Well, Cities: Skylines 2 is here, and it's another broken game release.
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?
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.
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.
"with this hardware", found your problem.
Yep we better all go drop $3k on a new computer so we can get this game to playable fps!
So, exactly as every other resource intensive game released, ever. Weird huh?
What is your deal? Do you believe that gaming should only be a hobby for the wealthy, or?
It is indeed much easier to argue against things you made up and not what was posted.
Where as I stated no such thing, you already have the answer. But, no, I do not believe the straw man you put forth to claim I intended.
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.
I see no justification for why CS 2 is this resource intensive.
It's a heavy city simulation game, so high CPU usage is kind of expected (though I think it could be better), but what about the RAM and GPU requirements and actual usage?
And I said nothing about justification. But, the RAM is easy to figure out as that is where the variables are stored and manipulated. A "heavy city simulation game" is going to have a great many variables and lots of formulae.
The GPU usage is likely to get the picture to be very pretty. But you could argue against it. The RAM, no, it is required by the genre.
You said that it is a resource intensive game, in a tone that implied to me that it's fine to you.
But not this much. CS 1, which is also a "heavy city simulation game", was totally fine with less, and while I agree that because of the new features it is expected that CS 2 uses more RAM, it is not expected to use this much more.
Also, you are talking as if every vehicle, pedestrian, building object each should cost 1 KB of RAM or something like that. Normally that's not the case.
Unconditionally loading 8k textures for all the existing models won't make the game "very pretty".
As in every sensible game, texture resolution and such should be configurable, and the game should not load textures not in use. At least one of these is very clearly not happening if the game requires multiple gigabytes of VRAM even on a new, basically empty save.
My fps is also around that in CS 1 and honestly it hasn't bothered me that much unless I look at the fps counter. While it would be nice to have 60 FPS, I don't think much about it while actually playing.
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.