The game could chug at launch depending on your settings, and to be clear, their defaults were fundamentally broken, some of the settings that made performance tank were engaged on ALL the default presets. But even at launch it could be made to be playable on most hardware… at the cost of looking basically the same as CS1. They’ve since patched some of the biggest offenders and it’s now smoother than that, too.
But they came out with a preemptive warning, instead of delaying for a short time and fixing those basics and now it’s a meme that the game doesn’t work on any hardware, and the extremely debatable “can’t even do 30fps on a 4090” thing became widespread as well.
FWIW, it’s not rare for sequels to take a long time to replace the previous game under that business model. If you look at all the Sims games they probably overlap quite a bit for a while. I played CS2 for 25 hours and stepped away to start playing some other things. Honestly, the performance bugs annoyed me less than some of the weird design and balance things that were also either broken or counterintuitively designed, although they’ve fixed a bunch of those, too. But I did enjoy getting my first city to megalopolis status and I’ll definitely come back to it.
Sounds like a fair take. I’ll probably buy it eventually.
Yeah, I’m intimately aware with things like The Sims. In fact, I’ve been a fan of the series since the very first one. And I own just about every expansion pack made for it.
Usually I’ll switch versions when there’s at least two, three packs out and a bunch of user content. Jumping on at launch is a frustrating affair. I also stopped playing CS when CS2 was forced upon us. That was just too barebones for me to be worth playing.
To me it felt more like a blend of new features, missing features and parts of the game that just work differently now.
I didn’t even get deeply into some of the mechanics on my first run (parking, for instace) and more complexity isn’t always better, so I often spent more time on these on vanilla, but if they make a beefy expansion and keep fixing bugs it may prompt me to return and see how much the balance of my old city and the process of making a new one are impacted.
I’m not sure what a “proper SimCity” means at this point. It’s not like the SC4 team is still around, and Skylines 1 was basically taking the concepts of the SimCity reboot and implementing them on a game without the tech limitations of that release. A new “official” SimCity would have to be either basically Cities Skylines-like… or a completely different game, which at that point would defeat the purpose.
I mean, I’d play another big-budget city builder, but at this point I don’t think the brand holds much weight for me.
It was a PR mistake, I’d say.
The game could chug at launch depending on your settings, and to be clear, their defaults were fundamentally broken, some of the settings that made performance tank were engaged on ALL the default presets. But even at launch it could be made to be playable on most hardware… at the cost of looking basically the same as CS1. They’ve since patched some of the biggest offenders and it’s now smoother than that, too.
But they came out with a preemptive warning, instead of delaying for a short time and fixing those basics and now it’s a meme that the game doesn’t work on any hardware, and the extremely debatable “can’t even do 30fps on a 4090” thing became widespread as well.
FWIW, it’s not rare for sequels to take a long time to replace the previous game under that business model. If you look at all the Sims games they probably overlap quite a bit for a while. I played CS2 for 25 hours and stepped away to start playing some other things. Honestly, the performance bugs annoyed me less than some of the weird design and balance things that were also either broken or counterintuitively designed, although they’ve fixed a bunch of those, too. But I did enjoy getting my first city to megalopolis status and I’ll definitely come back to it.
Sounds like a fair take. I’ll probably buy it eventually.
Yeah, I’m intimately aware with things like The Sims. In fact, I’ve been a fan of the series since the very first one. And I own just about every expansion pack made for it.
Usually I’ll switch versions when there’s at least two, three packs out and a bunch of user content. Jumping on at launch is a frustrating affair. I also stopped playing CS when CS2 was forced upon us. That was just too barebones for me to be worth playing.
To me it felt more like a blend of new features, missing features and parts of the game that just work differently now.
I didn’t even get deeply into some of the mechanics on my first run (parking, for instace) and more complexity isn’t always better, so I often spent more time on these on vanilla, but if they make a beefy expansion and keep fixing bugs it may prompt me to return and see how much the balance of my old city and the process of making a new one are impacted.
Honestly, this whole situation just makes me wish we’d get another proper Sim City. I put ungodly hours into them, especially 4. Maybe one day…
I’m not sure what a “proper SimCity” means at this point. It’s not like the SC4 team is still around, and Skylines 1 was basically taking the concepts of the SimCity reboot and implementing them on a game without the tech limitations of that release. A new “official” SimCity would have to be either basically Cities Skylines-like… or a completely different game, which at that point would defeat the purpose.
I mean, I’d play another big-budget city builder, but at this point I don’t think the brand holds much weight for me.
Well I’m a nostalgic old fart for sure. And I know the chances of it are below zero. Still, nostalgia sells. Who knows what can happen.