Facepalm: Developer Colossal Order launched the extremely anticipated sequel to 2015’s Cities: Skylines earlier this week, and issues went simply as most anticipated. Every week in the past, Colossal Order warned that the sport’s efficiency would possibly fall in need of some person’ expectations. As we highlighted on the time, the admission was both a novel little bit of honesty or an correct portrayal of the state of the business. Regardless, the developer cast forward and knowingly shipped a product it knew fell in need of a sure customary.
Did the gamble repay? I suppose that relies on the way you measure success.
Cities: Skylines II touched down on PC on October 24 and in keeping with SteamDB, peaked at 104,697 concurrent customers that day. As of this writing, the sport has greater than 14,800 opinions on Steam with an general score of “combined” and unsurprisingly, a lot of the unfavorable suggestions factors to efficiency points.
For comparability, the sport has a rating of 75 out of 100 on Metacritic however a person rating of simply 3.8 (typically unfavorable) out of 10.
Happily, fixes are on the best way. Colossal Order has already pushed out the primary of what it says are a number of patches to enhance efficiency within the recreation. Patch 1.0.11f1 would not repair every thing, and it is just accessible on Steam proper now, but it surely must be accessible on the Microsoft Retailer quickly.
This patch consists of the next enhancements and fixes:
- Modified LOD to be unbiased of rendering decision to get extra constant efficiency with excessive resolutions
- Minor optimization with fog
- Depth of subject optimizations and tweaks
- World illumination tweaks
- Optimized stutters when buildings spawn/stage up
- Optimized varied stutters throughout all techniques
- Mounted crash after upgrading wind turbine
- Mounted crash when automobile crashes into nonetheless hidden automobile with trailer
- Mounted crash with mesh loading (that occurs with low settings largely)
Colossal Order revealed an optimization information earlier this week to assist gamers get essentially the most out of the sport in its present state. Primarily based on early suggestions, it appears as if adjusting the depth of subject setting may web a stable efficiency increase. Reducing your decision and disabling volumetrics is one other surefire option to increase body charges on struggling machines.
The developer additionally addressed a performance-related difficulty that lately sprung up on Reddit involving in-game characters’ enamel. Responding to the matter, a rep instructed IGN that the sport’s “lifepath” characteristic isn’t linked to the geometry of characters and thus, would not influence characters’ efficiency. The complete assertion from the dev has been reproduced beneath:
“Citizen lifepath characteristic doesn’t tie to citizen geometry and doesn’t have an effect on the efficiency figures of the characters. We all know the characters require additional work, as they’re at present lacking their LODs which have an effect on some elements of efficiency. We’re engaged on bringing these to the sport alongside normal LODs enhancements throughout all recreation property. Characters characteristic lots of particulars that, whereas seemingly pointless now, will turn into related in the way forward for the challenge.”
That final sentence is especially attention-grabbing, and now we will not assist however marvel what CO has in retailer for the way forward for its metropolis constructing recreation. Might it evolve into extra of a folks sim than a metropolis constructing sim, and would that even be the precise transfer?
Cities: Skylines II is due out on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Sequence within the second quarter of 2024.
