A new building game will be released on Steam in October, but the developers sound skeptical about whether you should really play the game at launch.
What game is it?
- On October 24, a new city-building simulation “Cities: Skylines 2” will be released by the Finnish developer studio Colossal Order, serving as a sequel to the popular “Cities: Skylines” on Steam.
- As in the predecessor, you will build your own cities and transform them into huge metropolises. You will need to consider the needs of the citizens, the economy, and the energy supply of the local industry.
- There are also environmental factors like changing weather and seasons. Additionally, the chosen map influences the climate in your city.
You can watch a trailer for the game here:
However, even before the release of Cities: Skylines 2 on October 24, early criticism regarding the game’s performance has emerged from testers.
Colossal Order has also commented on the performance in a forum of the publisher Paradox Entertainment and sounds rather skeptical about whether you should really play the building game at release.
What do the developers say? In the statement, the developers acknowledge the concerns regarding performance. Although Cities: Skylines 2 is a next-gen title, the team has “not achieved the intended benchmark,” despite working tirelessly to deliver “the best possible gaming experience” (via forum.paradoxplaza.com).
Furthermore, the developers state that they want to continue working on the game in the coming months, but still want to transparently present performance expectations during the upcoming release.
Overall, Colossal Order believes that releasing the game at this time is the right decision in the long run and is convinced that players will have a great experience and fun with the game despite the performance issues.
How bad is the performance of Cities: Skylines 2 really? All tests regarding Cities: Skylines 2 share one common aspect: criticism of the performance. This really seems to be a problem.
Our colleagues from GameStar even deducted 10 points in their review of Cities: Skylines 2 because larger cities stuttered despite powerful hardware. Even with a PC equipped with a 13900K CPU and a GeForce RTX 4090, only 25-45 FPS were achieved in a city with 100,000 inhabitants.
- You can read the full review of Cities: Skylines 2 on GameStar.de
Colleagues from GameStar Tech are also reporting significant performance issues. When asked if the developers could still salvage it, “GameStar Tech” author Nils Raettig writes:
“Some improvements to performance may still be possible. However, the building game is likely to remain a very difficult case in the future, at least if the optical quality and the admittedly very high simulation degree are not (too) strongly affected.”
But internationally as well, Cities: Skylines 2’s performance is criticized. PC Gamer decided to start a new game save with just 45,000 inhabitants, as the FPS had already dropped below 30 frames per second at that point.
Likewise, PCGamesN writes about issues such as long wait times and frozen screens they experienced when zooming in and out of cities. They note that on those PCs, games like Baldur’s Gate 3 and Starfield ran “smoothly and powerfully” before.
Is there any praise for the building game? Yes, various aspects of Cities: Skylines 2 are well-received by testers. Although the building game does not completely reinvent the genre, there are several quality-of-life improvements and innovations compared to its predecessor that meaningfully enhance the gaming experience.
In particular, the construction of roads and general traffic within the city has been improved compared to its predecessor.
If you want to wait for the performance of Cities: Skylines 2 to improve a bit before release, there is now on Steam a new strategy game that fulfills your power fantasies.
