Well, Cities: Skylines 2 is here, and it's another broken game release.

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.

@hiddengoat @theangriestbird How did we get to the point where paying money for a broken, unfinished product was acceptable?

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.

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.

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.

Its not good for the general aura surrounding the release. I don't follow the game actively but all I hear is negativity.

The problem is, this sets a precedence in the gaming industry (and in the consumer's minds too) that it's fine to consume 16 GB of RAM, not on a late game megacity but on a new save.

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.

If you're not making your city a hell for the npcs in some way how are you having fun

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

Yeah IMO it's far better for games like Cities Skylines to use as much RAM as they can - especially once mods start coming out! I've had times where my heavily modded version of CS1 wanted 16+ gb of memory because loading assets from RAM is way faster than loading from SSD/HDD!

I don't get much FPS on CS 1, and it's not pleasant. It's probably somewhere between 20-30. But the news above mean that I shouldn't even dream about running CS 2 with this hardware, because it runs much worse than the first game, but also compared to other games.

Honestly I was expecting that CS 2 would run better than 1. I have a little hope that they will fix their shit, but now I don't expect significant improvements over the first game's performance.

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.

I’ve gotten so used to 60 fps that if I play below 60 it makes motion sick

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.

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

It does not sound like 50 FPS on 6 years old hardware. Maybe half?

RAM should be used. For gaming it would be wasteful not to use it.

Don't be afraid, I do use my RAM. Like, it's full of other important programs and filesystem cache.
But the game shouldn't take it away from other programs, and it should also be aware of the fact that windows starts swapping out programs when RAM usage has reached ~70%. This will significantly affect any programs you run simultaneously, but the game itself tooz because it's less used memory pages will be swapped out more. Random access for reading back swapped pages is much slower than loading the resources in smaller groups sequentially.

16 GB usage sounds like the game has loaded ALL of its models and resources, even those that are not needed (not in view, and probably not even accessible to the player), and probably has multiple copies of most with different resolution and such.

Loading to RAM that much data would be fine if they managed it to only be loaded to a cache, that can be released for other programs, but I don't think you can do that in any other way than using the filesystem cache, at which point the RAM usage does not even count against your process, or as usage at all.

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 .

Obviously the game does not have to use all the RAM. It only needs to preload textures and models that are useful on your system (based on graphics settings) and are in use right now or can be in use very soon.
Also, loading from disk is not as slow as you make it seem. Yes it is if your users install games to a drive that's bad for that purpose (like SMR tech hard drives), or if you haven't placed the resources strategically, by which I mean grouping resources so that commonly-used-together resources are placed sequentially for a quick and efficient read.
The first problem shouldn't be your concern: the player shouldn't expect top performance from hardware that was designed for a totally opposite task.

Marketers are paid to lie.

Yes, but they shouldn't touch any technical information, including the hardware requirements section. Marketers don't know shit about the game, just that they want to sell at much licenses as humanly possible.
The hardware requirements, however, is to be defined by those who know shit about the game. Preferably core developers or performance testers, who have an idea about the game's inner workings and about how much is it expected to use in average and in the worst case.

I find that people who watch reviewers are exponentially more disappointed in games because they let reviewers tell them how to feel.

I can agree with that and your point on Cyberpunk. I haven't played that game, but not because I'm not interested. It looked fun from content that I have seen.

But the performance concerns sound like that it's actually a huge problem.

I like it that so far it has been described a solid lunch except land leveling and performance, because the first one can probably be addressed in a few months at most if they want it. But even the published hardware requirements were disappointing, and this is a signal that the game will hardly get any better than that, if it can reach it.

Yeah, same, I'll reserve my judgement for later. If it's truly awful and unplayable then I'll have to finish building my RTX 3090 system, lol.

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.

Thats what I always thought of the game.

Yes, erm… totally about building beautiful cities.

Paradox is just the publisher on this one, Colossal Order is the dev.

Seriously, people don't understand what "cache" means, maybe they should just create a ramdisk and install the game there to understand the concept.

I believe people with lots of RAM simply enjoy the feeling of theoretically being able to run everything, but they don't actually want processes to use that RAM, because it would deny them the theoretical possibility to run everything.

I jest, of course. The problem is that as a user you don't have that much control over which process should use your RAM, and also freeing RAM is hard. Chrome gobbling up your whole memory is good when you're using Chrome, but you don't get it back when you alt+tab back to your game

You want 32GB or more for it to run somewhate decently.

No, you misunderstood. I don't want, like at all. That is totally undue. What fucking engine was this crap written in, electron or what???

The worst is not even the resource usage, but that there are actual people defending this bullshit.

Dude 51% of steam users have 16gb. 22% have 32gb. It's probably lower in the broader gaming public.

32gb is still pricey and far from standard. 16gb should at least be fine. 32gb to be "somewhat decent" is beyond unreasonable.

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.

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.

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

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.

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).

Here's a pre-release video from City Planner Plays that discusses the new roadway options. I believe even C:S1 added in snap-to-angle options eventually, which made it very easy to build roads at right angles. Unless you mean parallel roads? This is something that vanilla C:S1 did not have, but it looks like C:S2 has that on launch. The new road-building tools are one of the features that had me most hyped.

I had such a pain in the ass trying to make highway on ramp and off ramps look good while also being perpendicular to the highway and each other. Ruined the game for me because I couldn't get past the first offramp to even start building 😓 bugged me way too much

There will be a grid feature where you can make a perfect grid of city lots at once.

I played both CK2 and CK3 and have to say I love CK3. The create your religion system is so awesome and the events are great. I dont even feel like touching CK2 anymore aside from some mods

For CK and Vic they changed their design philosophy to be more "sandbox with realistic parameters" vs older games' "sandbox with prescripted events" to make historical events happen. It's an ambitious idea but so far the results have been pretty mixed. I'm hopefully they get it right eventually. Stellaris has really only gotten to be as polished as it very recently.

I don't know nothing, but I have a feeling that paradox hurried the release, not necessarily CO

Gamedev is all about smokes and mirrors. A conventional software engineer will actively resent the shitfuckery you have to do, to make games run well (for good reason; it introduces complexity into already insanely complex systems).

Some performance work, you cannot defer, like fundamental design decisions (3D vs. 2D, raytracing or not) or if you've coded a tiny feature and for some reason, it completely obliterates performance.

But there's always going to be tons of features that have been implemented well, they don't obliterate performance, but if you replace them with an unintuitive/complex smoke-and-mirror solution, then you may be able to shave off 20% execution time for that feature. Or not. Often no real way to know, except to try it out.

Some of these do need to be tackled throughout development, too, but it's easy to end up with a big block at the end of development.
Especially, if you had to rush a number of features that marketing promised, so that you can make the release date that marketing promised many months before anyone has any fucking clue how long it'll take.

There is a theory that games release like that to punish pirates, as anything but the launch version - and DLCs - rarely gets pirated.