I don't really understand how people make the review threads, but we're sitting at a 77 on OpenCritic right now. Many were worried about game performance after the recommended specs were released, but it looks like it's even worse than we expected. It sounds like the game is mostly a solid release except for the performance issues, but they really are that bad.
- Popular Cities: Skylines 1 streamers are reporting that they are not able to achieve a consistent 60 fps, even with RTX 4090s and lowering the graphics to 1440p medium settings. Based on utilization numbers, it sounds like the GPU is limiting factor here.
- Those same streamers are also reporting 16GB of RAM usage when loading up a new map, which means that the minimum recommended spec of 8GB was a blatant lie from the devs.
- IGN and other reviewers are reporting that the game does not self-level building plots, which is something that C:S1 did pretty well. This leads to every plot looking like this:
Maybe not a big deal to some, but the focus of Cities: Skylines has always been on building beautiful cities (vs. having a realistic simulation), so this feels like a betrayal of Colossal Order's own design philosophy.
Personally, this is a pretty big bummer for me. I like C:S1 a lot, but I find it hard to get into a gameflow that feels good unless I commit to mods pretty hard, and that means a steeper learning curve. For this reason, I tend to have more fun just watching other people play the game. I was looking forward to C:S2 as a great jumping on point to really dig into city-building myself. Maybe I'm being too harsh here because of my personal disappointment - many don't really care about hitting 60fps, but those same people also tend to not build top-end PCs. And it sounds like if you don't have a top-end PC, you're looking at sub 30 fps, and I think most agree that that is borderline unplayable.
Anyone else have thoughts on this one?
And I said nothing about justification. But, the RAM is easy to figure out as that is where the variables are stored and manipulated. A "heavy city simulation game" is going to have a great many variables and lots of formulae.
The GPU usage is likely to get the picture to be very pretty. But you could argue against it. The RAM, no, it is required by the genre.
You said that it is a resource intensive game, in a tone that implied to me that it's fine to you.
But not this much. CS 1, which is also a "heavy city simulation game", was totally fine with less, and while I agree that because of the new features it is expected that CS 2 uses more RAM, it is not expected to use this much more.
Also, you are talking as if every vehicle, pedestrian, building object each should cost 1 KB of RAM or something like that. Normally that's not the case.
Unconditionally loading 8k textures for all the existing models won't make the game "very pretty".
As in every sensible game, texture resolution and such should be configurable, and the game should not load textures not in use. At least one of these is very clearly not happening if the game requires multiple gigabytes of VRAM even on a new, basically empty save.