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?
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.