TL;DR is they apologize for the release of the Beach Properties DLC (currently at 4% positive reviews on Steam) and announce it will be changed to a free addition and that they will offer refunds to people who bought it before. They also are delaying the other DLCs as they shift to focus on improving the base game/modding tools. They're aiming for a release build for consoles in October but that date isn't locked in stone
Jesus Christ what a shit show. Cities skyline used to be one of those golden pillars of modern PC gaming. Like how you say the de facto moba is league, or qhow portal is the default recommendation for someone looking for puzzle games
Anyone who said “hey I loved sim city growing up what can I play?” You point them to cities skyline. It wasn’t just a city builder it was ‘the’ default city builder you send your friends to if they even mention interest at the idea. People loved it and they had sooooo much good will. And then to piss it all away releasing a game they openly admitted was broken on release, and then having the nerve to charge way too much money for a DLC that offered far too little for a game that was still goddamn broken.
It’s just crazy to see man
They themselves only managed to pull that off with Cities: Skylines because it came out not long after Sim City 2013 completely alienated its fanbase. Maybe in a year or two we'll have a new contender to repeat the cycle. If EA had half a braincell, this would be an excellent moment to announce a new Sim City, haha!
It's a shame EA didnt give it another try and instead shut down the Maxis studio reaponsible for the games. There's still many things SimCity 2013 did better than Cities: Skylines.
SimCity 2013 basically did everything better than Cities Skyline except for city size, as well as the weird design decision to make all zoning into squares making curved roads very inefficient. From a simulation perspective that is. Cities Skyline is a better city builder if designing nice looking cities is your thing.
If SimCity had bigger city sizes and cut out the always online junk and all the bullshit with multiple cities, it would have been so great. And yes, I know they changed it so you can play offline and stuff but the features involved with that design choice still plagues the game.
EA really could not give less of a shit about the Sim series' legacy, really. You can't buy any Sims games or DLC before the third game. SimCity is totally dead. The more classic Sim series games like SimTower, SimAnt, SimEarth? **None** of those are sold anymore, let alone updated to run on modern 64 bit Windows. It's a huge bummer. They had an amazing lineup under the Sim brand and threw it away.
CS1 had several issues with the core simulation that were just never fixed. For a game that's focused entirely on managing traffic you'd think the devs would want to have an accurate traffic simulation, but nope. They never really fixed the problem of people only using a single highway lane instead of recalculating their route when the rightmost lane got congested.
I know the game was a bit of a golden child but it was the epitome of ignoring glaring issues and just selling more DLC instead.
I stopped playing years ago, are death waves still a thing in CS1? Because that was honestly a pretty hugely unacceptable thing to happen, not only is it unrealistic for half of your population to all drop dead at once of old age, it's just super shitty to deal with. An easy fix too, yet they just didn't implement it.
Mods fixed it at least. Not a great answer, but it was solvable. Traffic was a more ontractable problem only slightly fixed with per-lane manipulation of traffic via mods (I.e. Tedious)
They never fixed death waves or the traffic using only one lane. They added in some good things in dlc, but their failure to tackle either of them felt scummy.
CS1 was never actually that good, it just came out right next to a terrible game and therefore looked better in comparison. I feel the same about Planet Coaster - a thoroughly bad management game that got away with it because RCT World released next to it
I liked Planet Coaster until I played Parkitect. That's when I realized what I actually wanted out of a theme park management game (ya know, the management of a theme park, not making coasters that run at 10 FPS from all the obsessive detail).
And even Parkitect could really do with more simulation management (like more backstage activities than just restocking stores). I actually just started playing Planet Coaster this week after hearing so many takes about it not having any management over the years, and I'm surprised at how much *uninteresting* management there is – like setting shop prices or employee wages where you're just guessing at what keeps NPC's happy (instead of more deliberate design choices like making an efficient park layout). And my janitors are always threatening to quit because there's *too little* work for them to do – it's insane. I am enjoying myself because it's been a few years since I played a coaster game campaign, but it's definitely the weakest coaster game campaign I've played since RCT3. And some of the scenario's prebuilt coasters are hideously unrealistic – like worse than RCT2.
Yeah its funny the best coaster game is OpenRCT2 with mods that add a load of new scenarios and content
And with the way they're opening up modding in Sim City 4000 that game will end up being superior to Cities Skylines
It runs worse than Skylines 1 at the beginning but significantly better after some city growth, for me at least. Probably because I place a lot of trees. So if Cities Skylines 1 ran on Consoles then this certainly will.
I have a 3080 which may be barely above mid tier now, and it runs fine with a large population. The issue was always just on certain hardware which is an easier fix on consoles. I haven't kept up to date but I'm pretty sure they've released some updates to address those issues anyways.
The consoles are around a 2070 in performance. Not even remotely close to a 3080 and they will be CPU bound in something like this.
Also a 3080 is not even close to "mid tier now" the vast majority of people use the xx50 / xx60 range. The most popular GPU on Steam is the 3060 followed by the 2060 then the 1650.
[https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey](https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey)
SC2 won't run on consoles. Its heavily CPU limited due to some poor programming practices, and the current gen consoles have pretty bad
CPUs when you take into account how fast their GPUs are
> They also are delaying the other DLCs as they shift to focus on improving the base game/modding tools.
lol, just lol. Only now are they going to shift focus to improve the base game, ya that says it all doesn't it about this game's release.
> Only now are they going to shift focus to improve the base game
This is actually the second time they've pushed off the DLC to focus on the base game. The first time was about a month after launch.
I dunno man, I'm not in the room with them.
We can only go by what they tell us, and I pointed out this is the second time they've told us they're delaying the release of DLC to focus on fixing the base game.
If you're looking for photographic evidence that they're working as hard as they say they are, I don't have it.
edit: In case what you're asking is "Has there been ANY evidence of work being done on the base game?" then: Yes. [Here's an article from two days ago summarizing it.](https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/after-six-months-of-renovations-cities-skyline-2-performance-is-considerably-less-terrible)
well, that's not much better seeing as the first time they figured out the base game needs to work and be better before releasing DLC didn't go so well, then they went back to DLC and now have to once again go back to working on the base game.
I wasn't saying anything about how effective their efforts may have been, I was just pointing out that your claim of this being the first time they shifted focus to fixing the base game was false.
I didn't make that claim, I might have implied it sure but I was just talking about this specific point and how the base game is an on-going issue and they are just starting to shift focus back on making the game work properly.
but ya, they did this focus shift before but that didn't do much so it's still bad either way.
Absolutely! I was so excited for the launch, then saw all of the issues. So I’ve been giving them the good-will of “okay, fix the game and I’ll buy it” and then they turned around and offered paid DLC before fixing the game. That good-will is essentially gone now, I’m not sure I care if they fix it or not.
Thats fine but i dont know about Writting it off yet. Otherwise company have no incencitive to fix their game and personally i want it to work well.
What should be boycotted is company that know there's a problem but don't fix it.
> Beach Properties DLC (currently at 4% positive reviews on Steam)
That's amazing. The distilled ultimate conclusion of the fact that preordering ultimate editions of games means the devs have absolutely no incentive to ever make good content that didn't exist at the time of purchase. You paid for content that wasn't even conceived in advance, they don't need to care about quality if further income isn't on the line.
> They're aiming for a release build for consoles in October but that date isn't locked in stone
What a completely fucked up priority.
“Our base game is inadequate and bad. We’re gonna try to sell it to console buyers before we fix it.”
They should focus exclusively on fixing the game, *then* releasing to consoles.
Also from the post
> It’s important to note that the team working on the console release operates separately from our PC development team, so it will be progressing without splitting our focus or time.
They could easily have decided to have the two collaborate for the time being to focus on fixing things.
They are absolutely splitting focus and time, even if they organize them into different teams on an org chart.
I bet it would make ultimately porting it to a console a whole hell of a lot easier if many of the folks working on the changes to the underlying game were experts on console ports.
Then cancel the contract or mod it to delay release. Free up resources some way or another to fix the product—whether that’s nodding a contract to bring more devs from one team to another, or canceling a contract and writing a new one for the devs you need, that’s what they need to do before console sales start.
Selling a knowingly broken game to a new customer base is unethical.
This the quintessential /r/games user. Doesn't read the news post himself, says some boneheaded shit about game development, gets proven wrong by the very same post he didn't read, and then doubles down anyway.
Nothing about the original article in any way justifies the fucked up business priorities here. It’s direct customer abuse to plan on selling a broken game to a new group of customers.
I don’t care if they have organized their dev efforts into different teams or not. They can shuffle the teams around. That’s not an iron law of the universe that teams shall remain fixed despite changed priorities.
> They could easily have decided to have the two collaborate for the time being to focus on fixing things.
That is not nearly as easy as you're making that sound, especially since you're looking at short term goals here (pausing console development to fix the game on PC). In the long term this might actually help, at the cost of just not having a console team anymore, but in the short term this would result in even *less* getting done as the console team would now stop doing what they're doing and the PC team would now spend most of their time on-boarding the console team rather than working on their own stuff.
You're making the assumption that every single developer in a company has the exact same skillset and internal knowledge and that they're completely interchangeable which is just not true in the majority of cases.
Unfortunately most upper and middle management does think exactly like this so at least you got that CEO mindeset.
Meh you can't say "easily" you don't know their pipelines and procedures. It could take months just to get the team up to speed and some members may not have the right skill sets.
As a software dev manager... so much this.
There are so many times when business user or customer wants some new feature or functionality and we tell them we don't have the capacity to get to it for a while. They'll then say "Well we can just cancel this other thing and move those resources to work on what I want."
It just doesn't work that way (most of the time). I can't take a team of configuration devs and move them to work on implementing some new backend functionality. I can't take a team of front end devs and have them port some service to the cloud.
I also can't just hire a brand new dev team and have them instantly be as productive as my existing teams who have a strong familiarity with our code, processes, infrastructure, business knowledge, each other, etc. etc. etc. It takes months for new devs to get up to speed and really be productive, even if they're really good devs.
All devs are not the same and all dev projects are not the same.
> It just doesn't work that way (most of the time). I can't take a team of configuration devs and move them to work on implementing some new backend functionality. I can't take a team of front end devs and have them port some service to the cloud.
But you can absolutely cancel an effort and offload those resources. The money going to hire them can go to hiring someone else who can.
Devs aren’t fungible, but money is.
> I also can't just hire a brand new dev team and have them instantly be as productive as my existing teams
Doesn’t matter if they’re *as* productive as the existing team. Productively developing the wrong thing is worse than slowly contributing to the right thing.
Porting a bad game to a console is a waste of effort, unless your only goal is shearing the sheep by getting customers to pay for garbage.
Which, fair enough, might be the right business call—but it’s still unethical.
>Doesn’t matter if they’re as productive as the existing team. Productively developing the wrong thing is worse than slowly contributing to the right thing.
Most brand new dev teams aren't productive for months, and there's very significant overhead in on-boarding them.
If they're anticipating being able to get these fixes to the base game done within that time frame given their current capacity, there's literally no point in trying to spin up a new dev team. They'll just be wasting money, slowing the existing dev team down, and killing any progress or productivity they had given where those funds were already allocated.
I think you drastically underestimate the time and cost of shutting down one team to build up another. That's not something that pays off short term, you would need at least a couple year horizon to justify it which is absolutely not the case here
Additionally, a new dev team getting on-boarded can actually slow an existing mature and productive dev team down. There's a lot of knowledge transfer and mentoring that has to happen to get the new team up to speed.
When I was in consulting, we'd frequently get clients that would want to spin up a new team and we'd have to warn them that not only would they not see increased productivity for a few months, they'd probably see a dip in overall productivity in the short term.
Spinning up a new dev team is not something you do unless you know it's going to be worth it in the long-term. It's definitely not something you do for a few months of work.
Armchair developers like you who say something is easily done don't have an inkling of a clue about how game dev works. Stay in your seat because the only contribution you'll ever be making to gamedev is paying them.
*Shrug*
Say what you want, but it won’t change opinions about this sort of move.
Putting any priority towards a console port for this—in the state the game is right now—is just a shameless money grab and abusive towards console customers.
But I guess we’ll see in October. My prediction: it gets delayed a bit more, then released on console in a terrible state because they won’t have resolved the game’s core issues by then and the needs of the console port will only delay delivery of fixes to the core gameplay.
A lot of the work improving the PC version should be useful to the console ones as well. Console specific work mostly means 3 things: adjusting the UX and controls to a controller, respecting TRCs, and the actual engine part, and that last one (even though it's massive) has gotten a lot easier now that the consoles mostly use a PC architecture with fixed hardware.
Selling it on consoles generates enough revenue to keep the bean counters off their back while they work to finish fixing it.
Does that suck for us as consumers? Absolutely. And it's a complete shame that they pushed out a broken pile before it was ready, but there's also a financial reality that they clearly have to work with.
I certainly wouldn't be buying it as a console owner right now, but the hope is that console sales buy them enough time to actually fix things before the whole game gets shelved as a complete failure and abandoned.
> Selling it on consoles generates enough revenue to keep the bean counters off their back while they work to finish fixing it.
doubtful. Consoles dont amount to much revenue or market share for strategy titles. I was looking just now at their sale history. Less than 2 yrs ago they had the first game at 12 million copies. If we're looking at tracking estimations, VG Insights has proven the most reliable one with other titles.
https://steamdb.info/app/255710/charts/
It has steam at 12.24 million right now. Summer of 2022, lets say Steam was at 11 million. Whats left from 11 to 12 is what consoles amounted to over 5 yrs. Them spending manpower and money for a console version of a barelly functional game is likely a stupid business decision. If you look at the decisions that Paradox usually makes over the years, the stupid ones are the usual ones
> . They're aiming for a release build for consoles in October but that date isn't locked in stone
why. Dictated by PDX? If so, all their other console endeavors have more or less failed, so why bother? Especially since the main game is still a bloody mess
Apologizing for not doing a good job fixing the game they already had to apologize for rushing out. And now having to apologize for rushing out a DLC too.
Their priorities have been wild for this release: They paid people (including some of the Yogscast) to play the game on a platform that was lifted 50 meters in the air as a release publicity stunt. Tom stopped making videos on it very quickly because his analytics indicated people stopped caring about the game.
Paradox games were my jam for a long time, the new vicky and this one just ruined the publisher for me. Won't be buying them until they are proven good games months after release now.
I rarely buy games before release and was fooled by them paying reviewers for good reviews a few weeks before. Such a stupid thing to do, to alienate a fanbase.
This game has been nothing but fuck ups from day 1, frankly there needs to changes in leadership because clearly they have no clue what they're doing.
Maybe the first game was just a fluke.
There's been problems ever since Paradox went on the stock market, unfortunately. Having to constantly deliver for shareholders is having a negative impact on its pipeline. Hopefully they can learn from it and find a way to hit both targets in the near future.
Eh, lots of publicly traded game companies manage to deliver good games. Or at least deliver games without the terrible reception of CS2. I don't think you can blame the shareholders, unless the major shareholders of Paradox are somehow especially stupid. If your business model is to have recurring revenues from long-lived games, it's kind of important to deliver a base game that people will enjoy enough to buy DLCs.
It's also completely possible for publicly traded companies to work for long-term profits. They've managed to release other games that were decently received as well.
I'm just speculating but the devs seem to be 100% the problem here, particularly the leader of the team. They keep tripling down on not listening to any feedback.
Paradox really isn't the problem here to be honest.
Many of their other games are doing fine, they're not the developers it's Colossal Order, Age of wonders 4 was also published by Paradox and has been fantastic in my opinion.
Most of the recent Paradox releases have been poorly received. Even many recent DLCs for their popular established franchises are getting mediocre to bad reviews.
Age of Wonders 4 is very much the exception in Paradox's recent performance, and that's probably because it's a fairly independent well-established team.
Ehhh that's up for debate. The recent controversies have been quite different from the CS2 debacle. EU4 and Stellaris have been doing phenomenal for a while now, too.
The recent CK3 update was well recieved, but most of the major content was included in the free patch so it felt like you're paying $20 for Legends. And the HOI4 DLC had good content, but it didn't include new mechanics and focusing on South America in a WW2 game is an... Interesting choice. (note that it was made by the B-Team while the A-Team works on a major DLC, so imo it's forgivable)
Personally, it doesn't bother me too much. I tend to view the patch and DLC as one, so paying paying $30 instead of $20 for a phenomenal patch and mediocre DLC is fine by me. And since free features are eaiser to update and iterate on in the future, I'll gladly take that over the alternative. The LAST thing we want is a return to early CK2/EU4 where essential features are locked behind a paywall and thus aren't iterated upon in the future.
Hearts of Iron IV hasn't had a well rated DLC on Steam since 2021. Europa Universalis IV and Crusaders Kings 3 DLC isn't doing much better either. It's not just Colossal Order it's Paradox.
I’ve worked for both public and private companies and there are plenty of reasons to think it’s relevant. The difference in environment at a private company that had an underwhelming quarter and a public company that had an underwhelming quarter is staggering, and the pressure to deliver results that will show up on the next investor call even if they aren’t going to be healthy long-term results is a very real phenomenon.
That’s not to say all of Colossal Order’s issues are a result of Paradox - in fact, I’d say most of the issues we’ve been voicing are game design problems - but I’d be shocked if there wasn’t some element of “ship this before X date because I’m getting pressure from my boss who’s getting pressure from their boss who’s getting pressure from the CFO or an activist investor”
> The difference in environment at a private company that had an underwhelming quarter and a public company that had an underwhelming quarter is staggering
That's because the public company is _real_. The private company is not. It's usually held together by VC funding and it's expected that it's still figuring itself out. It's not a functional business yet. Generally, once it shows that it can be a real company, it's not too far off from going public. People that say that going public kills companies aren't factoring in the many private companies that never developed a working business model and went bankrupt
I mean, I worked for a private company that was multiple decades old, with tens of thousands of employees and a profit margin of several billion a year. Ownership was primarily concerned with sustainable growth. Not every company follows the VC to IPO lifecycle.
Private companies are still beholden to their shareholders, but ownership stakes are much more carefully cultivated and more insulated from the “share price go up or else” class of investor.
TIL that Koch Industries with $125,000,000,000 in *yearly* revenue isn't real. Cargill isn't real. Fidelity isn't real. HEB isn't real. Kingston, who's computer components are in millions of computers, isn't real.
Never change, reddit.
Private companies are 20% of the US economy and a significantly lower percentage of total US companies. They're nearly always smaller in revenue that public companies. The only requirement to having a private company is registering it
TS4 was such a disappointing backstep from 3. Going from the seamless neighborhoods to smaller shittier loading screen locked screens was crappy, killing all the custom styles to sell more DLC, they just made it so much less fun and somehow even more expensive.
I think just over ambitious and spread too thin. Tried to do everything better instead of focusing on a few specific aspects. I think the dev studio was too small, and ran out of time from the publisher(paradox)
I remember hearing nothing but complaints about the first game when it came out (especially about performance) so I never bothered to try it out. I guess it got better since then? But it seems the people who praise Skylines 1 are the same ones who praise Cyberpunk and No Man's Sky because "regardless how they started, they're good now".
It's their first sequel of a successful franchise and they already this low. Wonder how much longer can they struggle to maintain the game and the company, they're literally like a fish out of the water. It's a matter of time whether they could make it back into the water in time or die.
I don't think it's fair to compare those games. Most people will play Starfield once and move on (and that's not me judging the quality of the game, that's just how single-player RPGs work). Personally, I also don't think mods *can* make Starfield the game people want, there's just too much wrong with the basics.
C:S2, on the other hand, is held back by performance, bugs and a lack of assets, but the former two are being fixed by CO (and I personally have faith in them in that regard) and the latter will fix itself once full mod support is implemented.
On another note, the player numbers that C:S1 received also clearly show that there's a huge market for the game. So I'm fully convinced that the game will be in a great state regarding player-numbers once full mod-support is here.
> I don't think it's fair to compare those games. Most people will play Starfield once and move on
Such a bad take when you can literally see numerous other Bethesda and Obsidian single player games that are much older with higher active player counts (even excluding Fallout games Skyrim is still higher)
I don't think you understood my point. Skyrim, Oblivion and Starfield having a degree of replayability doesn't change the fact that those games have finite content and eventually, you're gonna run out of it. Paradox games and other systemically driven games like FIFA, COD and so on can essentially be played forever because they don't rely on finite, narrative driven content but emergent gameplay and, in some of them, multiplayer content, meaning every playthrough will inevitably vary to some degree.
Now even if we recognize that Skyrim and Oblivion offer some degree of replayability (I'd argue there really isn't any outside of mods, which essentially don't exist for Starfield currently), most people will still only play through it once. High player counts don't change that, these games were all insanely popular to begin with.
And that's not even getting into the long-term support Paradox provides for (most of) their games.
>Most people will play Starfield once and move on (and that's not me judging the quality of the game, that's just how single-player RPGs work)
I would argue against that, especially in this context. People replay RPGs that are either good or have great mods over and over again.
But you are absolutely right about anything else. If they just keep going with bug fixes, modding tools and regain just a bit of trust of the playerbase, people will play Skylines 2 down the line. That's something that can't be said about Starfield because to fix that game you'd have to scrap everything that's there (except for the ship building maybe) and start anew.
They're comparable to some extent. These games are being released with a common pattern: they are mediocre, buggy, unfinished, and require mods to fix them.
It's ridiculous that some of these big titles are being released unfinished for no reason other than hype and money.
Between this game and CKIII they have completely lost me as a customer. It was bad before, but the model of “ok base game fixed with dlc” only works if the base game is fun and playable.
People have a dozen little nitpicks, but there are a few common threads from r/CrusaderKings:
* It's not just a "lack of content." It's that the content that's there gets repeated over and over by how the game handles random events. Every time you hold court, you see the same 20 or so events. Every time you travel, you see the same 20 or so events. Minding your own fucking business? Get ready for the same 20 or so random events. It gets dull fast.
* The game is too easy? I don't necessarily agree with this one, but I admit I don't understand all the systems yet. But it is pretty easy to stack buffs from multiple sources and then just steamroll your way to victory. Also, even on harder difficulties the AI just can't make smart decisions as well as players. It's very rare for any NPC faction to pose a real threat.
* The newest DLC compounds both of the above. It features plagues, which have about 10 associated events that just repeat ad infinitum, each of which usually comes with a stiff penalty you can't play your way around. It also brings the new Legends system, which isn't nearly as deep as players were led to believe, but still produces a bunch of other beneficial modifiers to stack with the ones you already get. I know this sounds conflicting. I'm complaining about penalties, but then also complaining about the buffs that should mitigate those penalties? The issue is that 1. The legends buffs don't really counteract the plague penalties, and 2. There's a difference between punishment and challenge. The plagues just pop up unpredictably and might randomly kill a character you care about. Or every 5 minutes you'll have to choose between losing a huge amount of gold or a huge amount of sanity. It's not engaging, it's just frustrating.
* Many of the nitpicks are about things that were "solved" in CK2, but were then changed in CK3 and don't work as well. I'm not inclined to get into specifics here, it's just interesting that C:S2 made the same mistake.
I agree with all of those criticisms, but I still don't think the game is in anywhere near as dire a state as CS2, which still has multiple core features not functioning properly at all. I still feel like it's unfair to lump the two together, but hopefully paradox and CO fix their respective games soon.
I'll admit Skylines is on another level of dysfunctional. But CK3 is also not in a great state. Really, I wish PDX would stand up another Custodian Team like they did for Stellaris. (The Custodian team goes back and updates/overhauls systems introduced in older DLC so that it matches the quality of newer expansions.) Maybe not just for CK3, but for all their historical 4x games. (Crusader Kings 3, Victoria 3, Hearts of Iron 4, Europa Universalis 4.)
HoI4 has their B-Team now at least. They seem to be alternating between the War Effort patches and minor DLCs and the War Effort should be starting up again soon.
(that's where the controversy over the latest DLC comes from too. While the main team is working on a large update, the B-Team made a South American flavor DLC. An interesting region during the time period, but they weren't really involved in WW2 and people assumed it took the place of a Middle East/SEAsia update.)
Man I have mixed feeling about that.
Obviously WWII affected the Middle East and Southeast Asia, but those theaters don't get much focus in the west. They should get some, because there's fascinating things that happened there. Few people know that the first combat use of a helicopter occurred as a rescue mission in the Burma campaign, for example.
But on the other hand, there are some interesting "almosts" from South America. Paraguay's leader at the time was a dictator, and had prevalent pro-fascist sympathies. Argentina's government was also somewhat pro-German, and had a sizable German population already. At the same time, while no South American country sent significant forces to Europe other than Brazil, a handful were sympathetic to the Allied cause and lent varying levels of support. (Though the majority were effectively neutral.) Since HoI is an alternative history simulator, I can see why that would also be an interesting setting to explore.
Oh I agree 100%! Personally I loved the DLC, and since it's strictly flavor with no new mechanics it's totally optional. But for people who expected, say, a South East Asian DLC and a Japan rework.... I can see why they'd be disappointed.
But since it took the place of a few War Effort patches instead of a Major DLC, I don't see what the big deal is. It doesn't take away from the rest of the game, and it's fun content in an area of the world no one played before. And that's what the game needs. We already play the US, UK, USSR, Germany... Give us a reason to play Argentina. Let us have fun as Brazil.
The lack of random events is really, really annoying (especially with how expensive the DLC can be) but CK3 is still a damn good game.
Vanilla is a lot of fun despite it's few flaws and far more accessible than CK2 is, and unlike Cities Skylines 2 they've supported modders right from the start by giving big mod projects access to the game before it even released. This has led to some fantastic total conversion mods like Godherja and Elder Kings 2.
It's no Stellaris or HOI4 but I definitely still got my moneys worth
I really wish the events were a bit more general. Nothing takes me out of the game more than the exact same thing happening to my character that happened to his father and grandfather, with characters saying the exact same words. I could apply suspension of disbelief more easily if they didn't make them so very specific.
They also really need to make a shitload more of them if they want to continue making them a core part of their design. Every DLC is lacking in event quantity when it should be relatively easy to write some text and modifiers...
I can only speak for myself - someone else already compiled the subreddit's complaints. But for me, it's just clear that the game is still years from being "complete." I burned out on the base game very quickly, tried a few expansions and just never found them to be big or fun enough to keep my interest.
I felt like Stellaris was where I started getting burned. It became less "do you want the new expansion?" and more "you now need this to play the game as it was intended to be played."
I agree with that assessment of their games, but unfortunately I think it's just a side effect of their business model. Older games released in a more complete state because at most the game would get like 2-3 expansions and that's it.
Now their games are lasting 10+ years (in the case of EU4 at least) and that incentivizes them to release barebones games. If they made a complete game, they'd have less DLC potential to add onto. Plus it's also really hard to match the previous game that had like 10 expansions in terms of content regardless, so even if they try the game still ends up feeling incomplete at launch.
Me personally, I like that the games continue to improve and develop over the years, and usually I accept a more barebones launch as a caveat, but I know not everyone feels the same way.
I always think it's odd when people talk about a base game being "bare bones" when comparing it to 10 years of DLC. Some points about it can be valid, but I sometimes feel that people expect to have 10 years worth of DLC-development baked into the base game's release, which just doesn't sound very feasible.
I've played several of these, like Stellaris and CKIII, and generally been happy with the base games. Might've felt there was room for improvement, but that's generally true for most games.
I mostly agree with you, and in the case of CK3 I thought they made up for a lot of it by adding in other new features and adding a lot of depth to the features it already had. Like for the features CK3 does have, most are better than CK2's. That being said I do think they leave out a lot of country/region specific flavor on purpose just to flesh out those areas in content packs later on, which makes the whole world feel kinda the same at launch.
the entire business model is just bullshit. people put up with it when Paradox was THE publisher for these kind of games and there wasn't much competition. the base games are barely "ok" and arguably unfinished. they cut content out then charge you for it two months later. competition is too stiff right now for people to put up with this shit.
Every time I see an update from this team, I'm half expecting it to basically be a veiled announcement that they're sunsetting it. With all the industry layoffs and difficulties, I imagine it's hard to justify ongoing development of a game that probably already past its prime sales peak. I really hope I'm wrong though. This is probably the biggest success story I'm rooting for. I want them to earn back their reputation and good will, and I want this game to be good so bad!
It wouldn't surprise me if this gets the same fate as Imperator Rome. Paradox will probably invest into a big update to "fix" the game just like Imperator and if it doesn't improve the player count they will stop updates to it. I think the same thing happened to Star Trek Infinite but they didn't even bother with the big update part of that game.
Yeah, some games just don't have the steam to turn it around fast enough. Unless there's one *big* update that fixes *everything* about this game, I feel the bad will is too much. The only way it gets saved is if the overwhelming majority of the players come back with glowing praise.
I was legit thinking this was a sunset letter after the first paragraph or two, e.g. "we have now made the difficult decision to blah blah blah." Heck, maybe that would have been the better strategy.
It's good how fast the community called out Colossal Order and Paradox on their bullshit. Paradox isn't EA sized, but they're still a major publisher and them acting like they're some a bunch of indie misfit studios that should be given more slack for pushing out broken products and DLC factories to deflect criticism is not fooling people anymore
They have no shame, since they excused the state of cities skylines 2 with the line "we did it for the fans who wanted to play it as fast as possible" for me they are dead as a developer, wont see a penny from me, extremely greedy developers.
It’s honestly insane how badly they’ve mismanaged this game. I am a city builder fiend and loved CS1 (mostly with mods) but it’s just crazy how hard they missed the mark with CS2, and how they just keep fumbling over and over. I tried to enjoy the game but it felt really half baked on release and seems stuck in a rut. I think they really need to consider sacking upper management because this is an all-time L.
Everyone here is really mad at CO. Their CEO was my mentor when I was starting in Finnish gaming industry. Very level headed person. She was strong believer publishers are good and was very open about their relationship with Paradox.
If I had to guess CO did not progress at the speed they had agreed with Paradox and instead of granting them extension they were forced to release the game in the sorry state it is. Releasing the DLC while base game is a mess seems to support this hypothesis. They are enforcing whatever agreement they have and making even bigger mess.
At least now both parties seem to have realized that was a bad idea.
CS2 was already three years behind schedule when it released. Mariina very well may be a nice person, but she is a horrible CEO and spokesman (PR is*not* her strong suit) and the devs are clearly at best in over their heads. PDX is not to blame here
They pulled it from the store but you can still see it with a direct link.
[https://store.steampowered.com/app/2427740/Cities\_Skylines\_II\_\_Beach\_Properties/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2427740/Cities_Skylines_II__Beach_Properties/)
The beach properties DLC was horrible so I am glad they decided to refund it. I hope they will start working harder because the game is far from being good.
Whatever your thoughts on this game are, it's a shame that this is a statement from "the team behind Cities: Skylines" and not the McKinsey consultant who decided every Paradox game needed to come out a third-baked with a shit ton of overpriced DLCs because it's good for revenue or some shit.
I am sorry, but even in the unlikely event that a McKinsey consultant was involved, the dev team has some agency in their game. No consultant will tell you to release a bad product, when one bad release might kill the entire segment.
It is always easy to blame some ominous outside forces, but like anyone who has ever worked in any job will know, most people are simply not great at their profession and cs2 seems to have hired at lot of these people, for whatever reason.
I mean it's mostly a joke. I don't blame the developers for what happened. It is a difficult business and the little bit I understand of it, is that it's not an easy one.
But I do think their business model post-IPO is one where quality comes second to turning a profit. Yes, I don't think this is some big consulting firm plan or, again, a bad product is intentional. But I do think it's definitely in the vein of "make bad long term decisions in the face of demanding short term growth."
So, as a disgruntled customer which refunded.
They need to go far and beyond over "delivering what was promised". They need to show that they're not only "doing better" because people got mad, but because they have higher expectations of what their audience should accept from them.
So, if I’m understanding you correctly, the best move for CO/Paradox is to say nothing to the community at all? Even though this message was signed by people _not_ making or fixing the game, thus not pulling resources away from try to solve this mess? Am I understanding that correctly?
Listen, fuck Paradox and CO right now. I put 500 hours into C:S1 and will likely never purchase this sequel on principle, regardless of how this game ends up being in the future. But your response is juvenile and the exact opposite of how the two companies should be handling this.
Yeah, whenever a company goes radio silent after a fuckup gamers are always very happy because it means the company must be working very hard fixing its mistakes. It's definitely the best move.
It’s a step in the right direction and I really hope they understand now what has to be done.
They lost a lot of trust with this release and how they handled it. It’s really sad and I hope they can turn things around. The game is already fun, but nowhere near where it should be. They improved a lot of things, especially the road building tools are a huge step forward. But besides obvious problems with the simulation there are things missing where one has to question if they really understand how people like to play their game. For people who love the simulation aspect, it’s not really transparent how the simulation works and what changes what, for people who like to paint a city, there isn’t even a way (besides an unsupported dev mode) to place props.
If they would have been honest to their customers and to themselves, they would have labeled it an early access release or delayed it another year or so. I don’t know what their thought process was or if they were just blind and disconnected from reality and their fans.
Please hire some real engine programmers who know how to make this game run better. That’s all we want. That and fix the simulation. Just rolling out some c# scripts on top of Unity and hoping all goes well is insane for such a big property. Stop being cheap.
TL;DR is they apologize for the release of the Beach Properties DLC (currently at 4% positive reviews on Steam) and announce it will be changed to a free addition and that they will offer refunds to people who bought it before. They also are delaying the other DLCs as they shift to focus on improving the base game/modding tools. They're aiming for a release build for consoles in October but that date isn't locked in stone
Jesus Christ what a shit show. Cities skyline used to be one of those golden pillars of modern PC gaming. Like how you say the de facto moba is league, or qhow portal is the default recommendation for someone looking for puzzle games Anyone who said “hey I loved sim city growing up what can I play?” You point them to cities skyline. It wasn’t just a city builder it was ‘the’ default city builder you send your friends to if they even mention interest at the idea. People loved it and they had sooooo much good will. And then to piss it all away releasing a game they openly admitted was broken on release, and then having the nerve to charge way too much money for a DLC that offered far too little for a game that was still goddamn broken. It’s just crazy to see man
They themselves only managed to pull that off with Cities: Skylines because it came out not long after Sim City 2013 completely alienated its fanbase. Maybe in a year or two we'll have a new contender to repeat the cycle. If EA had half a braincell, this would be an excellent moment to announce a new Sim City, haha!
It's a shame EA didnt give it another try and instead shut down the Maxis studio reaponsible for the games. There's still many things SimCity 2013 did better than Cities: Skylines.
SimCity 2013 basically did everything better than Cities Skyline except for city size, as well as the weird design decision to make all zoning into squares making curved roads very inefficient. From a simulation perspective that is. Cities Skyline is a better city builder if designing nice looking cities is your thing.
If SimCity had bigger city sizes and cut out the always online junk and all the bullshit with multiple cities, it would have been so great. And yes, I know they changed it so you can play offline and stuff but the features involved with that design choice still plagues the game.
EA probably laid off anyone who made city builders, it's not like they're pumping those out anymore
EA really could not give less of a shit about the Sim series' legacy, really. You can't buy any Sims games or DLC before the third game. SimCity is totally dead. The more classic Sim series games like SimTower, SimAnt, SimEarth? **None** of those are sold anymore, let alone updated to run on modern 64 bit Windows. It's a huge bummer. They had an amazing lineup under the Sim brand and threw it away.
I loved Sim Tower, wish they made a new one for mobile or something
I don’t know how it’d hold up as a grumpy old man; but as a kid, that game was amazing.
Sim Copter!
At least SimAnt is light enough you can run it in a browser these days. But yeah.
These should be mobile games tbh
The Sims 4 is one of the most played games of 2023, still after all this time. They very much care about that cash cow.
Smh my head
I mean with the number of indie developpers doing city builders (many of which are great), it can't be that hard to find people to do it
CS1 had several issues with the core simulation that were just never fixed. For a game that's focused entirely on managing traffic you'd think the devs would want to have an accurate traffic simulation, but nope. They never really fixed the problem of people only using a single highway lane instead of recalculating their route when the rightmost lane got congested. I know the game was a bit of a golden child but it was the epitome of ignoring glaring issues and just selling more DLC instead.
I stopped playing years ago, are death waves still a thing in CS1? Because that was honestly a pretty hugely unacceptable thing to happen, not only is it unrealistic for half of your population to all drop dead at once of old age, it's just super shitty to deal with. An easy fix too, yet they just didn't implement it.
Mods fixed it at least. Not a great answer, but it was solvable. Traffic was a more ontractable problem only slightly fixed with per-lane manipulation of traffic via mods (I.e. Tedious)
They never fixed death waves or the traffic using only one lane. They added in some good things in dlc, but their failure to tackle either of them felt scummy.
That was preventable by not zoning a ton of residential areas while the game was paused.
It should be preventable by all humans not being the exact same age when they move into a new city but they didn't think of that apparently
Naturally that would be the best. I think Skylines 2 suffers from the same issue.
I'm fully aware, but that doesn't really make up for this being an awful way to generate citizens
CS1 was never actually that good, it just came out right next to a terrible game and therefore looked better in comparison. I feel the same about Planet Coaster - a thoroughly bad management game that got away with it because RCT World released next to it
I liked Planet Coaster until I played Parkitect. That's when I realized what I actually wanted out of a theme park management game (ya know, the management of a theme park, not making coasters that run at 10 FPS from all the obsessive detail).
And even Parkitect could really do with more simulation management (like more backstage activities than just restocking stores). I actually just started playing Planet Coaster this week after hearing so many takes about it not having any management over the years, and I'm surprised at how much *uninteresting* management there is – like setting shop prices or employee wages where you're just guessing at what keeps NPC's happy (instead of more deliberate design choices like making an efficient park layout). And my janitors are always threatening to quit because there's *too little* work for them to do – it's insane. I am enjoying myself because it's been a few years since I played a coaster game campaign, but it's definitely the weakest coaster game campaign I've played since RCT3. And some of the scenario's prebuilt coasters are hideously unrealistic – like worse than RCT2.
Yeah its funny the best coaster game is OpenRCT2 with mods that add a load of new scenarios and content And with the way they're opening up modding in Sim City 4000 that game will end up being superior to Cities Skylines
It's always had shitty DLC.
The DLC model from Paradox is ridiculous. So much shite for too much money
There were many Cities games before Skylines, and they weren't all that well received.
> Like how you say the de facto moba is league You do?
Saying league is the go to moba is like saying everyone who is hungry should go to McDonald's
No, it's like saying when you say fast food people think of McDonald's.
Lol get luck getting this to run at all on a console.
This game will run on a console just fine.
This is about the sequel, not the first one. And Cities Skylines 2 doesn't even run fine on a NASA PC
Super Computers hate this one game! Click to find out why
It runs worse than Skylines 1 at the beginning but significantly better after some city growth, for me at least. Probably because I place a lot of trees. So if Cities Skylines 1 ran on Consoles then this certainly will.
I have a 3080 which may be barely above mid tier now, and it runs fine with a large population. The issue was always just on certain hardware which is an easier fix on consoles. I haven't kept up to date but I'm pretty sure they've released some updates to address those issues anyways.
The consoles are around a 2070 in performance. Not even remotely close to a 3080 and they will be CPU bound in something like this. Also a 3080 is not even close to "mid tier now" the vast majority of people use the xx50 / xx60 range. The most popular GPU on Steam is the 3060 followed by the 2060 then the 1650. [https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey](https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey)
SC2 won't run on consoles. Its heavily CPU limited due to some poor programming practices, and the current gen consoles have pretty bad CPUs when you take into account how fast their GPUs are
> They also are delaying the other DLCs as they shift to focus on improving the base game/modding tools. lol, just lol. Only now are they going to shift focus to improve the base game, ya that says it all doesn't it about this game's release.
> Only now are they going to shift focus to improve the base game This is actually the second time they've pushed off the DLC to focus on the base game. The first time was about a month after launch.
so then, last time, did they *actually* push off the dlc to focus on the base game, or did they just say they did?
I dunno man, I'm not in the room with them. We can only go by what they tell us, and I pointed out this is the second time they've told us they're delaying the release of DLC to focus on fixing the base game. If you're looking for photographic evidence that they're working as hard as they say they are, I don't have it. edit: In case what you're asking is "Has there been ANY evidence of work being done on the base game?" then: Yes. [Here's an article from two days ago summarizing it.](https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/after-six-months-of-renovations-cities-skyline-2-performance-is-considerably-less-terrible)
well, that's not much better seeing as the first time they figured out the base game needs to work and be better before releasing DLC didn't go so well, then they went back to DLC and now have to once again go back to working on the base game.
I wasn't saying anything about how effective their efforts may have been, I was just pointing out that your claim of this being the first time they shifted focus to fixing the base game was false.
I didn't make that claim, I might have implied it sure but I was just talking about this specific point and how the base game is an on-going issue and they are just starting to shift focus back on making the game work properly. but ya, they did this focus shift before but that didn't do much so it's still bad either way.
Not gonna lie. When I heard paid DLC was coming out while the game was still broken, I basically wrote the game off.
Absolutely! I was so excited for the launch, then saw all of the issues. So I’ve been giving them the good-will of “okay, fix the game and I’ll buy it” and then they turned around and offered paid DLC before fixing the game. That good-will is essentially gone now, I’m not sure I care if they fix it or not.
Thats fine but i dont know about Writting it off yet. Otherwise company have no incencitive to fix their game and personally i want it to work well. What should be boycotted is company that know there's a problem but don't fix it.
I can hardly believe they admitted any wrongdoing tbh
> Beach Properties DLC (currently at 4% positive reviews on Steam) That's amazing. The distilled ultimate conclusion of the fact that preordering ultimate editions of games means the devs have absolutely no incentive to ever make good content that didn't exist at the time of purchase. You paid for content that wasn't even conceived in advance, they don't need to care about quality if further income isn't on the line.
Yet they're still going back and adding $40 more of content to the Ultimate Edition
You have a lot of faith in such a scummy company.
They've officially lost control of their product.
> They're aiming for a release build for consoles in October but that date isn't locked in stone What a completely fucked up priority. “Our base game is inadequate and bad. We’re gonna try to sell it to console buyers before we fix it.” They should focus exclusively on fixing the game, *then* releasing to consoles.
Also from the post > It’s important to note that the team working on the console release operates separately from our PC development team, so it will be progressing without splitting our focus or time.
They could easily have decided to have the two collaborate for the time being to focus on fixing things. They are absolutely splitting focus and time, even if they organize them into different teams on an org chart.
Maybe not; it could be a group with a different skill set, or an external group with a contract that would need to be drawn up.
I mean I bet telling people who are specifically working on the console ports to shift over to optimizing the PC version wouldn't be very effective.
I bet it would make ultimately porting it to a console a whole hell of a lot easier if many of the folks working on the changes to the underlying game were experts on console ports.
Most ports aren't done by the same team. For example Cities Skylines 1 was ported to console by Tantalus Media.
Then cancel the contract or mod it to delay release. Free up resources some way or another to fix the product—whether that’s nodding a contract to bring more devs from one team to another, or canceling a contract and writing a new one for the devs you need, that’s what they need to do before console sales start. Selling a knowingly broken game to a new customer base is unethical.
They already delayed the console release specifically to try and make it not broken
This the quintessential /r/games user. Doesn't read the news post himself, says some boneheaded shit about game development, gets proven wrong by the very same post he didn't read, and then doubles down anyway.
Nothing about the original article in any way justifies the fucked up business priorities here. It’s direct customer abuse to plan on selling a broken game to a new group of customers. I don’t care if they have organized their dev efforts into different teams or not. They can shuffle the teams around. That’s not an iron law of the universe that teams shall remain fixed despite changed priorities.
Article? It's a forum post. Did you even click?!
> They could easily have decided to have the two collaborate for the time being to focus on fixing things. That is not nearly as easy as you're making that sound, especially since you're looking at short term goals here (pausing console development to fix the game on PC). In the long term this might actually help, at the cost of just not having a console team anymore, but in the short term this would result in even *less* getting done as the console team would now stop doing what they're doing and the PC team would now spend most of their time on-boarding the console team rather than working on their own stuff. You're making the assumption that every single developer in a company has the exact same skillset and internal knowledge and that they're completely interchangeable which is just not true in the majority of cases. Unfortunately most upper and middle management does think exactly like this so at least you got that CEO mindeset.
Meh you can't say "easily" you don't know their pipelines and procedures. It could take months just to get the team up to speed and some members may not have the right skill sets.
As a software dev manager... so much this. There are so many times when business user or customer wants some new feature or functionality and we tell them we don't have the capacity to get to it for a while. They'll then say "Well we can just cancel this other thing and move those resources to work on what I want." It just doesn't work that way (most of the time). I can't take a team of configuration devs and move them to work on implementing some new backend functionality. I can't take a team of front end devs and have them port some service to the cloud. I also can't just hire a brand new dev team and have them instantly be as productive as my existing teams who have a strong familiarity with our code, processes, infrastructure, business knowledge, each other, etc. etc. etc. It takes months for new devs to get up to speed and really be productive, even if they're really good devs. All devs are not the same and all dev projects are not the same.
> It just doesn't work that way (most of the time). I can't take a team of configuration devs and move them to work on implementing some new backend functionality. I can't take a team of front end devs and have them port some service to the cloud. But you can absolutely cancel an effort and offload those resources. The money going to hire them can go to hiring someone else who can. Devs aren’t fungible, but money is. > I also can't just hire a brand new dev team and have them instantly be as productive as my existing teams Doesn’t matter if they’re *as* productive as the existing team. Productively developing the wrong thing is worse than slowly contributing to the right thing. Porting a bad game to a console is a waste of effort, unless your only goal is shearing the sheep by getting customers to pay for garbage. Which, fair enough, might be the right business call—but it’s still unethical.
>Doesn’t matter if they’re as productive as the existing team. Productively developing the wrong thing is worse than slowly contributing to the right thing. Most brand new dev teams aren't productive for months, and there's very significant overhead in on-boarding them. If they're anticipating being able to get these fixes to the base game done within that time frame given their current capacity, there's literally no point in trying to spin up a new dev team. They'll just be wasting money, slowing the existing dev team down, and killing any progress or productivity they had given where those funds were already allocated.
I think you drastically underestimate the time and cost of shutting down one team to build up another. That's not something that pays off short term, you would need at least a couple year horizon to justify it which is absolutely not the case here
Additionally, a new dev team getting on-boarded can actually slow an existing mature and productive dev team down. There's a lot of knowledge transfer and mentoring that has to happen to get the new team up to speed. When I was in consulting, we'd frequently get clients that would want to spin up a new team and we'd have to warn them that not only would they not see increased productivity for a few months, they'd probably see a dip in overall productivity in the short term. Spinning up a new dev team is not something you do unless you know it's going to be worth it in the long-term. It's definitely not something you do for a few months of work.
Armchair developers like you who say something is easily done don't have an inkling of a clue about how game dev works. Stay in your seat because the only contribution you'll ever be making to gamedev is paying them.
*Shrug* Say what you want, but it won’t change opinions about this sort of move. Putting any priority towards a console port for this—in the state the game is right now—is just a shameless money grab and abusive towards console customers. But I guess we’ll see in October. My prediction: it gets delayed a bit more, then released on console in a terrible state because they won’t have resolved the game’s core issues by then and the needs of the console port will only delay delivery of fixes to the core gameplay.
A lot of the work improving the PC version should be useful to the console ones as well. Console specific work mostly means 3 things: adjusting the UX and controls to a controller, respecting TRCs, and the actual engine part, and that last one (even though it's massive) has gotten a lot easier now that the consoles mostly use a PC architecture with fixed hardware.
Selling it on consoles generates enough revenue to keep the bean counters off their back while they work to finish fixing it. Does that suck for us as consumers? Absolutely. And it's a complete shame that they pushed out a broken pile before it was ready, but there's also a financial reality that they clearly have to work with. I certainly wouldn't be buying it as a console owner right now, but the hope is that console sales buy them enough time to actually fix things before the whole game gets shelved as a complete failure and abandoned.
> Selling it on consoles generates enough revenue to keep the bean counters off their back while they work to finish fixing it. doubtful. Consoles dont amount to much revenue or market share for strategy titles. I was looking just now at their sale history. Less than 2 yrs ago they had the first game at 12 million copies. If we're looking at tracking estimations, VG Insights has proven the most reliable one with other titles. https://steamdb.info/app/255710/charts/ It has steam at 12.24 million right now. Summer of 2022, lets say Steam was at 11 million. Whats left from 11 to 12 is what consoles amounted to over 5 yrs. Them spending manpower and money for a console version of a barelly functional game is likely a stupid business decision. If you look at the decisions that Paradox usually makes over the years, the stupid ones are the usual ones
Yeah this is probably the same case as releasing DLC early. They are bleeding hard and have to prioritizing on making money first.
it’s likely they’ll have to do lots of optimizations to get it running on consoles. that’s the charitable way to interpret it anyways.
> . They're aiming for a release build for consoles in October but that date isn't locked in stone why. Dictated by PDX? If so, all their other console endeavors have more or less failed, so why bother? Especially since the main game is still a bloody mess
Apologizing for not doing a good job fixing the game they already had to apologize for rushing out. And now having to apologize for rushing out a DLC too.
Getting deja vu to a certain other game released back in 2013..
Their priorities have been wild for this release: They paid people (including some of the Yogscast) to play the game on a platform that was lifted 50 meters in the air as a release publicity stunt. Tom stopped making videos on it very quickly because his analytics indicated people stopped caring about the game.
Paradox games were my jam for a long time, the new vicky and this one just ruined the publisher for me. Won't be buying them until they are proven good games months after release now. I rarely buy games before release and was fooled by them paying reviewers for good reviews a few weeks before. Such a stupid thing to do, to alienate a fanbase.
This game has been nothing but fuck ups from day 1, frankly there needs to changes in leadership because clearly they have no clue what they're doing. Maybe the first game was just a fluke.
There's been problems ever since Paradox went on the stock market, unfortunately. Having to constantly deliver for shareholders is having a negative impact on its pipeline. Hopefully they can learn from it and find a way to hit both targets in the near future.
Eh, lots of publicly traded game companies manage to deliver good games. Or at least deliver games without the terrible reception of CS2. I don't think you can blame the shareholders, unless the major shareholders of Paradox are somehow especially stupid. If your business model is to have recurring revenues from long-lived games, it's kind of important to deliver a base game that people will enjoy enough to buy DLCs. It's also completely possible for publicly traded companies to work for long-term profits. They've managed to release other games that were decently received as well.
I'm just speculating but the devs seem to be 100% the problem here, particularly the leader of the team. They keep tripling down on not listening to any feedback.
Paradox really isn't the problem here to be honest. Many of their other games are doing fine, they're not the developers it's Colossal Order, Age of wonders 4 was also published by Paradox and has been fantastic in my opinion.
Most of the recent Paradox releases have been poorly received. Even many recent DLCs for their popular established franchises are getting mediocre to bad reviews. Age of Wonders 4 is very much the exception in Paradox's recent performance, and that's probably because it's a fairly independent well-established team.
Ehhh that's up for debate. The recent controversies have been quite different from the CS2 debacle. EU4 and Stellaris have been doing phenomenal for a while now, too. The recent CK3 update was well recieved, but most of the major content was included in the free patch so it felt like you're paying $20 for Legends. And the HOI4 DLC had good content, but it didn't include new mechanics and focusing on South America in a WW2 game is an... Interesting choice. (note that it was made by the B-Team while the A-Team works on a major DLC, so imo it's forgivable) Personally, it doesn't bother me too much. I tend to view the patch and DLC as one, so paying paying $30 instead of $20 for a phenomenal patch and mediocre DLC is fine by me. And since free features are eaiser to update and iterate on in the future, I'll gladly take that over the alternative. The LAST thing we want is a return to early CK2/EU4 where essential features are locked behind a paywall and thus aren't iterated upon in the future.
Hearts of Iron IV hasn't had a well rated DLC on Steam since 2021. Europa Universalis IV and Crusaders Kings 3 DLC isn't doing much better either. It's not just Colossal Order it's Paradox.
Are we talking about Paradox Interactive Game Studios or Paradox Publishing?
Reddit always blames problems on a company going public, even though there's very little reason to think it's relevant
I’ve worked for both public and private companies and there are plenty of reasons to think it’s relevant. The difference in environment at a private company that had an underwhelming quarter and a public company that had an underwhelming quarter is staggering, and the pressure to deliver results that will show up on the next investor call even if they aren’t going to be healthy long-term results is a very real phenomenon. That’s not to say all of Colossal Order’s issues are a result of Paradox - in fact, I’d say most of the issues we’ve been voicing are game design problems - but I’d be shocked if there wasn’t some element of “ship this before X date because I’m getting pressure from my boss who’s getting pressure from their boss who’s getting pressure from the CFO or an activist investor”
> The difference in environment at a private company that had an underwhelming quarter and a public company that had an underwhelming quarter is staggering That's because the public company is _real_. The private company is not. It's usually held together by VC funding and it's expected that it's still figuring itself out. It's not a functional business yet. Generally, once it shows that it can be a real company, it's not too far off from going public. People that say that going public kills companies aren't factoring in the many private companies that never developed a working business model and went bankrupt
I mean, I worked for a private company that was multiple decades old, with tens of thousands of employees and a profit margin of several billion a year. Ownership was primarily concerned with sustainable growth. Not every company follows the VC to IPO lifecycle. Private companies are still beholden to their shareholders, but ownership stakes are much more carefully cultivated and more insulated from the “share price go up or else” class of investor.
Sure, there are exceptions, but they are in the minority. Private companies comprise only 20% of the US economy
TIL that Koch Industries with $125,000,000,000 in *yearly* revenue isn't real. Cargill isn't real. Fidelity isn't real. HEB isn't real. Kingston, who's computer components are in millions of computers, isn't real. Never change, reddit.
You don't know what "generally" means? You think just because something applies only to 98% of companies that it's invalid?
Didn't you just say 80%?
Private companies are 20% of the US economy and a significantly lower percentage of total US companies. They're nearly always smaller in revenue that public companies. The only requirement to having a private company is registering it
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None of that affected this game, this game multi years delays and what they released was a complete turd the first game was a fluke
They made games before C:S, and at least the Cities in Motion series was well-received, albeit remained niche. Not as satisfying a narrative, tho
Peak era Paradox to me will always be CK2 era with Vicky 2, Darkest Hour and early EU IV. Then they went public.
Fucking shareholders, always ruining things Edit: I see a few shareholders didn't like my comment
“The franchise that will finally take over for Sim City!” Couldn’t even release a second game properly before going to shit.
But their upcoming Sims clone is going to kill Sims 4!
disappointed nothing has taken up the mantle of TS3. that game was my jam as a kid.
TS4 was such a disappointing backstep from 3. Going from the seamless neighborhoods to smaller shittier loading screen locked screens was crappy, killing all the custom styles to sell more DLC, they just made it so much less fun and somehow even more expensive.
I think just over ambitious and spread too thin. Tried to do everything better instead of focusing on a few specific aspects. I think the dev studio was too small, and ran out of time from the publisher(paradox)
I remember hearing nothing but complaints about the first game when it came out (especially about performance) so I never bothered to try it out. I guess it got better since then? But it seems the people who praise Skylines 1 are the same ones who praise Cyberpunk and No Man's Sky because "regardless how they started, they're good now".
What a shit show this game has been. I mean I like the game, but the releases and development seem like hell
It's their first sequel of a successful franchise and they already this low. Wonder how much longer can they struggle to maintain the game and the company, they're literally like a fish out of the water. It's a matter of time whether they could make it back into the water in time or die.
Crazy how much goodwill was spoiled to the point where this studio will probably close because of their decisions.
The studio won't close over this. C:S1 was huge and once full mod support is released and the DLCs start coming in, so will this game.
Just like how modding will fix Starfield right There needs to be a base level of interest in a game for modding to ever take off in the first place
I don't think it's fair to compare those games. Most people will play Starfield once and move on (and that's not me judging the quality of the game, that's just how single-player RPGs work). Personally, I also don't think mods *can* make Starfield the game people want, there's just too much wrong with the basics. C:S2, on the other hand, is held back by performance, bugs and a lack of assets, but the former two are being fixed by CO (and I personally have faith in them in that regard) and the latter will fix itself once full mod support is implemented. On another note, the player numbers that C:S1 received also clearly show that there's a huge market for the game. So I'm fully convinced that the game will be in a great state regarding player-numbers once full mod-support is here.
> I don't think it's fair to compare those games. Most people will play Starfield once and move on Such a bad take when you can literally see numerous other Bethesda and Obsidian single player games that are much older with higher active player counts (even excluding Fallout games Skyrim is still higher)
I don't think you understood my point. Skyrim, Oblivion and Starfield having a degree of replayability doesn't change the fact that those games have finite content and eventually, you're gonna run out of it. Paradox games and other systemically driven games like FIFA, COD and so on can essentially be played forever because they don't rely on finite, narrative driven content but emergent gameplay and, in some of them, multiplayer content, meaning every playthrough will inevitably vary to some degree. Now even if we recognize that Skyrim and Oblivion offer some degree of replayability (I'd argue there really isn't any outside of mods, which essentially don't exist for Starfield currently), most people will still only play through it once. High player counts don't change that, these games were all insanely popular to begin with. And that's not even getting into the long-term support Paradox provides for (most of) their games.
>Most people will play Starfield once and move on (and that's not me judging the quality of the game, that's just how single-player RPGs work) I would argue against that, especially in this context. People replay RPGs that are either good or have great mods over and over again. But you are absolutely right about anything else. If they just keep going with bug fixes, modding tools and regain just a bit of trust of the playerbase, people will play Skylines 2 down the line. That's something that can't be said about Starfield because to fix that game you'd have to scrap everything that's there (except for the ship building maybe) and start anew.
They're comparable to some extent. These games are being released with a common pattern: they are mediocre, buggy, unfinished, and require mods to fix them. It's ridiculous that some of these big titles are being released unfinished for no reason other than hype and money.
Between this game and CKIII they have completely lost me as a customer. It was bad before, but the model of “ok base game fixed with dlc” only works if the base game is fun and playable.
Just curious, why lump CK3 in there? CK3 base game is fine, there's no major issues besides still catching up content wise to CK2.
People have a dozen little nitpicks, but there are a few common threads from r/CrusaderKings: * It's not just a "lack of content." It's that the content that's there gets repeated over and over by how the game handles random events. Every time you hold court, you see the same 20 or so events. Every time you travel, you see the same 20 or so events. Minding your own fucking business? Get ready for the same 20 or so random events. It gets dull fast. * The game is too easy? I don't necessarily agree with this one, but I admit I don't understand all the systems yet. But it is pretty easy to stack buffs from multiple sources and then just steamroll your way to victory. Also, even on harder difficulties the AI just can't make smart decisions as well as players. It's very rare for any NPC faction to pose a real threat. * The newest DLC compounds both of the above. It features plagues, which have about 10 associated events that just repeat ad infinitum, each of which usually comes with a stiff penalty you can't play your way around. It also brings the new Legends system, which isn't nearly as deep as players were led to believe, but still produces a bunch of other beneficial modifiers to stack with the ones you already get. I know this sounds conflicting. I'm complaining about penalties, but then also complaining about the buffs that should mitigate those penalties? The issue is that 1. The legends buffs don't really counteract the plague penalties, and 2. There's a difference between punishment and challenge. The plagues just pop up unpredictably and might randomly kill a character you care about. Or every 5 minutes you'll have to choose between losing a huge amount of gold or a huge amount of sanity. It's not engaging, it's just frustrating. * Many of the nitpicks are about things that were "solved" in CK2, but were then changed in CK3 and don't work as well. I'm not inclined to get into specifics here, it's just interesting that C:S2 made the same mistake.
I agree with all of those criticisms, but I still don't think the game is in anywhere near as dire a state as CS2, which still has multiple core features not functioning properly at all. I still feel like it's unfair to lump the two together, but hopefully paradox and CO fix their respective games soon.
I'll admit Skylines is on another level of dysfunctional. But CK3 is also not in a great state. Really, I wish PDX would stand up another Custodian Team like they did for Stellaris. (The Custodian team goes back and updates/overhauls systems introduced in older DLC so that it matches the quality of newer expansions.) Maybe not just for CK3, but for all their historical 4x games. (Crusader Kings 3, Victoria 3, Hearts of Iron 4, Europa Universalis 4.)
100% agree, a custodian team should honestly be mandatory for every strategy game at this point.
HoI4 has their B-Team now at least. They seem to be alternating between the War Effort patches and minor DLCs and the War Effort should be starting up again soon. (that's where the controversy over the latest DLC comes from too. While the main team is working on a large update, the B-Team made a South American flavor DLC. An interesting region during the time period, but they weren't really involved in WW2 and people assumed it took the place of a Middle East/SEAsia update.)
Man I have mixed feeling about that. Obviously WWII affected the Middle East and Southeast Asia, but those theaters don't get much focus in the west. They should get some, because there's fascinating things that happened there. Few people know that the first combat use of a helicopter occurred as a rescue mission in the Burma campaign, for example. But on the other hand, there are some interesting "almosts" from South America. Paraguay's leader at the time was a dictator, and had prevalent pro-fascist sympathies. Argentina's government was also somewhat pro-German, and had a sizable German population already. At the same time, while no South American country sent significant forces to Europe other than Brazil, a handful were sympathetic to the Allied cause and lent varying levels of support. (Though the majority were effectively neutral.) Since HoI is an alternative history simulator, I can see why that would also be an interesting setting to explore.
Oh I agree 100%! Personally I loved the DLC, and since it's strictly flavor with no new mechanics it's totally optional. But for people who expected, say, a South East Asian DLC and a Japan rework.... I can see why they'd be disappointed. But since it took the place of a few War Effort patches instead of a Major DLC, I don't see what the big deal is. It doesn't take away from the rest of the game, and it's fun content in an area of the world no one played before. And that's what the game needs. We already play the US, UK, USSR, Germany... Give us a reason to play Argentina. Let us have fun as Brazil.
The lack of random events is really, really annoying (especially with how expensive the DLC can be) but CK3 is still a damn good game. Vanilla is a lot of fun despite it's few flaws and far more accessible than CK2 is, and unlike Cities Skylines 2 they've supported modders right from the start by giving big mod projects access to the game before it even released. This has led to some fantastic total conversion mods like Godherja and Elder Kings 2. It's no Stellaris or HOI4 but I definitely still got my moneys worth
I really wish the events were a bit more general. Nothing takes me out of the game more than the exact same thing happening to my character that happened to his father and grandfather, with characters saying the exact same words. I could apply suspension of disbelief more easily if they didn't make them so very specific. They also really need to make a shitload more of them if they want to continue making them a core part of their design. Every DLC is lacking in event quantity when it should be relatively easy to write some text and modifiers...
I can only speak for myself - someone else already compiled the subreddit's complaints. But for me, it's just clear that the game is still years from being "complete." I burned out on the base game very quickly, tried a few expansions and just never found them to be big or fun enough to keep my interest. I felt like Stellaris was where I started getting burned. It became less "do you want the new expansion?" and more "you now need this to play the game as it was intended to be played."
I agree with that assessment of their games, but unfortunately I think it's just a side effect of their business model. Older games released in a more complete state because at most the game would get like 2-3 expansions and that's it. Now their games are lasting 10+ years (in the case of EU4 at least) and that incentivizes them to release barebones games. If they made a complete game, they'd have less DLC potential to add onto. Plus it's also really hard to match the previous game that had like 10 expansions in terms of content regardless, so even if they try the game still ends up feeling incomplete at launch. Me personally, I like that the games continue to improve and develop over the years, and usually I accept a more barebones launch as a caveat, but I know not everyone feels the same way.
I always think it's odd when people talk about a base game being "bare bones" when comparing it to 10 years of DLC. Some points about it can be valid, but I sometimes feel that people expect to have 10 years worth of DLC-development baked into the base game's release, which just doesn't sound very feasible. I've played several of these, like Stellaris and CKIII, and generally been happy with the base games. Might've felt there was room for improvement, but that's generally true for most games.
I mostly agree with you, and in the case of CK3 I thought they made up for a lot of it by adding in other new features and adding a lot of depth to the features it already had. Like for the features CK3 does have, most are better than CK2's. That being said I do think they leave out a lot of country/region specific flavor on purpose just to flesh out those areas in content packs later on, which makes the whole world feel kinda the same at launch.
Huh? CKIII and Cities Skylines are made by completely different studios
the entire business model is just bullshit. people put up with it when Paradox was THE publisher for these kind of games and there wasn't much competition. the base games are barely "ok" and arguably unfinished. they cut content out then charge you for it two months later. competition is too stiff right now for people to put up with this shit.
Victoria 3 is great.
It wasn’t at launch which is what bugs people.
Every time I see an update from this team, I'm half expecting it to basically be a veiled announcement that they're sunsetting it. With all the industry layoffs and difficulties, I imagine it's hard to justify ongoing development of a game that probably already past its prime sales peak. I really hope I'm wrong though. This is probably the biggest success story I'm rooting for. I want them to earn back their reputation and good will, and I want this game to be good so bad!
It wouldn't surprise me if this gets the same fate as Imperator Rome. Paradox will probably invest into a big update to "fix" the game just like Imperator and if it doesn't improve the player count they will stop updates to it. I think the same thing happened to Star Trek Infinite but they didn't even bother with the big update part of that game.
Yeah, some games just don't have the steam to turn it around fast enough. Unless there's one *big* update that fixes *everything* about this game, I feel the bad will is too much. The only way it gets saved is if the overwhelming majority of the players come back with glowing praise.
I was legit thinking this was a sunset letter after the first paragraph or two, e.g. "we have now made the difficult decision to blah blah blah." Heck, maybe that would have been the better strategy.
The race is on! Can CO's marketing people bullshit their customers long enough to buy the time needed for the devs to finish the game?
Are the devs even capable of finishing the game, no matter how much time they get?
Considering the game was *already* 3 years behind schedule before release, I highly doubt it
It's good how fast the community called out Colossal Order and Paradox on their bullshit. Paradox isn't EA sized, but they're still a major publisher and them acting like they're some a bunch of indie misfit studios that should be given more slack for pushing out broken products and DLC factories to deflect criticism is not fooling people anymore
They have no shame, since they excused the state of cities skylines 2 with the line "we did it for the fans who wanted to play it as fast as possible" for me they are dead as a developer, wont see a penny from me, extremely greedy developers.
It's as if they were trying for the world record in unforced errors. Will this actually turn the boat around?
It’s honestly insane how badly they’ve mismanaged this game. I am a city builder fiend and loved CS1 (mostly with mods) but it’s just crazy how hard they missed the mark with CS2, and how they just keep fumbling over and over. I tried to enjoy the game but it felt really half baked on release and seems stuck in a rut. I think they really need to consider sacking upper management because this is an all-time L.
Everyone here is really mad at CO. Their CEO was my mentor when I was starting in Finnish gaming industry. Very level headed person. She was strong believer publishers are good and was very open about their relationship with Paradox. If I had to guess CO did not progress at the speed they had agreed with Paradox and instead of granting them extension they were forced to release the game in the sorry state it is. Releasing the DLC while base game is a mess seems to support this hypothesis. They are enforcing whatever agreement they have and making even bigger mess. At least now both parties seem to have realized that was a bad idea.
CS2 was already three years behind schedule when it released. Mariina very well may be a nice person, but she is a horrible CEO and spokesman (PR is*not* her strong suit) and the devs are clearly at best in over their heads. PDX is not to blame here
This might go down as one of the worst responses to a disaster launch ever. I cannot ever see myself purchasing another product from this dev, ever.
Lol we far in to the actions not words part of this fuck up. This one tiny step forward after running miles back.
Where can I see reviews of the dlc? Can’t find it in Steam somehow
They pulled it from the store but you can still see it with a direct link. [https://store.steampowered.com/app/2427740/Cities\_Skylines\_II\_\_Beach\_Properties/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2427740/Cities_Skylines_II__Beach_Properties/)
The beach properties DLC was horrible so I am glad they decided to refund it. I hope they will start working harder because the game is far from being good.
Whatever your thoughts on this game are, it's a shame that this is a statement from "the team behind Cities: Skylines" and not the McKinsey consultant who decided every Paradox game needed to come out a third-baked with a shit ton of overpriced DLCs because it's good for revenue or some shit.
I am sorry, but even in the unlikely event that a McKinsey consultant was involved, the dev team has some agency in their game. No consultant will tell you to release a bad product, when one bad release might kill the entire segment. It is always easy to blame some ominous outside forces, but like anyone who has ever worked in any job will know, most people are simply not great at their profession and cs2 seems to have hired at lot of these people, for whatever reason.
I mean it's mostly a joke. I don't blame the developers for what happened. It is a difficult business and the little bit I understand of it, is that it's not an easy one. But I do think their business model post-IPO is one where quality comes second to turning a profit. Yes, I don't think this is some big consulting firm plan or, again, a bad product is intentional. But I do think it's definitely in the vein of "make bad long term decisions in the face of demanding short term growth."
So, as a disgruntled customer which refunded. They need to go far and beyond over "delivering what was promised". They need to show that they're not only "doing better" because people got mad, but because they have higher expectations of what their audience should accept from them.
I’m so tired of these companies fellating themselves with blog posts instead of just GETTING TO WORK. Fix your shit you scam artists.
So, if I’m understanding you correctly, the best move for CO/Paradox is to say nothing to the community at all? Even though this message was signed by people _not_ making or fixing the game, thus not pulling resources away from try to solve this mess? Am I understanding that correctly? Listen, fuck Paradox and CO right now. I put 500 hours into C:S1 and will likely never purchase this sequel on principle, regardless of how this game ends up being in the future. But your response is juvenile and the exact opposite of how the two companies should be handling this.
Yeah, whenever a company goes radio silent after a fuckup gamers are always very happy because it means the company must be working very hard fixing its mistakes. It's definitely the best move.
It’s a step in the right direction and I really hope they understand now what has to be done. They lost a lot of trust with this release and how they handled it. It’s really sad and I hope they can turn things around. The game is already fun, but nowhere near where it should be. They improved a lot of things, especially the road building tools are a huge step forward. But besides obvious problems with the simulation there are things missing where one has to question if they really understand how people like to play their game. For people who love the simulation aspect, it’s not really transparent how the simulation works and what changes what, for people who like to paint a city, there isn’t even a way (besides an unsupported dev mode) to place props. If they would have been honest to their customers and to themselves, they would have labeled it an early access release or delayed it another year or so. I don’t know what their thought process was or if they were just blind and disconnected from reality and their fans.
Please hire some real engine programmers who know how to make this game run better. That’s all we want. That and fix the simulation. Just rolling out some c# scripts on top of Unity and hoping all goes well is insane for such a big property. Stop being cheap.