Joshua Wolens
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Cities: Skylines 2 released in a less than ideal state, and most of the talk around the game has centred around how Colossal Order intends to fix various issues with the game’s performance. Now, the studio has resumed its weekly “CO Word of the Week” feature—last sighted in 2018—to keep players updated on its progress. Specifically, at least for the first post, its progress on garbage patches and roaming gangs of stray dogs. What’s going on over there, you guys?
Written by Colossal Order CEO Mariina Hallikainen, today’s Word of the Week focuses on the game’s launch, which “was overshadowed by technical issues which caused disappointment, and rightfully so.”
Those issues—which were bad enough for the devs to warn players about before release—manifest in the form of “random FPS dips, slowdowns and hitches, along with visual issues like irritating shadow-flickering on certain buildings,” per Chris Livingston’s Cities: Skylines 2 review here on PCG, and that’s with a beefy 40-series RTX graphics card.
Hallikainen says the devs are working on it, and says they’re investigating “how we can speed up the patching process so we don’t have players waiting for these important fixes longer than necessary.” The CEO continues to say that, although the first patch for the game included some tweaks to LOD levels, the team is still working on it and that “finding optimal LOD levels is a balancing act between visual fidelity and performance,” and that more fixes would come soon, “including the characters and their teeth!”
So it sounds like there’s still some way to go before Cities: Skylines 2 plays like it ought to have done on release, and that work has to be done in addition to the usual fixes and tweaks to the actual gameplay. This is, if you ask me, the most tantalising part of the whole post. Not only is Colossal Order working on fixes for UI bugs and the economy, but it’s investigating a bug that’s causing citizens to “[abandon] their dogs resulting in a huge dog pack just stranded in the city.”
I’m no famous game designer, but it strikes me that the true fix for that issue is to lean into it. Let me turn my city into some kind of post-apocalyptic wasteland ruled by roving packs of feral dogs, like Denver in Fallout.
Alas, no one listens to my excellent ideas about these things. Still, Colossal Order is clearly very keen to reassure players that CS2 will, one day, be in a state fit for playing, which certainly raises the question as to why it couldn’t be delayed before release. The answer is, most likely, some dull financial thing to do with Paradox stockholders, which is a shame for the devs who worked on the game and the players who bought it.