this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2023

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Cities: Skylines 2 devs warn players of performance problems: 'we have not achieved the benchmark we targeted' (www.pcgamer.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

48 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Ahead of the city builder's release on October 24, the devs want to "manage expectations on performance."

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[–] [email protected] 119 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

I'm kind of used to devs releasing apologies for their games after a bad release and the following review bombing. It's almost guaranteed to happen for any modern AAA game, it's the sorry state of the industry. But now, we've reached a point where devs apologize for their games before they're even released. This shit is hilarious.

What's next? "We're going to release a game four years from now. You should temper your expectations, it's probably going to suck."

I mean, kudos to them for warning the potential customers, instead of lying to them or luring them in with nice trailers and trying to silence journalists by prohibiting them from showing game footage (I think I remember someone doing that...). Although I'm not sure how I should thank them. Should I buy the game because they were honest? Or should I not buy it, because, well, they were honest? I'm confused.

[–] [email protected] 43 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Given that Paradox has near decade-long lifecycles for their games the launch window is utterly meaningless. Hell, Europa Universalis IV had an expansion released earlier this year and it was released in 2013.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I wonder what is the oldest game to get a real expansion.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Of singleplayer games, it may be Quake. This one was created before the recent remaster and compatible with different engines.

In honor of Quake's 20th anniversary, MachineGames, an internal development studio of ZeniMax Media, who are the current owners of the Quake IP, released online a new expansion pack for free, called Episode 5: Dimension of the Past.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Episode 6: Dimension of the Machine was released in 2021. Quake was released in 1996, making it 25 years.

I have a feeling there's probably some obscure-ass Nethack clone that's been getting regular updates since the creator first programmed it on a PDP/11 but outside of that I can't think of any actual commercial products that have received expansions that long after.

Sigil doesn't count, but it should.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah, guess, Doom and Quake are the earliest non-arcade games that are still accessible to current generations of players making it somehow relevant. I feel like only Sega could do something, like releasing one of their classics updated with some new content, but it won't be the same as original cartridge releases and obviously incompatible with them.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Imperator has entered the chat

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That game had the unfortunate timing of being released when everyone knew CK3 was around the corner. It ended up being seen as a stopgap release and that just got worse when CK3 came out. It got a couple of DLCs but the players just weren't there anymore. It has some good ideas.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Tbf the whole game was someone taking the half-developed CK3 and slapping an antiquity simulator on top of that.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I mean, I think it just demonstrates that the problem is not on a development level, but rather on a project management and (particularly) an executive level.

Crunch and unreasonable deadlines in the gaming industry are the norm, and there's too much pressure from higher up to deliver a product as soon as possible, even if it isn't 100% ready.

Unfortunately, there's no real good answer for this as a consumer... If the game does well, the execs who set the deadlines pocket the profits. If it does poorly, the developers who worked on it bear the brunt of it by either getting insufficient raises, an even higher level of pressure on the next game, or at worst, get laid off.

The real answer would be widespread industry unionization. Efforts to do this are ever-so-slowly being made, but it's not even remotely close to being a reality. I'd say that if the game appeals to you and you don't mind performance issues at launch, buy it, but if not, then don't.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago

You're failing to take Paradox's lifecycles into account. Even though they're only the publisher, keep in mind that they're used to supporting games for 8-10 years after launch. Cities: Skylines came out in 2015 and has seen continual development ever since. Its performance was also abysmal at a point, but people kept playing and the devs kept improving it to the point where nobody even fully remembers why we cared about SimCity going to shit when Cities: Skylines was right there.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

problem is not on a development level, but rather on a project management and (particularly) an executive level.

In any industry as time progresses the production becomes more and more capital intensive and that needs more and bigger investors and all that capital means that there is a bigger risk and that is mitigated by the investors by requiring "their guys" to staff the management and these people are unusually really bad for the technical and actual value side of the business on the long run, because they are usually people with financial or marketing backgrounds. They fundamentally work by the logic of profit maximization and there are always easier and more surefire ways toi achieve that than with supplying a good product. It's even worse when the end product is something that could be considered "art". In AAA it all eventually leads into pushing bland installments under rushed deadlines for the same once successful franchise out one after another, just because that is where the risks are lowest and money is still being made.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

It’s possible some machines power through it. Just don’t preorder it and wait until you know it will work for you.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

Should I buy the game because they were honest? Or should I not buy it, because, well, they were honest? I’m confused.

Wait for the release and reviews. Then decide if you want to buy the game or not.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

the game will be optimized eventually. if you want to wait until then, do so. me, I just want to play this. I don't care I've been waiting a long time for this game, and I have a very powerful desktop PC so I don't really care.

I am upset they do not have a native Linux build this time around, however. And I don't care that proton has gotten good, a game like this needs to run natively to get the full experience. The first one did and Unity makes it trivially simple to export builds to other operating systems.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I would say what's next is preemptively decrying death threats, but they already do that when they preemptively fabricate the death threats.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

As a software developer I can say threats from users are absolutely real unfortunately. A lot of people suck and it’s easy to hear from them.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 year ago

Sure. But if you know your product is going to be trash, why not jump ahead of the curve and victimize yourself to start with? It's not difficult to do these days, and why wouldn't you do it? Altruism? At this point, not assuming this happens is just naive.

[–] [email protected] 88 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Props for transparency atleast

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago

It sucks, on one hand I'd prefer a delay so they can release what they're happy with - but on the other this is a developer that I know and trust to continue working to make things better for a long time. For many other games this would leave a bitter taste, but for this one it's a bit of a shrug for me.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yeah thanks for the heads up, I'll buy it in a year after release, when it's patched, for 50% discount on a steam sale. Or maybe in two years foe that botched launch apology hit discount of 70%.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

And has 3 DLCs

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yes but the expansions for basic features will still total several hundred.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah but it's Paradox. The only DLC you really need are the 5 or so that actually have a positive steam rating.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm more worried about it being a traffic simulator more than a city builder like the first one without any expansions. I would like to design a city I want to live in. It's good to be honest about performance at least.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Have you watched any of the feature highlights and accompanying dev talks? Visually speaking, the game looks worse in a lot of really bizarre ways, but the actual city simulation gameplay looks like it’s been much improved. There really wasn’t anything groundbreaking, but they added a lot of the depth that’s been seen in older Sim City titles, as well as what looks like an actually currency based economic model, as opposed to the shallow approximation of an economy that existed in Cities Skylines. They also added the frankly crucial changes to traffic AI that was added to CS1 via mods, into the base game. It looks like as far as the city simulation goes, CS2 will be a solid improvement and there have been a couple well known CS1 YouTubers that seem to confirm that.

That being said, I fully expect this game to look rough and maybe perform even rougher at release, but it does at least look like I definitely wouldn’t recommend anyone buy this at launch unless they pull some big improvements out of their asses which judging by this statement, they don’t plan to, but it is also releasing on gamepass…

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Nope, I don't follow any gaming media other than what I see when browsing all in Lemmy. I just noticed a new Cities Skylines game under Steam's top seller list so I only know what I saw from the previous game. My main hope is I can make walkable cities.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well check out their YouTube channel, the videos are very informative.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Does it still revolve around building roads or can cities finally thrive with alternative transport?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

"You can also create dedicated roads that only allow buses and service vehicles to operate on them, and tram tracks can be built separately bypassing road traffic altogether."

"Walkable areas in the city can be created using the pedestrian street along with the pedestrian path and bridges. The pedestrian street prohibits all other vehicular traffic except for service vehicles and delivery trucks bringing resources to local businesses."

Source: the website

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

You still need to build roads, but those can be car-free with either pedestrians only or public transport.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

You still need to build roads, but those can be car-free with either pedestrians only or public transport.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Personally, I think I would prefer they hold the game back and do whatever patches or updates they need to help with performance, rather than release a game they know is buggy. I guess it's nice that they're actually telling us before people buy the game, and they will be releasing updates. But frankly to me this feels like they're going to be fighting an uphill battle when they launch the game. Plenty of people won't see this message, and just buy the game expecting it to work, then turn sour due to the poor performance. You could end up with people refunding the game and never coming back with stuff like that.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Sry, release date sales are already on the book

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Usually that means: We didn't hire enough devs for optimization, didn't allocate enough time for it and prioritized marketing.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Their marketing has been awful though. They had a great build up with all the deep dive videos.... Then nothing for a month?!?

I originally thought it was going to come out a month ago, just after the end of the videos, then was shocked to find out it was still a month away.

I guess they wanted some time so they could address any feedback they got?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How is that awful? The deep dive videos are all we need to understand generally what the new things are, and why we should be looking forward to it. Isn't that all marketing can do?

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeh, but then there was nothing for a month!

Normally they build the hype up to the release, I have actually un-hyped coming up to this release.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I mean what were you expecting a month from release besides like maybe one additional trailer? The original trailer exists and I’m sure they’re paying to run that somewhere. And once someone sees it they can go watch the dev videos.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's probably more bad planning then, shouldn't they be peaking the hype just before launch?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If they cared about peaking hype they wouldn’t have told us about the performance problems. But frankly they don’t need to hype CS2 or even sell big at release and they’re well aware of it. Games like the latest annual COD have to sell as much as possible at release because they need players to fill the servers, they need to have an established player base to sell the battle passes to after a month, and the game has a maximum shelf life of a year, before it’s abandoned for the next game. But CS on the other hand doesn’t need to do any of that. It has virtually zero competition so it has a captive audience of everyone who likes modern city builder games, and it doesn’t matter when you buy it, because they aren’t making another one for 5-8 years. They know exactly how much money they’re going to make from this game and they’ll get yours too, whether it’s at release or a year from now.

To put it in perspective, COD games are made fast, and have to sell fast. Since CS1 released, there have been TEN Call of Duty games. In that same timespan were about to get ONE new Cities game.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

That's a fair point

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

And boom, they just today dropped the “one more trailer” I was talking about lol.

[–] ChangXi 1 points 1 year ago

To address your month long of no updates critique I generally would agree but they actually did use that time to gather feedback from the closed beta and fix many bugs. They gave a bunch of Youtubers, big and small, access to the closed beta, as well as a discord server with the developers. The Youtubers have been adhering to a CS2 video release schedule and giving feedback directly to the developers and they’re actually listening to them. So it seems like the marketing was mainly aimed towards the hardcore fan base that specifically looks for CS content.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

true, but that doesn't mean it was cheap.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I love the first one so much that I'll buy this thing regardless so I don't really care if it sucks at launch or not I'm going to enjoy it for a number of years

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Why not?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Dlc or performance fix first, place your bets