Cities: Skylines 2 devs warn players of performance problems: 'we have not achieved the benchmark we targeted'

Comments

• Aielman15@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I’m kind of used of 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.

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  • hiddengoat@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    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.

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    • meatand2veg@lemmynsfw.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Imperator has entered the chat

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    • JustZ@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

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

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  • jedibob5@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    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.

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    • hiddengoat@kbin.social ⁨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.

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    • Korkki@lemmy.world ⁨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 of the same once successful franchise out one after another because that is where the risks are lowest and money is made.

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  • llii@feddit.de ⁨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.

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  • AProfessional@lemmy.world ⁨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.

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  • DancingIsForbidden@lemmy.world ⁨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, however. Aont I don’t care that proton has gotten good, a game like this needs to run natively to get the full experience.

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  • pimento64@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

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

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    • AProfessional@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      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.

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• sebinspace@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Props for transparency atleast

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  • BeanMaster@lemmy.world ⁨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.

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• FluffyPotato@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  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.

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  • EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    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…

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    • FluffyPotato@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      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.

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• newthrowaway20@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  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.

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• spiderkle@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

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

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  • Nighed@sffa.community ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    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?

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    • AbsolutePain@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      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?

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    • spiderkle@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

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

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• sturmblast@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

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

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  • ggppjj@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Why not?

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