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.
Between this and Star Trek: Infinite seems like Paradox’s new MO is to set unreasonable deadlines and rush games to release. You should basically consider all their games early access at this point, except they’ll charge you for updates. They’ve learned that a buggy half-baked release wont effect their sales, and they can just patch the game and crank out new features as dlc.
Find me a performance patch in any Paradox game that requires you to buy a fucking DLC to apply.
Or maybe just quit bullshitting.
FFS, we’re talking about a relatively small developer/publisher that continually supports and develops most of their games for the better part of a decade (or more, like EU IV). I thought this shit is what people wanted but what it seems most gamers want is just any excuse to fucking whine.
Way to completely misread my post there bud. Its not about the dlc, its about Pdox (who isn’t exactly a small indie publisher anymore) rushing buggy, feature-bare games to release with the intent of abusing their dlc-centric business model. FFS I guess wanting a game that’s complete and works on release is whining.
If I wanted a mature, well-performing city-building game experience I’ll play Cities: Skylines 1.
From the reviews on that page, it sounds like Colossal Order delivered on the features it promised, but has lots of performance optimization left to do. By the sounds of it, on my laptop I’ll probably get 20fps and occasional stuttering on my gaming laptop by 10k population. I will see whether it is playable for my standards once it officially releases. I’d probably expect many game updates addressing performance and bugs in the first 6 months of release.
The demand and happiness mechanics are fundamentally different so it’s important not to try to play it like CS1 and expect the same results.
I’ve been looking forward to this game for months. Can’t wait for Tuesday, I’m theirs to disappoint.
That’s disappointing. Some level of unmet expectations are to be, well, expected for a sequel to such a cultural behemoth as Cities: Skylines, but it sounds like Colossal Order made some sacrifices on the release date altar. Such a shame.
There’s many things I can overlook here but the lack of bikes nixed my hype fully. I don’t want to build car hell yet again. I can leave the house if I wanna see that.
No bikes??? I hadn’t heard that, one of the most satisfying things about playing C:S1 to me was making great bike routes and useful public transit, without bikes I really don’t feel a drive to play this one now honestly hah. Maybe they are going the Sims route where all the useful basic things they added in the previous edition will be released over time as DLC, ffs.
I don’t think the first Cities Skylines shipped with bikes either? Wasn’t it part of the After Dark DLC? Or maybe that was just bike lanes? I hate the DLC for Paradox games… It’s so confusing that I think I’m just not going to buy their games anymore.
You’re right. After Dark was one of the first(?) DLCs and I’m not sure if bikes were part of that or the eco-friendly DLC but bikes definitely are not part of the vanilla experience (I have quite a few DLCs that are important to me and no bikes yet)
I mean… If I want to build a hell, I still want options.
Like, realistic space use for car hell would be interesting but maybe sometimes I wanna build a university on a hill and student housing at the top of a different hill and to get to class you have to bike up a hill both ways.
Game companies get greedier, gamers want bigger and better experiences for less money, investors want higher returns, computers aren’t getting faster at the same rate and the game industry can afford to treat it’s employees like shit because there’s always going to be a constant stream of new people who want to work in it.
If you compare the game on max settings to modded C:S1 (and if you ignore the leveling plot issues), I actually think it looks better than C:S1, or at least pretty close.
…which makes it pretty terrible. What did they change/improve if not the graphics? It should be so ahead that you don’t even have to think what looks better.
Not having 60 fps might be an issue for a shooter or anything that is built on fast reactions, but it doesn’t really sound like an issue in a city builder.
I don’t get much FPS on CS 1, and it’s not pleasant. It’s probably somewhere between 20-30. But the news above mean that I shouldn’t even dream about running CS 2 with this hardware, because it runs much worse than the first game, but also compared to other games.
Honestly I was expecting that CS 2 would run better than 1. I have a little hope that they will fix their shit, but now I don’t expect significant improvements over the first game’s performance.
I see no justification for why CS 2 is this resource intensive.
It’s a heavy city simulation game, so high CPU usage is kind of expected (though I think it could be better), but what about the RAM and GPU requirements and actual usage?
And I said nothing about justification. But, the RAM is easy to figure out as that is where the variables are stored and manipulated. A “heavy city simulation game” is going to have a great many variables and lots of formulae.
The GPU usage is likely to get the picture to be very pretty. But you could argue against it. The RAM, no, it is required by the genre.
You said that it is a resource intensive game, in a tone that implied to me that it’s fine to you.
But, the RAM is easy to figure out as that is where the variables are stored and manipulated. A “heavy city simulation game” is going to have a great many variables and lots of formulae.
But not this much. CS 1, which is also a “heavy city simulation game”, was totally fine with less, and while I agree that because of the new features it is expected that CS 2 uses more RAM, it is not expected to use this much more.
Also, you are talking as if every vehicle, pedestrian, building object each should cost 1 KB of RAM or something like that. Normally that’s not the case.
The GPU usage is likely to get the picture to be very pretty.
Unconditionally loading 8k textures for all the existing models won’t make the game “very pretty”.
As in every sensible game, texture resolution and such should be configurable, and the game should not load textures not in use. At least one of these is very clearly not happening if the game requires multiple gigabytes of VRAM even on a new, basically empty save.
It is indeed much easier to argue against things you made up and not what was posted.
Where as I stated no such thing, you already have the answer. But, no, I do not believe the straw man you put forth to claim I intended.
My fps is also around that in CS 1 and honestly it hasn’t bothered me that much unless I look at the fps counter.
While it would be nice to have 60 FPS, I don’t think much about it while actually playing.
Yeah I play a lot of rimworkd and dwarffortress and to be honest the only difference between playing it on my of the line pc and my 10yr old laptop is that it takes way longer to do stuff at max speed, which isn’t really how I play games like this. This review kinda sold me on this game.
Exactly. I still don’t get 60fps on the first one, a now 8 year old game on top of the line hardware. I don’t care. People here act like performance optimizing is just turning a knob they forgot, but it’s hours of detailed work finding anything and anything that may be able to shave nanoseconds off.
If the game is playable, I’m happy. It’s not a twitch shooter. It’s a city simulation.
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.
What are the CPU utilization numbers? C:S is a notoriously CPU-first game, particularly with mods. If your CPU can’t calculate more than 10fps, you won’t get more than 10fps.
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.
It starts (barebones, slow as hell) with 8GB. You want 32GB or more for it to run somewhate decently.
Seriously, people don’t understand what “cache” means, maybe they should just create a ramdisk and install the game there to understand the concept.
Seriously, people don’t understand what “cache” means, maybe they should just create a ramdisk and install the game there to understand the concept.
I believe people with lots of RAM simply enjoy the feeling of theoretically being able to run everything, but they don’t actually want processes to use that RAM, because it would deny them the theoretical possibility to run everything.
I jest, of course. The problem is that as a user you don’t have that much control over which process should use your RAM, and also freeing RAM is hard. Chrome gobbling up your whole memory is good when you’re using Chrome, but you don’t get it back when you alt+tab back to your game
freeing RAM is hard. Chrome gobbling up your whole memory is good when you’re using Chrome, but you don’t get it back when you alt+tab back to your game
Actually… you can do it with two .bat files and a “ram cleaner” tool:
Suspend all “chrome.exe” processes
Free all working sets (since Chrome is suspended, it marks all the RAM used by Chrome as swappable/discardable)
Now your game can use all the RAM, the OS will just swap out or discard whatever was in use by Chrome as needed.
Want to go back to Chrome?
Resume all “chrome.exe” processes
The OS will swap in whatever it swapped out, and let Chrome ask for as much RAM as it feels like.
Free all working sets what the fucking hell??? No, no, no, I don’t want to send my full browser to swapfile just because of a greedy game. Loading back all the memory pages will take a lot of time when I want to switch back to the browser, and it will lag for quite some more time until all the not too frequently used but important is loaded back too. This also applies to the reverse: swapping the game out and back in will take a ton of time, and then it will have lag spikes when it needs a dozen of memory page that is somewhat more rarely used and haven’t been loaded back with all the rest. This nonsense of literally using all your ram “as a cache” but as working set just makes everything slower in the end. This just cannot be justified. There’s a reason I’m using a multi tasking PC instead of a single-tasking gaming console, which you can only use for one purpose at a time.
And don’t tell me to put my swapfile on my SSD. This is the perfect way of killing yours, with writing 16 GB of data every time you switch between windows.
I don’t want to send my full browser to swapfile just because of a greedy game
You don’t, most of the times the game doesn’t use all that memory anyways (or crashes if it tries to… so still, doesn’t use it).
Loading back all the memory pages will take a lot of time
No it won’t. Browsers preemptively allocate a bunch of RAM just in case they need it… then never use it. “Loading back” empty memory, takes zero time.
This also applies to the reverse
No it doesn’t. Games rarely can be suspended and resumed successfully, and they rarely allocate RAM that they aren’t going to use. I was clear when I said you suspend “chrome.exe”, not “your game.exe”. If you resume the browser without exiting the game, the game stays in RAM and the browser manages with what’s left (surprisingly, they manage to run a tab or two without a problem, which further proves they didn’t “really” need all that much RAM in the first place).
swapfile on my SSD. This is the perfect way of killing yours
My swapfile SSD got retired after 10 years when I switched to a NVMe, it’s an external drive now.
writing 16 GB of data every time you switch between windows.
As explained above, no you don’t, most of the data simply gets discarded, maybe 1-2GB of it gets actually written. To further expand on that, the swapfile gets constantly pre-populated with less changing in-RAM data so the OS can “swap it out” instantly. That same data stays in the swapfile after it gets read into RAM again, so it doesn’t get written to the swapfile over and over, only read back.
There’s a reason I’m using a multi tasking PC instead of a single-tasking gaming console
If you do, then you put more RAM in it. Otherwise, you can use it as a gaming console. Your choice.
Loading back all the memory pages will take a lot of time
No it won’t. Browsers preemptively allocate a bunch of RAM just in case they need it… then never use it. “Loading back” empty memory, takes zero time.
Yes, it will, and I’m saying this from experience. I have 32 GB of RAM but since I have dozens of tabs in several windows open, the browser really consumes a lot of RAM. When windows starts swapping it out, even just a little because I’m over 70% utilization, I can feel that it got slower.
And on the occasion when in PH I accidently click “empty working sets” instead of “combine memory lists” and windows swaps out everything, it’s horrible for days until I just give up and reboot instead.
Games rarely can be suspended and resumed successfully
Probably I’m playing with the wrong games then, as those that I play don’t crash from it. One such example is Factorio where I have did that a lot in the past.
I was clear when I said you suspend “chrome.exe”, not “your game.exe”.
Now I understand, but then your workaround does not allow for switching back to the browser for looking up something.
surprisingly, they manage to run a tab or two without a problem, which further proves they didn’t “really” need all that much RAM in the first place
1-2 tabs maybe work fine. But the whole user interface will also be slower to respond, and if you have addons which need to do this or that when a page loads, then that 1-2 tabs won’t be usable either.
Also, I doubt that windows wouldn’t swap out parts of the game.
If you do, then you put more RAM in it. Otherwise, you can use it as a gaming console. Your choice.
I won’t spend on anywhere North of 32 GB. This is not a fucking server. I would rather just not play games that are so out of touch with reality. To back that up, I’ve just read someone else posted a steam statistics page that says only ~20% of steam users have 32 GB of RAM, while most of the rest has only 16.
Also, when I have built this PC I have heard multiple remarks that 64 GB RAM may not be a good idea, because the hardware memory manager would be slower with managing that amount of RAM than 32, which is important for games that move a lot of data in the RAM.
when in PH I accidently click “empty working sets” instead of “combine memory lists” and windows swaps out everything, it’s horrible for days until I just give up and reboot instead.
“Empty working sets” doesn’t swap out anything by itself, it marks it as “swappable” but stil in RAM. It does make a copy to swapfile in case it needs to swap it out so it can do it instantly.
To fully force a swap out, you have to clean the lists… level 1, I think? (sorry, in bed, don’t want to look it up RN).
If you did that with a HDD however… yeah, I can see how that would feel bad.
Pro tip: don’t leave PH open for too long, it’s kind of a devel tool and has some bugs that can mess up the hooks of the whole system. Best is to open, use, close, for ~15 day uptimes on Windows 8 to 10 without ECC.
I have 32 GB of RAM but since I have dozens of tabs in several windows open
I used to play games with 8 GB of RAM and 40 tabs in Chrome. It was either-or, it worked, didn’t kill the SSD, for years. 🤷
Is unity and c# really that bad by itself? I don’t have much experience in c# development, but I was in the impression that c# is a relatively fast language (not as much as c++ but much, much more than js, python and even java)
No, they’re pretty nice, that’s why they got popular. It’s when you pair them with game development, that shit hits the fan.
Basically, you have:
Rocket software - if it fails once, you fucked up
F-35, infrastructure software - if it fails, it better recovers fast
Business software - if it works for most of the workday, it’s fine
Consumer software - if it works most days, it’s fine
Game software - if it eventually works at least once, you’re fine; most people don’t care about replaying the same story anyway
Unity and C# are very easy to make utter crap with, and still have it “work at least once”… which leads game developers to use it, make it work, and have it packaged and sold. Add to that “modders”, who are mostly random people who want to see some [part] of some idea they had, work maybe once in the game… and you get a perfect recipe for disaster: rushed out games, with sloppy mods, often conflicting with each other.
I can’t say I’m surprised. I was wondering whether I should jump in on day 1, since I played C:S 1 pretty heavily, and want to support the devs, but this definitely means I’ll be waiting at least a few patches.
Yeah, my thought is that this is a game they’ll be supporting for 8-9 years so what the fuck does it matter if it runs like dogshit on day one? Don’t fucking buy it until the performance increases and the problems you mentioned are ironed out.
It really is that simple.
Anyone that expected this game to be perfect on launch was clearly not around whenever Cities: Skylines launched. The performance was godawful to the point that I refunded it. A couple of months and a couple of patches later shit was cleared up and I repurchased it. Didn’t have an issue after that.
So yeah, the whole “Why doesn’t this brand new game not have the same performance and features as a nine year old game with numerous DLCs and mods?” thing is getting fucking tiresome.
Preorders. It used to be that you had to preorder the LOTR special edition on DVD with figurines to make sure the shop had existences… then Kickstarter bastardized it into “pay to maybe get something”… and Steam jumped onto the bandvagon of “pay hoping it might work some day”.
Not sure how the point about Kickstarter is relevant but it’s not Steams fault devs are releasing unfinished games.
And I wouldn’t say it went straight to bad digital preorders. I feel like that is a more recent phenomenon and digital preorders were better years ago.
I just bought Fallout 4 GOTY for $5 the other day. Look forward to doing the same in a few years when Cyberpunk 2077 has a final release with everything fixed and polished. There’s so many good old games, why buy anything brand new.
And this doesn’t forgive devs for buggy initial releases either, because I’m not throwing money at something until it’s actually done.
Exactly this. No man’s Sky is apparently decent nowadays too.
Part of the issue is that publishers make studies sign contracts with fixed release dates, with heavy penalties for delays (even though basically any software project ends up going over time).
But yeah, just go through the backlog of older games, this way you also don’t need the latest PC either to play on max settings.
The base game of 2077 is pretty good now that 2.0 is out. My biggest issie with it at launch was the lack of cyberspace for hacker player characters. Felt like the game was funneling me towards standard FPS gameplay, even if there are a lot of options within that realm
I’d much rather play the game in its current state than waiting 3 or 4 months, i have a pretty beefy system and i dont mind low framerates in a strategy game. If you don’t feel the same then don’t pick it up, wait the 3 or 4 months and enjoy it then.
I don’t think it’s crazy to expect games to have playable performance levels when they release. Not to mention it’s a sequel so you’d think they would learn some things after fixing the first one.
Yeah the fucks up with all the Paradox apologia in this thread? I also remember Cities: Skylines on release It ran fine and my rig was shitty back then. It was a perfectly functional little city builder. People loved it and it was called the new Sim City!
“Just wait two years and put down another $50 on dlc bro. Ur dumb for expecting it to be good now.” Nah this shits unacceptable. If a game needs to be supported for years before its considered good then an honest developer would call it an early access game. Ya know, those games that get years of support, updates, and features for free.
DLC part pisses me off also. I know this game isn’t developed by Paradox but it seems to be a trend in Paradox games where you need to spend the base price + an absurd amount of extra money to get the developer’s “true vision” or whatever. It’s really annoying.
To get most of the base game features that are currently present in Crusader Kings III, you would’ve had to spend a sizeable chunk of cash on DLC for Crusader Kings II.
Yeah but it’s Paradox as the publisher who is the one setting the parameters of them having to build a game that is designed to support 10 years of DLC like all of their other products because that’s their monetization strategy.
Publishers still have a lot of power in a games development. They can set deadlines and dictate the direction they want a games development to take. Seeing as this is a recurring problem with games Paradox both develops and publishes, its easy to see who is to blame here.
I completely agree. I think the point of the commenter you’re replying to is that this is the kind of game that will fix these eventually. It’s still disappointing for a launch, but eventually it will probably become better than CS1.
We didn’t have god damn tunnels in CS1 when it was released and people were raging about the city being limited to 9 tiles.
If company admitted performance issues before release is the hill that these people are willing to die on, well go ahead then. Back then the alternative was either cities platinum series or the abomination sim city became and neither of those was any good. At least now you have something more modern than sim city 4 to fall back on if CS2 disappoints.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The problem is, this sets a precedence in the gaming industry (and in the consumer’s minds too) that it’s fine to consume 16 GB of RAM, not on a late game megacity but on a new save.
Games like this are also pretty palatable at low framerates imo, certainly much better than an fps or something. If the gameplay is solid I’ll definitely pick it up. I like to have it as a second monitor game.
I played both CK2 and CK3 and have to say I love CK3. The create your religion system is so awesome and the events are great. I dont even feel like touching CK2 anymore aside from some mods
For CK and Vic they changed their design philosophy to be more “sandbox with realistic parameters” vs older games’ “sandbox with prescripted events” to make historical events happen. It’s an ambitious idea but so far the results have been pretty mixed. I’m hopefully they get it right eventually. Stellaris has really only gotten to be as polished as it very recently.
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My suspicion is that the game would have been delayed had the new Harebrained Schemes game not just flopped.
I mostly play CS1 with mods (but very infrequently), and now it seems I’ll stick to that for the time being
Between this and Star Trek: Infinite seems like Paradox’s new MO is to set unreasonable deadlines and rush games to release. You should basically consider all their games early access at this point, except they’ll charge you for updates. They’ve learned that a buggy half-baked release wont effect their sales, and they can just patch the game and crank out new features as dlc.
Find me a performance patch in any Paradox game that requires you to buy a fucking DLC to apply.
Or maybe just quit bullshitting.
FFS, we’re talking about a relatively small developer/publisher that continually supports and develops most of their games for the better part of a decade (or more, like EU IV). I thought this shit is what people wanted but what it seems most gamers want is just any excuse to fucking whine.
“they can just patch the game and crank out new features as dlc” does not have the same meaning as “buy a fucking DLC to apply a performance patch”
lern2reed
Way to completely misread my post there bud. Its not about the dlc, its about Pdox (who isn’t exactly a small indie publisher anymore) rushing buggy, feature-bare games to release with the intent of abusing their dlc-centric business model. FFS I guess wanting a game that’s complete and works on release is whining.
If I wanted a mature, well-performing city-building game experience I’ll play Cities: Skylines 1.
From the reviews on that page, it sounds like Colossal Order delivered on the features it promised, but has lots of performance optimization left to do. By the sounds of it, on my laptop I’ll probably get 20fps and occasional stuttering on my gaming laptop by 10k population. I will see whether it is playable for my standards once it officially releases. I’d probably expect many game updates addressing performance and bugs in the first 6 months of release.
The demand and happiness mechanics are fundamentally different so it’s important not to try to play it like CS1 and expect the same results.
I’ve been looking forward to this game for months. Can’t wait for Tuesday, I’m theirs to disappoint.
E: corrected developer
Paradox is just the publisher on this one, Colossal Order is the dev.
Ah you’re right… I’ll fix that
That’s disappointing. Some level of unmet expectations are to be, well, expected for a sequel to such a cultural behemoth as Cities: Skylines, but it sounds like Colossal Order made some sacrifices on the release date altar. Such a shame.
I don’t know nothing, but I have a feeling that paradox hurried the release, not necessarily CO
Yeah, I think it’s usually the publisher pushing the release dates on the dev studio.
There’s many things I can overlook here but the lack of bikes nixed my hype fully. I don’t want to build car hell yet again. I can leave the house if I wanna see that.
No bikes??? I hadn’t heard that, one of the most satisfying things about playing C:S1 to me was making great bike routes and useful public transit, without bikes I really don’t feel a drive to play this one now honestly hah. Maybe they are going the Sims route where all the useful basic things they added in the previous edition will be released over time as DLC, ffs.
I don’t think the first Cities Skylines shipped with bikes either? Wasn’t it part of the After Dark DLC? Or maybe that was just bike lanes? I hate the DLC for Paradox games… It’s so confusing that I think I’m just not going to buy their games anymore.
This is why most people wait a couple years after a Paradox game comes out. They’re fantastic games…once you have the DLC.
You’re right. After Dark was one of the first(?) DLCs and I’m not sure if bikes were part of that or the eco-friendly DLC but bikes definitely are not part of the vanilla experience (I have quite a few DLCs that are important to me and no bikes yet)
They usually give a lot of free stuff at the same patch even if you don’t buy the dlc.
this, so much
If you’re not making your city a hell for the npcs in some way how are you having fun
I mean… If I want to build a hell, I still want options.
Like, realistic space use for car hell would be interesting but maybe sometimes I wanna build a university on a hill and student housing at the top of a different hill and to get to class you have to bike up a hill both ways.
I did this in university, it sucked
too bloody right
Game companies get greedier, gamers want bigger and better experiences for less money, investors want higher returns, computers aren’t getting faster at the same rate and the game industry can afford to treat it’s employees like shit because there’s always going to be a constant stream of new people who want to work in it.
Well that’s disappointing. Also noticed this review: https://www.gamesradar.com/cities-skylines-2-review/
And that for a game that looks like shit.
If you compare the game on max settings to modded C:S1 (and if you ignore the leveling plot issues), I actually think it looks better than C:S1, or at least pretty close.
…which makes it pretty terrible. What did they change/improve if not the graphics? It should be so ahead that you don’t even have to think what looks better.
It’s a less cartoony art style I think (although the style in original skyline evolved a lot) we will see.
Remember mods can fix/change loads
Not having 60 fps might be an issue for a shooter or anything that is built on fast reactions, but it doesn’t really sound like an issue in a city builder.
I don’t get much FPS on CS 1, and it’s not pleasant. It’s probably somewhere between 20-30. But the news above mean that I shouldn’t even dream about running CS 2 with this hardware, because it runs much worse than the first game, but also compared to other games.
Honestly I was expecting that CS 2 would run better than 1. I have a little hope that they will fix their shit, but now I don’t expect significant improvements over the first game’s performance.
“with this hardware”, found your problem.
Yep we better all go drop $3k on a new computer so we can get this game to playable fps!
So, exactly as every other resource intensive game released, ever. Weird huh?
I see no justification for why CS 2 is this resource intensive.
It’s a heavy city simulation game, so high CPU usage is kind of expected (though I think it could be better), but what about the RAM and GPU requirements and actual usage?
And I said nothing about justification. But, the RAM is easy to figure out as that is where the variables are stored and manipulated. A “heavy city simulation game” is going to have a great many variables and lots of formulae.
The GPU usage is likely to get the picture to be very pretty. But you could argue against it. The RAM, no, it is required by the genre.
You said that it is a resource intensive game, in a tone that implied to me that it’s fine to you.
But not this much. CS 1, which is also a “heavy city simulation game”, was totally fine with less, and while I agree that because of the new features it is expected that CS 2 uses more RAM, it is not expected to use this much more.
Also, you are talking as if every vehicle, pedestrian, building object each should cost 1 KB of RAM or something like that. Normally that’s not the case.
Unconditionally loading 8k textures for all the existing models won’t make the game “very pretty”.
As in every sensible game, texture resolution and such should be configurable, and the game should not load textures not in use. At least one of these is very clearly not happening if the game requires multiple gigabytes of VRAM even on a new, basically empty save.
The specs until recently were not as intensive but still pointed to the game not being super optimized.
Minimum was a 780 (3gv)
I expected that buying a 6650 (8gb) would have put me well over the minimum requirements.
What is your deal? Do you believe that gaming should only be a hobby for the wealthy, or?
It is indeed much easier to argue against things you made up and not what was posted.
Where as I stated no such thing, you already have the answer. But, no, I do not believe the straw man you put forth to claim I intended.
My fps is also around that in CS 1 and honestly it hasn’t bothered me that much unless I look at the fps counter. While it would be nice to have 60 FPS, I don’t think much about it while actually playing.
Yeah I play a lot of rimworkd and dwarffortress and to be honest the only difference between playing it on my of the line pc and my 10yr old laptop is that it takes way longer to do stuff at max speed, which isn’t really how I play games like this. This review kinda sold me on this game.
Exactly. I still don’t get 60fps on the first one, a now 8 year old game on top of the line hardware. I don’t care. People here act like performance optimizing is just turning a knob they forgot, but it’s hours of detailed work finding anything and anything that may be able to shave nanoseconds off.
If the game is playable, I’m happy. It’s not a twitch shooter. It’s a city simulation.
It’s not a deal breaker, but high fps is always preferable when using anything with a gui
I’ve gotten so used to 60 fps that if I play below 60 it makes motion sick
It’s still something I’d rather have than not; not having it makes for a less fluid experience.
Well, maybe this is why AMD is bringing back threadripper?
What are the CPU utilization numbers? C:S is a notoriously CPU-first game, particularly with mods. If your CPU can’t calculate more than 10fps, you won’t get more than 10fps.
It starts (barebones, slow as hell) with 8GB. You want 32GB or more for it to run somewhate decently.
Seriously, people don’t understand what “cache” means, maybe they should just create a ramdisk and install the game there to understand the concept.
Dude 51% of steam users have 16gb. 22% have 32gb. It’s probably lower in the broader gaming public.
32gb is still pricey and far from standard. 16gb should at least be fine. 32gb to be “somewhat decent” is beyond unreasonable.
32gb of DDR4-3200 RAM (fairly middle of the road RAM) is like $100.
“32gb of RAM is a week’s worth of groceries”
I believe people with lots of RAM simply enjoy the feeling of theoretically being able to run everything, but they don’t actually want processes to use that RAM, because it would deny them the theoretical possibility to run everything.
I jest, of course. The problem is that as a user you don’t have that much control over which process should use your RAM, and also freeing RAM is hard. Chrome gobbling up your whole memory is good when you’re using Chrome, but you don’t get it back when you alt+tab back to your game
Actually… you can do it with two .bat files and a “ram cleaner” tool:
Now your game can use all the RAM, the OS will just swap out or discard whatever was in use by Chrome as needed.
Want to go back to Chrome?
The OS will swap in whatever it swapped out, and let Chrome ask for as much RAM as it feels like.
Free all working sets what the fucking hell??? No, no, no, I don’t want to send my full browser to swapfile just because of a greedy game. Loading back all the memory pages will take a lot of time when I want to switch back to the browser, and it will lag for quite some more time until all the not too frequently used but important is loaded back too. This also applies to the reverse: swapping the game out and back in will take a ton of time, and then it will have lag spikes when it needs a dozen of memory page that is somewhat more rarely used and haven’t been loaded back with all the rest. This nonsense of literally using all your ram “as a cache” but as working set just makes everything slower in the end. This just cannot be justified. There’s a reason I’m using a multi tasking PC instead of a single-tasking gaming console, which you can only use for one purpose at a time.
And don’t tell me to put my swapfile on my SSD. This is the perfect way of killing yours, with writing 16 GB of data every time you switch between windows.
You don’t, most of the times the game doesn’t use all that memory anyways (or crashes if it tries to… so still, doesn’t use it).
No it won’t. Browsers preemptively allocate a bunch of RAM just in case they need it… then never use it. “Loading back” empty memory, takes zero time.
No it doesn’t. Games rarely can be suspended and resumed successfully, and they rarely allocate RAM that they aren’t going to use. I was clear when I said you suspend “chrome.exe”, not “your game.exe”. If you resume the browser without exiting the game, the game stays in RAM and the browser manages with what’s left (surprisingly, they manage to run a tab or two without a problem, which further proves they didn’t “really” need all that much RAM in the first place).
My swapfile SSD got retired after 10 years when I switched to a NVMe, it’s an external drive now.
As explained above, no you don’t, most of the data simply gets discarded, maybe 1-2GB of it gets actually written. To further expand on that, the swapfile gets constantly pre-populated with less changing in-RAM data so the OS can “swap it out” instantly. That same data stays in the swapfile after it gets read into RAM again, so it doesn’t get written to the swapfile over and over, only read back.
If you do, then you put more RAM in it. Otherwise, you can use it as a gaming console. Your choice.
Yes, it will, and I’m saying this from experience. I have 32 GB of RAM but since I have dozens of tabs in several windows open, the browser really consumes a lot of RAM. When windows starts swapping it out, even just a little because I’m over 70% utilization, I can feel that it got slower.
And on the occasion when in PH I accidently click “empty working sets” instead of “combine memory lists” and windows swaps out everything, it’s horrible for days until I just give up and reboot instead.
Probably I’m playing with the wrong games then, as those that I play don’t crash from it. One such example is Factorio where I have did that a lot in the past.
Now I understand, but then your workaround does not allow for switching back to the browser for looking up something.
1-2 tabs maybe work fine. But the whole user interface will also be slower to respond, and if you have addons which need to do this or that when a page loads, then that 1-2 tabs won’t be usable either.
Also, I doubt that windows wouldn’t swap out parts of the game.
I won’t spend on anywhere North of 32 GB. This is not a fucking server. I would rather just not play games that are so out of touch with reality. To back that up, I’ve just read someone else posted a steam statistics page that says only ~20% of steam users have 32 GB of RAM, while most of the rest has only 16.
Also, when I have built this PC I have heard multiple remarks that 64 GB RAM may not be a good idea, because the hardware memory manager would be slower with managing that amount of RAM than 32, which is important for games that move a lot of data in the RAM.
“Empty working sets” doesn’t swap out anything by itself, it marks it as “swappable” but stil in RAM. It does make a copy to swapfile in case it needs to swap it out so it can do it instantly.
To fully force a swap out, you have to clean the lists… level 1, I think? (sorry, in bed, don’t want to look it up RN).
If you did that with a HDD however… yeah, I can see how that would feel bad.
Pro tip: don’t leave PH open for too long, it’s kind of a devel tool and has some bugs that can mess up the hooks of the whole system. Best is to open, use, close, for ~15 day uptimes on Windows 8 to 10 without ECC.
I used to play games with 8 GB of RAM and 40 tabs in Chrome. It was either-or, it worked, didn’t kill the SSD, for years. 🤷
Stop using Chrome is a great first step. Seriously people. This is Lemmy. We’re better than that.
Feel free to use any other browser, they all allocate RAM preemptively just the same.
No, you misunderstood. I don’t want, like at all. That is totally undue. What fucking engine was this crap written in, electron or what???
The worst is not even the resource usage, but that there are actual people defending this bullshit.
Unity with C#.
That’s only half the problem… the add-ons are also written in Unity with C# 🤷
Is unity and c# really that bad by itself? I don’t have much experience in c# development, but I was in the impression that c# is a relatively fast language (not as much as c++ but much, much more than js, python and even java)
No, they’re pretty nice, that’s why they got popular. It’s when you pair them with game development, that shit hits the fan.
Basically, you have:
Unity and C# are very easy to make utter crap with, and still have it “work at least once”… which leads game developers to use it, make it work, and have it packaged and sold. Add to that “modders”, who are mostly random people who want to see some [part] of some idea they had, work maybe once in the game… and you get a perfect recipe for disaster: rushed out games, with sloppy mods, often conflicting with each other.
I can’t say I’m surprised. I was wondering whether I should jump in on day 1, since I played C:S 1 pretty heavily, and want to support the devs, but this definitely means I’ll be waiting at least a few patches.
Yeah, my thought is that this is a game they’ll be supporting for 8-9 years so what the fuck does it matter if it runs like dogshit on day one? Don’t fucking buy it until the performance increases and the problems you mentioned are ironed out.
It really is that simple.
Anyone that expected this game to be perfect on launch was clearly not around whenever Cities: Skylines launched. The performance was godawful to the point that I refunded it. A couple of months and a couple of patches later shit was cleared up and I repurchased it. Didn’t have an issue after that.
So yeah, the whole “Why doesn’t this brand new game not have the same performance and features as a nine year old game with numerous DLCs and mods?” thing is getting fucking tiresome.
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@hiddengoat @theangriestbird How did we get to the point where paying money for a broken, unfinished product was acceptable?
It’s not, don’t buy games on day one. Let the other suckers pay to beta test it. Once it’s fixed in a few years, you can buy it for a discount.
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Preorders. It used to be that you had to preorder the LOTR special edition on DVD with figurines to make sure the shop had existences… then Kickstarter bastardized it into “pay to maybe get something”… and Steam jumped onto the bandvagon of “pay hoping it might work some day”.
Not sure how the point about Kickstarter is relevant but it’s not Steams fault devs are releasing unfinished games.
And I wouldn’t say it went straight to bad digital preorders. I feel like that is a more recent phenomenon and digital preorders were better years ago.
Not wanting to make you feel old, but… No Man’s Sky botched preorder release was 7 years ago (2016).
I mentioned Kickstarter (est. 2009) as a stepping stone in getting people used to pay for not-yet-existing stuff.
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I just bought Fallout 4 GOTY for $5 the other day. Look forward to doing the same in a few years when Cyberpunk 2077 has a final release with everything fixed and polished. There’s so many good old games, why buy anything brand new.
And this doesn’t forgive devs for buggy initial releases either, because I’m not throwing money at something until it’s actually done.
Exactly this. No man’s Sky is apparently decent nowadays too.
Part of the issue is that publishers make studies sign contracts with fixed release dates, with heavy penalties for delays (even though basically any software project ends up going over time).
But yeah, just go through the backlog of older games, this way you also don’t need the latest PC either to play on max settings.
The base game of 2077 is pretty good now that 2.0 is out. My biggest issie with it at launch was the lack of cyberspace for hacker player characters. Felt like the game was funneling me towards standard FPS gameplay, even if there are a lot of options within that realm
I’d much rather play the game in its current state than waiting 3 or 4 months, i have a pretty beefy system and i dont mind low framerates in a strategy game. If you don’t feel the same then don’t pick it up, wait the 3 or 4 months and enjoy it then.
@saigot is much rather they release a complete project that works on day 1.
It does work I’ve been playing it all day!
Its not good for the general aura surrounding the release. I don’t follow the game actively but all I hear is negativity.
I don’t think it’s crazy to expect games to have playable performance levels when they release. Not to mention it’s a sequel so you’d think they would learn some things after fixing the first one.
i’m sure they learned plenty of things about the old game engine they built
and now they have a new one… which was the whole point
Yeah the fucks up with all the Paradox apologia in this thread? I also remember Cities: Skylines on release It ran fine and my rig was shitty back then. It was a perfectly functional little city builder. People loved it and it was called the new Sim City! “Just wait two years and put down another $50 on dlc bro. Ur dumb for expecting it to be good now.” Nah this shits unacceptable. If a game needs to be supported for years before its considered good then an honest developer would call it an early access game. Ya know, those games that get years of support, updates, and features for free.
DLC part pisses me off also. I know this game isn’t developed by Paradox but it seems to be a trend in Paradox games where you need to spend the base price + an absurd amount of extra money to get the developer’s “true vision” or whatever. It’s really annoying.
To get most of the base game features that are currently present in Crusader Kings III, you would’ve had to spend a sizeable chunk of cash on DLC for Crusader Kings II.
Colossal Order is the dev, Paradox is just the publisher. Paradox deserves crap for their many mistakes, but this one isn’t theirs.
Yeah but it’s Paradox as the publisher who is the one setting the parameters of them having to build a game that is designed to support 10 years of DLC like all of their other products because that’s their monetization strategy.
Publishers still have a lot of power in a games development. They can set deadlines and dictate the direction they want a games development to take. Seeing as this is a recurring problem with games Paradox both develops and publishes, its easy to see who is to blame here.
I completely agree. I think the point of the commenter you’re replying to is that this is the kind of game that will fix these eventually. It’s still disappointing for a launch, but eventually it will probably become better than CS1.
We didn’t have god damn tunnels in CS1 when it was released and people were raging about the city being limited to 9 tiles.
If company admitted performance issues before release is the hill that these people are willing to die on, well go ahead then. Back then the alternative was either cities platinum series or the abomination sim city became and neither of those was any good. At least now you have something more modern than sim city 4 to fall back on if CS2 disappoints.
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.
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.
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.
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The problem is, this sets a precedence in the gaming industry (and in the consumer’s minds too) that it’s fine to consume 16 GB of RAM, not on a late game megacity but on a new save.
Games like this are also pretty palatable at low framerates imo, certainly much better than an fps or something. If the gameplay is solid I’ll definitely pick it up. I like to have it as a second monitor game.
It feels like every Paradox sequel is worse than the previous game lately. CK3 is garbage compared to CK2 for instance, even after years of DLC.
I played both CK2 and CK3 and have to say I love CK3. The create your religion system is so awesome and the events are great. I dont even feel like touching CK2 anymore aside from some mods
For CK and Vic they changed their design philosophy to be more “sandbox with realistic parameters” vs older games’ “sandbox with prescripted events” to make historical events happen. It’s an ambitious idea but so far the results have been pretty mixed. I’m hopefully they get it right eventually. Stellaris has really only gotten to be as polished as it very recently.
They also changed their philosophy so fewer and worse DLC, at least for CK. It does not appear that CK3 will ever have feature parity with CK2.