Not exactly surprising when the developers themselves warned of performance issues prior to launching 2. Which, to their credit, was a good thing to do.
But these days EVERY game has performance issues even on the best hardware. Which means we collectively got burned out on buying yet another poorly performing game.
Also, 2 apparently misses quite a few features from 1. So it’s pretty much a downgrade when buying it now.
They can probably fix a few of these issues down the road. Maybe then I’ll actually buy it…
The good thing would've been to not release it in this state, or at the very least into early access first with some discount. But instead they tried to tell us that we don't need more than 30 FPS anyway (assuming you can even reach that), which is just an asshole move.
Fully agreed, but between no warning and a warning, getting the warning beforehand is the lesser of two evils :D
It’s honestly shocking anyway that they can’t get a city builder to run halfway decent on the best hardware. This genre usually is barely a step above chess games in terms of system requirements.
The real time agent simulation is easy for something like Banished, Foundation, Tropico, or Timberborn where your population isn’t going to get out of the low thousands if you even play it long enough to get there, and there’s no choice between walking/driving/any form of transit or any combination of them, and the network that path-finding is performed on is substantially simpler. There’s a lot of simulation going on behind the scenes in Skylines (which IMO is worth the performance hit), and the graphics are technically superior to most games in the city building genre. The main thing, though is just that Skylines is doing things that basically no other game does, or doing them at a scale that no other game does.
The game could chug at launch depending on your settings, and to be clear, their defaults were fundamentally broken, some of the settings that made performance tank were engaged on ALL the default presets. But even at launch it could be made to be playable on most hardware... at the cost of looking basically the same as CS1. They've since patched some of the biggest offenders and it's now smoother than that, too.
But they came out with a preemptive warning, instead of delaying for a short time and fixing those basics and now it's a meme that the game doesn't work on any hardware, and the extremely debatable "can't even do 30fps on a 4090" thing became widespread as well.
FWIW, it's not rare for sequels to take a long time to replace the previous game under that business model. If you look at all the Sims games they probably overlap quite a bit for a while. I played CS2 for 25 hours and stepped away to start playing some other things. Honestly, the performance bugs annoyed me less than some of the weird design and balance things that were also either broken or counterintuitively designed, although they've fixed a bunch of those, too. But I did enjoy getting my first city to megalopolis status and I'll definitely come back to it.
Sounds like a fair take. I’ll probably buy it eventually.
Yeah, I’m intimately aware with things like The Sims. In fact, I’ve been a fan of the series since the very first one. And I own just about every expansion pack made for it.
Usually I’ll switch versions when there’s at least two, three packs out and a bunch of user content. Jumping on at launch is a frustrating affair. I also stopped playing CS when CS2 was forced upon us. That was just too barebones for me to be worth playing.
To me it felt more like a blend of new features, missing features and parts of the game that just work differently now.
I didn't even get deeply into some of the mechanics on my first run (parking, for instace) and more complexity isn't always better, so I often spent more time on these on vanilla, but if they make a beefy expansion and keep fixing bugs it may prompt me to return and see how much the balance of my old city and the process of making a new one are impacted.
I'm not sure what a "proper SimCity" means at this point. It's not like the SC4 team is still around, and Skylines 1 was basically taking the concepts of the SimCity reboot and implementing them on a game without the tech limitations of that release. A new "official" SimCity would have to be either basically Cities Skylines-like... or a completely different game, which at that point would defeat the purpose.
I mean, I'd play another big-budget city builder, but at this point I don't think the brand holds much weight for me.
On top of the performance issues, I've already invested a bunch in the first one with the billions of DLC they had. Starting over and having to buy all the new DLC they'll most certainly be making for 2 does not sound enticing. lol I'm sticking with 1, probably indefinitely or until the second one runs its course and the complete edition winds up super cheap in a Steam sale or something.
I did this with Civilization 5 and Civilization 6. As far as I know, Civilization 6 is a perfectly solid game – doesn’t have the C:S2 launch problems – but I’ve already got a bunch of DLC for 5, and I don’t feel like Civilization 6 adds enough over Civilization 5 to warrant going back and buying a bunch of content again.
I’ve got no problem with the Paradox model of “sell a base game, then keep selling content that’s worth the money”. In fact, I’m pretty happy with it. However, that doesn’t extend to “repurchase content every couple of years for $180 or so”.
Civ 6 is almost a completely different game from 5 and is super fun. It regularly goes on sale for pretty cheap, I would highly recommend you give it a second look. Plus the only DLC you really need is gathering storm.
It’s on gamepass. I installed it played for an hour or two, and un-installed. If I’d paid for it on steam I might have felt obligated to keep playing regardless of how much I was enjoying it. Not so much with gamepass.
That must be new. Last time I refunded was for street fighter 5 so that would’ve been several years ago.
Again though, this is a moot point. The game is on gamepass so of course the Steam numbers will be somewhat lower. No one is going to buy the steam version if they have a gamepass sub.
Jedi Survivor is a great example of developers truly having passion for a game and it’s lore, but publisher deadlines completely ruin it’s potential. I enjoyed it immensely once I got it running acceptably (40-50 fps on a 1080ti). There’s a lot to do and a lot of cool details.
Starfield is no buggier than any other Bethesda game. My biggest problem with it is it’s lacking the wanderlust of elder scrolls or fallout, the weird random discoveries are just kind of mediocre. Idk if there’s a way to patch that out
Kerbal Space Program 2. I put an easy 1000 hours in on the original, but the second one still looks pretty raw at this point. May buy it if the science update seems solid enough to keep me hooked.
Bought and played through Cyberpunk on release, it was ok on PC but never replayed it till the patch. Much better after the patch.
I never bothered with the second game because the first game was pretty meh. I think I played it for about 20 hours before getting bored and moving on. The game is a glorified traffic simulator.
It was a much more accurate traffic simulation than anything that came before it, save for maybe SimCity 2013, but that wasn’t worth shit when you only had a single tile smaller than a Skylines tile to work with. The Skylines 2 traffic simulation is improved quite a bit as well - still has its quirks of course.
SimCity 2013 was definitely worse. Sims in that game don’t have persistent identities: they go ti the nearest available job opening every morning, and they sleep in a different bed every night.
I’ve not seen a suggestion to tune the graphics, but then I’ve not looked for one, I just went in and set them as I usually would with any game, and then tried a few adjustments to get the frame rate up
I’ve got a 3080 and it runs great even at 2k resolution. I’ve lowered certain settings, some are just broken. Quick search will bring up tons of guides on which settings to turn down.
I’m gonna say this because it’s obvious…A project should really be finished before you release it. Like, I imagined a pretty fucking dope game the other day but you don’t see me charging $70 for it do you?
I will though if you want to send me the money I’ll tell you about the game and then sell you the real game in a few years maybe.
This is why the Star Citizen people have Scrooge McDuck amounts of money and you don't. Gotta get rid of that pesky conscience if you're going to get ahead.
I have a 3070ti and over 100 hours in game so far, and I’d consider it the best city builder I’ve ever played in 33 years of obsession with city builders. All my graphics settings are maxed out at 1440p and I get about 20 fps average in a 100k population city. I could turn the settings down and get 30+ probably, but I’d rather have it look good, and it’s not any kind of action game so I really don’t give a shit unless it turns into a literal slideshow.
Huh, it seems like it would be annoying to draw out roads and whatnot.
That said, Cities Skylines 2 doesn’t run well on most people’s computers, hence why the first is still more popular. Fix that and I think people will upgrade.
I honestly might pay full price if I was confident it would work well on my hardware, which is pretty solid mid range (6650XT w/ 5600X). But from what I’ve seen, the experience is pretty mediocre on more powerful hardware, so I’m going to wait for patches.
I’ll also only buy at full price if it’s near a major holiday, otherwise I won’t have time to play.
Add comment