Cities Skylines II

[jasontoddwhitt]

Re: Cities Skylines II

After watching City Planner Play's videos on Cities II, yeah I can't wait for this.

[Hooe]

Re: Cities Skylines II

Just announced today — C:S II will forego support of the Steam Workshop and instead have a mod platform built into the game itself, allowing user-generated assets to appear on all platforms. Mods which author code, such as Traffic Manager, will remain exclusive to PC as platform-holder policies forbid such mods from appearing on consoles.

This is an absolute win for anyone who plays on console; C:S on PlayStation or XBOX obviously never supported mods. I have seen some reservations about this change from those who play on PC, though.

[KSUowls]

Re: Cities Skylines II

https://www.ign.com/articles/cities-skylines-2-dev-admits-performance-issues-will-launch-the-game-anyway

So...why are they launching this if performance is bad? Oh right Paradox. They will probably release a $10 DLC for performance upgrade in 6 months

[Cubfan]

Re: Cities Skylines II

Just delay the game and fix the performance issue but no Paradox going for that money and milking everyone with multiple DLC's

[ODogg]

Re: Cities Skylines II

Just delay the game and fix the performance issue but no Paradox going for that money and milking everyone with multiple DLC's

There is nothing forcing anyone to purchase it on release day though.

Personally I'm not in favor of a delay to a game I've been looking forward to for a good while just because performance may not be whatever benchmark they came up with a year or two ago.

[KSUowls]

Re: Cities Skylines II

There is nothing forcing anyone to purchase it on release day though.

Personally I'm not in favor of a delay to a game I've been looking forward to for a good while just because performance may not be whatever benchmark they came up with a year or two ago.

Personally, I'm not in favor of encouraging the industry to release broken games with the hope that they will fix it at some point down the road.

The release of a game always forms the foundation of its future. Once a game has been released, then most of the incentive to improve it has already been lost from the developer's viewpoint. From a fan's perspective, if the game has problems and people don't buy it then that only further hurts us because the company isn't likely to continue supporting a game that doesn't drive their bottom line. There are outliers of course, but for every No Man's Sky, there are a dozen Warhammer 3's.

Fortunately no one is forced to buy anything, but we are all less likely to get what we want when the game doesn't deliver on day 1.

[ODogg]

Re: Cities Skylines II

Personally, I'm not in favor of encouraging the industry to release broken games with the hope that they will fix it at some point down the road.

Not running optimally is not broken though.. unless perhaps you have a low end PC. And if you do, then you should now know not to purchase day one. I believe that was the entire intent of them divulging this to the public, so people would know and be able to act accordingly.

With that in mind I see no reason for any delay on this game.

[KSUowls]

Re: Cities Skylines II

Before the story, before the gameplay mechanics, before the features and UI, a game has to run smoothly before anything else matters. So yes, a game not running optimally absolutely is broken.

Now, ultimately we don't know what benchmarks are on this game or what exactly they mean by "temper expectations". However, this is the first time that I can recall a developer saying this on a game which they are not delaying or at least promising a day 1 optimization patch. So, we're left to speculate on what it means.

We can take some known facts and make some logical assertions though: First, the console version of this game was delayed, which at this point seems reasonable to correlate to this statement on the PC release that there are some performance issues that still need some work. Second, the number of people with high end gaming pc's is not a lot. So, if the game requires a build like mine (4090, 7900x3d, 64gb memory beast) to run smoothly, then that definitely is a reason to delay this game because we are not the customer base which will drive sales and long term support of the game. A bunch of day 1 refunds and negative scores does not help anyone, even the people whose machines are good enough to not have problems at launch.

If the game runs smoothly on a mid range system then this is a non-issue. Hopefully it's this latter point, but if that is the case then it makes this dev statement all the more peculiar since that is already the standard expectation for any PC release. Unfortunately there is some evidence that this isn't the case. The game's recommended PC specs have been updated from very reasonable to now recommending a pretty high end GPU (3080). A leaked FPS from a couple of weeks ago showed 42fps on a believed to be 3080 gpu. There are a lot of unknown variables there (how late into the game were they, what settings did they have, etc), but in almost any context that is not an encouraging thing to see from such a high end card.

[ODogg]

Re: Cities Skylines II

Before the story, before the gameplay mechanics, before the features and UI, a game has to run smoothly before anything else matters. So yes, a game not running optimally absolutely is broken.

optimal is entirely subjective based upon hardware and preferences. it does not at all mean the game is "broken."

I'll be playing the "broken" game next week, which I guess makes me a wizard of epic proportions to be able to do what you say is not possible

[ODogg]

Re: Cities Skylines II

Before the story, before the gameplay mechanics, before the features and UI, a game has to run smoothly before anything else matters. So yes, a game not running optimally absolutely is broken.

Now, ultimately we don't know what benchmarks are on this game or what exactly they mean by "temper expectations". However, this is the first time that I can recall a developer saying this on a game which they are not delaying or at least promising a day 1 optimization patch. So, we're left to speculate on what it means.

We can take some known facts and make some logical assertions though: First, the console version of this game was delayed, which at this point seems reasonable to correlate to this statement on the PC release that there are some performance issues that still need some work. Second, the number of people with high end gaming pc's is not a lot. So, if the game requires a build like mine (4090, 7900x3d, 64gb memory beast) to run smoothly, then that definitely is a reason to delay this game because we are not the customer base which will drive sales and long term support of the game. A bunch of day 1 refunds and negative scores does not help anyone, even the people whose machines are good enough to not have problems at launch.

If the game runs smoothly on a mid range system then this is a non-issue. Hopefully it's this latter point, but if that is the case then it makes this dev statement all the more peculiar since that is already the standard expectation for any PC release. Unfortunately there is some evidence that this isn't the case. The game's recommended PC specs have been updated from very reasonable to now recommending a pretty high end GPU (3080). A leaked FPS from a couple of weeks ago showed 42fps on a believed to be 3080 gpu. There are a lot of unknown variables there (how late into the game were they, what settings did they have, etc), but in almost any context that is not an encouraging thing to see from such a high end card.

btw I have high end hardware, just got a 4080. if it doesn't run playable on my system then I will certainly concede that the game is most assuredly broken

[canes21]

Re: Cities Skylines II

I have not looked into it yet, but the move away from Steam Workshop doesn't sound like the worst idea if they actually do it with care. While the Workshop is convenient, it also has plenty of issues. Discovering new mods on there is not the easiest, hardly ever do mod creators give you all the info you need like poly counts for 3D assets, all of the mod dependencies, etc. If they can moderate it better, then that will be fantastic.

What I also am very interested in seeing, and they may have covered this, is if this move means the GamePass version on PC will have full access to all PC mods. I was going to play the game on GamePass for "free" first, then potentially move to the Steam version once the Workshop started to get a lot more mods that I was likely to use, but if this move away from Steam's Workshop means I can play on GamePass and still use mods unlike CS1, then that is one major positive with this move for me at least.

[KSUowls]

Re: Cities Skylines II

optimal is entirely subjective based upon hardware and preferences. it does not at all mean the game is "broken."

I'll be playing the "broken" game next week, which I guess makes me a wizard of epic proportions to be able to do what you say is not possible

I see that you're a strawman kind of guy. The silly response makes sense.

[Hooe]

Cities Skylines II

Personally, I'm not in favor of encouraging the industry to release broken games with the hope that they will fix it at some point down the road.

The release of a game always forms the foundation of its future. Once a game has been released, then most of the incentive to improve it has already been lost from the developer's viewpoint. From a fan's perspective, if the game has problems and people don't buy it then that only further hurts us because the company isn't likely to continue supporting a game that doesn't drive their bottom line. There are outliers of course, but for every No Man's Sky, there are a dozen Warhammer 3's.

Fortunately no one is forced to buy anything, but we are all less likely to get what we want when the game doesn't deliver on day 1.

I can only speak to Cities: Skylines, which Paradox has supported for literally eight years now, but doesn’t Paradox generally have an incredibly strong track record of supporting their games well after their initial release?

Yes, they created their own ability to support C:S by releasing approximately a couple dozen items of paid DLC for C:S in that time frame. That’s the business model. At the same time, each major DLC release also added mechanics and bug fixes into the base game free of charge. Reasonable minds can beg to differ but I think this is a more honest and transparent way to support continuous development of their games than, say, a live service card game mode.

I assume their other games have operated similarly, but even just based on C:S alone, I think there plenty of evidence supporting having faith in Paradox to do right by their players of C:S II over time than, say, any AAA licensed sports game developer.

Granted, as I previously mentioned, I’m a console player. I have no choice but to wait for performance fixes which are apparently stopping the on-time console release of the game. I think if you’re concerned about frame drops and such, you can and should easily justify waiting to buy.

[bkrich83]

Re: Cities Skylines II

I can only speak to Cities: Skylines, which Paradox has supported for literally eight years now, but doesn’t Paradox generally have an incredibly strong track record of supporting their games well after their initial release?

Yes, they created their own ability to support C:S by releasing approximately a couple dozen items of paid DLC for C:S in that time frame. That’s the business model. At the same time, each major DLC release also added mechanics and bug fixes into the base game free of charge. Reasonable minds can beg to differ but I think this is a more honest and transparent way to support continuous development of their games than, say, a live service card game mode.

I assume their other games have operated similarly, but even just based on C:S alone, I think there plenty of evidence supporting having faith in Paradox to do right by their players of C:S II over time than, say, any AAA licensed sports game developer.

Granted, as I previously mentioned, I’m a console player. I have no choice but to wait for performance fixes which are apparently stopping the on-time console release of the game. I think if you’re concerned about frame drops and such, you can and should easily justify waiting to buy.

I play a lot of Paradox games on PC and you are correct, I'd say their track record for long term support of their games is very good.

[ODogg]

Re: Cities Skylines II

I see that you're a strawman kind of guy. The silly response makes sense.

Call me what you like, doesn't change the fact that "not optimal" and broken are the same, or even close.

You may also want to check out my thread "Negativity in Gaming" though, since you seem so desperate to have this game broken based upon a statement of "not optimal" :P