Cities: Skylines 2 won’t get paid DLC until its performance issues are sorted, devs say
Quality-of-life features from the original also on the way
Cities: Skylines 2 devs Colossal Order have said that the game known as the Builder of Cities and Destroyer of Framerates (at least, known as of me typing this) won’t get any paid expansions while they’re still getting its performance up to scratch.
Cities: Skylines 2 hit PC last month to mixed reviews, with most (but not all) of the criticism directed at the game’s surprisingly demanding CPU and GPU specs and its extremely rocky performance, which seems to be about as smooth as driving on a Tory-funded road full of potholes.
Complaints include low FPS, stuttering and ugly dynamic resolutions made worse by a lack of DLSS support and limited FSR, which James attempts to remedy - albeit within the limits of what the game actually allows - with some recommended graphics settings here. That doesn’t include having to pull any virtual teeth from tiny citizens going about their business, for what it’s worth.
While Sin didn’t run into performance problems while playing for our own Cities: Skylines 2 review, Colossal Order admitted that they “have not achieved the benchmark we targeted” in the city-building game and vowed to make some fixes. Those fixes began to arrive at the end of last month with a first patch aimed at improving things like depth of field, global illumination and LOD, while smoothing out stutters and eliminating some crashes (including a literal crash caused by cars crashing into each other).
The game’s latest patch makes some further improvements around shadows, unnecessarily large textures and the order in which objects are rendered that was apparently more demanding on the GPU that it needed to be. Alongside the ongoing performance fixes, there are also some balancing tweaks and wider bug fixes, along with the removal of a radio advert that was deemed offensive.
Still, there’s more work to be done. Colossal Order, for their part, seem open about the problems and dedicated to making right by players, promising that no paid content would be released for the game while the team remains focused on getting performance to where it needs to be.
“On the topic of DLCs, we will not release new paid content for Cities: Skylines II before the outstanding performance issues are fixed to our standards,” the studio wrote in its latest weekly blog. “As a small team, we must focus on the task at hand to avoid spreading too thin.”
The studio added that they would be looking at adding features and quality-of-life elements from the original Cities: Skylines that aren’t in its sequel at the moment.
“We are also very much looking forward to starting to go through your suggestions for Cities: Skylines II, such as adding some beloved quality-of-life improvements already familiar from the predecessor that were missed in the sequel due to priorities and time constraints.”
Elsewhere, there are notes about fixing bugs around garbage collection and stray dogs, which could apparently multiply and cause “an insane number of abandoned packs of dogs all over the city”, which is one of the more amusing patch notes I’ve seen lately.