Cities: Skylines 2 was surrounded by controversy days before its recent release, as its developers announced that the game would launch on its scheduled date but not in the best possible condition. Thus, both the developer Colossal Order and the publisher Paradox Interactive kept their promise and released the highly anticipated city management and construction title on October 24th for PC. However, it arrived with very noticeable performance issues, as they had already warned.
A few hours after the mentioned game’s release, and with several player criticisms regarding the performance issues, its developers communicated their intentions to improve the experience as much as possible. They also took the opportunity to reiterate once again that their goal is to make Cities: Skylines 2 run at 30 FPS, the ideal frame rate for this game, according to the developer.
Cities: Skylines 2 hopes to address its issues with upcoming updates
Through a blog post, Colossal Order has stated its intention to address the issues in the game. They aim to resolve problems experienced by some users with specific hardware configurations, eliminate flickering caused by synchronization issues in the simulation, and implement GPU optimization and balance improvements. Additionally, they plan to enhance CPU optimizations that have not been completed yet as part of the ongoing process.
Furthermore, the studio also recommends reducing the game’s resolution to at least 1080p, as well as disabling depth of field, volumetrics, and global illumination to achieve a FPS rate that allows players to enjoy the game in the best possible way. Additionally, Colossal Order aims to expand its scaling options, including compatibility with AMD’s FSR2 and Nvidia’s DLSS2, once the game supports the Temporal Anti-Aliasing system used by both scalers.
It’s worth noting that, despite the numerous improvements Cities: Skylines 2 is set to receive, at least as indicated by its developers, the goal remains to achieve a stable 30 FPS. “It’s worth mentioning that for a game like this, the performance goal is to run it at a consistent minimum of 30 FPS. There is no real benefit in a city builder to aim for higher FPS,” the developer states. They also emphasize that “a growing city will inevitably be limited by the CPU.”
With the announcement of the upcoming improvements for the game published by Paradox Interactive, the studio also explained the reason why the game was released on PC despite having multiple issues, as they themselves acknowledged. “We came to the conclusion that performance is not a decisive factor for every player. For us, the number one priority is that players have fun with the game, and we have seen enough player comments from those who enjoy the game,” which is why they found it more unfair to postpone its release than to launch it in the state they did.
We will see if Cities: Skylines 2 manages to redeem itself from its current state on PC and if, by the time the game is released on consoles, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S, it can be in its best possible state.
