A fresh update has just been released for Highrise City. And we have plenty of other news as well. But let's focus on what's new first. After massive feedback from the Community, we're finally ready to roll out the new Research menu. You will have multiple categories now and can invest your hard-earned research points in multiple tech trees. The new structure is way more effective and was also built with future content in mind. There are also some research missions now which you can fulfill.
Additionally, the UI got an overhaul. Highrise City now looks more modern and we hope you like the new order and style. The HUD got reworked as well and the Tutorial got improved, too. For the future, we will also update the voice-overs.
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And there's even more. New Milestones got added, we improved loading times, added smaller animations, updated various buildings and even added new ones (There's a new power plant... you'll find it, no worries!). And we've been fixing and fine-tuning a lot of things.
Full Changelog:
- New UI
- New Research Menu
- Research Missions
- HUD displays unemployed people per citizen stage. You can switch between relative to the camera position and absolute numbers
- New animations for building selection
- Improved the tutorial for new UI elements
- Reduced Zone 4 & 5 building cists
- Added 6 new Milestones
- Optimized the game a lot, depending on the machines memory now citizens with up to 50 Million citizens are possible
- Improved distance from where on vehicles are visible
- Vehicles will reduce their speed when they reach their target
- Improved the time it takes to save the game
- Reduced size of save games
- Improved loading times
- Reduced memory use while saving and loading
- Improved quality of shadows
- Increased the storage of local storage by 100%
- Fixed a bug which would sometimes block jobs from being taken
- Improved Chinese language
- Carriers now highlight their trucks
- Garbage Zones can only be build near the Garbage Carrier
- Compass now turns correctly
- Number of vehicle spawns are now connected to the city size
- Police, Firetrucks and Ambulances now start at their buildings
- Construction sites now have different colors
- If the player does not have enough resources during the Tutorial, the player can still finish it
- Increased number of resources for each new city for every difficulty mode
- Fixed a bug when building a farm
- If you press "M" or "N" buildings now turn smoother when you build them
- New Building Model: Fishery
- New Building Model: Bank
- New Building Model: Wind Turbine
- New Building: Tidal Power Station
- New Building: Global Carrier
If you think that's all, you're wrong however. We have been working on more features in the background. We'd like to announce that Highrise City will be leaving Early Access later this year and that the Science Update is the last bigger update before the full release. And we've been working on some massive changes which will influence the way you play the game a lot.
Features for Full Release:
- Public Transport with Buses
- Special gigantic mega skyscrapers
- Story Missions
- Substations & Electricity Lines
- Updated Voice-Overs
- A small Story
- A massive multistaged mega project to build
- A new Map
- New Production Chains
Of course, smaller changes, quality of life improvements are also planned. But especially the new electricity management and the public transport will change how you build cities. In addition to that, that secret mega project is something very, very special. We've been working for months now on some of these features and are glad that we can finally confirm that we've been working on them. And we can't wait to show you more.
But does that mean, that Highrise City will soon be finished? No. Of course not. It means we've come to a point where we have the game in a stage where we can say it is ready for a Full Release. But obviously we have tons of ideas for additional content and we will still keep optimizing the gameplay experience and work on additional stuff.
Having that said: By the end of this month, we will raise the price for the game slightly in preparation for the Full Release. So if you think about getting it now, we'd recommend doing so during the ongoing Summer Sale.
