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Cities: Skylines 2 devs considered release delay to boost performance, but decided it’s “not a dealbreaker"Colossal Order lay out plans for updates
Colossal Order lay out plans for updates
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Paradox Interactive
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Paradox Interactive
Ina “note on release timing” on Steam, the developers comment that “while some setups on PC have challenges, we concluded the performance is not a dealbreaker for all the players”, based on pre-launch verdicts. “For us,” the note goes on, “the number one priority is for the players to have fun with the game, and we had seen enough feedback from players enjoying the game that it would be more unfair to postpone. We know we will keep working on the game and do our best to fix issues as fast as possible, so we wanted to respect the announced release date and allow people to start playing the game.”
Colossal Order note that balancing GPU performance doesn’t necessarily mean reducing overall quality - it could be a question of “taking fewer samples with smarter distribution to achieve identical or very similar results”. They’re also thinking about upscaling solutions, going beyond AMD FSR1 “which does not look that good when the scale ratio is 50%”, but which “made sense” to include at launch as the Unity engine supports it out of the box.
“There is no real benefit in a city builder to aim for higher FPS (unlike a multiplayer shooter) as a growing city will inevitably become CPU-bound,” the post insists. “What matters more with this type of game is to avoid stutters and have a responsive UI.” Achieving 60FPS “does not hurt”, the developers add, “as it can contribute to better visuals in relation to temporal effects”. However, “we just don’t believe there would be a long-term benefit in setting the target to 60fps, especially because we face rendering challenges both from close-ups and far distances.”
If you’re wrestling with low or uneven Cities: Skylines 2 frame-rates, you might want to check out our James’s guide to thebest Cities: Skylines 2 PC settings. In RPS’sCities: Skylines 2 review, Sin Vega described the game as “an engaging zone-based city builder that balances simulation with ease of play, but offers little that feels substantially new or improved enough to warrant a sequel”.
