I'll just add onto this by saying a few other things that were cut (though some may come back in some fashion) but not mentioned were things like maybe having a sort of art gallery/museum within the City Hall showing off different things from past Paralake versions that no longer exist or changed massively over time. As well as the Jennifer's shown in the cut content was going to be a jewelry specific store while clothing would be its own building. We also wanted to include a sort of mineshaft for exploration and a new type of area we hadn't ever covered in other versions.
Some screenshots like the one showing the cut modern apartments were before we had any exacting plans for how to make V6 better than V5 but those were going to replace the market area (ish) outside the City Hall and Police station to create some extra housing. Eventually we came to terms that the highway is simply a huge problem for both new and existing players. It then became a plan to either lift the highway to no longer cut through the city/business streets or some other way. This is probably the most monumental thing that then required V6 to be rethought out in every way possible, which then you can find the whiteboard meetings of different stages of how to do it. Including when we had a huge off ramp into business, that became a bit impractical later on.
As we progressed our way through V6's development plan you can see how we tried to condense some places and expand other ones as to make foot traffic a bit nicer and less use of cars to get to them. Not until closer to the latter stages of making V6 did we start to create the Metro. We knew we still needed some kind of public transportation but the Monorail was no longer viable given the sudden height changes and gaps it would need to cover; let alone make it easily accessible unlike before. One other thing we knew we absolutely needed to do was expand the Bazaar, as it has always been one of the busiest locations on the map, which definitely could not fit the area it was in, so we looked at all sorts of different layouts and ways to expand it, but hopefully cut down on the lag it produced. Another big point of focus was how to isolate places which typically have gunfights and places that don't, as to have "safer" areas but not completely restrict movement or sightlines. If you look at the suburbs plans, we went through many iterations of how exactly that should be laid out and not make it feel too compact but also not too open without relying on fake buildings to fill in spaces if possible. It's an area I still think we could possibly improve for V7 personally but I am happy with how it has ended up, as now every house has a garage and the small houses are just slightly bigger with a more useful floorplan.
Lastly, I will just say another big focus for V6 was simply making it so the city looks newer but slightly aged, we had less empty gaps in places, and attention to smaller details for every little thing. This meant tons of custom models and textures needing to be made. So a shout out to everyone involved to making those happen as well, it helps make the map feel more alive and like a real city. It never ceases to amaze me just what Paralake started as and what it has become. For me personally it has been amazing to watch it happen, as I remember working with
@Xquality from our earliest moments of starting Paralake. It's one of those things that in your head you imagine V1 looking like how V6 does now, but V1 looks nothing even remotely close and it's amazing we decided to actually use it at the time in some ways given the large empty spaces. So finally thank you
@peeps thank you
@Lelios1 thank you everyone that did anything to help make V6 possible, and that includes everyone reading this long post or even ones who skip over it, as the important part is we have an active community.
