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?
The problem is that they don't communicate this and still ask for the full price.
Imagine I'm a gamer who wants to buy and play a working game today, not in half a year. Nothing on their store page indicates that the game isn't in a playable state yet, so I'd pay full price for a game I can't actually play. That's misleading at best, and a downright fraud at worst.
They could easily fix this by delaying the game or launching it as early access for people who don't mind playtesting a half-finished game, but they didn't.
They did communicate: https://www.pcgamer.com/cities-skylines-2-devs-warn-players-of-performance-problems-we-have-not-achieved-the-benchmark-we-targeted/
These guys are the exception.
This is not what I'm talking about, because the vast majority of people buying the game won't have seen this. It's not enough that the info is somewhere on the internet, it needs to be front and center when buying the game.
Did they do so on the store page, or the news section connected to it? Or was it only announced on news sites no one reads?
If you wouldn't be so lazy you could find it out yourself.
I doubt the average player looks up whether the devs came out to warn players their game runs like shit before buying it, I think they just buy it. Similar to how people probably don't check to see if a movie director has mentioned how bad the sound mixing and lighting is in a movie before going to watch it. Might be a crazy take but imo the onus isn't on the person buying the game to make sure the game is finished, let alone looking up articles on the game to make sure the devs didn't admit that it runs like ass and isn't finished. Though with how often it happens and how often there's people that excuse it maybe that's where we're at now, you reap what you sow and whatnot lol
Anyone buying a full price title without looking it up with a quick Google search or reading reviews on Steam is far gone from my compassion.
You can even refund it so easy it's not even worth the outcry and i don't even pretend to care about anyone pre-ordering digital downloads.
It's shitty that these devs have to put the games out too early, but it would save everybody's money and nerves if you just start to see releases today as early access because that's what they all are. There are many companies out there which don't say a peep and i won't wreck anyone who at least tries to give a heads-up !pre-release! which anyone who cares could get easily for free.
It's kind of baffling how we accept this as pretty much the standard for major releases these days. Why would we be okay buying anything else like this? If I bought a pair of shoes and they had issues that made them unwearable until I got them repaired I would be irritated as fuck, and obviously this would be unacceptable for a store to sell them like that.