I dunno – I’m sympathetic to the DLC argument, but bad performance isn’t something I can forgive on launch day. I’m sure they’ll patch it in time, but if I buy a full-priced game, I expect it to run decently well. Anything less makes for a poor user experience. If a publisher truly cares about user experience then they won’t release a game in that state, or if they do, they’ll make it 100% clear on the storefront that the game has performance issues.

No one is expecting the game to release with 0 bugs. It’s the severity and quantity of bugs that is the issue.

FWIW, my current take is that this release would be fine if they had simply released it in early access.

deleted by creator

Yeah IMO it’s far better for games like Cities Skylines to use as much RAM as they can - especially once mods start coming out! I’ve had times where my heavily modded version of CS1 wanted 16+ gb of memory because loading assets from RAM is way faster than loading from SSD/HDD!

Gamedev is all about smokes and mirrors. A conventional software engineer will actively resent the shitfuckery you have to do, to make games run well (for good reason; it introduces complexity into already insanely complex systems).

Some performance work, you cannot defer, like fundamental design decisions (3D vs. 2D, raytracing or not) or if you’ve coded a tiny feature and for some reason, it completely obliterates performance.

But there’s always going to be tons of features that have been implemented well, they don’t obliterate performance, but if you replace them with an unintuitive/complex smoke-and-mirror solution, then you may be able to shave off 20% execution time for that feature. Or not. Often no real way to know, except to try it out.

Some of these do need to be tackled throughout development, too, but it’s easy to end up with a big block at the end of development.
Especially, if you had to rush a number of features that marketing promised, so that you can make the release date that marketing promised many months before anyone has any fucking clue how long it’ll take.

There is a theory that games release like that to punish pirates, as anything but the launch version - and DLCs - rarely gets pirated.

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.

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

Thats what I always thought of the game.

Yes, erm… totally about building beautiful cities.

I don’t know nothing, but I have a feeling that paradox hurried the release, not necessarily CO

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.

removed by mod

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

I can leave the house if I wanna see that

too bloody right

I don’t want to build car hell yet again

this, so much

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.

If you’re not making your city a hell for the npcs in some way how are you having fun

60fps complaints go back to the dark days of 360/ps3 ports where HD resolutions on the consoles meant high framerate was no longer a viable option there. Since AAA games started using console as lead platform pc became saddled with 30fps caps as well. It possibly happened even earlier, but that was the time where I started noticing it.

60fps doesn’t matter. It’s not a shooter. Even CS1 I could only get 50ish on a new map, and that’s with hardware that’s 6 years newer than the game

It does not sound like 50 FPS on 6 years old hardware. Maybe half?

RAM should be used. For gaming it would be wasteful not to use it.

Don’t be afraid, I do use my RAM. Like, it’s full of other important programs and filesystem cache.
But the game shouldn’t take it away from other programs, and it should also be aware of the fact that windows starts swapping out programs when RAM usage has reached ~70%. This will significantly affect any programs you run simultaneously, but the game itself tooz because it’s less used memory pages will be swapped out more. Random access for reading back swapped pages is much slower than loading the resources in smaller groups sequentially.

16 GB usage sounds like the game has loaded ALL of its models and resources, even those that are not needed (not in view, and probably not even accessible to the player), and probably has multiple copies of most with different resolution and such.

Loading to RAM that much data would be fine if they managed it to only be loaded to a cache, that can be released for other programs, but I don’t think you can do that in any other way than using the filesystem cache, at which point the RAM usage does not even count against your process, or as usage at all.

If you aren’t using all your ram then you’re loading textures, shaders, and everything from disk, which is thousands of times slower and that would lead to .

Obviously the game does not have to use all the RAM. It only needs to preload textures and models that are useful on your system (based on graphics settings) and are in use right now or can be in use very soon.
Also, loading from disk is not as slow as you make it seem. Yes it is if your users install games to a drive that’s bad for that purpose (like SMR tech hard drives), or if you haven’t placed the resources strategically, by which I mean grouping resources so that commonly-used-together resources are placed sequentially for a quick and efficient read.
The first problem shouldn’t be your concern: the player shouldn’t expect top performance from hardware that was designed for a totally opposite task.

Marketers are paid to lie.

Yes, but they shouldn’t touch any technical information, including the hardware requirements section. Marketers don’t know shit about the game, just that they want to sell at much licenses as humanly possible.
The hardware requirements, however, is to be defined by those who know shit about the game. Preferably core developers or performance testers, who have an idea about the game’s inner workings and about how much is it expected to use in average and in the worst case.

I find that people who watch reviewers are exponentially more disappointed in games because they let reviewers tell them how to feel.

I can agree with that and your point on Cyberpunk. I haven’t played that game, but not because I’m not interested. It looked fun from content that I have seen.

But the performance concerns sound like that it’s actually a huge problem.

I like it that so far it has been described a solid lunch except land leveling and performance, because the first one can probably be addressed in a few months at most if they want it. But even the published hardware requirements were disappointing, and this is a signal that the game will hardly get any better than that, if it can reach it.

Yeah, same, I’ll reserve my judgement for later. If it’s truly awful and unplayable then I’ll have to finish building my RTX 3090 system, lol.

I guess you’re just talking about one person, but I think Cities Skylines was received quite well in general? I just remember a bunch of praise for Cities Skylines (in contrast to Sim City 2013 which a bunch of people had a meltdown about).