this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2023

203 points (99.5% liked)

Gaming

31083 readers

12 users here now

From video gaming to card games and stuff in between, if it's gaming you can probably discuss it here!

Please Note: Gaming memes are permitted to be posted on Meme Mondays, but will otherwise be removed in an effort to allow other discussions to take place.

See also Gaming's sister community Tabletop Gaming.

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 3 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

203

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

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

120 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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:

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?

top 50 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] [email protected] 67 points 1 year ago (8 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 65 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

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.

load more comments (4 replies)

load more comments (2 replies)

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (6 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

load more comments (2 replies)

load more comments (5 replies)

load more comments (3 replies)

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (6 children)

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.

load more comments (6 replies)

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

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.

load more comments (5 replies)

[–] [email protected] 50 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

load more comments (3 replies)

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I mean.. If I want to build a hell, I still want options.

Like, realistic space use for car hell would be interesting but maybe sometimes I wanna build a university on a hill and student housing at the top of a different hill and to get to class you have to bike up a hill both ways.

load more comments (1 replies)

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

I don’t want to build car hell yet again

this, so much

load more comments (1 replies)

[–] [email protected] 48 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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!

[–] [email protected] 44 points 1 year ago (6 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

"with this hardware", found your problem.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Yep we better all go drop $3k on a new computer so we can get this game to playable fps!

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (5 children)

So, exactly as every other resource intensive game released, ever. Weird huh?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What is your deal? Do you believe that gaming should only be a hobby for the wealthy, or?

load more comments (1 replies)

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The specs until recently were not as intensive but still pointed to the game not being super optimized.

Minimum was a 780 (3gv)

I expected that buying a 6650 (8gb) would have put me well over the minimum requirements.

MINIMUM:

Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system

OS: Windows® 10 Home 64 Bit

Processor: Intel® Core™ i7-4790K / AMD® Ryzen™ 5 1600X

Memory: 8 GB RAM

Graphics: Nvidia® GeForce™ GTX 780 (3GB) or AMD® Radeon™ RX 470 (4GB)

RECOMMENDED:

Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system

OS: Windows® 10 Home 64 Bit | Windows® 11

Processor: Intel® Core™ i7-9700K | AMD® Ryzen™ 5 5600X

Memory: 16 GB RAM

Graphics: Nvidia® GeForce™ RTX 2080 Ti (11GB) | AMD® Radeon™ RX 6800 XT (16GB)

load more comments (3 replies)

load more comments (1 replies)

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

It's not a deal breaker, but high fps is always preferable when using anything with a gui

load more comments (3 replies)

[+] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

[removed by mod]

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

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.

load more comments (2 replies)

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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

load more comments (2 replies)

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (8 children)

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.

What are the CPU utilization numbers? C:S is a notoriously CPU-first game, particularly with mods. If your CPU can't calculate more than 10fps, you won't get more than 10fps.

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.

It starts (barebones, slow as hell) with 8GB. You want 32GB or more for it to run somewhate decently.

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

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (7 children)

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

load more comments (7 replies)

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

If I wanted a mature, well-performing city-building game experience I'll play Cities: Skylines 1.

From the reviews on that page, it sounds like Colossal Order delivered on the features it promised, but has lots of performance optimization left to do. By the sounds of it, on my laptop I'll probably get 20fps and occasional stuttering on my gaming laptop by 10k population. I will see whether it is playable for my standards once it officially releases. I'd probably expect many game updates addressing performance and bugs in the first 6 months of release.

The demand and happiness mechanics are fundamentally different so it's important not to try to play it like CS1 and expect the same results.

I've been looking forward to this game for months. Can't wait for Tuesday, I'm theirs to disappoint.

E: corrected developer

load more comments (2 replies)

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (3 children)

And that for a game that looks like shit.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

load more comments (1 replies)

load more comments (2 replies)

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

Well, maybe this is why AMD is bringing back threadripper?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

My suspicion is that the game would have been delayed had the new Harebrained Schemes game not just flopped.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

Well that's disappointing. Also noticed this review: https://www.gamesradar.com/cities-skylines-2-review/

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

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.

load more comments (2 replies)

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Can you at least make perpendicular roads easily? I had trouble doing that in the first game.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Oh cool, maybe I’ll check out skylines 1 again

load more comments (2 replies)

load more comments