BODY: Anyone who has tried to lay down a perfect highway interchange with a Joy-Con thumbstick knows the pain. Paradox Interactive's answer, announced October 8, is a Nintendo Switch 2 version of Cities: Skylines that finally supports keyboard and mouse.
The game arrives October 29 as Cities: Skylines – Expanded Edition, priced at ¥6,890 including tax. Ten DLC expansion packs come bundled in, among them After Dark, Snowfall, and Green Cities — the kind of package that turns a lean base game into a sprawling, decades-deep city sim.
The upgrades run deeper than input methods. The buildable grid expands from 9 tiles to 25, matching the PlayStation 5 remaster that launched in September. There's a new environmental control panel for adjusting weather and time of day in real time, plus a map editor and quick-select tools that console players have long gone without. Two graphics modes are on offer: Performance targeting 60fps, and Quality targeting 30fps. Tantalus Media, the studio behind earlier console ports of the game, handled the Switch 2 optimization.
Taken together with the PS5 version, this marks a clear line between the original Switch release — which ran on hardware well past its limits — and what Paradox now considers the definitive console editions.
The insider take
Japan has a quietly enormous appetite for city builders, and it long predates Cities: Skylines. Artdink's A-Train series has been running since 1985, and SimCity was a formative title for a generation of Japanese PC owners. But the genre has always sat awkwardly on consoles here, where the Switch is the dominant platform and a mouse is not standard equipment. That's what makes the keyboard-and-mouse support more than a checkbox: Switch 2's new mouse-capable Joy-Con gives Paradox a precision input that millions of Japanese households will actually own, without anyone buying a gaming PC. For a title like this, in this market, it may be the single most consequential feature on the list.
Originally reported by AUTOMATON (Japanese).