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?
I don't know, this whole 60fps thing is a new demand from gamers. Frankly I don't care about reviews anymore. Everyone skews negative, and I'm tired of it.
My hard takes:
I haven't watched anything and I'm excited. I'm not "hyped", I don't think it will redefine city building forever. I think I will enjoy my time in a game that is by definition an iteration of the franchise. Maybe it'll be great. Maybe it'll be worse than the first, but I'm going to decide that myself, not let some reviewer begging me for a subscribe tell me.
60fps feels smooth, less than 60fps doesnt feel smooth. Even in non-shooters. I dont like the jittery look when i pan the camera or do anything. Computers are more than capable of it. I say this as a programmer who focuses on low level optimization. Almost all software runs like shit because devs dont care about performance and people are just used to it. I still have my mind blown on a near daily basis on how much I can squeeze out of my cpu. Not because i'm doing anything crazy or complicated, but because 90% of software has visible latency for clicking a button and eats tons of ram for no good reason.
That's... Not really how it works at all. Using all of your ram is actually pretty bad. Because then if your computer needs more ram, something is getting dumped to the page file. On your hard drive. There's no easier way to make your PC crawl than to make your cpu have to keep swapping shit to and from the page file.
It's entirely possible to have a better system for when to have those textures loaded to decrease overall ram usage, better/less wasteful data structures, culling techniques to decrease the number of things that have to be loaded and directly handled (e.g. in factorio if you have a belt with only 1 type of item on it, it wont track every individual item. It just averages the throughput to save on processing power.)
The average consumer still has 8, i have 16 and run into problems with some modern games. I also shouldnt have to close other applications on my computer because your shit game cant handle its memory properly.