Publisher Paradox Interactive and developer Colossal Order launched the highly anticipated city builder and management experience Cities: Skylines 2 on October 24. However, just as the studio warned, the game turned out to be a mess in the performance department for many players. Today, Colossal Order gave an update on things its planning to bring for improving the situation.
Despite saying that Cities: Skylines 2 has been developed with hardware in mind "for the future," the developer says it expects performance to improve with upcoming game updates.
The issues are not "deeply rooted" to the game's foundation, according to Colossal Order, meaning it will be able to solve the stuttering, the high GPU usage, and further optimize how the game uses the CPU in upcoming patches. The game's fidelity shouldn't be affected by a large margin with its changes, per the studio.
As for current players, the studio recommends dropping the resolution to at least 1080p, disabling Depth of Field and Volumetrics, and Global Illumination to get a playable frame rate.
Upscaling solutions like FSR2 and DLSS2 for gaining extra performance are also in the development pipeline. However, a release date was not shared today as some of the game's objects aren't compatible with the use of Temporal Anti-aliasing in those tech features.
The studio added that while frame rates will improve with patches, it's target performance will remain at 30FPS for recommended hardware:
"It is worth mentioning that for a game like this, the performance target is to run at a steady 30FPS minimum. There is no real benefit in a city builder to aim for higher FPS (unlike a multiplayer shooter) as a growing city will inevitably become CPU-bound. What matters more with this type of game is to avoid stutters and have a responsive UI."
As for its decision to keep the launch date instead of postponing the release for further optimizations, Colossal Order said "while some setups on PC have challenges, we concluded the performance is not a dealbreaker for all the players. For us, the number one priority is for the players to have fun with the game, and we had seen enough feedback from players enjoying the game that it would be more unfair to postpone."
At the time of writing, the over 10,000 user reviews on Steam sit at 50% approval with a "Mixed" rating attached to it.
Cities: Skylines 2 is now available via Steam and the Microsoft Store for $49.99. The city-builder is also a part of the PC Game Pass subscription service. The game's Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5 versions are incoming in Spring 2024 following the recent delay.
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