a leisure rework.
Park Adventures promises to bring a lot more joy to Cities Skylines 2. You’re able to choose between amusement parks, zoos, city parks, and nature reserves, but Iceflake says it “did not want the park area itself to dictate which one you are making.” Instead, you’re free to incorporate whichever buildings, facilities, and rides take your fancy, and as you expand it out, the choices you make will determine how your citizens treat the location.
Alongside this, the team decided to overhaul both how leisure works more broadly in CS2, and also how your citizens choose and use their destinations. It stresses in a new development blog that both these upgrades “will be available to everyone, whether you own Park Adventures or not.” It adds that you can also expect “plenty of visual and other improvements to the base game,” including some aspects that “reach beyond parks themselves.”
Today’s focus, though, is on the redesign of CS2’s leisure systems. “The existing system is quite straightforward,” Iceflake notes: Citizens determine the kind of activity they’re after and choose a suitable destination, typically based on distance. “Once they have done that, there isn’t much reason for them to reconsider this decision,” it explains. “Of course, that doesn’t leave much room for the idea of actually spending time in a park, which became a problem.”
Initially, the team experimented with the idea of each individual visitor having their own personal preferences across categories such as excitement, socialization, and relaxation, with certain ages or social groups favoring particular forms. “This sounded interesting on paper, but it quickly created other problems. If a visitor had a very specific preference and the park didn’t contain exactly what they wanted, they would always be disappointed.” It also resulted in too much micromanagement and was skewed due to adults making up 60-70% of the typical population.
Now, the system looks more at the park as a whole, but still leaves room for individual visitors to make decisions while they’re there. As for how those decisions are made, both in terms of the DLC and the wider game, distance will now be a slightly less defining factor. “If one destination is already crowded, a citizen may decide that another park is a better choice, even if it’s a little bit farther away. Not only that, but the condition and the quality of the leisure destinations also affect the experience.”
As citizens move through a park, they’ll look at factors such as how far away a particular attraction or amenity is, whether there are long queues, and whether there are similar facilities available in close proximity. Should those factors change as they approach, it might alter their plans. “Restaurants are treated more like attractions,” Iceflake points out, “while amenities fulfill the secondary needs that can arise during a visit.” These will potentially affect the rating and feedback you receive.
Iceflake has also worked to improve “the visibility of everyday life in the city.” Along with watching your citizens travel, you’ll be able to see them “actually stop, interact with their surroundings, and spend time in public spaces.” Leisure is the ideal starting point to implement this, the developer writes; in Park Adventures you’ll visibly see people queuing for attractions, sitting on rides, and watching the animal exhibits.
“This same thinking also led to interactive props,” Iceflake continues, describing a new concept it calls ‘Divert logic.’ “Before leaving home, a citizen does not necessarily decide that they absolutely must sit on one particular bench. Instead, if they are already travelling somewhere and encounter a suitable interactive prop along the way, there is a chance that they stop and use it before continuing on their original journey.”
These are small touches, but ones that really bring a bustling city to life – making it feel like a place filled with personality rather than a simple churn of numbers and statistics sliding around your infrastructure empire. “It is still very much a work in progress,” the team writes, so we are not going to promise that every prop in the game is suddenly going to have citizens climbing all over it, but the underlying technology is there, and this gives us a starting point for expanding these kinds of interactions in the future.”
“A large part of the work has been about making leisure something that the citizens actually do, rather than simply a destination to visit before heading home,” Iceflake concludes. Returning to the example of the DLC, the team says, “We want the park to make sense as a simulation, but we also want the result of that simulation to be visible. If a park is full of attractions, but everyone simply walks to one building and then goes home, a lot of the work happening under the hood is not particularly interesting to watch.”
The Park Adventures DLC for Cities Skylines 2 is set to release in the fourth quarter of 2026. Whether you get it or not, the hope is that you can expect to feel notably more personality in town. “While Park Adventures is about creating parks and giving citizens new places to visit, the work around it has ended up touching a much wider part of the game.”