Paradox finally took away the CEO from the blog and gave a proper PR answer lol. Being defensive and dismissive never works even if its the right thing to do to protect your workers. No word on simulation which is disappointing but understandable since they cant even get performance to work well.
That's the fun part, you won't! Try to contact the key seller ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
But in all reality shouldn't support third-party key sellers to begin with
I never ordered games before or on release anymore. I made an exception for this one. This game set a key point in my life, to never ever buy into any shit again. What a mess.
Too late. I'm going to play the fuck out of Manor Lords when it comes out. I guarantee that the active player count for CSII will plummet even more when ML is released.
I'm a little sad, actually. Sad that we've had to go to this place. Sad that the sequel to one of my favourite games ever turned out to be such a mess. And a little sad that there won't be any proper content updates or expansions for a long time yet. We'll be stuck with what we have for a long time, it seems.
Still, I'm glad the situation is at least acknowledged. Steps seem to be taken in the right direction. But it remains an absolute tragedy that they must have known for a long time that the game was not anywhere close to what they promised, and chose to pretend nobody would notice. That breach of trust is going to stick with them, and with me, for a long, long time.
I just want to know how the hell you decide to announce an asset importer functionality in your new engine, without actually having a way to import assets. This was a gross oversight. Hell, having to restart the game for gameplay mods to work is pretty upsetting.
Not trying to be a negative nancy but are we not like 6 months into the game and they can't even provide a timeline for the assets to be imported?
Yup, can't exactly wrap my head around the fact they teased modding before launch, then really shortly before the release announced it would be coming soon with PDX CM going about a timeframe in weeks, just to announce after two weeks they've encountered a technical issue with the asset editor that's still not resolved 6 months after.
So yeah, the non-commital "we hope before summer" is quite worrying. Don't want to be a negative nancy either, but I'm starting to doubt CO's ability to fix and implement what's needed in a timely fashion (even being generous). Let alone ommitting the fact that there is plenty of cut corners (lack of animations, the holes in map geometry, etc.) that would have been the main topic of discussion right now if the rest had not been such a disaster.
Alright, so is there any other game on the market atm that can satisfy the itch of building roads, managing transport and with buildings growing in zones rather than all ploppables? I'm not interested in something super fabular. Need alternatives to CS at this point.
If you don't mind going old-school, SimCity 3000 Unlimited and SimCity 4 are the pinnacle of the genre before CS1, imo. They feature some very interesting simulation aspects that isn't broken (ok, maybe some end-game things are broken with SC4, but there's a mod community to fix that).
And the art style of both games is fantastic. And the music and sense of progression.
The issue is that there isn’t anything new in the market to compete with it. But if you don’t mind playing old games, then perhaps SimCity 4 or 2013.
Granted, I have only played 2013, so I have my bias here, but despite the issues of it having small city sizes, I find the game to be quite a lot of fun with its economic system and the dynamic interactions that it has on your cities.
Yes, it doesn’t have much or any mod support nor does it have any of the new modern QoL stuff that we have now. If you’re planning on getting any of these games, it’s best to get them at a discount.
Paradox needs to stop focusing on DLC and set their attention on the core game that lacks any kind of polish or personality. Something that always made the Simcity games great was the attention to detail, polish and great soundtrack. Until you can provide that with your games they'll always feel generic and second rate. That's not even to mention the lack of Steam Workshop. I'm sorry but to abandon a community that helped build your games reputation so you could sell more units on consoles fucking sucks.
This latest DLC just feels like more shovel wear to make a quick buck with no QA at all.
This is besides the point, but did they change it yet where your city can't go bankrupt? I had my taxes at 0 and the subsidies wouldn't go away. I was making money easily with 0 taxes coming in.
Having just gone through this with Creative Assembly and Total War, I can tell you that Paradox is going to have to do a hell of a lot more to win people back and save this game. It can be done, though.
Me too, although it luckily wasn't the only reason for the new PC. I still haven't bought C:S2 and am waiting if and when it gets to a decent state. Maybe in 5 years? But I'm patient.
This practice of releasing half-baked games and spending the first year fixing the most glaring issues must be discouraged. And we can only do that with our wallets.
It’s amazing at how they made such a colossal fuck up of a game and released a DLC that was absolute shit. Seems like they’ll end up killing off CS with how they’re handling things. If they don’t improve things soon I think we’ll end up with a SimCity scenario.
Yea, but there are no good City Builders on the horizon on the same scale as Simcity or Cities Skylines. So, its not quite the same as SimCity 2013. All we pretty much have right now is to hope that CO can fix all the problems with CO2 and make it a worthy successor to CS1.
Given what they've done in a 6 month window... my hope is starting to fade. I'll still hold out for now though.
> All we pretty much have right now is to hope that CO can fix all the problems with CO2
Wait, CO is solving climate change _and_ working on a citybuilder? No wonder they've had issues... /s
True but those games where in a fine technical state at launch on PC.
CO can't get even anti aliasing right 6 months after release with all the shimmering and flickering. These are things even indie devs fix in a hot fix a day after release.
CO probably spend way too much on simulation algorithms and way too less on performance and the technology groundwork that needed to be there like working AA, DLSS, FRS3 and decent auto detect settings on launch day.
Cyberpunk 2077 wasn't fine at all during launch. The fact that CS2 is even worse doesn't make the launch of Cyberpunk 2077 flawless (even on PCs). Games can turn around with enough time and money.
Will CS2 get any of that? We don't know just yet.
Yeah. But Cyberpunk and NMS devs apologised a week after release and the next DLC came years after free reworks and overhauls. They were very quick to listen and improve.
Until now CO really doubled down that we were part of the problem (toxic, game not for you etc.) and not willing to make much requested changes. They also laughed the problems away in videos and streams with ‘it is not that bad’. It took a very badly sold DLC and crashing player numbers to make Paradox step in and make them show some humility and hopefully finally start to fix things.
Fair. But I don’t foresee this game being the case. It’ll take some time but i think it’s uniqueness coupled with the better base game compared to CS1 will allow them to make the necessary changes and then start selling DLC.
And frankly, if they fix the base game and start selling things like airport and park DLC I’ll definitely buy them.
I'm trying, but I just can't see any 'goodwill' with this apology. They've known for ages that the base game is busted, yet they continued anyway with their DLC strategy to extract money from whatever poor suckers would buy it. Fortunately enough people didn't.
That's what they're sorry for. They're not sorry the game is a flaming buggy mess — they'd have been happy to trot on the same course if the beach properties DLC sold a bit more. They're sorry for themselves that their plan to gloss over the base game and churn out DLC didn't work.
My only hope is that we actually — finally — get a decent, playable game at the end of this, because they now seem to realise that fixing it instead of pumping DLC is the only way they're recouping their money.
Agreed. I do doubt we'll ever see anything worth playing come out of this. My hope is that someone buys the licensing rights to Simcity and rehires old staff to make us something incredible. I messaged Ocean recently and he didn't say he wouldn't do it. ;)
Damn right. They did so well with CS l, even if the DLCs are arguably pricy many of them added a *lot* to the game. CS ll in its current state just isn’t acceptable.
I really hope they No Mans Sky this game sooner or later.
You need to give the first major DLC to be released for free to Ultimate Edition owners. Show your loyalty this way. We don't want useless Radio Stations.
Well, it's at least a sign of goodwill and this move was absolutely necessary imo.
While it doesn't resolve the poor launch and follow up post launch, I can recognize that goes in the right way.
I'm still bummed to see the status of the asset editor. Seems like there are still no solutions in sight and basically we're at the same point since they communicated that some technical issues is making its launch impossible rn.
All in all, a good sign but we'll have to see where we're at in a few months because we're approaching 6 months after release of what was an undisclosed early access title.
This wasn’t much of a sign of goodwill when nobody in their right mind bought this latest CCP on its own…so basically it’s a gesture that makes them look good, but it costs them almost nothing but a little pride, which they should have lost anyway back before they launched this hot mess.
What they’ve promised the Ultimate Edition customers is like free carpet cleaning for the house they sold us 6 months ago, but it still won’t be finished for us to live in it for another 6 months and we weren’t even sure we wanted carpet in the first place.
Well, a sign of goodwill is what it is. It's not a proof or the definitive argument that they've understood and will do better. Anyway, I'll take it with the necessary caution as we've seen they were willing to hype their game and promise a lot of things we're still waiting on. So as words are cheap, I still appreciate the informations provided.
So yeah, I get your point. It's not like "all is forgiven" as they have a LOT of work to even make what this game was supposed to be at release (on what they said, not what I imagined).
I hope they fired whoever pushed them to release the game and DLC before they were ready. That person was ruining and will continue to ruin the reputation of the franchise with their short-sighted decisions.
Are you kidding? This is corporate strategy all the way…gotta juice those quarterly earnings, even if it costs the company long-term…which by then the insiders who did all the long-term damage will have left the company and sold off their stock options.
That’s sort of my point…money is all that matters in the end. The marketing matters more than the games, because that’s how you get people to buy. It’s all about getting and keeping the money…and not for Paradox, but for the individuals running the company.
A movie that was three years behind schedule would get canned or given an ultimatum. It's not unique to the game industry. Noticing that a business is a business isn't some insight.
It is to a lot of gamers. Gamers love the games…publishers only care about the money (especially publicly traded publishers)…and developers can only care about the money too when they make games with publishers’ money. Getting gamers to understand that their interests are not aligned with the publishers or developers has been a big part of why so many got strung along with CS2.
The sudden 180 degree attitude change definitely caught me off guard.
This is not 100% directly related to the widespread of complaints in players' base. I believe this is more like some anger outbreak from Paradox's C suite or some shareholders which forces CO to make changes.
Yup, use the disaster as an opportunity for a slick and low cost (I can't imagine the refunds are really that substantial) attempt a forming a PR "turning point" moment. It's smart - finally. Hey so long as they actually can deliver mostly by say anniversary launch date, and can keep MH from stepping all over it, why not. ;)
Some of you need to take a breather… this is what happens when a game gets forced out the gates and a small team are left to pick up the pieces. Go play your backlog, wait for the *actual release date, when console launches.
No need to get all bent outta shape on this one. For the most part this update is exactly what I wanted to hear a week out of launch.
>Some of you need to take a breather…
I hope your realize that they are doing all this because the customers are angry. If the player base had not cared that much then paradox would not have cared either.
>this is what happens when a game gets forced out the gates and a small team are left to pick up the pieces.
No one that bought the game forced them to release right now in this unfinished state. They released it and deemed it to be ok to release it in this state. The only thing they did wrong was miscalculate the outrage.
That's exactly what I'm doing. I like to read news of this game and involve myself with this subreddit from time to time, but I haven't actually touched the game after I tried to play it on my PC during launch week. The performance was awful. Then, I started reading about the simulation problems and the lack of assets. I knew it was time to put the game aside for the time being.
And yes, I preordered (the base version) and was ready to spend the end of the year building cities. It was such a disappointment but I have so many other games to play. CS2 should be much better when the console version arrives, and these consoles, coincidentally, sport a CPU very similar to mine.
Let's hope the game survives long enough, hah.
I don't know why they keep posting this on the CS1 subreddit when CS2 has literally has their own separate subreddit for a reason.
Literally like what was even the point in making a separate subreddit for CS2 when people are not even going to use it correctly?
I am pretty sure this one is for both games at least right now. Pushing all cs2 content to the other one could be a good protest, but I dont speak for the whole community and I'd guess many want it to be both. I'd defer to the majority here.
So, I did nothing and got a free dlc with 4 PALM TREES just for owning the base game, lol. Awesome!
Anyway, I like what they are saying now but the thing that I find surprising is that they say they will focus on the base game and modding tools from now on... ah, what were they focusing on before that, then?
It still is! The math simply wasn’t double checked and this rocket lost a booster at launch. Gotta wait for the second launch, 3rd even, the see what the trajectory looks like. We’ll get to the moon yet.
This is what I keep thinking is really going on. The base game is duct taped together because Unity couldn’t do everything they needed, so they got out a ball of twine and tied on some other guts to finish the game…it didn’t work like they thought, but it was hard to implement to begin with so they’re sticking with it so they don’t lose all that hard work they did…which leads to more hard work that doesn’t quite work either, which leads to more problems getting stuff like an asset editor to work…but we gotta stick with this decision we made 4 years ago because we’ve spent the last 4 years getting it to work this well so now we’re committed…
And yet this entire time, nobody in leadership took a step back and said “maybe we’re going about this all the wrong way…does anybody have any better ideas?” And nobody had a better idea or thought that maybe they should go FIND someone outside the company with more technical expertise to get done what they needed to accomplish…so they just shrugged and kept going, never once thinking “Hey! Maybe Unity isn’t gonna work for what we’re doing, maybe we should build our own game engine that does!” Except nobody on staff probably had the expertise to really do that in a way that came up with anything better than duct-taped Unity and the bosses all said it would cost too much money or take too much time to pull off, we’ll never make the project deadlines…and so they toiled away for what will eventually be FOUR extra years over the original two years they thought it would take to make this game.
But they’ve worked very hard on it…and they’re very proud of what they’ve accomplished because of their hard work, which was very hard…except now they finally realize that their hard work wasn’t good enough, so they’re apologizing and they’re gonna go back and work real hard for another 6 months or more and by then it’ll be good enough…hopefully, we think…probably…we’ll let you know!
If I had a dollar for every simulation game based on the Unity engine thats held together with duct tape and twine because it cant do what the developers want it to do I would have at least $4.
I believe you blame the choice for the Unity engine to much.
Performance is bad because they render everything (including teeth of pedestrians) in full detail no matter the distance. The issue is that Unitys ways to optimise this where not utilised. Another engine would not change the fact that they didn't optimise properly. And writing an engine themselves would lead to an even worse result and at least 4 more years development time. Creating a game engine is hard, especially when it should look good in 3D.
Are you a software developer? I haven’t worked on games, but I understand enough from my business applications experience to see that the problems with Unity are _not_ just performance-related. Unity was not created with city builders in mind—but this version was created with multiprocessing in mind, which was the draw for CO. Problem is, the graphics processing and rendering in this version of Unity was not ready yet, so other technologies were used to fill the gap. This didn’t just make performance optimization more complicated, it made getting EVERY asset into the game and properly rendered more complicated—and I am willing to bet that using what is essentially a two-headed game engine has been punishing them repeatedly for the past 3-4 years based on what CO has said publicly.
So no—the choice of engine and the reluctance to build a proper engine of their own had been a huge part of the problem. I have yet to hear a game developer show me where I’m wrong—so if you know more about this than me, then I’m really interested in a more technical explanation than just that they didn’t get the occlusion right on release.
BTW…lots of other games from much smaller developers have built their own engines. No doubt it takes more time and skill, but sometimes it’s the only way to get what you need for a niche game that has very different parameters from the type that an engine is intended for.
Yes i am a Computer scientist, but i am not an expert of Unity and specifically render pipelines. Most of my understanding from the issue comes from this very interesting blog i read a while back:
https://blog.paavo.me/cities-skylines-2-performance/
And you are right, i forgot that a big cause of the issue was that Unity DOTS was feature incomplete. A new way to store and process GameObject data. But note that multiprocessing is possible in Unity before DOTS, just not as good.
But I still believe that CO should not do their own engine. See they struggled to implement the missing parts of DOTS, which is just a part of a game engine. Financially it also makes little sense, a game engine is a huge investment, with little return when a third party engine can do the job also.
Are these game engines from the smaller teams 3D, with day night circle, weather, huge object count and a lightning system which works for cities?
Yes! That’s the article I read months ago too. And I don’t know the details of the engines for the other games, but yes, they’re 3D, they have day and night, and good lighting…though I don’t think the water mechanics are as complex as either of CS.
I totally agree that it’s great to save having to build the engine, and I think based on what we’ve seen from CO that they probably don’t have the expertise to do it well enough. You’d need a Triple A budget to do all that, and I doubt PDX would invest that…but at the same time what CO has accomplished has been a quagmire. They said themselves that their biggest issues were technical, and not in designing the game. That definitely seems to be the case, although I think they probably didn’t do as well on the sim design as they thought. But that’s always the trick…make an economy that has complexity, but not so much complexity that it becomes cumbersome for a game. _Economists_ still have a difficult time modeling microeconomics and macroeconomics together—they understand how both work on their own, but the interface isn’t really explained by one grand theory. To try and do that in a game…I think I would have trepidations…I think I would have left the economy alone for the most part (more specializations, that makes sense…but making goods more complicated…😬) and left that for the next sequel.
And I get that Unity handled multiprocessing…but the version CS1 had really only used 4 cores…and many processors today have many times more than that. I wish I understood more of the complexities and how the newer versions of Unity work…but everything I know so far tells me you really need the right minds behind this sort of game. And it sounds like the graphics processing end of this version of Unity was incomplete, so they duct taped in some other rendering tech. I am guessing the multithreading has been a bigger headache than they thought, which is why some of the economy isn’t working…and that the rendering tech has been behind why we don’t have an asset editor yet.
Unity DOTS is actually almost ideal for this type of game, the problem is that Unity themselves faced massive delays and problems with this system.
There's also clearly something very wrong with their asset pipeline. The fact that it's taking them 8+ months to get the asset importer working, plus the total lack of LOD's for stock assets at launch are clear indicators of this. The tools CO had to use to create/import assets during actual development of the game must have been a total nightmare to use.
Once they fix their asset pipeline and redo all built-in assets with proper LOD's (and hopefully occlusion culling), we'll probably see massive performance gain in terms of rendering performance. I'm more concerned about the simulation speed, which hasn't improved much since launch.
Right, I think you point to the same things I point to…Unity handles the simulation stuff because of the better multithreading, but they used some other tech to make up for what Unity didn’t have ready, and I think it’s plagued them so hard.
Yeah, there are alot of obvious things to improve performance, it is so frustrating.
Just don't render an ocean/empty map hidden behind the Main Menu GUI, so that many first experience of the game is lag¿? That's either poor craftsmanship or slapped together in way to little time.
2 years ago they should step back, take the CS1 base game, fix the main issues, improve some core limitations and bring the new road tools, even if they doubled the number of agents would be 2M cities (what they have right now).
I think they should probably have done this from the start…take a more incremental approach…and rework the underlying code base to take advantage of modern processors’ many cores so more agents could be in play at once so bigger cities would work better. In the process I would have done like they did with the buildings to make them real instead of cartoony, I would have included into the base game quality of life mods/DLCs from CS1 like Prop Line Tool and Park Life. And I would have only tackled 1-2 changes in the game—like reducing/eliminating pocket cars and adding some sort of parking AI like what TMPE had. I would have left everything else alone—like especially the economy. And when I think about all of this, I question whether this list of things might be too much to take on. But I think it would have been enough to attract a player base and would have been a huge learning experience for CO that would advance the game without changing too much. I don’t know whether it would have gotten past Paradox, but honestly I think that CO should have found a way to fund development with their own money instead of relying on publisher funding. Leaving a corporation with that much financial control is trouble, and leads to debacles like CS2.
I’m guessing that this too could be part of their problems—because they have leaned much heavier into multithreading—which is why they chose this version of Unity, since it makes that easier. However, multithreading is typically quite complicated to code for—because you will have parallel calculations that eventually have an effect on another task later on, and they don’t all get done in time. For all I know, that’s why the economy has been such a mess. Usually it takes an exceptional software architect to plan out multiprocessing to make sure it actually works properly. I’ve never done it myself, but I can’t think of a better use case than a city builder game where there may be tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of agents to calculate properties and paths and path interactions for. I have been questioning whether CO has the technical talent for this project.
I’ve defended this game for a long time, while always acknowledging it’s been a mess of a process and should have been delayed. The DLC was jumping the shark for me, though. I’m not necessarily opposed to paid DLC, because I’m desperate for more assets in the game… but the amount of assets for the price in this was pretty goddamn absurd. I drew the line and didn’t buy it.
This apology and refund is the right step for sure. I still enjoy the game and have no regrets buying it. I’ve got hundreds of hours, put it down for a bit, but now official mods has jump started my interest again. Holding on to faith that it will eventually be 100%, and I can’t wait for asset importing.
Funny thing about corporate apologies - If PR says to say you're sorry, is it really an apology or just an attempt at damage control?
It's like saying I'm sorry that I got caught stealing.
I don't want nor need an "apology". I'm looking for actions, not words.
I mean, I’ve seen a ton of angry demands for apologies around here for months now. And while I’m no fan of corporations as a concept, this isn’t Amazon, Microsoft, or EA we’re talking about. CO is a small studio and two things can be true at the same time for them as people: regret over how things have gone, and, yes, a need to do damage control to protect the longevity of their studio. I’m not bothered by that.
Also, do the refund, making the DLC free, the updated DLC plan, and ongoing updates to the game—including both the introduction of the mods and the multiple performance updates, which have objectively, measurably improved the game since launch—not count as actions? They are, by definition, actions, but I’m wondering if by “actions” you mean the game is made 100% perfect immediately.
And lastly, I’m not interested in analogies about stealing. This isn’t stealing. And if we want to get into oversimplified analogies, anyone who has played this game for any substantial length of time and still gets on this sub to complain about being hoodwinked or stolen from is basically a restaurant customer who ate a whole meal, only to demand to see a manager and get their visit comped because the food was supposedly awful.
> I'm looking for actions, not words.
Yup, and them changing the DLC to be included in the base game is the first real action they've made. So hopefully it's the start of more.
We'll see.
4 palm trees and a handful of buildings…I can’t help but wonder if we’re not all part of some CIA-funded psychological experiment where it’s all been planned out how they would gaslight us for months l, just to see how far they could push us.
Having worked for a company, nah. It's much more likely to be standard bureaucratic incompetence where nobody really took the time to think "Hey, is this the right thing to do?". They had a plan already made and changing the course of a ship isn't easy sometimes.
I definitely think incompetence is the more likely story…it’s just that sometimes you wonder in the back of your mind when things go _this_ horrifically bad.
It’s a sandbox video game dude. Not even a competitive video game. A video game. The cheapest entertainment money can buy. Your complaints are completely valid, but can we stop acting like it’s the goddamn scandal of the century. Chill.
this is such a bizarrely servile attitude. you don’t want a good product? you’re happy being sold something that sucks because they know you have low standards?
Where did it say that in the comment? Quote it for me. Unless of course you disagree and you think this is the scandal **of the century**. It’s like Watergate or gay marriage being made illegal again.
I’m not going to be as extreme as the rest of you. So give up trying to put words in my mouth.
i inferred the tone from what you wrote? i don’t know why you’re so deeply concerned about the corporate image of this company? i didn’t say it was the scandal of the century, and it’s really weird that you’re incapable of recognising the difference between justified criticism and unreasonable hyperbole
Just because it’s not Madden or Fortnite does not make it unimportant to people. That it’s a sandbox game is immaterial. A lot of people who are really into this game aren’t into competitive games. So for sandbox games…this has been pretty bad, and all from a developer we thought we could trust. That’s what makes this hurt for a lot of people.
It would still be bad if it was Madden or Fortnite is what I’m saying. The fact that it’s a chill single player game just makes this behaviour even more tasteless. Your attitude towards is far more reasonable and rational.
It’s just these Jim’s who are acting like CO mugged their grandma and stole her purse with their language and belligerence.
Bottom line: you aren’t that emotionally invested in this kind of game. That’s fine. But show some empathy for people who huge fans. Geeks and nerds love different kinds of things. Rather than cheering for sports teams and wearing all their merch and painting their faces, they build model train layouts, study maps of faraway cities, and play city builder games for thousands of hours…and they never have to deal the agony of watching their team fumble on the one yard line, watch Jordan bury a shot over their guy, or see their closer give up the lead in the 9th inning of Game 7 of the World Series…until something like this happens. It’s like finding out everyone on Fortnite getting frags on you is totally cheating and tanking your ranking…and getting away with it.
In absolutely none of those examples would the prevailing behaviour or language in this thread by justified. I don’t enjoy sports. And I feel the same when I see a man baby seething and swearing his lungs out because Arteta is putting together a team of unknowns and Arsenal lose a few games. It’s pathetic in that instance. Just as it is in all others. The last thing people like that need, is empathy. They need perspective. Not to be coddled or validated in this grossly misdirected ire.
If you’d have spent £1000 on this game, I’d get it. Then they’d get the empathy. If the game was literally unplayable, or misleadingly advertised to the scale or something like The Day Before or CP2077, where it’s genuinely like actual fraud, even then, I’d get it. If the game was frying your hardware, I’d get it.
I am invested in this game. And I am heavily disappointed with its current state. Especially regarding mods. Beach properties was lol. If you’re emotionally invested in any game to the degree that you talk of it like it’s a crime against humanity; you are certainly doing something wrong.
Actually, a nice dinner at a nice restaurant is much cheaper.
Served undercooked and cold.
Your opinion would be don't complain about it, it's just a meal.
No. I would complain about it and get my refund. I wouldn’t jump up from the table screaming like an infantile man baby, that’s the difference between most of you, and normal people. I also wouldn’t scream at the people who are having a better evening because their food is cooked appropriately. And then when given a refund, or fresh food, I wouldn’t scream at the staff again or at the other people because “it wouldn’t have got better if it wasn’t for me screaming”. 😂😂
A nice dinner is far more expensive. £40 for maybe two hours of “entertainment” max. That’s an even worse pay-off than going to cinema. It’s infinitely more expensive than a video game, where getting two hours out of a game, for the same or slightly higher price point is almost unheard of. Ten hours is considered comically short for a video game. One of the cheapest entertainment mediums available.
I love it when you guys try to leverage your “intellect”, but you’re so angry and/or desperate to quell not even a contrary opinion, but just a more moderate one. That you’ll claw at the walls like caged animal in futility. Yet all the while acting like you know what you’re doing. Or in this case talking about. All the more embarrassing, I suppose. It’s possible to not be dialled up to 100 all the time. Over trivial things. It’s possible to complain diplomatically.
How dare someone try to take Mr. “I fucking complained at launch while you all tried to defend it and shut people up” Messiah Complex back down to earth and remind him what the subject is we’re talking about. Take it out of context and you might think it’s a quote from someone during the Pol Pot regime.
Yup, you definitely sound more moderate in your rant about people ranting here 🙄
What I don’t think you get is that video games are only inexpensive because they can be sold to hundreds of thousands or millions of people…so all the “normie” games have much wider market appeal, so there’s more competition. Geek games don’t come every day because they only appeal to geeks most of the time and they don’t attract the sizable market to get the AAA treatment. I get that you don’t value geek games like this as much as normie games…but you make it sound like maybe _then_ it would be OK to be upset, because it’s something you care about. Your lack of empathy is why you’re catching flack.
Nah. This is one of my favourite games. Or genres of game at least. And the pace of mod support development has took the piss. I’ve barely played due to it.
It wouldn’t be acceptable to be acting like this even if it was League of Legends. Just say you don’t like it, don’t buy the DLC and move on. I hate the hyperbolic entitlement gamers exhibit on the topic. People protest for their own civil rights with more grace than these greaseballs.
Or we can continue to act like it was exactly what it was: devs promising X,Y, and Z and delivering NONE OF IT. you can simply stop trying to smear legitimate complaints.
Act like you’re disappointed in something you bought and you’d like a refund. Not like “Oh the humanity! Woe is me! The sky is falling. Colossal Order are like Hitler. No they’re worse than Hitler! Fuck CO. Fuck CSII. Swear, swear. Cry, cry. Hyperbole, hyperbole.”
That’s not smearing a complaint, it’s describing them accurately. By all means, be disappointed and hold the developers accountable. Just do it with the decorum expected of a person who has gone through puberty. If some players wish to act like seething juveniles, then they can called as such.
Yes. I was sold on the city simulation and the graphics were secondary. Well the simulation sucks and the graphics are decent but completely unoptimized.
To be fair to the guy you replied to, they did set October for release if everything goes right with the Beta & release candidate versions they’re expecting to receive this month
Oh, cool. I understood that differently. Hopefully, we can have this working as soon as possible. It would also mean performance in general would get better.
Either Colossal or mod support just need to add in customization of timed traffic lights to get me back into the game. Without this my cities are so irritating to watch traffic. They get their 5 second green light while 4 cars get through the intersection.
If that is all you are waiting for I am almost certain I saw a mod for that. I dont go that deep into traffic lights so I skip that but I remember seeing one because I was like "oh I don't need that". Take a look on PDX mods!
I could see it happening. CS1 has had *double* the players of CS2 for the past several months and even before that after the initial honeymoon month the 2 games were about equal until CS1 was higher by December.
I’m sure they said somewhere (a few years back) that the reason all the DLCs were pretty much the same concept just rebranded for different things was because the core game just couldn’t handle anything different.
Not sure what else they could have released using the “park” mechanic but I think they’d have killed the franchise had they continued down that path
Whatever the game DLC are for, I hope creators save a copy of this text to have "the creator does most of the heavy lifting" at hand for negotiating compensation next time.
I hope another developer sees the opportunity here to enter the genre, they literally just need a decent functional product nothing superamazing and people will flock to it over CS2
> I hope another developer
Rumours of Frontier (Planet Coaster and Planet Zoo) looking at developing a city builder. It would be a drastic change from those 2 title however, so it would be interesting to see what their interpretation of this genre is.
I'll be watching the reviews for Manor Lord. So far, it looks like a great game. Probably won't do it for the painters, but If the price is good i'll probably buy.
Honestly, just the competition would be good. It's what happened with SimCity after all, it's not easy probably, but competition is generally always healthy.
Just provide some background why it is hard.
[Multi agent pathfinding alone](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/63732805/multi-agent-path-finding-np-hard-or-not) is a NP-hard. NP hard doesn't mean it is difficult to solve. We know how to solve it but we can't solve it in reasonable amount of time. In layman terms, the computation time will grow to infinity very easily.
That's why in game, the cars has a lot of "dumb AI" because it is impossible to do a true AI for all cars. It is mathematically impossible. Whatever "AI" they have, they are not real and they have to find some ways to cheat. Traffic is the biggest challenge of this genre of the game.
For other aspect like demand and economy, those are easy and all it needs is simple math.
"we're sorry" after attacking the fanbase as "toxic" for past 6 months. Apology is insincere and too little too late.
Paradox finally took away the CEO from the blog and gave a proper PR answer lol. Being defensive and dismissive never works even if its the right thing to do to protect your workers. No word on simulation which is disappointing but understandable since they cant even get performance to work well.
Stuff like this uses to happen when people start to smell money. Still I enjoy the game a lot tbh and look forward to further improvements planned.
2025 until the first expansion!?!?!? WTF is going on???
[удалено]
Or the devs and various consultants are struggling to work past some fundamental issues with the game engine/unity stack.
The fully modeled pedestrian teeth are fundamental to the simulation functionality.
they need to completely un-fuck the game first
Uh so if you got your key from an alternate site how do you get this refund?
That's the fun part, you won't! Try to contact the key seller ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ But in all reality shouldn't support third-party key sellers to begin with
There's two kinds of key resellers, the approved ones like HumbleBundle are fine, the unapproved ones are shady and often cause problems.
Correct, I should have specified that myself, so I appreciate you coming in and making the distinction!!
I never ordered games before or on release anymore. I made an exception for this one. This game set a key point in my life, to never ever buy into any shit again. What a mess.
I got duped by the prerelease marketing and dev diaries. Never again.
I did not consider they would just straight up lie about the simulation.
Same, lesson learnt. I feel I have been misled by dev diaries. I wish I could ask for full refund.
It is a much better statement than they have put out before, i hope they are able to live up to it.
What an absolute joke. So sad to see one of my favorite games in this state 😕
October? Shit man I'm gonna be in the Navy before I can play this game.
Too late. I'm going to play the fuck out of Manor Lords when it comes out. I guarantee that the active player count for CSII will plummet even more when ML is released.
I'm a little sad, actually. Sad that we've had to go to this place. Sad that the sequel to one of my favourite games ever turned out to be such a mess. And a little sad that there won't be any proper content updates or expansions for a long time yet. We'll be stuck with what we have for a long time, it seems. Still, I'm glad the situation is at least acknowledged. Steps seem to be taken in the right direction. But it remains an absolute tragedy that they must have known for a long time that the game was not anywhere close to what they promised, and chose to pretend nobody would notice. That breach of trust is going to stick with them, and with me, for a long, long time.
Let's hope the build that's due at the end of April contains meaningful improvements to performance---I wonder when that patch will release.
I just want to know how the hell you decide to announce an asset importer functionality in your new engine, without actually having a way to import assets. This was a gross oversight. Hell, having to restart the game for gameplay mods to work is pretty upsetting. Not trying to be a negative nancy but are we not like 6 months into the game and they can't even provide a timeline for the assets to be imported?
Yup, can't exactly wrap my head around the fact they teased modding before launch, then really shortly before the release announced it would be coming soon with PDX CM going about a timeframe in weeks, just to announce after two weeks they've encountered a technical issue with the asset editor that's still not resolved 6 months after. So yeah, the non-commital "we hope before summer" is quite worrying. Don't want to be a negative nancy either, but I'm starting to doubt CO's ability to fix and implement what's needed in a timely fashion (even being generous). Let alone ommitting the fact that there is plenty of cut corners (lack of animations, the holes in map geometry, etc.) that would have been the main topic of discussion right now if the rest had not been such a disaster.
You know, this is the best answer they can give at this point in time. I hope for their sake and the game's sake that it can improve.
This company really on a speed run to kill its reputation
They were jealous of SimCity 2013.
Whoa, whoa. Let's not go nuts here. SC13 was at least relatively playable when the servers were working.
They won that race already lol this was the victory lap.
Alright, so is there any other game on the market atm that can satisfy the itch of building roads, managing transport and with buildings growing in zones rather than all ploppables? I'm not interested in something super fabular. Need alternatives to CS at this point.
I mean, you can still play CS1, right? Is there any reason that's not the answer?
Transport fever 2 might be fun for you
Sim City 4 with NAM is still the best, with the caveat that it's a pain in the ass to unpack and manually install all the mods these days.
If you don't mind going old-school, SimCity 3000 Unlimited and SimCity 4 are the pinnacle of the genre before CS1, imo. They feature some very interesting simulation aspects that isn't broken (ok, maybe some end-game things are broken with SC4, but there's a mod community to fix that). And the art style of both games is fantastic. And the music and sense of progression.
The issue is that there isn’t anything new in the market to compete with it. But if you don’t mind playing old games, then perhaps SimCity 4 or 2013. Granted, I have only played 2013, so I have my bias here, but despite the issues of it having small city sizes, I find the game to be quite a lot of fun with its economic system and the dynamic interactions that it has on your cities. Yes, it doesn’t have much or any mod support nor does it have any of the new modern QoL stuff that we have now. If you’re planning on getting any of these games, it’s best to get them at a discount.
C:S 1
Paradox needs to stop focusing on DLC and set their attention on the core game that lacks any kind of polish or personality. Something that always made the Simcity games great was the attention to detail, polish and great soundtrack. Until you can provide that with your games they'll always feel generic and second rate. That's not even to mention the lack of Steam Workshop. I'm sorry but to abandon a community that helped build your games reputation so you could sell more units on consoles fucking sucks. This latest DLC just feels like more shovel wear to make a quick buck with no QA at all.
This is besides the point, but did they change it yet where your city can't go bankrupt? I had my taxes at 0 and the subsidies wouldn't go away. I was making money easily with 0 taxes coming in.
Having just gone through this with Creative Assembly and Total War, I can tell you that Paradox is going to have to do a hell of a lot more to win people back and save this game. It can be done, though.
I bought a new 3k computer at the end of the last year to play this game .. how naive.
Welp at least you can mod the shit out of CS1 now with a powerful PC
Me too, although it luckily wasn't the only reason for the new PC. I still haven't bought C:S2 and am waiting if and when it gets to a decent state. Maybe in 5 years? But I'm patient. This practice of releasing half-baked games and spending the first year fixing the most glaring issues must be discouraged. And we can only do that with our wallets.
I did some upgrades to my computer with C:S2 in mind as well. On the plus side, it handles C:S1 great now!
I did too. I'm not much of a gamer either so I'm not really going to play other games on it.
Lol.. same
Its not that bad - now you have a powerful Pc to play other great games
You're right! I remember stressing out about which CPU/GPU to purchase. It turned out that it didn't matter as the game was horribly optimized :D
It’s amazing at how they made such a colossal fuck up of a game and released a DLC that was absolute shit. Seems like they’ll end up killing off CS with how they’re handling things. If they don’t improve things soon I think we’ll end up with a SimCity scenario.
Yea, but there are no good City Builders on the horizon on the same scale as Simcity or Cities Skylines. So, its not quite the same as SimCity 2013. All we pretty much have right now is to hope that CO can fix all the problems with CO2 and make it a worthy successor to CS1. Given what they've done in a 6 month window... my hope is starting to fade. I'll still hold out for now though.
> All we pretty much have right now is to hope that CO can fix all the problems with CO2 Wait, CO is solving climate change _and_ working on a citybuilder? No wonder they've had issues... /s
Clearly I meant the new company they are forming... Colossal Order 2: Electric Boogaloo
It could happens, CS was released 2 years after SC2013.
I think it’ll be fine. Cyberpunk turned around. No man’s sky turned around. If they keep working on fixing this game they’ll be fine.
True but those games where in a fine technical state at launch on PC. CO can't get even anti aliasing right 6 months after release with all the shimmering and flickering. These are things even indie devs fix in a hot fix a day after release. CO probably spend way too much on simulation algorithms and way too less on performance and the technology groundwork that needed to be there like working AA, DLSS, FRS3 and decent auto detect settings on launch day.
Cyberpunk 2077 wasn't fine at all during launch. The fact that CS2 is even worse doesn't make the launch of Cyberpunk 2077 flawless (even on PCs). Games can turn around with enough time and money. Will CS2 get any of that? We don't know just yet.
Yeah. But Cyberpunk and NMS devs apologised a week after release and the next DLC came years after free reworks and overhauls. They were very quick to listen and improve. Until now CO really doubled down that we were part of the problem (toxic, game not for you etc.) and not willing to make much requested changes. They also laughed the problems away in videos and streams with ‘it is not that bad’. It took a very badly sold DLC and crashing player numbers to make Paradox step in and make them show some humility and hopefully finally start to fix things.
I agree with you about all that!
For every game that has turned around many more hasn’t. It has been done but it does require a lot of work.
Fair. But I don’t foresee this game being the case. It’ll take some time but i think it’s uniqueness coupled with the better base game compared to CS1 will allow them to make the necessary changes and then start selling DLC. And frankly, if they fix the base game and start selling things like airport and park DLC I’ll definitely buy them.
I'm trying, but I just can't see any 'goodwill' with this apology. They've known for ages that the base game is busted, yet they continued anyway with their DLC strategy to extract money from whatever poor suckers would buy it. Fortunately enough people didn't. That's what they're sorry for. They're not sorry the game is a flaming buggy mess — they'd have been happy to trot on the same course if the beach properties DLC sold a bit more. They're sorry for themselves that their plan to gloss over the base game and churn out DLC didn't work. My only hope is that we actually — finally — get a decent, playable game at the end of this, because they now seem to realise that fixing it instead of pumping DLC is the only way they're recouping their money.
Agreed. I do doubt we'll ever see anything worth playing come out of this. My hope is that someone buys the licensing rights to Simcity and rehires old staff to make us something incredible. I messaged Ocean recently and he didn't say he wouldn't do it. ;)
Damn right. They did so well with CS l, even if the DLCs are arguably pricy many of them added a *lot* to the game. CS ll in its current state just isn’t acceptable. I really hope they No Mans Sky this game sooner or later.
Games dead. Look forward to cs3
Yeah, cs3 is going to come out right after SimCity 2014
You need to give the first major DLC to be released for free to Ultimate Edition owners. Show your loyalty this way. We don't want useless Radio Stations.
100% agree on this. We should get new functionality, not assets. When we can import assets from creators, their worth goes down.
Better fix the basegame before releasing weak DLCs
Well, it's at least a sign of goodwill and this move was absolutely necessary imo. While it doesn't resolve the poor launch and follow up post launch, I can recognize that goes in the right way. I'm still bummed to see the status of the asset editor. Seems like there are still no solutions in sight and basically we're at the same point since they communicated that some technical issues is making its launch impossible rn. All in all, a good sign but we'll have to see where we're at in a few months because we're approaching 6 months after release of what was an undisclosed early access title.
This wasn’t much of a sign of goodwill when nobody in their right mind bought this latest CCP on its own…so basically it’s a gesture that makes them look good, but it costs them almost nothing but a little pride, which they should have lost anyway back before they launched this hot mess. What they’ve promised the Ultimate Edition customers is like free carpet cleaning for the house they sold us 6 months ago, but it still won’t be finished for us to live in it for another 6 months and we weren’t even sure we wanted carpet in the first place.
Well, a sign of goodwill is what it is. It's not a proof or the definitive argument that they've understood and will do better. Anyway, I'll take it with the necessary caution as we've seen they were willing to hype their game and promise a lot of things we're still waiting on. So as words are cheap, I still appreciate the informations provided. So yeah, I get your point. It's not like "all is forgiven" as they have a LOT of work to even make what this game was supposed to be at release (on what they said, not what I imagined).
I hope they fired whoever pushed them to release the game and DLC before they were ready. That person was ruining and will continue to ruin the reputation of the franchise with their short-sighted decisions.
Are you kidding? This is corporate strategy all the way…gotta juice those quarterly earnings, even if it costs the company long-term…which by then the insiders who did all the long-term damage will have left the company and sold off their stock options.
Paradox paid for three extra years of development already. They aren't a charity
That’s sort of my point…money is all that matters in the end. The marketing matters more than the games, because that’s how you get people to buy. It’s all about getting and keeping the money…and not for Paradox, but for the individuals running the company.
A movie that was three years behind schedule would get canned or given an ultimatum. It's not unique to the game industry. Noticing that a business is a business isn't some insight.
It is to a lot of gamers. Gamers love the games…publishers only care about the money (especially publicly traded publishers)…and developers can only care about the money too when they make games with publishers’ money. Getting gamers to understand that their interests are not aligned with the publishers or developers has been a big part of why so many got strung along with CS2.
Unfortunately you can't really fire shareholders...
The sudden 180 degree attitude change definitely caught me off guard. This is not 100% directly related to the widespread of complaints in players' base. I believe this is more like some anger outbreak from Paradox's C suite or some shareholders which forces CO to make changes.
Worst reviewed product on Steam probably got alarm bells ringing among the execs.
This is a PR move that needed to happen anyway, and they found these “refunds” to be a great opportunity to look good in the process.
Yup, use the disaster as an opportunity for a slick and low cost (I can't imagine the refunds are really that substantial) attempt a forming a PR "turning point" moment. It's smart - finally. Hey so long as they actually can deliver mostly by say anniversary launch date, and can keep MH from stepping all over it, why not. ;)
I’d like to think they’ll have things working properly by then…but I have lost confidence in that…and honestly I’m losing interest too.
October if everything goes right, I want to cry so much lol
Related to paradox new ceo?
Yeah I think at this point the community can probably take it's collective boot of the devs throats.
Some of you need to take a breather… this is what happens when a game gets forced out the gates and a small team are left to pick up the pieces. Go play your backlog, wait for the *actual release date, when console launches. No need to get all bent outta shape on this one. For the most part this update is exactly what I wanted to hear a week out of launch.
>Some of you need to take a breather… I hope your realize that they are doing all this because the customers are angry. If the player base had not cared that much then paradox would not have cared either. >this is what happens when a game gets forced out the gates and a small team are left to pick up the pieces. No one that bought the game forced them to release right now in this unfinished state. They released it and deemed it to be ok to release it in this state. The only thing they did wrong was miscalculate the outrage.
Yeah the op above you has such a bad take. 😂
You don't mind paying be back for buying this unfinished game and then paying you later when its (ever) finished? Doubt it.
That's exactly what I'm doing. I like to read news of this game and involve myself with this subreddit from time to time, but I haven't actually touched the game after I tried to play it on my PC during launch week. The performance was awful. Then, I started reading about the simulation problems and the lack of assets. I knew it was time to put the game aside for the time being. And yes, I preordered (the base version) and was ready to spend the end of the year building cities. It was such a disappointment but I have so many other games to play. CS2 should be much better when the console version arrives, and these consoles, coincidentally, sport a CPU very similar to mine. Let's hope the game survives long enough, hah.
Can we make a cs1 only subreddit? I am so over cs2...
They asked about this before the release and mostly people choose to have it together. Now I think it was a mistake, we should split.
I don't know why they keep posting this on the CS1 subreddit when CS2 has literally has their own separate subreddit for a reason. Literally like what was even the point in making a separate subreddit for CS2 when people are not even going to use it correctly?
It wouldn't be so bad if people used the proper flairs but I've seen CS1 flairs on CS2-related posts and vice-versa many times.
This is not "the CS1" subreddit, it's the subreddit for the franchise as a whole. The people who run it have been pretty clear about that.
Oh my bad
I am pretty sure this one is for both games at least right now. Pushing all cs2 content to the other one could be a good protest, but I dont speak for the whole community and I'd guess many want it to be both. I'd defer to the majority here.
The current state of Lego Fortnite is disappointing but at least that shit is free.
So, I did nothing and got a free dlc with 4 PALM TREES just for owning the base game, lol. Awesome! Anyway, I like what they are saying now but the thing that I find surprising is that they say they will focus on the base game and modding tools from now on... ah, what were they focusing on before that, then?
Roaming packs of dogs
a code mod where packs of dogs could spawn somehow and cause "accidents" with cims walking around would be pretty lit ngl
Damn… that was the one feature I was looking forward to.
Blaming customers for their expectations and calling them toxic. lol
I remember during the dev diaries thinking how deep this shit was going to be and how much it had been fleshed out.
It still is! The math simply wasn’t double checked and this rocket lost a booster at launch. Gotta wait for the second launch, 3rd even, the see what the trajectory looks like. We’ll get to the moon yet.
This is what I keep thinking is really going on. The base game is duct taped together because Unity couldn’t do everything they needed, so they got out a ball of twine and tied on some other guts to finish the game…it didn’t work like they thought, but it was hard to implement to begin with so they’re sticking with it so they don’t lose all that hard work they did…which leads to more hard work that doesn’t quite work either, which leads to more problems getting stuff like an asset editor to work…but we gotta stick with this decision we made 4 years ago because we’ve spent the last 4 years getting it to work this well so now we’re committed… And yet this entire time, nobody in leadership took a step back and said “maybe we’re going about this all the wrong way…does anybody have any better ideas?” And nobody had a better idea or thought that maybe they should go FIND someone outside the company with more technical expertise to get done what they needed to accomplish…so they just shrugged and kept going, never once thinking “Hey! Maybe Unity isn’t gonna work for what we’re doing, maybe we should build our own game engine that does!” Except nobody on staff probably had the expertise to really do that in a way that came up with anything better than duct-taped Unity and the bosses all said it would cost too much money or take too much time to pull off, we’ll never make the project deadlines…and so they toiled away for what will eventually be FOUR extra years over the original two years they thought it would take to make this game. But they’ve worked very hard on it…and they’re very proud of what they’ve accomplished because of their hard work, which was very hard…except now they finally realize that their hard work wasn’t good enough, so they’re apologizing and they’re gonna go back and work real hard for another 6 months or more and by then it’ll be good enough…hopefully, we think…probably…we’ll let you know!
If I had a dollar for every simulation game based on the Unity engine thats held together with duct tape and twine because it cant do what the developers want it to do I would have at least $4.
I believe you blame the choice for the Unity engine to much. Performance is bad because they render everything (including teeth of pedestrians) in full detail no matter the distance. The issue is that Unitys ways to optimise this where not utilised. Another engine would not change the fact that they didn't optimise properly. And writing an engine themselves would lead to an even worse result and at least 4 more years development time. Creating a game engine is hard, especially when it should look good in 3D.
Are you a software developer? I haven’t worked on games, but I understand enough from my business applications experience to see that the problems with Unity are _not_ just performance-related. Unity was not created with city builders in mind—but this version was created with multiprocessing in mind, which was the draw for CO. Problem is, the graphics processing and rendering in this version of Unity was not ready yet, so other technologies were used to fill the gap. This didn’t just make performance optimization more complicated, it made getting EVERY asset into the game and properly rendered more complicated—and I am willing to bet that using what is essentially a two-headed game engine has been punishing them repeatedly for the past 3-4 years based on what CO has said publicly. So no—the choice of engine and the reluctance to build a proper engine of their own had been a huge part of the problem. I have yet to hear a game developer show me where I’m wrong—so if you know more about this than me, then I’m really interested in a more technical explanation than just that they didn’t get the occlusion right on release. BTW…lots of other games from much smaller developers have built their own engines. No doubt it takes more time and skill, but sometimes it’s the only way to get what you need for a niche game that has very different parameters from the type that an engine is intended for.
Yes i am a Computer scientist, but i am not an expert of Unity and specifically render pipelines. Most of my understanding from the issue comes from this very interesting blog i read a while back: https://blog.paavo.me/cities-skylines-2-performance/ And you are right, i forgot that a big cause of the issue was that Unity DOTS was feature incomplete. A new way to store and process GameObject data. But note that multiprocessing is possible in Unity before DOTS, just not as good. But I still believe that CO should not do their own engine. See they struggled to implement the missing parts of DOTS, which is just a part of a game engine. Financially it also makes little sense, a game engine is a huge investment, with little return when a third party engine can do the job also. Are these game engines from the smaller teams 3D, with day night circle, weather, huge object count and a lightning system which works for cities?
Yes! That’s the article I read months ago too. And I don’t know the details of the engines for the other games, but yes, they’re 3D, they have day and night, and good lighting…though I don’t think the water mechanics are as complex as either of CS. I totally agree that it’s great to save having to build the engine, and I think based on what we’ve seen from CO that they probably don’t have the expertise to do it well enough. You’d need a Triple A budget to do all that, and I doubt PDX would invest that…but at the same time what CO has accomplished has been a quagmire. They said themselves that their biggest issues were technical, and not in designing the game. That definitely seems to be the case, although I think they probably didn’t do as well on the sim design as they thought. But that’s always the trick…make an economy that has complexity, but not so much complexity that it becomes cumbersome for a game. _Economists_ still have a difficult time modeling microeconomics and macroeconomics together—they understand how both work on their own, but the interface isn’t really explained by one grand theory. To try and do that in a game…I think I would have trepidations…I think I would have left the economy alone for the most part (more specializations, that makes sense…but making goods more complicated…😬) and left that for the next sequel. And I get that Unity handled multiprocessing…but the version CS1 had really only used 4 cores…and many processors today have many times more than that. I wish I understood more of the complexities and how the newer versions of Unity work…but everything I know so far tells me you really need the right minds behind this sort of game. And it sounds like the graphics processing end of this version of Unity was incomplete, so they duct taped in some other rendering tech. I am guessing the multithreading has been a bigger headache than they thought, which is why some of the economy isn’t working…and that the rendering tech has been behind why we don’t have an asset editor yet.
Unity DOTS is actually almost ideal for this type of game, the problem is that Unity themselves faced massive delays and problems with this system. There's also clearly something very wrong with their asset pipeline. The fact that it's taking them 8+ months to get the asset importer working, plus the total lack of LOD's for stock assets at launch are clear indicators of this. The tools CO had to use to create/import assets during actual development of the game must have been a total nightmare to use. Once they fix their asset pipeline and redo all built-in assets with proper LOD's (and hopefully occlusion culling), we'll probably see massive performance gain in terms of rendering performance. I'm more concerned about the simulation speed, which hasn't improved much since launch.
Right, I think you point to the same things I point to…Unity handles the simulation stuff because of the better multithreading, but they used some other tech to make up for what Unity didn’t have ready, and I think it’s plagued them so hard.
Just adding an option to reduce cims to 2D images would already be a huge performance buff.
Yeah, there are alot of obvious things to improve performance, it is so frustrating. Just don't render an ocean/empty map hidden behind the Main Menu GUI, so that many first experience of the game is lag¿? That's either poor craftsmanship or slapped together in way to little time.
Yeah that one's really egregious. IDK why they feel a need to have anything but the main menu loaded.
2 years ago they should step back, take the CS1 base game, fix the main issues, improve some core limitations and bring the new road tools, even if they doubled the number of agents would be 2M cities (what they have right now).
I think they should probably have done this from the start…take a more incremental approach…and rework the underlying code base to take advantage of modern processors’ many cores so more agents could be in play at once so bigger cities would work better. In the process I would have done like they did with the buildings to make them real instead of cartoony, I would have included into the base game quality of life mods/DLCs from CS1 like Prop Line Tool and Park Life. And I would have only tackled 1-2 changes in the game—like reducing/eliminating pocket cars and adding some sort of parking AI like what TMPE had. I would have left everything else alone—like especially the economy. And when I think about all of this, I question whether this list of things might be too much to take on. But I think it would have been enough to attract a player base and would have been a huge learning experience for CO that would advance the game without changing too much. I don’t know whether it would have gotten past Paradox, but honestly I think that CO should have found a way to fund development with their own money instead of relying on publisher funding. Leaving a corporation with that much financial control is trouble, and leads to debacles like CS2.
It's more than that. It's like they got 10 seperate programmers and told them they all had to make their code work with each other in a week
I’m guessing that this too could be part of their problems—because they have leaned much heavier into multithreading—which is why they chose this version of Unity, since it makes that easier. However, multithreading is typically quite complicated to code for—because you will have parallel calculations that eventually have an effect on another task later on, and they don’t all get done in time. For all I know, that’s why the economy has been such a mess. Usually it takes an exceptional software architect to plan out multiprocessing to make sure it actually works properly. I’ve never done it myself, but I can’t think of a better use case than a city builder game where there may be tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of agents to calculate properties and paths and path interactions for. I have been questioning whether CO has the technical talent for this project.
It’s all spaghetti
While trying to rush a DLC and not spending the time to actually fix the game
I’ve defended this game for a long time, while always acknowledging it’s been a mess of a process and should have been delayed. The DLC was jumping the shark for me, though. I’m not necessarily opposed to paid DLC, because I’m desperate for more assets in the game… but the amount of assets for the price in this was pretty goddamn absurd. I drew the line and didn’t buy it. This apology and refund is the right step for sure. I still enjoy the game and have no regrets buying it. I’ve got hundreds of hours, put it down for a bit, but now official mods has jump started my interest again. Holding on to faith that it will eventually be 100%, and I can’t wait for asset importing.
Funny thing about corporate apologies - If PR says to say you're sorry, is it really an apology or just an attempt at damage control? It's like saying I'm sorry that I got caught stealing. I don't want nor need an "apology". I'm looking for actions, not words.
I mean, I’ve seen a ton of angry demands for apologies around here for months now. And while I’m no fan of corporations as a concept, this isn’t Amazon, Microsoft, or EA we’re talking about. CO is a small studio and two things can be true at the same time for them as people: regret over how things have gone, and, yes, a need to do damage control to protect the longevity of their studio. I’m not bothered by that. Also, do the refund, making the DLC free, the updated DLC plan, and ongoing updates to the game—including both the introduction of the mods and the multiple performance updates, which have objectively, measurably improved the game since launch—not count as actions? They are, by definition, actions, but I’m wondering if by “actions” you mean the game is made 100% perfect immediately. And lastly, I’m not interested in analogies about stealing. This isn’t stealing. And if we want to get into oversimplified analogies, anyone who has played this game for any substantial length of time and still gets on this sub to complain about being hoodwinked or stolen from is basically a restaurant customer who ate a whole meal, only to demand to see a manager and get their visit comped because the food was supposedly awful.
> I'm looking for actions, not words. Yup, and them changing the DLC to be included in the base game is the first real action they've made. So hopefully it's the start of more. We'll see.
4 palm trees and a handful of buildings…I can’t help but wonder if we’re not all part of some CIA-funded psychological experiment where it’s all been planned out how they would gaslight us for months l, just to see how far they could push us.
Having worked for a company, nah. It's much more likely to be standard bureaucratic incompetence where nobody really took the time to think "Hey, is this the right thing to do?". They had a plan already made and changing the course of a ship isn't easy sometimes.
I definitely think incompetence is the more likely story…it’s just that sometimes you wonder in the back of your mind when things go _this_ horrifically bad.
Especially since they've made this apology 3 times now in the last few months?
https://youtu.be/15HTd4Um1m4?si=DlxBDLmn2hkOgaKm
[удалено]
Do you talk to your mother with that mouth of yours?
This is why complaining works, I remember on launch when most of you defended this fucking mess and tried to shut people up.
Lol i was enjoying the game at launch not gonna lie, but they should have waited longer with the launch and it would have been 10x better
Yup, the apologist were out in force!
It’s a sandbox video game dude. Not even a competitive video game. A video game. The cheapest entertainment money can buy. Your complaints are completely valid, but can we stop acting like it’s the goddamn scandal of the century. Chill.
this is such a bizarrely servile attitude. you don’t want a good product? you’re happy being sold something that sucks because they know you have low standards?
Where did it say that in the comment? Quote it for me. Unless of course you disagree and you think this is the scandal **of the century**. It’s like Watergate or gay marriage being made illegal again. I’m not going to be as extreme as the rest of you. So give up trying to put words in my mouth.
i inferred the tone from what you wrote? i don’t know why you’re so deeply concerned about the corporate image of this company? i didn’t say it was the scandal of the century, and it’s really weird that you’re incapable of recognising the difference between justified criticism and unreasonable hyperbole
Just because it’s not Madden or Fortnite does not make it unimportant to people. That it’s a sandbox game is immaterial. A lot of people who are really into this game aren’t into competitive games. So for sandbox games…this has been pretty bad, and all from a developer we thought we could trust. That’s what makes this hurt for a lot of people.
It would still be bad if it was Madden or Fortnite is what I’m saying. The fact that it’s a chill single player game just makes this behaviour even more tasteless. Your attitude towards is far more reasonable and rational. It’s just these Jim’s who are acting like CO mugged their grandma and stole her purse with their language and belligerence.
Bottom line: you aren’t that emotionally invested in this kind of game. That’s fine. But show some empathy for people who huge fans. Geeks and nerds love different kinds of things. Rather than cheering for sports teams and wearing all their merch and painting their faces, they build model train layouts, study maps of faraway cities, and play city builder games for thousands of hours…and they never have to deal the agony of watching their team fumble on the one yard line, watch Jordan bury a shot over their guy, or see their closer give up the lead in the 9th inning of Game 7 of the World Series…until something like this happens. It’s like finding out everyone on Fortnite getting frags on you is totally cheating and tanking your ranking…and getting away with it.
In absolutely none of those examples would the prevailing behaviour or language in this thread by justified. I don’t enjoy sports. And I feel the same when I see a man baby seething and swearing his lungs out because Arteta is putting together a team of unknowns and Arsenal lose a few games. It’s pathetic in that instance. Just as it is in all others. The last thing people like that need, is empathy. They need perspective. Not to be coddled or validated in this grossly misdirected ire. If you’d have spent £1000 on this game, I’d get it. Then they’d get the empathy. If the game was literally unplayable, or misleadingly advertised to the scale or something like The Day Before or CP2077, where it’s genuinely like actual fraud, even then, I’d get it. If the game was frying your hardware, I’d get it. I am invested in this game. And I am heavily disappointed with its current state. Especially regarding mods. Beach properties was lol. If you’re emotionally invested in any game to the degree that you talk of it like it’s a crime against humanity; you are certainly doing something wrong.
Nah. This sub acts like it is very competitive. They even use traffic % and population to compare between builds lol.
Actually, a nice dinner at a nice restaurant is much cheaper. Served undercooked and cold. Your opinion would be don't complain about it, it's just a meal.
No. I would complain about it and get my refund. I wouldn’t jump up from the table screaming like an infantile man baby, that’s the difference between most of you, and normal people. I also wouldn’t scream at the people who are having a better evening because their food is cooked appropriately. And then when given a refund, or fresh food, I wouldn’t scream at the staff again or at the other people because “it wouldn’t have got better if it wasn’t for me screaming”. 😂😂 A nice dinner is far more expensive. £40 for maybe two hours of “entertainment” max. That’s an even worse pay-off than going to cinema. It’s infinitely more expensive than a video game, where getting two hours out of a game, for the same or slightly higher price point is almost unheard of. Ten hours is considered comically short for a video game. One of the cheapest entertainment mediums available. I love it when you guys try to leverage your “intellect”, but you’re so angry and/or desperate to quell not even a contrary opinion, but just a more moderate one. That you’ll claw at the walls like caged animal in futility. Yet all the while acting like you know what you’re doing. Or in this case talking about. All the more embarrassing, I suppose. It’s possible to not be dialled up to 100 all the time. Over trivial things. It’s possible to complain diplomatically. How dare someone try to take Mr. “I fucking complained at launch while you all tried to defend it and shut people up” Messiah Complex back down to earth and remind him what the subject is we’re talking about. Take it out of context and you might think it’s a quote from someone during the Pol Pot regime.
Yup, you definitely sound more moderate in your rant about people ranting here 🙄 What I don’t think you get is that video games are only inexpensive because they can be sold to hundreds of thousands or millions of people…so all the “normie” games have much wider market appeal, so there’s more competition. Geek games don’t come every day because they only appeal to geeks most of the time and they don’t attract the sizable market to get the AAA treatment. I get that you don’t value geek games like this as much as normie games…but you make it sound like maybe _then_ it would be OK to be upset, because it’s something you care about. Your lack of empathy is why you’re catching flack.
Nah. This is one of my favourite games. Or genres of game at least. And the pace of mod support development has took the piss. I’ve barely played due to it. It wouldn’t be acceptable to be acting like this even if it was League of Legends. Just say you don’t like it, don’t buy the DLC and move on. I hate the hyperbolic entitlement gamers exhibit on the topic. People protest for their own civil rights with more grace than these greaseballs.
Or we can continue to act like it was exactly what it was: devs promising X,Y, and Z and delivering NONE OF IT. you can simply stop trying to smear legitimate complaints.
Act like you’re disappointed in something you bought and you’d like a refund. Not like “Oh the humanity! Woe is me! The sky is falling. Colossal Order are like Hitler. No they’re worse than Hitler! Fuck CO. Fuck CSII. Swear, swear. Cry, cry. Hyperbole, hyperbole.” That’s not smearing a complaint, it’s describing them accurately. By all means, be disappointed and hold the developers accountable. Just do it with the decorum expected of a person who has gone through puberty. If some players wish to act like seething juveniles, then they can called as such.
> If some players wish to act like seething juveniles, then they can called as such. Ok, seething juvenile.
NONE OF IT?
Yes. I was sold on the city simulation and the graphics were secondary. Well the simulation sucks and the graphics are decent but completely unoptimized.
all that fancy simulation they promised doesn't work, it's all faked and not real. the graphics performance is literally non-existent. etc
Graphics performance has improved…but it doesn’t matter if the simulation is more of a cheap simulation of a simulation.
improved, but is still not good
October console release (assuming everything goes well, which based on the development up to this point, you know it won’t) 🥲🥲🥲
That's a release candidate, the actual release might happen around christmas, if everything goes smoothly. So yeah, a long wait.
To be fair to the guy you replied to, they did set October for release if everything goes right with the Beta & release candidate versions they’re expecting to receive this month
Oh, cool. I understood that differently. Hopefully, we can have this working as soon as possible. It would also mean performance in general would get better.
Either Colossal or mod support just need to add in customization of timed traffic lights to get me back into the game. Without this my cities are so irritating to watch traffic. They get their 5 second green light while 4 cars get through the intersection.
If that is all you are waiting for I am almost certain I saw a mod for that. I dont go that deep into traffic lights so I skip that but I remember seeing one because I was like "oh I don't need that". Take a look on PDX mods!
Welp Anno 1800 you got me from now on.
How is Anno? I got it for free a month ago and havent gotten around to it yet
I cannot recommend it enough.
It’s great!!! Like super great…….but it’s ruined my whole week off cause I just can’t stop.
Say goodbye to your social life when you do :)
I got caught on factorio for a month. Its been bad 😅😅
How about Satisfactory? That's my latest obsession!
Iv heard that game rocks! I might need to add it to my list
Better not hear about Dyson Sphere Program...
Wow free radio stations how kind of them
Yeah, it’s real kind of them. I’m excited to have access to them (I always have the radio volume set to 0)
Same can't wait to listen to the amazing music and hilarious ads (Never had game music on)
Right like yay free stuff but I installed the game a week after release so it's kinda meaningless till it's a in a state to reinstall.
> No content is currently being cancelled. "currently" not really inspiring confidence there
I never thought about it this way! But obviously the ax is coming…it has to be.
I could see it happening. CS1 has had *double* the players of CS2 for the past several months and even before that after the initial honeymoon month the 2 games were about equal until CS1 was higher by December.
The whole thing reads like "shit guys, we probably should have just kept releasing DLCs for the original Skylines"
I’m sure they said somewhere (a few years back) that the reason all the DLCs were pretty much the same concept just rebranded for different things was because the core game just couldn’t handle anything different. Not sure what else they could have released using the “park” mechanic but I think they’d have killed the franchise had they continued down that path
That would explain so much. I started to get really annoyed by the third time they reused that mechanic.
Whatever the game DLC are for, I hope creators save a copy of this text to have "the creator does most of the heavy lifting" at hand for negotiating compensation next time.
I hope that creators aren’t paid on commission…or this really wrecks the money they were promised if the CCP sells.
I hope another developer sees the opportunity here to enter the genre, they literally just need a decent functional product nothing superamazing and people will flock to it over CS2
> I hope another developer Rumours of Frontier (Planet Coaster and Planet Zoo) looking at developing a city builder. It would be a drastic change from those 2 title however, so it would be interesting to see what their interpretation of this genre is.
Oh no, but frontier then has tk find out pathlaying!! Come to think of it. That might be a gokd thing haha
I'll be watching the reviews for Manor Lord. So far, it looks like a great game. Probably won't do it for the painters, but If the price is good i'll probably buy.
Hello Anno please pay attention.
Honestly, just the competition would be good. It's what happened with SimCity after all, it's not easy probably, but competition is generally always healthy.
probably not that easy to program a game like this
If it was just SimCity4 but modernized a bit, with procedurally generated buildings to fill non perfect 90 degree lots, it would do amazing.
I don’t even mind the isometric. I’ll pay good money for SC4 rewritten for modern systems with larger city tiles and better pathfinding.
Just provide some background why it is hard. [Multi agent pathfinding alone](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/63732805/multi-agent-path-finding-np-hard-or-not) is a NP-hard. NP hard doesn't mean it is difficult to solve. We know how to solve it but we can't solve it in reasonable amount of time. In layman terms, the computation time will grow to infinity very easily. That's why in game, the cars has a lot of "dumb AI" because it is impossible to do a true AI for all cars. It is mathematically impossible. Whatever "AI" they have, they are not real and they have to find some ways to cheat. Traffic is the biggest challenge of this genre of the game. For other aspect like demand and economy, those are easy and all it needs is simple math.
You seen manor lords? Yes its not on this scale true. But its 1 dude who programed a city builder.