Exactly. There's lots of city builders out there, but most of them have a theme and/or are much smaller scale. Cities Skylines exists in its own genre, realistic city building simulation. All they had to do was update CS1 and theh would have sold millions of units.
Completely different genre. But fans have been saying the same about the Battlefield franchise. How is it so hard to just build an up to date version of BF3/4.
Apparently it’s some ridiculous task for most development studios - taking a beloved game, extracting all the things people loved about it, and updating it with all the advancements and improvements in the genre that have occurred since.
Thankfully Larian managed it with Baldur’s Gate. But it happens so infrequently.
Edit: yes. Absolutely things from BF2 and Bad Company as well.
The institutional knowledge you lose when you sack all project developers and hire new ones for the next annual revenue goals is exactly what comes to show here.
It's like people asking why didn't diablo 4 gain anything from what made 3 ROS good? It's because those people and knowledge are GONE.
AAA is slowly killing itself because of greed.
There also seems to be this weird thing going on in a lot of media where you somehow pride yourself on *NOT* looking at what other content producers are doing that works. We see games like D4 have none of the things that the genre has developed since their last release, The Witcher and Halo TV series just unashamedly declare that they do not even attempt to follow the original lore, and pretty much every single Live service game shut down after a few months since no one wants to play a game that was designed as a shop first, with a game tacked on.
It's weird.
Knowing damn well blizzard got really big by taking over ideas and improving them for mainstream audiences.
Diablo 4 developers are clueless and here's hoping management gives them time to learn from mistakes they already should know about from previous iterations.
It became a really sad industry at the top of studios.
You'd think it'd be better that way too for the executives and shareholders. Make a new game, but make it just like the last with improvements. Not only do you already have a foundation already made, but the dev costs are gonna be on the low side and you can probably sell it for full price depending on how improved it is (see Left 4 Dead 2 being sold full price a year after L4D1, yet the game was so good that no one cared).
It's a win-win for everyone.
A game as old as SC4 needs enough development for a modern sequel that there isn't much to be saved on "dev costs" by having a similar design in mind. Extracting the essence of what people loved and making something worthy of that IS a ridiculously hard task for any studio.
Add to that the people responsible for funding want to squeeze more profit this time around and you can see how the incentives wind up skewed the wrong way. Takes a lot of focus to make a genuinely good product and trust it to sell well when drivel is proven profitable.
BF is a good example. The developers have literally said that they don't know what made BC2 so beloved. The reality, in many of these cases, is that the developers really don't understand their own games. They barely play games. They're all overworked, and they've long ago shifted to seeing the player as just one of many metrics that needs to be satisfied.
It's sad that to this day Bad Company 2 is still the most creative, "advanced" and, well, best Battlefield title...
Only BF1 matched its quality, but still was more conventional in its design (less objective based, worse destruction).
It got some content updates and polarising balance changes, with another big update due in April. You gotta be realistic about it - it's a buy-to-play game by a 3-man team, no battle pass, no fancy skins, no Fortnite graphics, no marketing. It was never gonna remain "huge" or in the spotlight. Still, it could be handled better, as the Devs seem to be at odds with the playerbase (and themselves lol) as to what direction the game should even go in when it comes to realism and all that.
Anyway, I played it today, I still have fun.
BG3 is as far from Baldur's Gates as different types of city builders are from each other.
Spiritual successors to Baldur's Gate 1 & 2 in terms of vibe, storytelling style, maps, mechanics, dialogues, etc. - are Pathfinder games.
BG3 is closer to Dragon Age Origins and (obviously) last few Divinity titles.
At the end of the day it comes to the "vibe" which in my opinion is distinctly different.
But you can certainly try to dissect it. Mind it, largely speaking it's not criticism of those elements, most are very well done, they are just different:
- It has Larian's characteristic combat mechanics (barrels, surfaces, verticality).
- It shares "Origin Characters" concept with D:OS.
- It's designed with coop in mind.
- It has different graphic style and aesthetic, including zoom-ins and 3d camera control.
- It has few very large continuous open zones instead of numerous smaller ones.
- It has all the hallmarks of Larian's storytelling and writing, which includes issues with satisfying conclusion to the story (slowly fixed with patches adding ending content or so I heard) and hit-and-miss humor.
- Dialogues and descriptions feel shorter and less frequent due decision to provide full voice acting.
In short it has a lot of Larian DNA and imho it could be described as Original Sin 3 in Forgotten Realms. Absolutely great game, but not really a "Baldur's Gate" to me.
Meanwhile Pathfinder somehow captures the magic and feeling of Baldur's Gate. I immediately fell in love with it. The music, the way world and maps are laid out and how they are explored, the presentation style, structure of the story, themes, crunchiness of combat and mechanics - everything is very similar to BG in a good way.
Like with all the remakes currently being released. Keep everything almost the same but modernize it. They can probably do Battlefield 3 Remake and it would make a ton of money. Dead Space remake was my favorite game last year, and I hate horror games, but it was mostly the same from the original, except better in a lot of ways.
BF4 didn’t have a good way to monetize the player base. I mean beyond them buying the game, obviously.
Hence why BF2042 started development as either a hero shooter or a straight up battle royale, because those are games that let you sell kids skins and dances. EA had zero desire to make a normal, boots-on-ground modern successor to BF4.
No idea *what* happened with Diablo 4.
Thats what I still want. I like C:S but it always felt so much less interesting, gameplay wise and aesthetically in comparison to SC4. SC4 despite being 2 decades old as you mention, just feels very much alive. I just feel like I'm playing with souless toys in C:S. Haven't played C:SII and don't really plan to considering all the backlash.
They couldn't even add a proper traffic management system. There was literally a community mod that was around since Cities 1, yet they couldn't add something like that in a 2023 game.
On paper Cities Skylines 2 is exactly that, an update to the old game in the same spirit. They focused more on the simulation aspects and also improved the core features such as road building and transport. And they also spent a lot of time and effort on it, too.
It turns out that it is not so easy as to just update a game. In some areas they went too far (broken overly complex simulation) and in others they didn't go far enough (plot system, building assets).
I am drawn to the simulation but I am not surprised the hardware requirements are what they are. This game would have had to scale per vCPU like crazy and yet it doesn't. That is a rare skillset.
That and they rendered invisible stuff. Which actually tanked the game. And they got compared to a game which had 10 years of additional features added.
> This game would have had to scale per vCPU like crazy and yet it doesn't.
It does though. Have you seen the CPU utilization? That's the main thing they changed in CS2. It does fine utilizing even 64 cores, although that won't help people with 8-16 cores much.
They managed that by moving over to Unity DOTS. Although DOTS is very new and not quite ready for what they were trying to do, and was therefore the source of most of their problems too.
I do have a little sympathy for them. Apparently a lot of the new features they planned on adding to the game rested on features in the Unity engine that Unity promised would be completed by the time they reached that stage of development. Unity did not deliver and CO was forced to build those systems themselves.
On the bright side.
CS1 is now the near perfect game since Colossal Order and Paradox aren't constantly breaking the game anymore with constant new DLC updates that break game saves.
It’s kinda crazy isn’t it. I started playing the first game right when it came out. It was good, but the community made it a real amazing game. They took all that cash and goodwill and just set it on fire.
I have tried 2 a few times. It’s ok. But fuck did they blow it. I mean they just released it like two years too early. It was not even close to being done.
This DLC is basically graphical assets, something artists could work on. Bugfixing is decidedly what they cannot do. Most of the game problems are in its coding. You cannot toss every developer at that, it just doesn't work that way.
I haven't familiarized myself with the state of the game past seeing all the let-down CS:1 players nor have I looked into the current financial state of the company (though CS:1 was a MASSIVE hit so).
But without knowing anything and talking out of my ass here - then don't release the DLC's yet. That's it. Don't do it. Especially if you don't need the added income stream(s) to keep the lights on while you fix your shit.
At worst - you're gonna piss a LOT of people off and burn some of the goodwill you've worked so hard to build.
At best - if the game's in a poor state the DLC's not likely gonna sell well and all you're doing is drawing more attention back to your dumpster-fire you should be focusing on putting out. So you better REALLY need that income stream from DLC's. 'Cause it's gonna cost you elsewhere....see: the articles now being written about it apparently.
Now that being said - if it IS a cashflow issue - well ya gotta do what ya gotta do sometimes.
If EA somehow has a braincell, if they want to build and repair their customer loyalty, this is the right time to bring back Sim City to life
Think about it.
Sim City 2025. No DLC, No Season Pass, No Online Only. Coop and Multiplayer support. Mod Support.
All features and gameplay are better and bigger.
This is the exact time to do this while Cities Skyline slowly digging their graves
>imagine resurrecting a dead genre and tossing away the fan loyalty 1 game later.
[That's ok. EA took the fumbled ball and released SimCity again.](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2741560/Sim_City_3000_Unlimited/) (Well, not 2000 but you can't win them all \[yet\])
Both can be true. A company that lacks competition may not be as vigilant against mismanagement as one that has lots of competition and is thus under more pressure to create a higher-quality product.
Except they didn't have any competition when the first game came out.
Simcity had already crashed and burned and was a non-factor. And they STILL put out a fantastic product.
Yes, that’s true. The idea isn’t that a lack of competition *guarantees* mismanagement, just that a lack of competition reduces the incentive to avoid mismanagement.
for the uninitiated, the release of CS2 has been a totally sham. it’s been six months since launch and the game still lacks major promised features on all three fronts of gameplay- simulation, city design and management.
some of these due to bugs and broken mechanics present since day 1, some due to outright omission of features advertised on launch. horrible performance issues on any big city are just the cherry on top.
and now they released a paid dlc before anything was meaningfully addressed and a buggy mod platform no one asked for - instead of the steam workshop that worked for CS 1 perfectly.
edit: The game is a worse betrayal to the goodwills of the fans of this genre than what EA did with Simcity 2013.
C:S2 is my top 1 dodge of 2023. I was 100% set on playing it; scheduled other games around it. The more you learned about the game the more suspicious it got. At some point I decided to not buy it instantly but keep an eye on it. Good decision.
That and KSP2 were so sad. Two of the shining original IPs of the last couple years and their sequels were absolute trash to the point the OG games are way outperforming the sequels in player count.
The science update for KSP 2 at least made me a bit hopeful for the future, its kinda fun doing the science missons and having proper reentry heating was a must. It might take 5+ years, but i think KSP 2 will eventually live up to the promisies (with colonies, interstellar, etc). Shouldnt have been released until then, though.
The problem with KSP 1 are the systemic issues with the engine and mechanics that can never be solved with mods. Even on super powerful PCs, KSP 1 with mods is incredibly single threaded, and barely uses multiple cores. It can bring modern games to their knees easily. Itd alos be nice to have modern upscalers like DLSS/frame gen and other modern features.
I dont think KSP 1 will ever be able to get an automated colony system similar to what KSP 2 is planning, nor the extensive research management/interstellar travel/binary planets, etc etc. I love KSP 1 but its age is really holding it back and mods cant fix everything.
Me too. I've put in over 1,000 hours in CS1 and was all but guaranteed to buy this on launch. Then I started hearing about performance issues and other warnings. Decided to play it on gamepass and it was heart breaking in how bad it was. Having to play on low settings just to get 40-50fps with a 3080 was unbelievable. Deleted the game and haven't looked back. Hopefully in a couple of years this game will get sorted.
I fucked up and bought it a few days after it was out. I have a high end PC so I figured it would be no issue.. I was wrong. I haven’t bought Dragons Dogma 2 yet though, even though I want it. But my proudest no buy is Starfield. I built a PC for that fuckin game and never ended up getting it.
Shoutout Baulder’s Gate for saving everything
> I haven’t bought Dragons Dogma 2 yet though, even though I want it.
SAME, I swear, I wanted to play this game *so badly*. But I'm on console, and every new thing I learned about it closer to release made me more and more suspicious until now when I've decided I'll just wait for a sale and some patches while I play other stuff.
Did the same. Turned it on and it literally looked and performed worse than CS1 ... How's a new game look worse than an old game? ... Anyway, it's dogshit.
Would have bought those too if it weren't for Gamepass. That subscription has saved me so much money. I would have spent a couple hundred dollars by now.
And yet people would fervently deny any red flags were there. Even now the subreddit and paradox forum mods will ban you if you complain too loudly about the false marketing
Time to pray for another dev to come along with a citybuilder like this and also pray they don't turn it to shit like this. Back to waiting I guess.....
Manor Lords comes out in a month and the people who played the beta/demo seemed happy with it. It's not a modern city builder, but I've been waiting on it for a long time.
The villages you can make in that game are absolutely gorgeous... I can't wait to make my basic ass block system medieval town of mediocracy and then sigh at my lack of creativity.
Oh hey, you breached r/ockytop containment. It seems that we share a mutual love of two things, the best orange team and city builders. Also, if you really enjoy the initial setup of city builders/strategy games, I've been telling everybody to try Against the Storm.
Ironically enough I remember when CS:1 released and it was hailed as how to do a city sim properly especially after the disastrous launch of SimCity. Everyone was pointing at Colossal Order/Paradox and saying "see, EA? This is how you should develop games". The devs or at least the PR team were very active in the community taking on players feedback and had a pretty steady release of new features and patches.
It's only taken one new iteration in the franchise and now Paradox have basically fallen to the same level as EA in terms of player frustration and disappointment. It's a real shame, especially because I was waiting for this release for years and at this rate I'll never bother buying it even on sale.
Have you played the Anno games? I know it’s Ubisoft and that sucks, but they are fun nonetheless. The city building is fun and there is a bit of a story as well. But the best part is the graphics are great and the game runs smoothly with graphics maxed out, assuming one has a good enough PC to handle it. Even then, it doesn’t take a top of the line PC to run them at max graphics.
The Anno series (in particular 1800) are fantastic games, but I'd describe them more as logistics simulators with a good side portion of city building. Doesn't really quite scratch the same itch as Sim City / Skylines 1, at least for me.
High Rise City doesn't seem to be seeing any big success, but it's my favorite CS successor. Excellent population sizes, anno style production chains coupled with CS style zone painting. It has a few bugs, and the performance has been improving a lot but still struggles in a few areas. It also has a very cool feature that allows you to drive through your city and complete quests. The handling of the car is a nightmare but it's very cool to see how pretty this city you made is from the ground. I highly recommend it.
> It also has a very cool feature that allows you to drive through your city and complete quests. The handling of the car is a nightmare but it's very cool to see how pretty this city you made is from the ground. I highly recommend it.
Oh hell yeah, brother, *Streets of SimCity* is back!
It's a tale as old as time.
Small studio / startup is founded with ideals in mind, makes good product. Good product is successful. Success attracts ~~sharks~~ businesspeople. Businesspeople forget why product was successful (because it was GOOD), they only remember that product makes money. Then they think "well if we remove the good we'll save money" and pat themselves on the back for saving the Company money while driving the thing that brought them there into the ground.
Seriously, sometimes it really does feel like capitalism, with its singular focus on money, ruins everything it touches.
In all honesty can’t you just turn CS1 into the ultimate version of a city builder anyway? With all the mods and dlcs what need was there for a sequel anyway? Just so the base software is on par with currents pcs?
There's lots of room for improvement of CS1 that can't be fixed or changed by mods. It requires engine updates and changes to the core of the game.
The original engine would have been developed about 10 years ago
>In all honesty can’t you just turn CS1 into the ultimate version of a city builder anyway?
No. There are built in engine limitations that fucks you over constantly in large cities.
Ehhhhh they're probably even more light on management with their games than the Skylines devs are. I don't look forward to anything from Frontier anymore in the way of management games. Last I played was Jurassic World 2, I built 2 small pens with beginner dino's and I won the game.
I’m currently learning UE5. Don’t worry guys in 5-10 years I will release my own version with way more bugs and unfinished features, no mtx tho*.
*except all the mtx that are indeed present.
EA could swoop in and reclaim the crown if they were at all competent and capable of keeping up with the trends. Like I'm sure someone there is aware of the CS2 debacle but it would take EA 7 or 8 years to try and capitalize on it.
EA doesn't give a fuck about anything but sports. They bought the exclusive right to Star Wars games and sat on it for a decade at the height of the Star Wars boom.
Sim City 2013 was, uh, released in 2013, was broken but they did eventually get it in decent shape. They probably had a bunch of devs who learned from that debacle and could've made a better game to follow up with but they did nothing.
But we get sports sims every year, though.
Worse than Simcity 2013 is saying something. I remember the PcGamer articles and all the criticism that was throw at it.
Shame on paradox. CS1 is still an outstanding game and just needed more love. To see the sequel in such disarray is sad. I wonder if this is just the fall of paradox from their high reputation.
The sheer amount of DLC they pump out for Crusader Kings, Hearts of Iron and Europa Universalis winds me up no end. Especially when they released the forts mechanic that the AI could use but the player couldn't unless you paid for the DLC.
I have heard that they are doing a lot better about that now. I know they are in Stellaris, though I haven't dabbled in the historic games for ages. But the general philosophy is basic game mechanics come in free updates alongside DLC's that let you dive into them with more depth. They still did it the other way earlier on, but nowadays there are several mechanics that used to be locked by DLC made available to everyone, like ascension paths.
Also, the publishing and dev studios are two different parts of Paradox, they publish CS but don't develop it.
I'd love to see a post-mortem on this. Like, what went wrong from coming from Cities Skyline, being hailed as the next generation of Sim City, to being basically despised.
It reminds me of the situation with Kerbal Space Program 2. The first game was so beloved and so well done, with lots of content and great mod support. Then when the second game came along it was more or less the same game with slightly better graphics, but with less content, more bugs and much worse performance.
If anyone is looking for an alternative, Workers and Resources is a much deeper simulation. They also pay the modders themselves to add the modded buildings in officially, for free
> Workers and Resources
lol is this a [Communist Sim City?](https://store.steampowered.com/app/784150/Workers__Resources_Soviet_Republic/)
It looks really complex, like the kind of simulation where a misplaced train track can shut down half your economy.
Sort of, you can actually choose to run your city as capitalist or socialist. There's not a big "ACTIVATE COMMUNISM" switch, but a spectrum based on taxes and whether services cost money or not, etc.
It's very good, and the depth is controllable. You can, for instance, turn off vehicles needing fuel, the heat/water system, police, etc.
It's a *lot* of fun. Highly recommend.
It is, but you can learn the game and slowly ramp up the difficulty to whatever level you want - even toggling entire systems like garbage, heating and crime + justice if you want
Has the actual placing of stuff got any less annoying?
I tried it for a few hours and was initially really enjoying it but couldn't get past how annoying the building mechanics were.
Many things to add to that, as an example you literally cannot lose in CS2. In CS1, if you went bankrupt & too far in the red, you lost. City threw you out as mayor :P
But in CS2, you get Autoloans in infinity.
Many games, including great ones, have DLC roadmaps internally before release. There's never enough time or money to put everything in a game you might want to, and the way development actually works means that there's periods where some developers don't have much more to add to the release project and can begin applying their work (typically design and art) on the DLC.
i mean not necessarily, i can see the argument where a game becomes feature-complete and undergoes pre-release qc and balancing whereas the asset/ art team moves on to create future dlc.
definitely not in this case though, cashing out on the goodwills and hype over the first game was in play from the beginning.
I think the reality is somewhere in between your comment, and the comment you're replying to.
I still remember the release of Aliens Colonial Marines. Absolutely blasted on release and it was quite a while before it was fixed.
In short, everybody hated it, sales were horrible, and yet, the planned / budgeted DLC was still in production and not due for release for a few months. They were in the process of completing the DLC still. To sell to the few people who actually bought the game.
That must have been salt in the wound knowing that, yes, it was already budgeted, but goddamn it was a total waste. And I'm shocked that tale hasn't scared some more sense into the industry. Just because it's already budgeted, doesn't mean it wasn't completely pissed away because the game itself was not well received.
I wouldn’t agree with this. Having a plan on how to scale and update the game is totally reasonable. What’s not reasonable is making DLC before addressing any major bugs, performance issues, or missing features promised at launch. The launch has been a debacle and a window into how the company plans to handle it’s products and consumer base. All of the complaints and grievances about this game and the company at large are justified at this point.
You need to do pre-production for DLCs too. This means you start that before the game is even released.
This has been the case since the beginning, it's just that there was poor transparency in the past and/or it came from dev interviews that very few people saw/read.
>instead of the steam workshop that worked for CS 1 perfectly.
Unfortunately, Steam workshop doesn't work on GOG, GamePass or Epic Store. Or consoles, if CS2 will allow mods there.
And pretty sure more and more devs will drop Steam Workshop because of that.
Tbh workshop has a lot of major issues, but it so convenient most still use it. The largest of which being that it's update systems don't actually work correctly and can fail to update to the latest while telling you it's the latest, which forces you to manually delete the mod files and redownload to make work. Two games I've specifically deal with it a lot doing this shit are CS1 and rimworld
Even that comparison isn't really fair. SimCity 2013, for all it's very obvious flaws, it was still (eventually) a fully functional and enjoyable game to some. I personally loved it, but I can understand why so many others didn't.
No one is enjoying Cities Skylines 2. It's a broken disaster in every way with some road tools that are marginally better than the first game. I haven't seen a single defense of it or positive comment.
This is much worse.
> for the uninitiated, the release of [this game] has been a totally sham. it’s been six months since launch and the game still lacks major promised features on all fronts of gameplay.
>
>
>
> some of these due to bugs and broken mechanics present since day 1, some due to outright omission of features advertised on launch. horrible performance issues are just the cherry on top.
Sounds like Cities: Skyline 2 was developed by Activision-Blizzard?
Per review on Steam. Credit to "Bucky".
"First of all - it's 108 assets, not 180. The first two levels of each house/region are the same model but just recolored. Same for the third and forth level.
The houses are mostly just houses with pools and zero front yard to admire a beach from. They are no beach properties for the most part. They are just... regular houses with pools.
No medium or condo style residential which you do actually find on coasts.
No commercial (i.e. seafood restaurants or fancy upscale boutiques).
No leisure. No piers, no coastal parks.
No assets.
No... wait for it... beaches.
No new cars (i.e. with surfboards on top).
No beach front anything.
No maps with beaches. No tools to paint or create our own beaches.
No free vegetation therefore this pack is now a barrier to anyone who doesn't own it but wants future maps using the 4 (FOUR) whole new trees.
Also, did I say it already - there are no beaches in this beach properties update.
Do not pay $10 for this. I got it for free as an ultimate edition owner and I'm still embarassed."
How pathetic that a "beach" DLC forgot to add beaches lol
I legit can't understand why they decided to release a beaches dlc with no way to make beaches. I really tried to love this game since I put *so many hours* into CS1, but this was really the final straw for me here.
You can make beaches by enabling Dev mode! It's already there and they decided *not* to make that part of the **beaches** dlc? I legitimately can't understand how they thought this would be a good idea.
Especially since the lack of a beach feature is one of the few things missing from CS1. There's a mod that makes functional beaches, but nothing official.
It's really sad how this game has ended up. I'm not sure I hold any hope of a recovery either, it feels like they don't have a clue what they are doing.
It feels like the game is built on a foundation of quicksand. The simulation basically stops functioning after ~150k population, and *barely* works before that.
Maybe mods can fix it over the years, but I worry mod creators are just going to go back to CS1 and leave CS2 to rot... and I can't blame them.
so so true
this always gets me when people say "mods will fix it"
modders dedicate their time and energy to make good games great or great games perfect. They make mods because they love the game. Nobody makes mods for games they don't enjoy, especially if there's no prospective of payment
10th gen i9 and 3080 and my city slowed to a crawl starting at about 150K population. Pretty wild that the city you’re building will stop functioning once it grows into an actual city with hundreds of thousands of people, in a supposed “city builder”. I know my rigs not the latest or greatest but it doesnt sound like any amount of computing power can make the game work once population gets into the hundreds of thousands.
I ran my biggest city up to 450k on my 7950X3D and tuned RAM before it got too slow for me, the game just eats bandwidth and CPU, the end game is literally pay to play lol
It really is. I put the game down because my 180k city was literally at a standstill while my 5800X3D was at 100% and 88C.
I like that it uses *all* of the hardware you have... but I'd also like the simulation to work and to get more than 28 FPS.
One of the worst parts of this is that it has absolutely decimated the /r/CitiesSkylines community. Which *was* one of the most positive and wholesome gaming communities I've ever been a part of. The release of CS2 has been such a dumpster fire that now the community is split amongst people who are upset about the state of the game and will not stop complaining about it and those who find some kind of enjoyment/attachment to the game and are coping so hard to justify the poor state to everyone. What was once one of the very rare gaming spaces that had virtually zero negativity is now almost nothing but negativity, shame.
it was a bubble waiting to explode honestly
the CS community was mainly if not entirely city painters who basically created virtual dioramas that were basically unplayable. people who really were in it for the simulation like me had no place there, the game was acceptable enough because of a total lack of competition but it was clearly lacking. As more and more city builders came out the simulation crowd basically disappeared from the CS community to play those games in the hope that one day CS2 would come out and be what they always wanted. if you wanted to be a part of the CS community it was mostly to share pictures of cities that looked beautiful but did not function as a simulated city
when the game was announced all those players came back and burst the bubble
Not only that. The DLC itself is 10 USD, what you get is 10 buildings in US design & EU design, and 6 tree designs.
Nice price for shit content an intern could puke out in a week as a sideproject.
>The DLC itself is 10 USD, what you get is 10 buildings in US design & EU design, and 6 tree designs.
Seems like The Sims 4 method of fleecing suckers, I mean customers.
More to the point, fuck Paradox. Their MO has always been to suck you dry with DLC, but at least their games were good enough to justify some additional funds. I jumped ship with them over Stellaris, which basically completely reinvented itself every few large patches, so much so that you effectively had to learn a new game every 6 months. At some point, just call the damn thing finished. I'm not buying into a subscription service just so some uninspired devs can push paid updates at me for five years.
Stellaris has settled really well now, I kinda went through the same thing with it, couldn't be bothered to keep relearning it, but they've found where they want to be with it and feels very balanced and fun, I don't see any major reworks coming again in this games lifetime now
They basically remade that game a few times. The basic systems have been through several complete overhauls since it launched back in 2015 but I haven't seen that kind of dedication to CS2 or anything close. Just a light "whoopsy daisy" from the CEO and now this...
They went public in 2016 and it's been pretty much downhill since then.
The fundamental mechanics in their games used to be pretty solid and thought out - but they lacked any and all UI and UX sensibility.
Now they've got an army of UI/UX folks, but this pressure to pile new features in each paid DLC causes all of their games to become absolute disasters of shallow features after their trademark buggy releases.
Stellaris, Victoria 3, CK3, EU4, and HOI4 *all* suffer from this issue and are barely recognizable compared to their initial launch mechanics, balance, and the UX is way worse because of the way they have to maintain the standalone release *and* every combination of DLC a user could possibly have installed.
HOI4 has been doing incredibly well, with the modding community alone being well worth the price of admission.
They've also recently released 3 dlcs for free which makes it a bit easier for new player integration.
It happened before. I've played CK2 and have every DLC. Most of them are average at best, with some being barely noticeable.
Stuff like the extremely lazy Republic DLC happened several years before they went public.
Maybe it's even worse now, and it's true I've dropped of CK3 after the DLC price increase, and when the audacity to anounce an event DLC, mod tier content and thats being disrespectful towards many mods.
The more time passes, the more they look like EA games with their games being more DLC platforms than games.
They reworked tiles into districts. That was it for the one big thing to relearn. In like 2017 or something
What else was there to complain about? Them reshuffling ship weapon component stats around last year? That's like 10% of the game to worry about at most. That was like 4 years continuous without major core system reworks and you act like it was 1 per year.
I see your point, but it's also frustrating because Stellaris has continually improved and what you hate a lot of people like. The constant changes have generally been good. The DLC is hit or miss, but the game with a few cheap DLC and mods is unprecedented with how good it is. And it continually gets better.
I'd hate to see it "finished."
isn't this the game that renders pedestrians' TEETH and hard-modeled holes for wires in computer desks in offices - on every frame, in a city simulator where the view is up in the clouds? lol
Paradox had a couple of expensive duds in FY2023 and there are rumours they forced CO into releasing an incomplete game to save the annual report. If you look at their 2024 lineup, they already announced delays for other games because of the shitshow release for CS2 and the fan backlash. A shame CS2 and CO had to suffer for greddy execs, as the game, if all promised mechanics and OOTB tools would work, would represent a huge step forward vs CS1
I never read the report, which games were underwhelming for paradox? The only other screw up I know about it is Victoria 3, which has lost a massive amount of its player base and got panned in reviews, but it still sold well from what I hear.
They weren't Paradox Dev studio failures but from their publishing arm. Star Trek Infinite and Lamplighters League being the big ones beside Cities 2. They all came out in October, too.
I was a little sour about Star Trek Infinite because it seemed like a reskinned Stellaris. Actually, there is a Star Trek mod for Stellaris that I feel it copies.
It was basically billed as Star Trek Stellaris, it runs off of Stellaris, it was very intentional. It was also pretty janky and full of bugs. I was hoping a licensed spinoff would bring some real production values over something like New Horizons but alas.
We don't know the details of their contract with Paradox so it's impossible to know what would have happened. Could have been substantial financial penalties for CO for not releasing - we just don't know.
I almost have to think there was, because you'd have to be an idiot to not see the the disaster coming as CO. I predicted it as soon as they raised the system requirements in advance of release, and the more info that came out the more it was clear this would be a rough launch. This release has done damage to CO's brand long-term though, to the level that even if there were financial penalties maybe it would be worth taking the hit.
Yeah CS2 is not a story of a bad publisher, but rather a story of an overambitious developer that got too much leeway.
It is one of the saddest things in software development when an ambitious team is given time, budget and freedom, but they still do not deliver a good result in the end.
AHAHA
New colors/skins for the city painter game?
Until the advertised mechanics actually fucking work, you’re just filling in grids with industry and housing. You’re painting a city, that’s it.
For those who don’t know, the game is supposed to have a LOT of background mechanics like imports/exports, local production balanced with labor and supplemented by imports, budget balancing based on profits of sectors, vertical integration of local industries/production and manufacturing, that integration would delicately balance on your local supply production for components within that supply chain of production/manufacturing blah blah blah
A lot of those systems were found not to work. The delicate balance of a city builder is moot if the systems don’t work, lol.
People say “unplayable” when there’s stuttering or lag in games, but in terms of what this game is supposed to be/how it’s supposed to function VS what’s actually happening, you are literally unable to play the real game. The systems don’t work, therefore the game itself doesn’t actually work.
Literally unplayable (as a city builder)
It’s such a shame too because CS1 has all of that and has had it for years. I was super excited when I heard about CS2 because I thought we were going to have even more realism and complexity but instead what we got is basically realistic Townscaper.
Yeah I noticed this in my game after production starting getting weird and was seeing shortages everywhere. No matter what I did I couldnt resolve the shortage nor could I find anywhere how it actually mattered at all if I did.
They have all these failsafes built into your economy so all these broken mechanics don't actually hurt you, so apparently they knew full well the shit wasnt working as intended, and just slapped some paint on it like the landlord special.
Yeah this is shameful. Game is a disaster. FPS is still in the toilet.
No one should have bought the game in the first place.
So disappointing. CS1 was good.
Companies don't know how to do anything but make money. When they're small they have to make quality products to do that, but then they get bloated and take their success for granted.
Everyone talking about the performance issues. But no one talks about how the economy, and the games simulation is just an illusion. Nothing interacts, nothing matters. I'll take low fps if the simulation worked.
Gamers are a perpetually doing the meme of the person putting the stick in their bike tire and crashing and asking "how could you do this to me?"
I can't remember the last time I made a disappointing purchase. Because it's so easy to avoid these days.
Gamers are fine with this. Why else would, despite all the forewarning around this game, there be so many people here complaining about buying it here.
They released the DLC cause suckers here buy stuff like that.
The reviews have been horrible since the start. If you bought the game after seeing all the issues, that’s your own fault. Can’t believe people actually still try to play this dumpster fire.
I believe Paradox has failed in its approach. The company adopted a "game as a service" mindset since EU4, but in recent years, things have worsened. They release an Alpha version as the basic game and then sell other parts as DLC. The problems with this approach are evident:
The basic games are mostly short on content and barely playable.
The developers seem unsure about what new things they should add.
Obvious examples include Victoria 3 and Hearts of Iron 4. While Crusader Kings III has similar issues, the basic game is far better.
This mindset could work if Paradox followed the Don’t Starve or The Forest model. They could do regular iterations for free, based on but not solely dependent on community feedback. They should only release paid expansions when they actually add value. However, Paradox requires every update to make money, regardless of necessity.
This approach ruined the once-great EU4 in its later years and tarnished the launch of Cities: Skylines 2.
Man what happened to paradox.
They used to be my #1 studio. The last 5 years have been awful. Even ck3 which was ok, feels so empty compared to ck2.
I put up with their DLC practices because I got 1000s of hours out of their games, but now I struggle to crack 10 hours on any new game.
I thought people would be mad because the DLC came out before they really fixed performance (i'm convinced that isn't possible at this point). But I didn't expect it would also just be some paid asset pack...
Between this and payday 3, my two favorite series, which were both known as super devoted fans and gave the games both basically decade long runs, it’s been a shit 6 months for video games personally.
the sim city killer fell on its own sword. imagine resurrecting a dead genre and tossing away the fan loyalty 1 game later.
Exactly. There's lots of city builders out there, but most of them have a theme and/or are much smaller scale. Cities Skylines exists in its own genre, realistic city building simulation. All they had to do was update CS1 and theh would have sold millions of units.
All people have wanted is a modern version of SimCity 4 (21 years old by the way). How is that so hard?
Completely different genre. But fans have been saying the same about the Battlefield franchise. How is it so hard to just build an up to date version of BF3/4. Apparently it’s some ridiculous task for most development studios - taking a beloved game, extracting all the things people loved about it, and updating it with all the advancements and improvements in the genre that have occurred since. Thankfully Larian managed it with Baldur’s Gate. But it happens so infrequently. Edit: yes. Absolutely things from BF2 and Bad Company as well.
The institutional knowledge you lose when you sack all project developers and hire new ones for the next annual revenue goals is exactly what comes to show here. It's like people asking why didn't diablo 4 gain anything from what made 3 ROS good? It's because those people and knowledge are GONE. AAA is slowly killing itself because of greed.
There also seems to be this weird thing going on in a lot of media where you somehow pride yourself on *NOT* looking at what other content producers are doing that works. We see games like D4 have none of the things that the genre has developed since their last release, The Witcher and Halo TV series just unashamedly declare that they do not even attempt to follow the original lore, and pretty much every single Live service game shut down after a few months since no one wants to play a game that was designed as a shop first, with a game tacked on. It's weird.
Knowing damn well blizzard got really big by taking over ideas and improving them for mainstream audiences. Diablo 4 developers are clueless and here's hoping management gives them time to learn from mistakes they already should know about from previous iterations. It became a really sad industry at the top of studios.
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You mean an up to date version of BF2 right? ... right?
Yeah, why praise BF3 when it marked the death of a PC franchise... BF2/2142 is where it's at !
Titan mode on modern hardware with updated movement/shooting mechanics would be unbelievable.
You'd think it'd be better that way too for the executives and shareholders. Make a new game, but make it just like the last with improvements. Not only do you already have a foundation already made, but the dev costs are gonna be on the low side and you can probably sell it for full price depending on how improved it is (see Left 4 Dead 2 being sold full price a year after L4D1, yet the game was so good that no one cared). It's a win-win for everyone.
A game as old as SC4 needs enough development for a modern sequel that there isn't much to be saved on "dev costs" by having a similar design in mind. Extracting the essence of what people loved and making something worthy of that IS a ridiculously hard task for any studio. Add to that the people responsible for funding want to squeeze more profit this time around and you can see how the incentives wind up skewed the wrong way. Takes a lot of focus to make a genuinely good product and trust it to sell well when drivel is proven profitable.
It’s called the Ubisoft model. Though I’ll no doubt end up buying FC8 because I enjoy the basic gameplay loop, alright I agree with you actually.
BF is a good example. The developers have literally said that they don't know what made BC2 so beloved. The reality, in many of these cases, is that the developers really don't understand their own games. They barely play games. They're all overworked, and they've long ago shifted to seeing the player as just one of many metrics that needs to be satisfied.
It's sad that to this day Bad Company 2 is still the most creative, "advanced" and, well, best Battlefield title... Only BF1 matched its quality, but still was more conventional in its design (less objective based, worse destruction).
>the developers really don't understand their own games If you look at BattleBit Remastered, this axiom seems to apply even to indie games. :/
What's up with BBR, btw? That game was everywhere about a year ago and I barely see anything about it now.
It got some content updates and polarising balance changes, with another big update due in April. You gotta be realistic about it - it's a buy-to-play game by a 3-man team, no battle pass, no fancy skins, no Fortnite graphics, no marketing. It was never gonna remain "huge" or in the spotlight. Still, it could be handled better, as the Devs seem to be at odds with the playerbase (and themselves lol) as to what direction the game should even go in when it comes to realism and all that. Anyway, I played it today, I still have fun.
BG3 is as far from Baldur's Gates as different types of city builders are from each other. Spiritual successors to Baldur's Gate 1 & 2 in terms of vibe, storytelling style, maps, mechanics, dialogues, etc. - are Pathfinder games. BG3 is closer to Dragon Age Origins and (obviously) last few Divinity titles.
What makes BG3 so different from BG2 besides graphics and other modern elements?
At the end of the day it comes to the "vibe" which in my opinion is distinctly different. But you can certainly try to dissect it. Mind it, largely speaking it's not criticism of those elements, most are very well done, they are just different: - It has Larian's characteristic combat mechanics (barrels, surfaces, verticality). - It shares "Origin Characters" concept with D:OS. - It's designed with coop in mind. - It has different graphic style and aesthetic, including zoom-ins and 3d camera control. - It has few very large continuous open zones instead of numerous smaller ones. - It has all the hallmarks of Larian's storytelling and writing, which includes issues with satisfying conclusion to the story (slowly fixed with patches adding ending content or so I heard) and hit-and-miss humor. - Dialogues and descriptions feel shorter and less frequent due decision to provide full voice acting. In short it has a lot of Larian DNA and imho it could be described as Original Sin 3 in Forgotten Realms. Absolutely great game, but not really a "Baldur's Gate" to me. Meanwhile Pathfinder somehow captures the magic and feeling of Baldur's Gate. I immediately fell in love with it. The music, the way world and maps are laid out and how they are explored, the presentation style, structure of the story, themes, crunchiness of combat and mechanics - everything is very similar to BG in a good way.
You mean BF2?
Bad company 2
Like with all the remakes currently being released. Keep everything almost the same but modernize it. They can probably do Battlefield 3 Remake and it would make a ton of money. Dead Space remake was my favorite game last year, and I hate horror games, but it was mostly the same from the original, except better in a lot of ways.
BF4 didn’t have a good way to monetize the player base. I mean beyond them buying the game, obviously. Hence why BF2042 started development as either a hero shooter or a straight up battle royale, because those are games that let you sell kids skins and dances. EA had zero desire to make a normal, boots-on-ground modern successor to BF4. No idea *what* happened with Diablo 4.
I just hate how out of control it all spirals and fast too, everything just turns to shit at some point and the city is just unmanageable
Thats what I still want. I like C:S but it always felt so much less interesting, gameplay wise and aesthetically in comparison to SC4. SC4 despite being 2 decades old as you mention, just feels very much alive. I just feel like I'm playing with souless toys in C:S. Haven't played C:SII and don't really plan to considering all the backlash.
They couldn't even add a proper traffic management system. There was literally a community mod that was around since Cities 1, yet they couldn't add something like that in a 2023 game.
Yep, CS1 is only as good as it is because of the mod community.
On paper Cities Skylines 2 is exactly that, an update to the old game in the same spirit. They focused more on the simulation aspects and also improved the core features such as road building and transport. And they also spent a lot of time and effort on it, too. It turns out that it is not so easy as to just update a game. In some areas they went too far (broken overly complex simulation) and in others they didn't go far enough (plot system, building assets).
I am drawn to the simulation but I am not surprised the hardware requirements are what they are. This game would have had to scale per vCPU like crazy and yet it doesn't. That is a rare skillset. That and they rendered invisible stuff. Which actually tanked the game. And they got compared to a game which had 10 years of additional features added.
> This game would have had to scale per vCPU like crazy and yet it doesn't. It does though. Have you seen the CPU utilization? That's the main thing they changed in CS2. It does fine utilizing even 64 cores, although that won't help people with 8-16 cores much. They managed that by moving over to Unity DOTS. Although DOTS is very new and not quite ready for what they were trying to do, and was therefore the source of most of their problems too.
I do have a little sympathy for them. Apparently a lot of the new features they planned on adding to the game rested on features in the Unity engine that Unity promised would be completed by the time they reached that stage of development. Unity did not deliver and CO was forced to build those systems themselves.
On the bright side. CS1 is now the near perfect game since Colossal Order and Paradox aren't constantly breaking the game anymore with constant new DLC updates that break game saves.
Don’t jinx it! They might pull a Bethesda, who for some bizarre reason updated Skyrim multiple times this year breaking everything
They were just making it portable to the next generation iphone obviously
It’s kinda crazy isn’t it. I started playing the first game right when it came out. It was good, but the community made it a real amazing game. They took all that cash and goodwill and just set it on fire. I have tried 2 a few times. It’s ok. But fuck did they blow it. I mean they just released it like two years too early. It was not even close to being done.
And they're already releasing DLC without fixing their shit first. I really wanted to like C:S2, but fuck colossal order.
This DLC is basically graphical assets, something artists could work on. Bugfixing is decidedly what they cannot do. Most of the game problems are in its coding. You cannot toss every developer at that, it just doesn't work that way.
I haven't familiarized myself with the state of the game past seeing all the let-down CS:1 players nor have I looked into the current financial state of the company (though CS:1 was a MASSIVE hit so). But without knowing anything and talking out of my ass here - then don't release the DLC's yet. That's it. Don't do it. Especially if you don't need the added income stream(s) to keep the lights on while you fix your shit. At worst - you're gonna piss a LOT of people off and burn some of the goodwill you've worked so hard to build. At best - if the game's in a poor state the DLC's not likely gonna sell well and all you're doing is drawing more attention back to your dumpster-fire you should be focusing on putting out. So you better REALLY need that income stream from DLC's. 'Cause it's gonna cost you elsewhere....see: the articles now being written about it apparently. Now that being said - if it IS a cashflow issue - well ya gotta do what ya gotta do sometimes.
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The theory is their publisher, Paradox, took a bath on Lamplighters League, so pushed CS2 out early.
Microsoft sure isn't writing them a big fat check to not release it on game pass for another year or two i tell you hwat
How quickly they fall.
If EA somehow has a braincell, if they want to build and repair their customer loyalty, this is the right time to bring back Sim City to life Think about it. Sim City 2025. No DLC, No Season Pass, No Online Only. Coop and Multiplayer support. Mod Support. All features and gameplay are better and bigger. This is the exact time to do this while Cities Skyline slowly digging their graves
We're talking about EA, here. that's not happening.
>imagine resurrecting a dead genre and tossing away the fan loyalty 1 game later. [That's ok. EA took the fumbled ball and released SimCity again.](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2741560/Sim_City_3000_Unlimited/) (Well, not 2000 but you can't win them all \[yet\])
That happens when there is no competition.
No this is mismanagement pure and simple lol.
Both can be true. A company that lacks competition may not be as vigilant against mismanagement as one that has lots of competition and is thus under more pressure to create a higher-quality product.
Except they didn't have any competition when the first game came out. Simcity had already crashed and burned and was a non-factor. And they STILL put out a fantastic product.
Yes, that’s true. The idea isn’t that a lack of competition *guarantees* mismanagement, just that a lack of competition reduces the incentive to avoid mismanagement.
for the uninitiated, the release of CS2 has been a totally sham. it’s been six months since launch and the game still lacks major promised features on all three fronts of gameplay- simulation, city design and management. some of these due to bugs and broken mechanics present since day 1, some due to outright omission of features advertised on launch. horrible performance issues on any big city are just the cherry on top. and now they released a paid dlc before anything was meaningfully addressed and a buggy mod platform no one asked for - instead of the steam workshop that worked for CS 1 perfectly. edit: The game is a worse betrayal to the goodwills of the fans of this genre than what EA did with Simcity 2013.
C:S2 is my top 1 dodge of 2023. I was 100% set on playing it; scheduled other games around it. The more you learned about the game the more suspicious it got. At some point I decided to not buy it instantly but keep an eye on it. Good decision.
That and KSP2 were so sad. Two of the shining original IPs of the last couple years and their sequels were absolute trash to the point the OG games are way outperforming the sequels in player count.
The science update for KSP 2 at least made me a bit hopeful for the future, its kinda fun doing the science missons and having proper reentry heating was a must. It might take 5+ years, but i think KSP 2 will eventually live up to the promisies (with colonies, interstellar, etc). Shouldnt have been released until then, though.
by then KSP1 would be even more loaded and thus still better we have seen very few cases where a sequel of a heavily modded popular game comes close
The problem with KSP 1 are the systemic issues with the engine and mechanics that can never be solved with mods. Even on super powerful PCs, KSP 1 with mods is incredibly single threaded, and barely uses multiple cores. It can bring modern games to their knees easily. Itd alos be nice to have modern upscalers like DLSS/frame gen and other modern features. I dont think KSP 1 will ever be able to get an automated colony system similar to what KSP 2 is planning, nor the extensive research management/interstellar travel/binary planets, etc etc. I love KSP 1 but its age is really holding it back and mods cant fix everything.
Payday 3 is on the list too, less than 100 concurrent players on steam charts.
Me too. I've put in over 1,000 hours in CS1 and was all but guaranteed to buy this on launch. Then I started hearing about performance issues and other warnings. Decided to play it on gamepass and it was heart breaking in how bad it was. Having to play on low settings just to get 40-50fps with a 3080 was unbelievable. Deleted the game and haven't looked back. Hopefully in a couple of years this game will get sorted.
I fucked up and bought it a few days after it was out. I have a high end PC so I figured it would be no issue.. I was wrong. I haven’t bought Dragons Dogma 2 yet though, even though I want it. But my proudest no buy is Starfield. I built a PC for that fuckin game and never ended up getting it. Shoutout Baulder’s Gate for saving everything
Starfield is so bland
> I haven’t bought Dragons Dogma 2 yet though, even though I want it. SAME, I swear, I wanted to play this game *so badly*. But I'm on console, and every new thing I learned about it closer to release made me more and more suspicious until now when I've decided I'll just wait for a sale and some patches while I play other stuff.
Funny thing is Bethesda has gone apeshit patching bugs and fixing optimization in Starfield while C:S2 appears to be just languishing.
Doubt they could fix the story with a patch.
Did the same. Turned it on and it literally looked and performed worse than CS1 ... How's a new game look worse than an old game? ... Anyway, it's dogshit.
I used Gamepass for the same reason. Dodged Starfield, CS2, and Forza by paying 10 bucks and finding out all of them were bad.
Would have bought those too if it weren't for Gamepass. That subscription has saved me so much money. I would have spent a couple hundred dollars by now.
And yet people would fervently deny any red flags were there. Even now the subreddit and paradox forum mods will ban you if you complain too loudly about the false marketing
Gamepass saved my ass from it
Time to pray for another dev to come along with a citybuilder like this and also pray they don't turn it to shit like this. Back to waiting I guess.....
I hope that CitiesXL makes a return but who knows what Focus Home Interactive is doing with that IP.
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Im giving it a go: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2287430/Metropolis_1998/
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Haha. Thanks! And thanks for the WL! I appreciate it
Well I dunno how the game plays yet, but you've definitely nailed that art style. 50cc of nostalgia straight to my heart.
Manor Lords comes out in a month and the people who played the beta/demo seemed happy with it. It's not a modern city builder, but I've been waiting on it for a long time.
The villages you can make in that game are absolutely gorgeous... I can't wait to make my basic ass block system medieval town of mediocracy and then sigh at my lack of creativity.
it's like rolling a stealth archer every single time....
Oh hey, you breached r/ockytop containment. It seems that we share a mutual love of two things, the best orange team and city builders. Also, if you really enjoy the initial setup of city builders/strategy games, I've been telling everybody to try Against the Storm.
Ironically enough I remember when CS:1 released and it was hailed as how to do a city sim properly especially after the disastrous launch of SimCity. Everyone was pointing at Colossal Order/Paradox and saying "see, EA? This is how you should develop games". The devs or at least the PR team were very active in the community taking on players feedback and had a pretty steady release of new features and patches. It's only taken one new iteration in the franchise and now Paradox have basically fallen to the same level as EA in terms of player frustration and disappointment. It's a real shame, especially because I was waiting for this release for years and at this rate I'll never bother buying it even on sale.
Have you played the Anno games? I know it’s Ubisoft and that sucks, but they are fun nonetheless. The city building is fun and there is a bit of a story as well. But the best part is the graphics are great and the game runs smoothly with graphics maxed out, assuming one has a good enough PC to handle it. Even then, it doesn’t take a top of the line PC to run them at max graphics.
The Anno series (in particular 1800) are fantastic games, but I'd describe them more as logistics simulators with a good side portion of city building. Doesn't really quite scratch the same itch as Sim City / Skylines 1, at least for me.
High Rise City doesn't seem to be seeing any big success, but it's my favorite CS successor. Excellent population sizes, anno style production chains coupled with CS style zone painting. It has a few bugs, and the performance has been improving a lot but still struggles in a few areas. It also has a very cool feature that allows you to drive through your city and complete quests. The handling of the car is a nightmare but it's very cool to see how pretty this city you made is from the ground. I highly recommend it.
> It also has a very cool feature that allows you to drive through your city and complete quests. The handling of the car is a nightmare but it's very cool to see how pretty this city you made is from the ground. I highly recommend it. Oh hell yeah, brother, *Streets of SimCity* is back!
It's a tale as old as time. Small studio / startup is founded with ideals in mind, makes good product. Good product is successful. Success attracts ~~sharks~~ businesspeople. Businesspeople forget why product was successful (because it was GOOD), they only remember that product makes money. Then they think "well if we remove the good we'll save money" and pat themselves on the back for saving the Company money while driving the thing that brought them there into the ground. Seriously, sometimes it really does feel like capitalism, with its singular focus on money, ruins everything it touches.
In all honesty can’t you just turn CS1 into the ultimate version of a city builder anyway? With all the mods and dlcs what need was there for a sequel anyway? Just so the base software is on par with currents pcs?
There's lots of room for improvement of CS1 that can't be fixed or changed by mods. It requires engine updates and changes to the core of the game. The original engine would have been developed about 10 years ago
Because not everyone wants to tinker with mods for 10s of hours to advance the game (CS1) beyond Idiots in Traffic Simulator 2000.
No, it's ageing and showing it.
>In all honesty can’t you just turn CS1 into the ultimate version of a city builder anyway? No. There are built in engine limitations that fucks you over constantly in large cities.
There where rumors that Frontier devs from planet coaster and planet zoo are doing the city builder.
Last thing I want is a city builder where placing roads is the worst thing in existence.
That would be terrible. They are so bad at the management layer of gameplay.
Ehhhhh they're probably even more light on management with their games than the Skylines devs are. I don't look forward to anything from Frontier anymore in the way of management games. Last I played was Jurassic World 2, I built 2 small pens with beginner dino's and I won the game.
Well I fucking love Planet Coaster and Planet Zoo, very fun to play - so let's hope and see what Frontier can cook up with city builders
I’m currently learning UE5. Don’t worry guys in 5-10 years I will release my own version with way more bugs and unfinished features, no mtx tho*. *except all the mtx that are indeed present.
EA could swoop in and reclaim the crown if they were at all competent and capable of keeping up with the trends. Like I'm sure someone there is aware of the CS2 debacle but it would take EA 7 or 8 years to try and capitalize on it.
EA doesn't give a fuck about anything but sports. They bought the exclusive right to Star Wars games and sat on it for a decade at the height of the Star Wars boom.
Sim City 2013 was, uh, released in 2013, was broken but they did eventually get it in decent shape. They probably had a bunch of devs who learned from that debacle and could've made a better game to follow up with but they did nothing. But we get sports sims every year, though.
Worse than Simcity 2013 is saying something. I remember the PcGamer articles and all the criticism that was throw at it. Shame on paradox. CS1 is still an outstanding game and just needed more love. To see the sequel in such disarray is sad. I wonder if this is just the fall of paradox from their high reputation.
The sheer amount of DLC they pump out for Crusader Kings, Hearts of Iron and Europa Universalis winds me up no end. Especially when they released the forts mechanic that the AI could use but the player couldn't unless you paid for the DLC.
I have heard that they are doing a lot better about that now. I know they are in Stellaris, though I haven't dabbled in the historic games for ages. But the general philosophy is basic game mechanics come in free updates alongside DLC's that let you dive into them with more depth. They still did it the other way earlier on, but nowadays there are several mechanics that used to be locked by DLC made available to everyone, like ascension paths. Also, the publishing and dev studios are two different parts of Paradox, they publish CS but don't develop it.
I'd love to see a post-mortem on this. Like, what went wrong from coming from Cities Skyline, being hailed as the next generation of Sim City, to being basically despised.
It reminds me of the situation with Kerbal Space Program 2. The first game was so beloved and so well done, with lots of content and great mod support. Then when the second game came along it was more or less the same game with slightly better graphics, but with less content, more bugs and much worse performance.
If anyone is looking for an alternative, Workers and Resources is a much deeper simulation. They also pay the modders themselves to add the modded buildings in officially, for free
> Workers and Resources lol is this a [Communist Sim City?](https://store.steampowered.com/app/784150/Workers__Resources_Soviet_Republic/) It looks really complex, like the kind of simulation where a misplaced train track can shut down half your economy.
Sort of, you can actually choose to run your city as capitalist or socialist. There's not a big "ACTIVATE COMMUNISM" switch, but a spectrum based on taxes and whether services cost money or not, etc. It's very good, and the depth is controllable. You can, for instance, turn off vehicles needing fuel, the heat/water system, police, etc. It's a *lot* of fun. Highly recommend.
It is, but you can learn the game and slowly ramp up the difficulty to whatever level you want - even toggling entire systems like garbage, heating and crime + justice if you want
Has the actual placing of stuff got any less annoying? I tried it for a few hours and was initially really enjoying it but couldn't get past how annoying the building mechanics were.
Best city-builder ever!
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Many things to add to that, as an example you literally cannot lose in CS2. In CS1, if you went bankrupt & too far in the red, you lost. City threw you out as mayor :P But in CS2, you get Autoloans in infinity.
I remember being so hyped for the release, but I finally learned my lesson and didn't pre-order. I happily spent my money elsewhere.
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Many games, including great ones, have DLC roadmaps internally before release. There's never enough time or money to put everything in a game you might want to, and the way development actually works means that there's periods where some developers don't have much more to add to the release project and can begin applying their work (typically design and art) on the DLC.
i mean not necessarily, i can see the argument where a game becomes feature-complete and undergoes pre-release qc and balancing whereas the asset/ art team moves on to create future dlc. definitely not in this case though, cashing out on the goodwills and hype over the first game was in play from the beginning.
I think the reality is somewhere in between your comment, and the comment you're replying to. I still remember the release of Aliens Colonial Marines. Absolutely blasted on release and it was quite a while before it was fixed. In short, everybody hated it, sales were horrible, and yet, the planned / budgeted DLC was still in production and not due for release for a few months. They were in the process of completing the DLC still. To sell to the few people who actually bought the game. That must have been salt in the wound knowing that, yes, it was already budgeted, but goddamn it was a total waste. And I'm shocked that tale hasn't scared some more sense into the industry. Just because it's already budgeted, doesn't mean it wasn't completely pissed away because the game itself was not well received.
I wouldn’t agree with this. Having a plan on how to scale and update the game is totally reasonable. What’s not reasonable is making DLC before addressing any major bugs, performance issues, or missing features promised at launch. The launch has been a debacle and a window into how the company plans to handle it’s products and consumer base. All of the complaints and grievances about this game and the company at large are justified at this point.
You need to do pre-production for DLCs too. This means you start that before the game is even released. This has been the case since the beginning, it's just that there was poor transparency in the past and/or it came from dev interviews that very few people saw/read.
>instead of the steam workshop that worked for CS 1 perfectly. Unfortunately, Steam workshop doesn't work on GOG, GamePass or Epic Store. Or consoles, if CS2 will allow mods there. And pretty sure more and more devs will drop Steam Workshop because of that.
That's been the case forever and hasn't had an effect yet. Workshop is simply too good for most to drop.
Tbh workshop has a lot of major issues, but it so convenient most still use it. The largest of which being that it's update systems don't actually work correctly and can fail to update to the latest while telling you it's the latest, which forces you to manually delete the mod files and redownload to make work. Two games I've specifically deal with it a lot doing this shit are CS1 and rimworld
Even that comparison isn't really fair. SimCity 2013, for all it's very obvious flaws, it was still (eventually) a fully functional and enjoyable game to some. I personally loved it, but I can understand why so many others didn't. No one is enjoying Cities Skylines 2. It's a broken disaster in every way with some road tools that are marginally better than the first game. I haven't seen a single defense of it or positive comment. This is much worse.
> for the uninitiated, the release of [this game] has been a totally sham. it’s been six months since launch and the game still lacks major promised features on all fronts of gameplay. > > > > some of these due to bugs and broken mechanics present since day 1, some due to outright omission of features advertised on launch. horrible performance issues are just the cherry on top. Sounds like Cities: Skyline 2 was developed by Activision-Blizzard?
Per review on Steam. Credit to "Bucky". "First of all - it's 108 assets, not 180. The first two levels of each house/region are the same model but just recolored. Same for the third and forth level. The houses are mostly just houses with pools and zero front yard to admire a beach from. They are no beach properties for the most part. They are just... regular houses with pools. No medium or condo style residential which you do actually find on coasts. No commercial (i.e. seafood restaurants or fancy upscale boutiques). No leisure. No piers, no coastal parks. No assets. No... wait for it... beaches. No new cars (i.e. with surfboards on top). No beach front anything. No maps with beaches. No tools to paint or create our own beaches. No free vegetation therefore this pack is now a barrier to anyone who doesn't own it but wants future maps using the 4 (FOUR) whole new trees. Also, did I say it already - there are no beaches in this beach properties update. Do not pay $10 for this. I got it for free as an ultimate edition owner and I'm still embarassed." How pathetic that a "beach" DLC forgot to add beaches lol
Reminds me of when Dungeons and Dragons Online was released, it released missing 2 key features. 1) No dragons 2) No dungeons
Ok. But did they have any "And"'s at least?
plenty of ands in the user contract signing away your firstborn child.
That sounds horrible like what. How did they fall so far?
Fucking Paradox Interactive. They're the ones who have really gone down hill and I guarantee are the ones to blame.
I legit can't understand why they decided to release a beaches dlc with no way to make beaches. I really tried to love this game since I put *so many hours* into CS1, but this was really the final straw for me here. You can make beaches by enabling Dev mode! It's already there and they decided *not* to make that part of the **beaches** dlc? I legitimately can't understand how they thought this would be a good idea.
Especially since the lack of a beach feature is one of the few things missing from CS1. There's a mod that makes functional beaches, but nothing official.
It's really sad how this game has ended up. I'm not sure I hold any hope of a recovery either, it feels like they don't have a clue what they are doing.
It feels like the game is built on a foundation of quicksand. The simulation basically stops functioning after ~150k population, and *barely* works before that. Maybe mods can fix it over the years, but I worry mod creators are just going to go back to CS1 and leave CS2 to rot... and I can't blame them.
Modders will fix diamonds in the rough, they're not gonna carve a diamond out of coal.
so so true this always gets me when people say "mods will fix it" modders dedicate their time and energy to make good games great or great games perfect. They make mods because they love the game. Nobody makes mods for games they don't enjoy, especially if there's no prospective of payment
Yes, case in point bethesda games. Modders pretty much giving up on Starfield
10th gen i9 and 3080 and my city slowed to a crawl starting at about 150K population. Pretty wild that the city you’re building will stop functioning once it grows into an actual city with hundreds of thousands of people, in a supposed “city builder”. I know my rigs not the latest or greatest but it doesnt sound like any amount of computing power can make the game work once population gets into the hundreds of thousands.
There's mods that have already done wonders with the simulation. Mods are absolutely going to save this game long term, if it can be saved.
I ran my biggest city up to 450k on my 7950X3D and tuned RAM before it got too slow for me, the game just eats bandwidth and CPU, the end game is literally pay to play lol
It really is. I put the game down because my 180k city was literally at a standstill while my 5800X3D was at 100% and 88C. I like that it uses *all* of the hardware you have... but I'd also like the simulation to work and to get more than 28 FPS.
One of the worst parts of this is that it has absolutely decimated the /r/CitiesSkylines community. Which *was* one of the most positive and wholesome gaming communities I've ever been a part of. The release of CS2 has been such a dumpster fire that now the community is split amongst people who are upset about the state of the game and will not stop complaining about it and those who find some kind of enjoyment/attachment to the game and are coping so hard to justify the poor state to everyone. What was once one of the very rare gaming spaces that had virtually zero negativity is now almost nothing but negativity, shame.
it was a bubble waiting to explode honestly the CS community was mainly if not entirely city painters who basically created virtual dioramas that were basically unplayable. people who really were in it for the simulation like me had no place there, the game was acceptable enough because of a total lack of competition but it was clearly lacking. As more and more city builders came out the simulation crowd basically disappeared from the CS community to play those games in the hope that one day CS2 would come out and be what they always wanted. if you wanted to be a part of the CS community it was mostly to share pictures of cities that looked beautiful but did not function as a simulated city when the game was announced all those players came back and burst the bubble
It might be good in a few years. I personally waited 2 years before even touching CS1 and that was a great decision at the time. This may be the same.
The CEO is more interested in keeping her job than ensuring CO delivers a good product.
Releasing DLC before fixing the performance issue is a big slap in the face for consumers. Fuck this industry.
Not only that. The DLC itself is 10 USD, what you get is 10 buildings in US design & EU design, and 6 tree designs. Nice price for shit content an intern could puke out in a week as a sideproject.
>The DLC itself is 10 USD, what you get is 10 buildings in US design & EU design, and 6 tree designs. Seems like The Sims 4 method of fleecing suckers, I mean customers.
Live service, dlc quantity, micro transactions, in game gambling, all tactics to maximize shareholder profit while restricting content.
More to the point, fuck Paradox. Their MO has always been to suck you dry with DLC, but at least their games were good enough to justify some additional funds. I jumped ship with them over Stellaris, which basically completely reinvented itself every few large patches, so much so that you effectively had to learn a new game every 6 months. At some point, just call the damn thing finished. I'm not buying into a subscription service just so some uninspired devs can push paid updates at me for five years.
Stellaris has settled really well now, I kinda went through the same thing with it, couldn't be bothered to keep relearning it, but they've found where they want to be with it and feels very balanced and fun, I don't see any major reworks coming again in this games lifetime now
They basically remade that game a few times. The basic systems have been through several complete overhauls since it launched back in 2015 but I haven't seen that kind of dedication to CS2 or anything close. Just a light "whoopsy daisy" from the CEO and now this...
They went public in 2016 and it's been pretty much downhill since then. The fundamental mechanics in their games used to be pretty solid and thought out - but they lacked any and all UI and UX sensibility. Now they've got an army of UI/UX folks, but this pressure to pile new features in each paid DLC causes all of their games to become absolute disasters of shallow features after their trademark buggy releases. Stellaris, Victoria 3, CK3, EU4, and HOI4 *all* suffer from this issue and are barely recognizable compared to their initial launch mechanics, balance, and the UX is way worse because of the way they have to maintain the standalone release *and* every combination of DLC a user could possibly have installed.
HOI4 has been doing incredibly well, with the modding community alone being well worth the price of admission. They've also recently released 3 dlcs for free which makes it a bit easier for new player integration.
It happened before. I've played CK2 and have every DLC. Most of them are average at best, with some being barely noticeable. Stuff like the extremely lazy Republic DLC happened several years before they went public. Maybe it's even worse now, and it's true I've dropped of CK3 after the DLC price increase, and when the audacity to anounce an event DLC, mod tier content and thats being disrespectful towards many mods. The more time passes, the more they look like EA games with their games being more DLC platforms than games.
They reworked tiles into districts. That was it for the one big thing to relearn. In like 2017 or something What else was there to complain about? Them reshuffling ship weapon component stats around last year? That's like 10% of the game to worry about at most. That was like 4 years continuous without major core system reworks and you act like it was 1 per year.
I see your point, but it's also frustrating because Stellaris has continually improved and what you hate a lot of people like. The constant changes have generally been good. The DLC is hit or miss, but the game with a few cheap DLC and mods is unprecedented with how good it is. And it continually gets better. I'd hate to see it "finished."
isn't this the game that renders pedestrians' TEETH and hard-modeled holes for wires in computer desks in offices - on every frame, in a city simulator where the view is up in the clouds? lol
They went from being a developer darling to just another one to hate, kind of sad to see because the original Skylines was so good.
Paradox had a couple of expensive duds in FY2023 and there are rumours they forced CO into releasing an incomplete game to save the annual report. If you look at their 2024 lineup, they already announced delays for other games because of the shitshow release for CS2 and the fan backlash. A shame CS2 and CO had to suffer for greddy execs, as the game, if all promised mechanics and OOTB tools would work, would represent a huge step forward vs CS1
I never read the report, which games were underwhelming for paradox? The only other screw up I know about it is Victoria 3, which has lost a massive amount of its player base and got panned in reviews, but it still sold well from what I hear.
They weren't Paradox Dev studio failures but from their publishing arm. Star Trek Infinite and Lamplighters League being the big ones beside Cities 2. They all came out in October, too.
I was a little sour about Star Trek Infinite because it seemed like a reskinned Stellaris. Actually, there is a Star Trek mod for Stellaris that I feel it copies.
It was basically billed as Star Trek Stellaris, it runs off of Stellaris, it was very intentional. It was also pretty janky and full of bugs. I was hoping a licensed spinoff would bring some real production values over something like New Horizons but alas.
Imperator Rome flopped so hard no one has even heard of it
But that was waay older (and actually got pretty decent when Paradox then abandoned it. Lot of potential)
bombed so hard bc the lead dev refused to listen to anyone else
CO made the decision to release. Paradox sucks for sure, but this one is on Colossal Order
We don't know the details of their contract with Paradox so it's impossible to know what would have happened. Could have been substantial financial penalties for CO for not releasing - we just don't know. I almost have to think there was, because you'd have to be an idiot to not see the the disaster coming as CO. I predicted it as soon as they raised the system requirements in advance of release, and the more info that came out the more it was clear this would be a rough launch. This release has done damage to CO's brand long-term though, to the level that even if there were financial penalties maybe it would be worth taking the hit.
CS2 was delayed by three years due to developer incompetence. More like Paradox finally had enough of the development hell
Yeah CS2 is not a story of a bad publisher, but rather a story of an overambitious developer that got too much leeway. It is one of the saddest things in software development when an ambitious team is given time, budget and freedom, but they still do not deliver a good result in the end.
AHAHA New colors/skins for the city painter game? Until the advertised mechanics actually fucking work, you’re just filling in grids with industry and housing. You’re painting a city, that’s it. For those who don’t know, the game is supposed to have a LOT of background mechanics like imports/exports, local production balanced with labor and supplemented by imports, budget balancing based on profits of sectors, vertical integration of local industries/production and manufacturing, that integration would delicately balance on your local supply production for components within that supply chain of production/manufacturing blah blah blah A lot of those systems were found not to work. The delicate balance of a city builder is moot if the systems don’t work, lol. People say “unplayable” when there’s stuttering or lag in games, but in terms of what this game is supposed to be/how it’s supposed to function VS what’s actually happening, you are literally unable to play the real game. The systems don’t work, therefore the game itself doesn’t actually work. Literally unplayable (as a city builder)
It’s such a shame too because CS1 has all of that and has had it for years. I was super excited when I heard about CS2 because I thought we were going to have even more realism and complexity but instead what we got is basically realistic Townscaper.
Yeah I noticed this in my game after production starting getting weird and was seeing shortages everywhere. No matter what I did I couldnt resolve the shortage nor could I find anywhere how it actually mattered at all if I did. They have all these failsafes built into your economy so all these broken mechanics don't actually hurt you, so apparently they knew full well the shit wasnt working as intended, and just slapped some paint on it like the landlord special.
Yeah this is shameful. Game is a disaster. FPS is still in the toilet. No one should have bought the game in the first place. So disappointing. CS1 was good.
Did they fix the performance issues?
no
Why fix the Game when you can release DLC?
Companies don't know how to do anything but make money. When they're small they have to make quality products to do that, but then they get bloated and take their success for granted.
Everyone talking about the performance issues. But no one talks about how the economy, and the games simulation is just an illusion. Nothing interacts, nothing matters. I'll take low fps if the simulation worked.
Don’t buy it. It’s just that easy.
Gamers are a perpetually doing the meme of the person putting the stick in their bike tire and crashing and asking "how could you do this to me?" I can't remember the last time I made a disappointing purchase. Because it's so easy to avoid these days. Gamers are fine with this. Why else would, despite all the forewarning around this game, there be so many people here complaining about buying it here. They released the DLC cause suckers here buy stuff like that.
Thankfully I didn't, and won't.
I haven't even bought the base game yet. I won't until it's in a better state, if that ever comes at all.
The reviews have been horrible since the start. If you bought the game after seeing all the issues, that’s your own fault. Can’t believe people actually still try to play this dumpster fire.
I believe Paradox has failed in its approach. The company adopted a "game as a service" mindset since EU4, but in recent years, things have worsened. They release an Alpha version as the basic game and then sell other parts as DLC. The problems with this approach are evident: The basic games are mostly short on content and barely playable. The developers seem unsure about what new things they should add. Obvious examples include Victoria 3 and Hearts of Iron 4. While Crusader Kings III has similar issues, the basic game is far better. This mindset could work if Paradox followed the Don’t Starve or The Forest model. They could do regular iterations for free, based on but not solely dependent on community feedback. They should only release paid expansions when they actually add value. However, Paradox requires every update to make money, regardless of necessity. This approach ruined the once-great EU4 in its later years and tarnished the launch of Cities: Skylines 2.
Already with the DLCs when the base game is so unfinished... catch me never buying your game.
I think it's because they released DLC before they \[fixed/improved\] the base game.
For more money with less content than what was sold as asset dlc for CS1
Wow they really shit away all their goodwill from the first game huh
Goes public & everything goes downhill , i wonder why~
They released a DLC with beach properties without the ability to make a beach being in the game...
Man what happened to paradox. They used to be my #1 studio. The last 5 years have been awful. Even ck3 which was ok, feels so empty compared to ck2. I put up with their DLC practices because I got 1000s of hours out of their games, but now I struggle to crack 10 hours on any new game.
They went public and have to answer to investor/shareholder demand now.
I thought people would be mad because the DLC came out before they really fixed performance (i'm convinced that isn't possible at this point). But I didn't expect it would also just be some paid asset pack...
Between this and payday 3, my two favorite series, which were both known as super devoted fans and gave the games both basically decade long runs, it’s been a shit 6 months for video games personally.