Alright, so I got the game and it a) actually has a fantastic options menu with a ton of granularity, and b) it has some really dumb, wasteful settings flagged as "high" with no "ultra" preset.
I went from launching into a default in the 30s for the default map to toning down their nuts global illumination, volumetric clouds and transparent reflections for a neat 100+ fps. And then I cranked it back up a bit to be hovering around 90. I'm sure I'll have to tweak more when I get deeper into the game, but yeah, no, this is gonna be playable.
For the record, I think setting up decent defaults and settings should be a thing in PC games. Tuning the game shouldn't be the first thing you have to do. But whether it's thanks to last minute patches or people overreacting to the announcements I think this was a bit overblown. I'll report back if that proves not to be the case as I get deeper in.
JustZ@lemmy.world 8 months ago
My god man two hours have passed, did it drop off yet?
MudMan@kbin.social 8 months ago
Hah. It did lose some fps as the city grew. By the time I expanded to a bunch of tiles I was hovering at 50-60 instead of 70-90, but I'm on a VRR display, so I never felt the need to crank it down further. It may get there eventually, but I'm done for the day
The defaults for high are absolutely messed up, and it's entirely possible that some of the settings are straight up bugged. The game doesn't look that much better than CS1 on reasonable settings... but it also doesn't run that much worse, either.
Honestly, I have bigger gripes with some of the interface and with how much micromanagement there is in here. I think the tech issues are both overblown and could have been mitigated with better defaults.
JustZ@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I just bought the game and see their post from today, which matches up with what you’re saying. I have high hopes.
MudMan@kbin.social 8 months ago
Yeah, I saw that they acknowledged the broken settings and provided a slightly confusing explanation about the technical reasons for it.
I genuinely think they should have locked those settings to a lower default until they can patch them. I get what they're trying to do by being transparent, but... yeah, I don't think it worked out for them or the people interested in the game.
I've been playing a bunch, I now have a large city going on and it's still very playable, at the cost of worse lighting and slow-loading textures in close-ups. Honestly, at this point I'm more annoyed by some UI and sim quirks than the performance, but here's hoping they keep improving all of the above.