I don’t really understand how people make the review threads, but we’re sitting at a 77 on OpenCritic right now. Many were worried about game performance after the recommended specs were released, but it looks like it’s even worse than we expected. It sounds like the game is mostly a solid release except for the performance issues, but they really are that bad.
- Popular Cities: Skylines 1 streamers are reporting that they are not able to achieve a consistent 60 fps, even with RTX 4090s and lowering the graphics to 1440p medium settings. Based on utilization numbers, it sounds like the GPU is limiting factor here.
- Those same streamers are also reporting 16GB of RAM usage when loading up a new map, which means that the minimum recommended spec of 8GB was a blatant lie from the devs.
- IGN and other reviewers are reporting that the game does not self-level building plots, which is something that C:S1 did pretty well. This leads to every plot looking like this:
Maybe not a big deal to some, but the focus of Cities: Skylines has always been on building beautiful cities (vs. having a realistic simulation), so this feels like a betrayal of Colossal Order’s own design philosophy.
Personally, this is a pretty big bummer for me. I like C:S1 a lot, but I find it hard to get into a gameflow that feels good unless I commit to mods pretty hard, and that means a steeper learning curve. For this reason, I tend to have more fun just watching other people play the game. I was looking forward to C:S2 as a great jumping on point to really dig into city-building myself. Maybe I’m being too harsh here because of my personal disappointment - many don’t really care about hitting 60fps, but those same people also tend to not build top-end PCs. And it sounds like if you don’t have a top-end PC, you’re looking at sub 30 fps, and I think most agree that that is borderline unplayable.
Anyone else have thoughts on this one?
Yeah, my thought is that this is a game they’ll be supporting for 8-9 years so what the fuck does it matter if it runs like dogshit on day one? Don’t fucking buy it until the performance increases and the problems you mentioned are ironed out.
It really is that simple.
Anyone that expected this game to be perfect on launch was clearly not around whenever Cities: Skylines launched. The performance was godawful to the point that I refunded it. A couple of months and a couple of patches later shit was cleared up and I repurchased it. Didn’t have an issue after that.
So yeah, the whole “Why doesn’t this brand new game not have the same performance and features as a nine year old game with numerous DLCs and mods?” thing is getting fucking tiresome.
I don’t think it’s crazy to expect games to have playable performance levels when they release. Not to mention it’s a sequel so you’d think they would learn some things after fixing the first one.
Yeah the fucks up with all the Paradox apologia in this thread? I also remember Cities: Skylines on release It ran fine and my rig was shitty back then. It was a perfectly functional little city builder. People loved it and it was called the new Sim City! “Just wait two years and put down another $50 on dlc bro. Ur dumb for expecting it to be good now.” Nah this shits unacceptable. If a game needs to be supported for years before its considered good then an honest developer would call it an early access game. Ya know, those games that get years of support, updates, and features for free.
Colossal Order is the dev, Paradox is just the publisher. Paradox deserves crap for their many mistakes, but this one isn’t theirs.
Yeah but it’s Paradox as the publisher who is the one setting the parameters of them having to build a game that is designed to support 10 years of DLC like all of their other products because that’s their monetization strategy.
Publishers still have a lot of power in a games development. They can set deadlines and dictate the direction they want a games development to take. Seeing as this is a recurring problem with games Paradox both develops and publishes, its easy to see who is to blame here.
DLC part pisses me off also. I know this game isn’t developed by Paradox but it seems to be a trend in Paradox games where you need to spend the base price + an absurd amount of extra money to get the developer’s “true vision” or whatever. It’s really annoying.
To get most of the base game features that are currently present in Crusader Kings III, you would’ve had to spend a sizeable chunk of cash on DLC for Crusader Kings II.
i’m sure they learned plenty of things about the old game engine they built
and now they have a new one… which was the whole point
I completely agree. I think the point of the commenter you’re replying to is that this is the kind of game that will fix these eventually. It’s still disappointing for a launch, but eventually it will probably become better than CS1.
@hiddengoat @theangriestbird How did we get to the point where paying money for a broken, unfinished product was acceptable?
It’s not, don’t buy games on day one. Let the other suckers pay to beta test it. Once it’s fixed in a few years, you can buy it for a discount.
I just bought Fallout 4 GOTY for $5 the other day. Look forward to doing the same in a few years when Cyberpunk 2077 has a final release with everything fixed and polished. There’s so many good old games, why buy anything brand new.
And this doesn’t forgive devs for buggy initial releases either, because I’m not throwing money at something until it’s actually done.
Exactly this. No man’s Sky is apparently decent nowadays too.
Part of the issue is that publishers make studies sign contracts with fixed release dates, with heavy penalties for delays (even though basically any software project ends up going over time).
But yeah, just go through the backlog of older games, this way you also don’t need the latest PC either to play on max settings.
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I’d much rather play the game in its current state than waiting 3 or 4 months, i have a pretty beefy system and i dont mind low framerates in a strategy game. If you don’t feel the same then don’t pick it up, wait the 3 or 4 months and enjoy it then.
@saigot is much rather they release a complete project that works on day 1.
It does work I’ve been playing it all day!
The problem is that they don’t communicate this and still ask for the full price.
Imagine I’m a gamer who wants to buy and play a working game today, not in half a year. Nothing on their store page indicates that the game isn’t in a playable state yet, so I’d pay full price for a game I can’t actually play. That’s misleading at best, and a downright fraud at worst.
They could easily fix this by delaying the game or launching it as early access for people who don’t mind playtesting a half-finished game, but they didn’t.
They did communicate: https://www.pcgamer.com/cities-skylines-2-devs-warn-players-of-performance-problems-we-have-not-achieved-the-benchmark-we-targeted/
These guys are the exception.
This is not what I’m talking about, because the vast majority of people buying the game won’t have seen this. It’s not enough that the info is somewhere on the internet, it needs to be front and center when buying the game.
It’s kind of baffling how we accept this as pretty much the standard for major releases these days. Why would we be okay buying anything else like this? If I bought a pair of shoes and they had issues that made them unwearable until I got them repaired I would be irritated as fuck, and obviously this would be unacceptable for a store to sell them like that.
Games like this are also pretty palatable at low framerates imo, certainly much better than an fps or something. If the gameplay is solid I’ll definitely pick it up. I like to have it as a second monitor game.
We didn’t have god damn tunnels in CS1 when it was released and people were raging about the city being limited to 9 tiles.
If company admitted performance issues before release is the hill that these people are willing to die on, well go ahead then. Back then the alternative was either cities platinum series or the abomination sim city became and neither of those was any good. At least now you have something more modern than sim city 4 to fall back on if CS2 disappoints.
Its not good for the general aura surrounding the release. I don’t follow the game actively but all I hear is negativity.
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There’s many things I can overlook here but the lack of bikes nixed my hype fully. I don’t want to build car hell yet again. I can leave the house if I wanna see that.
No bikes??? I hadn’t heard that, one of the most satisfying things about playing C:S1 to me was making great bike routes and useful public transit, without bikes I really don’t feel a drive to play this one now honestly hah. Maybe they are going the Sims route where all the useful basic things they added in the previous edition will be released over time as DLC, ffs.
I don’t think the first Cities Skylines shipped with bikes either? Wasn’t it part of the After Dark DLC? Or maybe that was just bike lanes? I hate the DLC for Paradox games… It’s so confusing that I think I’m just not going to buy their games anymore.
This is why most people wait a couple years after a Paradox game comes out. They’re fantastic games…once you have the DLC.
You’re right. After Dark was one of the first(?) DLCs and I’m not sure if bikes were part of that or the eco-friendly DLC but bikes definitely are not part of the vanilla experience (I have quite a few DLCs that are important to me and no bikes yet)
They usually give a lot of free stuff at the same patch even if you don’t buy the dlc.
I don’t want to build car hell yet again
this, so much
I can leave the house if I wanna see that
too bloody right
Those same streamers are also reporting 16GB of RAM usage when loading up a new map, which means that the minimum recommended spec of 8GB was a blatant lie from the devs.
I’m not saying this is necessarily the case, but just because a game uses 16gb of ram on a 32gb system does not been it can’t make do with 8gb on a more limited system.
Not having 60 fps might be an issue for a shooter or anything that is built on fast reactions, but it doesn’t really sound like an issue in a city builder.
Exactly. I still don’t get 60fps on the first one, a now 8 year old game on top of the line hardware. I don’t care. People here act like performance optimizing is just turning a knob they forgot, but it’s hours of detailed work finding anything and anything that may be able to shave nanoseconds off.
If the game is playable, I’m happy. It’s not a twitch shooter. It’s a city simulation.
It’s not a deal breaker, but high fps is always preferable when using anything with a gui
It’s still something I’d rather have than not; not having it makes for a less fluid experience.
Yeah I play a lot of rimworkd and dwarffortress and to be honest the only difference between playing it on my of the line pc and my 10yr old laptop is that it takes way longer to do stuff at max speed, which isn’t really how I play games like this. This review kinda sold me on this game.
I don’t know, this whole 60fps thing is a new demand from gamers. Frankly I don’t care about reviews anymore. Everyone skews negative, and I’m tired of it.
My hard takes:
- 60fps doesn’t matter. It’s not a shooter. Even CS1 I could only get 50ish on a new map, and that’s with hardware that’s 6 years newer than the game.
- RAM should be used. For gaming it would be wasteful not to use it. If you aren’t using all your ram then you’re loading textures, shaders, and everything from disk, which is thousands of times slower and that would lead to … you guessed it, gamers bitching about lag. What are you using that ram for anyway when you’re gaming that’s a higher priority? If you’re watching someone and they’re complaining that a game is using too much ram shut them off. They don’t how computers work. These aren’t the days of 256MB of ram. I have 32 gigs. I want them to use it.
- Marketers are paid to lie. They don’t understand what the game can do, they’re paid to sell it. Cyberpunk was disappointing for many because they believed marketers running unleashed, saying the game would be a revolution, that it would be gaming evolved. It wasn’t. Instead gamers “only” got a fun open world RPG and they were disappointed by it. (And bugs, they had legit concerns but marketing was stupid around that game and every one of their marketers should have been fired )
- I find that people who watch reviewers are exponentially more disappointed in games because they let reviewers tell them how to feel. If you want to start enjoying games more, stop letting them tell you if you should be disappointed. They’re going for clicks and views, and the rage train gets a lot of them. Just try it and return it if you don’t like it.
I haven’t watched anything and I’m excited. I’m not “hyped”, I don’t think it will redefine city building forever. I think I will enjoy my time in a game that is by definition an iteration of the franchise. Maybe it’ll be great. Maybe it’ll be worse than the first, but I’m going to decide that myself, not let some reviewer begging me for a subscribe tell me.
60fps complaints go back to the dark days of 360/ps3 ports where HD resolutions on the consoles meant high framerate was no longer a viable option there. Since AAA games started using console as lead platform pc became saddled with 30fps caps as well. It possibly happened even earlier, but that was the time where I started noticing it.
I mostly agree with this post, but
the focus of Cities: Skylines has always been on building beautiful cities (vs. having a realistic simulation)
this is simply not true
Thats what I always thought of the game.
Yes, erm… totally about building beautiful cities.
Between this and Star Trek: Infinite seems like Paradox’s new MO is to set unreasonable deadlines and rush games to release. You should basically consider all their games early access at this point, except they’ll charge you for updates. They’ve learned that a buggy half-baked release wont effect their sales, and they can just patch the game and crank out new features as dlc.
Find me a performance patch in any Paradox game that requires you to buy a fucking DLC to apply.
Or maybe just quit bullshitting.
FFS, we’re talking about a relatively small developer/publisher that continually supports and develops most of their games for the better part of a decade (or more, like EU IV). I thought this shit is what people wanted but what it seems most gamers want is just any excuse to fucking whine.
Way to completely misread my post there bud. Its not about the dlc, its about Pdox (who isn’t exactly a small indie publisher anymore) rushing buggy, feature-bare games to release with the intent of abusing their dlc-centric business model. FFS I guess wanting a game that’s complete and works on release is whining.
“they can just patch the game and crank out new features as dlc” does not have the same meaning as “buy a fucking DLC to apply a performance patch”
lern2reed
And that for a game that looks like shit.
If you compare the game on max settings to modded C:S1 (and if you ignore the leveling plot issues), I actually think it looks better than C:S1, or at least pretty close.
…which makes it pretty terrible. What did they change/improve if not the graphics? It should be so ahead that you don’t even have to think what looks better.
What the fuck do you expect a city builder to look like?
And seriously, are you still at the level of brain paralysis where you think PERFORMANCE = GRAPHICS?
Do you not understand CPU vs GPU bound?
It’s a less cartoony art style I think (although the style in original skyline evolved a lot) we will see.
Remember mods can fix/change loads
A game like this is not going to release without bugs. It’s just not going to happen. Expect Colossal to patch it fairly rapidly and over the course of a few years release all of the DLC that will make it feel like a rich city building experience. For now, I’ll stick to C:S1. No need for the pitchforks and torches.
No one is expecting the game to release with 0 bugs. It’s the severity and quantity of bugs that is the issue.
FWIW, my current take is that this release would be fine if they had simply released it in early access.
I dunno – I’m sympathetic to the DLC argument, but bad performance isn’t something I can forgive on launch day. I’m sure they’ll patch it in time, but if I buy a full-priced game, I expect it to run decently well. Anything less makes for a poor user experience. If a publisher truly cares about user experience then they won’t release a game in that state, or if they do, they’ll make it 100% clear on the storefront that the game has performance issues.
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Well that’s disappointing. Also noticed this review: https://www.gamesradar.com/cities-skylines-2-review/
My suspicion is that the game would have been delayed had the new Harebrained Schemes game not just flopped.
I can’t say I’m surprised. I was wondering whether I should jump in on day 1, since I played C:S 1 pretty heavily, and want to support the devs, but this definitely means I’ll be waiting at least a few patches.
I never play these types of games but I distinctly remember my friend having a full on meltdown about how fucked up the first Cities Skylines was like a decade ago, lol.
I guess you’re just talking about one person, but I think Cities Skylines was received quite well in general? I just remember a bunch of praise for Cities Skylines (in contrast to Sim City 2013 which a bunch of people had a meltdown about).
Being better than later Sim City games isn’t much on an achievement, doesn’t mean that CS wasn’t quite janky at the start.
Well, maybe this is why AMD is bringing back threadripper?
Game companies get greedier, gamers want bigger and better experiences for less money, investors want higher returns, computers aren’t getting faster at the same rate and the game industry can afford to treat it’s employees like shit because there’s always going to be a constant stream of new people who want to work in it.
