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?
@hiddengoat @theangriestbird How did we get to the point where paying money for a broken, unfinished product was acceptable?
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.
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.
The base game of 2077 is pretty good now that 2.0 is out. My biggest issie with it at launch was the lack of cyberspace for hacker player characters. Felt like the game was funneling me towards standard FPS gameplay, even if there are a lot of options within that realm
Exactly this. No man's Sky is apparently decent nowadays too.
Part of the issue is that publishers make studies sign contracts with fixed release dates, with heavy penalties for delays (even though basically any software project ends up going over time).
But yeah, just go through the backlog of older games, this way you also don't need the latest PC either to play on max settings.
Preorders. It used to be that you had to preorder the LOTR special edition on DVD with figurines to make sure the shop had existences... then Kickstarter bastardized it into "pay to maybe get something"... and Steam jumped onto the bandvagon of "pay hoping it might work some day".
Not sure how the point about Kickstarter is relevant but it's not Steams fault devs are releasing unfinished games.
And I wouldn't say it went straight to bad digital preorders. I feel like that is a more recent phenomenon and digital preorders were better years ago.
Not wanting to make you feel old, but... No Man's Sky botched preorder release was 7 years ago (2016).
I mentioned Kickstarter (est. 2009) as a stepping stone in getting people used to pay for not-yet-existing stuff.
I'd much rather play the game in its current state than waiting 3 or 4 months, i have a pretty beefy system and i dont mind low framerates in a strategy game. If you don't feel the same then don't pick it up, wait the 3 or 4 months and enjoy it then.
@saigot is much rather they release a complete project that works on day 1.
It does work I've been playing it all day!