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Cities Skylines 2 CEO apologizes after comments about gameplay
(www.pcgamesn.com)
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this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2023
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Nah, a fake economy is fixable with a DLC, performance is a can that gets kicked down the road.
A fake economy wouldn’t be fixable with a DLC. It’s a fundamental and inseparable part of the simulation. If the economy is fake, then it’s fake for good I’m afraid. The thing about cities skylines DLC as well is that they’re all just bolted on. None of the CS1 DLC made any changes to the way the game worked, which made it so that DLCs didn’t even integrate with eachother. Thats why the fishing industries from the Sunset Harbor expansion didn’t function with the industries DLC. We are stuck with whatever the simulation is in CS2, for better or worse.
I mean they could update the economy with a free patch that goes along with related improvements in a DLC. Paradox's EU4 does that kind of thing a lot, and it works well. Whether CO will do that is another story though, but it's a proven model.
But good point.
You’re not wrong that it is technically possible. However historically speaking colossal order has not been willing or capable of doing that so I wouldn’t bet money on it. Half the reason CS2 exists in the first place is actually implement things that were added by DLC to CS1 into a bad game.
I'm guessing the engine just wasn't capable of complex logic. It was single thread limited, so I'm guessing adding any kind of complex logic would require a huge change just to set up threading so performance doesn't tank, to the point where they might as well make a new release.
My understanding is that this release was supposed to fix that underlying code so it could support much more complex computation without killing the render loop. I don't have any specific statements to prove that, other than them saying you'll be able to make as big of a city as your hardware can handle.
So that's why I think it's feasible to add later. But you're absolutely right that they haven't done that in the past, so I could be reading between the lines incorrectly.
I'm curious from a gamedev perspective why you think any of the mechanics are sacrosanct - all economies are fake. they depend on mutual agreement of arbitrary values and systems.
Because the economy is the basis for the rest of the simulation. It’s not something you can just refactor in a DLC, you’d have to practically rebuild the game from the ground up around it. Which isn’t technically impossible, but the likelihood of it happening are slim to none. The proof of this is CO’s last game Cities Skylines, and in fact the very existence of CS2. They added snow and snow related services in a DLC, but they couldn’t/wouldn’t implement it into the base game, or even implement it into existing maps. Then they released the industries DLC which overhauled industry mechanics, but when they released DLCs later that added new industries, they couldn’t / wouldn’t integrate them with the same system used in the industries DLC. And those were incremental new features, not total rewrites of how the city’s economy works. Half the reason Cities Skylines 2 exists is so they could actually roll all the changes made over the years by DLC into the actual base game. CS2 is little more than a refactor at this stage.
And the economy isn’t fake in the same way all economies are fake. It’s fake in that it seemingly doesn’t exist. There are numbers and graphs and features in the game’s UI that don’t actually correlate to existing parts of the simulation. At least, that’s the way it appears, given extensive testing by the community. The developers have insisted these mechanics do exist, they’re just broken. We’ll have to wait and see, which is what I’m doing.
but it's not. CS has an economy, but the entire simulation runs alongside it, not on it.
I think you think you know a lot more about game dev than you actually do.
Cities Skylines simulation didn’t have an economy to run on, correct. But CS2 allegedly does run on its economy, that’s the entire point, whether or not it does so. Thats is CS2’s big differentiator between itself and CS1. It’s their highlight feature and centerpiece of their marketing prior to release.
Either CS2’s simulation is powered by its economy, or it isn’t. If it is, then it will work fine once they will fix whatever is allegedly broken. If it isn’t, then the development team lied and the odds that they will at some point in time refactor the entire simulation to fundamentally change how it works are slim to none, and we know that because over CS1’s entire lifespan they never bothered to do this for even simple mechanics like snowfall, much less the entire economy simulation.
What you believe is technologically possible is irrelevant, when we have almost a decade of Colossal Order history to inform us on what will happen lol. I think you’re vastly overestimating the value of what you consider your game dev experience when talking about this company.
It sounds like you don't know anything about the economy complaints in CS2.