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?

  • jarfil@beehaw.org
    3·
    1 year ago

    What fucking engine was this crap written in, electron or what???

    Unity with C#.

    That’s only half the problem… the add-ons are also written in Unity with C# 🤷

    • ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org
      1·
      1 year ago

      Is unity and c# really that bad by itself? I don’t have much experience in c# development, but I was in the impression that c# is a relatively fast language (not as much as c++ but much, much more than js, python and even java)

      • jarfil@beehaw.org
        2·
        1 year ago

        Is unity and c# really that bad by itself?

        No, they’re pretty nice, that’s why they got popular. It’s when you pair them with game development, that shit hits the fan.

        Basically, you have:

        • Rocket software - if it fails once, you fucked up
        • F-35, infrastructure software - if it fails, it better recovers fast
        • Business software - if it works for most of the workday, it’s fine
        • Consumer software - if it works most days, it’s fine
        • Game software - if it eventually works at least once, you’re fine; most people don’t care about replaying the same story anyway

        Unity and C# are very easy to make utter crap with, and still have it “work at least once”… which leads game developers to use it, make it work, and have it packaged and sold. Add to that “modders”, who are mostly random people who want to see some [part] of some idea they had, work maybe once in the game… and you get a perfect recipe for disaster: rushed out games, with sloppy mods, often conflicting with each other.