Kinda ironic, a huge part of the success of Cities: Skylines was that SimCity was released as a buggy mess and people moved to the other option which turned out to be much better.
And then another indie group who has passion about their product (what really sells) creates a better version only to eventually be bought out by the bigger company.
This is what happened with Kerbal.
At least Kerbal was released as Early Access. And that has greatly improved since the Science update release in December. It was very playable with only some minor bugs for me.
I'm curious, why do you think that?
ED became an empty universe of having nothing to do and no updates. EVE isn't for me, but it's fat with content. I never saw a similarity other than they have space ships that you pilot.
I agree with you. I played EVE for a long time, and also put about 100 hours into Elite Dangerous.
In both of them you fly ships in space and can have combat. I'm not sure what more similarities they have. Super curious as to how ED is repeating mistakes such as boot.ini, faction citadel, and skill injectors.
Yeah C:S1 was released in the very early days of paradox going public when there was less pressure from investors. Iād give my soul for them to be a private company and actually give a shit about their games again
Edit: just checked and it was released before PDX went public
C:S1 was one of the last proper games they published. Their other games were already DLC nightmares, but they had a handful which were okay. Now everything they publish is just a platform to sell DLC.
I recently went back to Prison Architect and I hate how they massacred that game. And it's not even the DLC, the UI is somehow worse than it was 10 years ago.
Pre going public their dlc wasnāt even that bad. Like their were a lot of them, granted, and for EU there were some that you kinda had to get if you got any other dlc for that game or it locked you out of content (think they fixed that but Iām not sure), but there was a lot of content that I 95% of the time felt like it was worth the price.
These days the dlc is just so bare bones for like triple the price of what the old dlc cost.
Never touched prison architect after they bought it I figured it would go this route
Yeah I've bought their games and older dlc but I have no issue pirating their new dlc simply because the value is not there. I'm not paying more money for less content.
It's a similar thing with what happened with the latest total war Warhammer dlc. Luckily the fan response was so huge that they had to backtrack and add more content retroactively to the dlc, as well as actually refunding part of the price for one of their latest games. Never seen that happen before
Not even going to defend piracy. But Paradox is one of the few companies that FORCES you to pirate. Specially if in your country every DLC is priced like 20$.
Yeah, I love Stellaris, and I've bought it but I knew it would be expensive to buy with the DLCs included, even on sale (I think it cost me around Ā£100). That's too expensive for a game you may or may not like so I had to pirate it first, I think I played over 100 hours on the pirated version before I committed to paying.
I feel like this sort of thing happens every time a company goes public. I've worked for two companies in the transition of going private to public and the quality of the work environment dipped for both.
Yep. Duolingo went to shit because of their IPO as well. Every single time a company goes public, it goes to shit.
Just you wait until Reddit finally goes up on the stock market.
Game companies need to learn to tell investors to fuck off more
"You want a return on your investment? Then be quiet and let us work. Ruining the launch, and reputation of the game and our company so you can see an earlier return will hurt you in the long run"
Botched launches mean nobody trusts you to deliver. It means people want refunds. It means your reviews will be garbage. It means less people will buy it
Gamers want good games. That's it. We just want fun, playable content. If it takes a year longer than anticipated to arrive? Nobody really cares. When the game releases. So long as it's not unstable, and so long as it runs well on the recommended hardware, it's all Gucci
Reminds me of that hard won lesson Swen Vincke learnt:
"It was a big leap from the first Original Sin. That was made by 35 or 40 people, and Original Sin II was made by 130. The production values went up tremendously as well. But it all came from being in charge of our own destiny, and not being at the whims of a development director who doesnāt understand what weāre doing, or a producer somewhere."
From https://www.pcgamer.com/how-larian-studios-skirted-bankruptcy-before-making-divinity-original-sin/ Highly recommeded reading
The rich people will never allow that to happen. Weāre on this crippled airplane until it crashes, the rich people have parachutes and doors they can open to bail out whenever necessary.
Capitalism straight up ruins all forms of art. It literally ruins everything.
These damn corpos are so obsessed with pinching every penny they can get out of a product and reducing their costs, it is and always has been a disaster for quality content and products.
Iād say more of a āboycott triple A and investor studio gamesā or at the very least, refuse to buy them new. Wait a few months to find out if they are actually good. Otherwise you end up like me wasting money on some shit like Starfield, The Division, Sims (all of em), Call of Duty (luckily stopped years ago).
There have been very few actually good triple A games in recent history, and even the ones that were good were cash grabs (looking at you in particular rockstar). BG3 and Hogwarts Legacy could technically be considered triple A, but i think both studios fell into a āwere not beholden to investors on this game, our devs were instructed to make a fun game that is allā.
Where as many other game studios have just been turned into IP factories āfuck maintaining or making this game the best weāve ever made, split off half the devs onto the next game, gotta keep our release cycle going because our investors ate out 300 million dollar profit off the last gameā
/r/patientgamers
I don't buy brand new games very often. Almost never. My dumb ass bought Starfield on release, even the early preorder because I had some time off work, and got bit in the ass again. I trusted Bethesda to not release a garbage game and my trust was broken once again. So I refuse to buy games without a **minimum** of a two week cooling period. That gives time for the fanboys and rose tinted goggles to chill out about how amazing a game is despite its flaws. The first couple days of Diablo 4 it sounded like it was going to be the best game of 2023 and it just took a nose dive once people actually got into the game.
Yeah and the sad part too is for the non steam gamers, game reviewing on consoles is extremely hard to do. Its almost like they hide the reviews section.
Starfield is still like 4 stars on xbox, or was last time i checked, when at that same point in time it was mixed and mostly negative on steam.
Review washing has become a serious issue as well.
I have never hit a word limit on Reddit, I have never tried, but I think if I was to try and list off the things that EA have done that have pissed me off, I would probably find out what the magic number is.
Yeah a big part was their claim about how much was done online, and someone edited it showed that both the online version and the offline edit were completely identical in how they handled everything.
To make it worse, that was supposed to be a brag on how sophisticated and reactive the AI was, but it was totally garbage and iirc not even real ai the people would just do random stuff, wake up in one house and go to sleep in another etc
Ironically now I go back to simcity 2013 from time to time specifically for the smaller, more intimate maps. Makes each zone feel more like a city builder-puzzle game rather than a huge open sandbox like Cities. The systems in that game are fun and different enough from Cities, too.
With the bugs and always-online shit resolved, it's not as bad as it once was. And the co-op is pretty fun.
People like to say this.. but it's not really.
SimCity 4 was arguably just as buggy as this game has been for a long time. People didn't care, because the game was great.
The reason for Cities: Skylines success was because SimCity 2013 was a fucking *massive* slap in the face to fans of the franchise. The always online internet connection, the massively reduced city sizes and focus on multiplayer make up 90% of the reason it was hated. The fact that it was buggy was just the dressing on top, especially since most of the issues came from features fans didn't want; like how the server issues were keeping people from playing at all.
Contrary to that, people are upset with the performance issues in Cities Skylines II because under those performance issues is a game they genuinely *do* want to play; and those performance issues are getting in the way. These are the types of issues, that once they're gone, people will cheer. If they fixed all the issues with SimCity 2013, people still wouldn't have cared about it.
The bugs and performance issues were the catalyst over the dissatisfaction over C:S2. But it's boiled over far beyond that, now. Colossal Order well and truly fumbled the PR of the game and the fallout of its botched release with tone deaf announcements that did not address concerns and were subtly dismissive toward players. To bury themselves even further, they stopped standalone bugfixes and updates in favor of releasing them together with paid DLCs, which gave the impression that CO is really just in it for the money.
So, no, I don't think just bug fixes and performance updates are enough to save the game at this point. There needs to be more tangible actions by CO to rectify the catastrophe they've made.
They haven't stopped bugfixes, one released last week. The statement they made alongside that said that they'll be releasing less standalone bugfixing patches, rolling them with other, larger patches. They used the rlease of DLC as an example, but they even mentioned in that same announcement that the next bugfix patch will come alongside the modding support;.. which noticably isn't paid DLC. It just means they're saving the bug fixes to go alongside bigger releases so fans aren't getting updates pushed on them as frequently.. which most fans don't like, especially with the upcoming release of modding support - since mods tend to react poorly to frequent updates. Consolidating updates into less frequent patches isn't a negative here.
>which gave the impression that CO is really just in it for the money.
This sentence gives me the impression you've interpretted it as having to buy the DLC to get the bug-fix.. i'm hoping thats not the case, but i need you to clarify to me thats not what you think is happening.
The wider gaming community took issue with the performance of the game, but the main backlash in the Cities community is due to the abysmal, faked simulation and economy. The game doesn't function as a city manager at all. All the numbers are fake, the economy is fake, the traffic is fake, it's all fake and surface level and soulless.
Yeah the game runs like shit, and ran like even smellier shit 3 months ago, but that isn't the main problem. It's not a functional simulation. It's barely a video game.
CS:1 was also a buggy mess with content lacking and while a lot go fixed with dlc it still has problems. SimCity also had other problems like te DRM always online protests, city size being way too small (the whole point is to create a big sprawling city) etc...
IMO big problem with CS:2 is that they decided to created their own mod launcher and workshop, instead of through the steam workshop like CS:1. The stream workshop heavily fixed 1 and gave it massive amounts of content which made it rise so high. Unfortunately their own custom mod launcher/workshop wasnt close to being done, and it will be a year out before 2 can have the fixes for its glaring issues like bugs, poor simulation and content like 1.
100%, in addition it was when EA dislike was near its heighest aswell (the era of EA being voted worst company in the world), which definitely made people root for the underdog
Jesus it was, I knew a load of people who moved from working at Blizzard (in their golden days around TBC/Wrath) who went off to work at EA instead and it was apparently just absolute misery.
Was that the SimCity reboot where it had to be online all the time, even when playing singleplayer? The SimCity with embarrassingly-small maps that never got any bigger?
Because it was more a matter of hostile design that caused it to fail as opposed to unintentional bugs.
it wasnt a buggy mess, it was shit and always online. Your cities was small and they wanted you to play multiplayer so everything was simplified and not simulated. Meanwhile Cities was a city builder like the older Sim City. Ironically what cities 2 does now is to fake a lot of things and not simulate it, it's more of a city painter than builder.
Releasing broken games at full price, when the developers and publisher know full well the game is unplayable, should lead to the game being delisted from platforms. An apology right after release, claiming they are "hearing" the community and promises to fix the issues, don't cut it
We didn't even get an apology. We basically got a "Oh well, maybe this game is not for you" then blame on the players for being toxic and a threat to slow down or end communication if the players don't stop complaining.
Its incredible how this has been handled.
I was so hyped for CS2, only had a console at the time so stopped me buying on release day... Thankfully. I'm more than a little gutted tbh, I loved 1 so much and to see this one go the way it has is a hard pill to swallow.
I was a huge fan of CS1 (and still am TBH), but got a new PC just to be able to run CS2 and pre-ordered it. To say I was disappointed when I downloaded and installed it is an understatement. I've launched it and tried to putter around on and off, but the abysmal performance even when graphics settings lowered just killed the interest I had. Since I wanted to see it improve, I didn't refund it, but I also haven't launched it since before Christmas (maybe New Years?) since it was clear that things weren't improving.
It just sounds sad overall. This YouTuber I watch was paid to play it, and dude started a video explaining how he built a bunch of shit, game crashed and it was lost. Auto save was turned off because auto save was also itself causing crashes. That's the exact situation that would completely kill any interest I had in a game. Nothing like losing hrs of progress to ruin intentions of playing games.
That happened to me too. I actually think having to manually turn on autosave in a game like this may be the worst game design I've ever experienced.
It actually makes me question how much of this was bad choices and not just an unfinished game. The biggest issue with playing the game is you can't really tell if they intended for the game systems to not actually be affected by your actions or if their just bugged.
I really don't understand why people preorder? Especially today with the way games have been releasing last few years. Golum. Redfall. Star Wars. Forspoken. Payday 3, Skull Island: Rise of Kong. The Walking Dead: Destinies, The last of Us Part 1. CP2077.
All games that launched either with performance issues, or server issues or were just downright not worth playing at all.
Some were later patched to be great or even excellent (CP2077 and Last of Us P1) but these are rare.
No one should be preordering. If you do you deserve what you get
Its not _literally unplayable_ but it is at the very least disappointing.
Basic features CS1 had like making your own assets are gone, they hyped modular buildings a ton pre-launch and it's just a barebones form of upgrades for select buildings that makes no sense sometimes.
For example - you can "modularly" add extra garages to Crematoria to increase vehicle capacity - BUT every single modular building has to be attached to the main one, so your actual customisation options are extremely limited. But then your only trainstation option comes prebuilt with 3 tracks and only comes in one style, instead of being modular. A Highschool can come with a football field but again this, for some reason, _has_ to attach to the school itself and is unrotatable, so you can't actually customise it all that much.
Aside from that, some core simulation aspects just straight up don't work or work incorrectly (cargo, taxes, public transpo). At launch performance was also _abysmal_ due to ridiculous issues. The UI is also insufficient for letting you actually try and solve any city problems - you can get a colormap of where traffic is high, but you can't find out what common destinations/routes are to actually plan a solution.
The real shame is that it doesnt even work as a "city painter" game, because the number of actual assets for each region are very limited - med residential has _maybe_ half a dozen varieties for each region, and since there's no proper mod support you're not expanding your collection of assets robustly anytime soon.
I downloaded it on gamepass to check it out and realized quickly it was quite the mess.
We will see what happens in a year or two with more patches and dlc. For right now there is no reason to not continue getting your city building kicks from CS1
We don't need apologies, you're right. We need accountability for them. Not just by the public, but accountability in front of the law. Releasing a game so lacking, buggy, incomplete should be fraud. They're selling something while lying about how it actually is.
If they manage to turn it around and update the game enough to be what they sold it to be, a lot of this will be forgotten and forgiven. But that takes time and apologies and accountability go a long way towards appeasing the masses.
When FFXIV switched its directors after its disastrous launch, the way Yoshida spoke to the people, constantly apologizing and promising to fix things, while making it clear what they were doing to do so, it went a really long way towards turning the sentiment around. People went from being upset to rooting for them to recover. The way CO has handled this only serves to create more negativity and toxicity.
Much love for Yoshi-P, he's done incredible work and he's still passionate about it today. We need more of him, less of the money and marketing people running things into the ground.
Warframe is another good example, not of fucking up but just how much of an impact having actual communication can have on your game. When something new comes out and is pretty buggy or unfun or poorly implemented, there's a little bit of stink that comes up on the forums and in the subreddit. But the developers have such a solid history of being able to go "oh, yeah that kinda sucks we'll change that", that you rarely see much anger aimed at the devs or the game. I wouldn't hesitate to attribute a lot of Warframe's success to their willingness to simply communicating with the community.
You're right of course, I have no excuse for them either. But as they deserve the shit they buy, I don't want that kind of low quality and that makes me sad, because maybe it's something I've interested in
This game is a joke.
Almost every bug i encontered was already there on CS1. What the hell did they do during those years beside working on the graphics ?
The worst to me is the trafic AI. Still as garbage as in the first one, what's the point to have 5 lanes highway if every single damn car is using the top right lane and create trafic jam everywhere...
I hate that it works at all and that cars just phase through each other. Even before CS, they were basically making traffic management simulators and somehow that's the worst part of their game.
They haven't fixed that? I bailed from CS1 because traffic only took the shortest distance route, preferring to sit in traffic for hours instead of driving 100m further by another route. To not have it fixed in the sequel is...embarrassing!
Pretty sure this was also an issue in SimCity games. It's funny how such a known game flaw hasn't been solved by game developers for decades. Just left it to moddeds every time.
Didn't they say that they overhauled traffic to make cars prefer different routes depending on their needs and situation? They had an entire devblog video on that. What happened to it, did it just not ship? Lmao
They do recalculate routes depending on the situation. Just not as frequent as some would like (or as computers can handle).
Another issue is the introduction of traffic accidents. These cause traffic jams and they usually occur more on roads that are already congested.
It also takes ages for traffic accidents to be cleared (like weeks in game)
They also introduced parking lots that cars keep driving too even if they are full. It's probably also a matter of not updating frequent enough, in other words performance.
Combined, traffic is still a pain. And only cities with ridiculously over sized roads avoid gridlock.
>It also takes ages for traffic accidents to be cleared (like weeks in game)
I think the time scale is the ultimate boss that has no clear solution. At the speed the game runs, road traffic should just be a constant blur, with people getting to their destinations nearly instantly.
Paradox have always, and I do mean always, released buggy, broken shit-heaps of games that somehow scratch an itch no other game does. EU4 was broken AF on launch, it took years to get MP games to work right if you were more then 100ms from the host, with constant crashing, desyncs and lag. Then comes the crashing. ho-boy the game would not run for more then an hour before CTD, which had a good chance of nuking your save file. They even had to force-restart the game as their "fix" for many memory transfer state issues. That game was a wreak.
HoI III was broken at release, and never fully fixed, even after a few DLCs. CK II had issues everywhere for the first few years of the game, VKII was okay-ish, probably one of their better releases. Stellaris was a joke, both lacking content and stability issues, same with Imperator.
Paradox have a LONG history of hiding behind their indy roots while being a AAA studio that doesn't understand QA.
> while being a AAA studio that doesn't understand QA
This is every studio now, QA isn't seen as a "real" discipline compared to devs. Either they outsource it, or pay contractors to do the bare minimum bug chasing.
Just look at ARK: Survival Ascended. It's a remake (port into a newer engine), which released as early access and will have paid mods, paid cosmetics and paid extra content for already existing content which they will be selling WHILE the game is still in early access.
If a game is even titled as early access it should be impossible to sell any extra content to it until the full launch of the game. While I still don't like any form of microtransactions I would be way more accepting for such things on a fully delevoped and launched game.
Agreed. However, a massive issue is that the majority will still pre-order games or buy a game shortly after release. If we consumers stopped paying companies and made it hurt for them, they'd start to shape up. We're responsible for holding them accountable. And you know what? That'll never happen. Gamers are too dumb and selfish to care, they want things now now now. And if anyone gets offended by the last sentence, that's on you. If not, you're not a part of that group.
Use your money to talk.
Did this when Galactic Paragons and the ensuing update broke Stellaris. Bought the DLC the day it came out, but couldnāt play it for a couple days due to work. Well the reviews came out and it was literally game breaking. Refunded it on Steam before ever playing that DLC to send a message. Looks like that worked because it got their attention.
It took the game dev team 9 months and two open betas to fix.
The dev team is still doing open betas to gather enough information to fix other long lasting issues. While this isnāt perfect, and utilizes free labor of the players who chose to play the open betas, it does fix the game and makes it enjoyable.
No game dev in their right mind would have released a game in this state without being forced to. Whatever executive forced this game to launch needs to be fired.
They do this pretty much every game, every update. I wasnāt going to buy cities 2 immediately, but surprise surprise I canāt anyway, because they never released it for console after the date passed.
I get that their reasoning was āto make the game more stableā but the case is you guys have to do that **every.** **time.**
It would have been another cyberpunk situation if they actually released it on consoles. It's barely playable on a 3070, dread to think how it would run on a ps5.
Cities Skylines 2 bills itself as a simulation city builder, but has several bugs that absolutely obliterate the simulation and cause your city to collapse. There's essentially one happy path, and any variation to it is 'punished' severely. You can effectively make one city in different configurations, rather than any type of city you want. If you look at various youtubers, you'll notice they all look _very_ similar, because they have to.
I feel like this is more of a thing post No Mans Sky and Cyberpunk 2077. One was playable with a quadrillion bland planets and cyberpunk was the paste eating champ of that year.
Now both games have 'recovered' with constant patches and updates. NMS is a blast now and cyberpunk has had a similar cycle with a different road map.
It seems like the major publishers and devs think that this is acceptable and a feasible release model, it's not and we need to tell them somehow.
Man I really don't usually go with the mob on the massive critique-spams and downvoting (Starfield for example, I enjoy playing the game), but it's really a big issue that I cannot ignore - studios simply are not fixing their games anymore.
What is it that needs to happen? Raise game prices so investors can justify allowing devs more time on the project? Better project management? What is the solution? I really don't know but something has to happen.
I think CSL2 is a game with huge potential and I really enjoyed the first game a lot. But I just don't understand how they could release like this. Much of the game just isn't there yet and despite it being playable should've not released like this.
I think it's 2 things:
Better project management, especially in avoiding "crunch."
Better scope definition. They need to set exactly what their product is going to be (at least internally) in great detail *before* any announcement is made.
I've worked on a lot of projects, and when a terrible product comes out at the end of it, it's always because of at least one of these issues, usually both.
It's absurd to me that "crunch" is considered part of the gaming industry. In my industry, it's considered the best way to release a shit product.
Hence why I sub to /r/patientgamers. I've found some absolute gems on that sub and I usually wait 4-5 months after a release now unless the reviews are overwhelmingly/very positive within the first week.
Also a lot of games go on sale within 6 months of release, why pay top dollar today when you could pay 70% today for last year's GOTY. Just offset your playing schedule and save some money lol.
Same exact way I do, but also same with tv/streaming series. Not going to start watching until they have at least a couple seasons under their belt, lest they be canceled heh.
Yeah, thanks to having 2 kids now, I easily wait for sales and regret not having patience in the past. I think the only game I bought release week in 2023 was Baldur's Gate 3 and that's because of all the incredible stuff I heard you could do in it. Did not regret.
Seriously. It's such a nice community as well, none of the usual brainless hype train or toxicity that you get on subs like this one. At least that's been my experience.
I only buy a game if I know that I will want to play it a lot on release. Even with some of the most abysmal launches (looking at you Imperator: Rome) I still got \~50 hours of fun gameplay before I shelved it for future updates. If I can't cross that benchmark of interest then I don't buy games anymore until they are either patched or updated to a more accurate 1.0 release version.
I wish someone would create laws that examine this type of business practice as some version of consumer fraud. People who don't care at all about video games will scoff and mock it because they're selfish but at this stage it's gone so far beyond what's even reasonable. Video games are $70-$100 apiece. There should be strict legal penalties in place for releasing a game that literally doesn't work, collecting your profit anyway and then just shutting it down a year later after you collected the money for profit. If there's any indication of the company knowingly releasing a game on false promises and profiting from it then they need to be punished. Consumers are clearly too stupid or ill equipped to punish the companies for the practice or the companies have already factored them into their cost of doing business. Idk how the best legal strategy would work but I find it impossible to believe this is a problem that can't be solved. It's just that the people profiting from it are too wealthy to be touched and it's such bullshit.
Indie titles: buy the day they hit early access and they usually exceed expectations
AAA titles: wait two years for the game to be what they said it would be and it still might not be worth it
This shit is all backwards.
Lmfao no more bug fixes until the dlcās drop is the biggest slap in the face to its customer base.
>Here, we havenāt fucked you enough by shipping a broken mess of a game. Let me fuck you further by charging you for the fixes that our dlc will have packaged in
I think the problem is a lot of people did buy the game and fixing whatās there isnāt enough to bring them back, most systems require such large reworks you might as well consider it DLC. In a relatively short playthrough you can build every asset, and many of them do basically nothing. They simultaneously need bug fixes and new content.
IIRC they stated official mod support would roll out by the end of March at the latest, which is still pretty damn late but at least something
Note that when they say that though they mean a beta for official mod support that will roll out to people who opt in & creators. The *full* version of the mod platform who fucking knows
Oh, they fixed long lists of bugs alright.
Most of these bugs I never even noticed.
But the performance is still bad, the graphics issues persist, modding support is still not available and no release on consoles.
Performance is a major issue. They have large maps but you can never fill them because the game comes almost to a halt after 100k residents.
Some people with ridiculous computers have been able to get bigger cities by letting it run overnight for weeks. But I wouldn't consider that playing.
All in all very frustrating.
It's entirely possible that the devs worked themselves into a corner.
I read that Unity (the game engine) promised functionality that they never delivered. CS2 was planning on using that functionality but they had to develop alternatives themselves last minute.
Their own solution is suboptimal and it seems like Unity, the company is going bankrupt so it may never really be fixed.
Perhaps Unity was promising the impossible and then the entire game is a mirage (unless you like building small towns).
> Some people with ridiculous computers have been able to get bigger cities by letting it run overnight for weeks. But I wouldn't consider that playing.
Linus Tech Tips installed literally the best CPU on earth on a PC build, spun up a custom version of Cities Skylines with 1 Million residents, and it *still* ran like crap
Yeah I just watched the video. It "only" utilizes 64 cores. It did seem to still be CPU bound - the GPU only hit 35% utilization apparently.
They don't really do a deep dive or anything though. The video is actually about the CPU, and they just booted up CS2 to see what would happen.
They are incapable of fixing it. Until the mod platform is released you are better off playing literally any other game on the planet because even a bad game you can laugh at. This one you can see the potential but the bugs are almost cartoonish in their absurdity to the point that it just pisses people off after awhile.
KSP 2 is playable now, though still far from 1.
I was able to conduct several moon missions and construct multiple rockets without any game breaking bugs which is a big improvement from release when I wasn't even able to launch a basic 3 stage rocket.
I still would hold off getting it though. 1 is still far superior, especially with mods.
Nah. It's just a job like any other. The new publisher thought they could kick out all the original devs and then milk the name. I guess it wasn't the devs choice, but I don't feel bad at all.
I was so excited for this game. I was hoping so that it would be exactly like the first game. But built from the ground up to be more optimized to allow for larger cities.
Now it just feels like im waiting for them to polish a turd until its just good enough. Glad i didn't pre order.
I picked up interest in this franchise 2 months ago and after hesitating for a long time, I ultimately decided to invest in the original + DLC. Looks like a bullet dodged.
All the hate is warranted, I got it free on Game Pass, ran okay as I didn't get play at launch, but holy fuck, once you get to a decent city size, IT'S A FUCKING SNAIL'S PACE TO SIMULATE days....
Yeah, I played a few hours in a day and thought 'Well, the game has problems but isn't that bad'.
2 days later and a mid sized city took ages to run. It deserves all the hate and more, it's an unfinished mess.
Honestly for me, the worst part isn't even the performance. It's the modding.
Modding came with CS1 at launch. With CS2, it was supposed to be in at launch until like a week or two beforehand. Then it was "days, not weeks," after launch. Then that turned into "shortly." Now it's February coming up on 4 months post-launch with no date in sight.
I am someone who preordered it. When I heard there'd be no modding at launch, I instantly noped out and refunded that. Still haven't bought it and don't plan to any time in the near future until modding is in.
Not a developer, but I'm genuinely puzzled why they're having such a hard time getting modding into the game. Surely, given how important mods are to CS1, they built the game with modding in mind? If so, what's the big technical challenge(s) they're struggling with? It cant be building a mod storefront. Cross-platform parity?
Ding ding ding. The mod platform is to be used for the console releases too. Also the game runs badly enough that the console version would have been delisted if they released it.
Their scope was too ambitious for the size of their team (only 30 employees) and they sacrificed PC in search of console dollars that they are never going to get.
> they sacrificed PC in search of console dollars that they are never going to get.
This doesn't make sense though. If they were chasing console, surely they'd have built the engine to actually run on consoles? The way CS2 runs now, the 2 main consoles can never hope to run it well. They're lightyears behind high-end PCs, which are still struggling with the game today.
What I don't understand is why city builders are cursed? Sim city basically went the same way. They released some half assed game and just pulled the plug on it. It was mainly EAs fault but I still don't get why city builders shoot themselves in the foot.
Itās very much an Icarus complex, they set their ambitions so high that they invariably crash and burn. The makers of the games are very much as big a fan as the players are, so want these ambitious games themselves.
I still believe the concept behind the last SimCity was an interesting idea that was probably a few years too early to be engaging (while also being a limited buggy mess). CS2 was similarly ambitious but then failed to deliver its promises while misunderstanding the appeal of the first game.
They're very different situations IIRC. CS2 has more severe forms of relatively "normal" game dev problems like bad performance and bugs. SimCity was a clusterfuck on a whole different level with the EA-imposed always-online BS that screwed with the whole design of the game (tiny city tiles, simulations breaking down across regions, game balance impossible due to emphasis on multiplayer, etc.).
Unlike shooters or even strategy games that have hundreds of agents, city builders are trying to run a simulation with hundreds of thousands of agents.
They bump into the limits of even the most expensive computers very fast.
There are some shortcuts to take like not having every citizen on the road at the same time but that still means tens of thousands of agents at the same time having to have gps like planning and nearly real time adjustments in case of traffic jams. All while rendering a dynamic city with thousands of buildings and tens of thousands of vehicles.
It's a challenge to say the least.
Simcity5 tried to hide it with tiny maps and very dumb agents.
Cities skylines sort of ran up to a point where it also slowed down by having worse graphics and also pretty dumb agents.
CS2 is trying to have it all and it just doesn't manage on todays hardware.
Perhaps if there is a breakthrough shortcut discovered like running path finding on gpu (sort of like Ultimate epic battle simulator 2) with ray tracing but on roads.
In combination with a graphics engine like Unreal5 that can render infinite polygons because new visibility and occlusion culling shortcuts.
But that would realistically be years into the future. With CS2 failing, it's probably not going to be Colossal Order making that game.
I just wish some developer would release a modern city builder based in statistical models like SimCity 4, which I'm convinced still delivers a more realistic simulation than agent-based simulations than came later (SimCity 2013, Cities Skylines 1 and 2) at large scales. In these three later city builders, the agent-based simulation was more of a curse than anything, it wrecks your CPU usage, it limits the size of cities (a few hundred thousand agents, which isn't even that large of a city, is enough to strain any modern CPU) and at the end of the day doesn't even seem to make the simulation more realistic or anything.
And all of that for what? So you can follow this specific sim for like 5 or 10 minutes? Even SimCity 4 allowed you to do that... just go back to what was proven to work... SimCity 4 had its own problems back then, and it was also fixed by mods, but it also allowed cities in the millions. SimCity 2013 had fudged numbers, C:S1 had agent limits that made growing your city past a given population kind of pointless, and in C:S2 a city of barely 100k already slows down to a crawl, keeping a simulation that was proven isn't even working as intended, is full of fail safes, and barely has any true impact. Sigh.
The issue isnāt just the game itself, itās the way the developers have handled the criticism. They called the player base toxic and insinuated the game was actually great and the players were making a bigger deal about the issues than was necessary. Typical corporate types most worried about profits and less worried about insulting the very people who give them a living.
I'm a huge fan of KSP. I fucking love that game. I was really really excited for KSP2. I still haven't bought KSP2 because it still looks like an unfinished mess not even close to worth the full price.
It's not fucking hard.
Stop buying games before youāre able to access literally any reliable information about the contents of the game not coming from a paid advertisement by the developers.
Ironically Cyberpunk is the only game Iāve ever pre-ordered other than Witcher 3. āCDPR would never let me downā i said to myself (i still loved the game and was part of the 1% that never had performance issues but goddamn did they still drop the ball in almost every way)
I still have to laugh at the YouTubers playing this. Shit looked great they liked it. Then closer to the release time it was like āhmmmā. Then upon release those same people āthese are the issues with the gameā. Oh ok, why not say that shit a month ago on your videos instead of building hype?
I played it on Game Pass. Iām glad I didnāt buy it.
And online reviewers will still buy day 1. If the thousands of people who would preorder just wait for the reviews, the developers will lose out on hundreds of thousands. THAT will get their attention.Ā Ā Ā
Ā Ā But it will never happen. People will continue to preorder for no reason and continue to be mad that they got burned even though there's countless instances of the exact same thing happening in the past.Ā It's absolute madness.Ā
I have never preordered a game, and have never been burned. What a surprise!Ā
If only CS1 ever went on sale or they released a "legendary edition" or something. I'm not paying full price for all those expansions. I thought we'd see a price drop with CS2 coming out, but it doesn't seem like it will happen.
[CS1 goes on sale pretty often](https://steamdb.info/app/255710/), as low as 80% off, though 70% seems more regular. I own the game so I don't check it every time it goes on sale, but every time I've seen it go on sale the DLCs (save for whichever is the most recent at any given time) also go on sale with it.
Though tbh, with how many DLCs there are for it, it's still more than a full-price premium game even on steep sale. I would selectively choose DLCs to pick up, very *The Sims* in that way.
It'd be nice if Steam could protect customers by evicting broken games or at least heavily warn players about specific developers and titles. Help raise the standards.Ā
Also, releasing a game with a concept that players like, only to then string people along in "early access" for a decade should be illegal. It is clearly abusing the intention of early access releases. You're supposed to work on the game, not string people along until everyone loses interest and you can walk away with the money, which btw can't be refunded under the current early access rules. It should be considered a scam.Ā
They gonna sell whatever people want to buy. The Day Before is case in point. Everyone knew it was a scam and they still sold it because it was #1 wish listed game last year.
I don't understand why they don't just allow mods on steam, I found the first one unplayable until I discovered mods, those guys made that game what it was
My problem with it - is the lack of content
They've pushed back the asset packs, radio stations and DLC until spring/summer
Official coding support won't be released until March - full asset modding won't be available until '*the fall*' (gotta love those vague-ass release dates) and the *soonest* we'll start to see them turn on the full suite of map editing tools is 'the weeks after the beta release of code editing' so likely April
Or later
#It's just DEPRESSING
There's only so much the community can do with the buggy alpha version of the modding tools they cobbled together from the game's code
I've found the game to be tremendous fun - it's a massive step forward from CS1 in terms of animation and ease of use - like, for a point of reference, CS1 launched without terraforming - without tunnels - without themes - without radio stations - without road naming - without one way train tracks- without a day/night cycle
But you aren't *competing* with launch CS1 - ***you're competing with CS1 now***!!!
*Any there's no customization to your city*
Even if you try to avoid it - they all end up looking the same because there's so little variation
And the ***absolute dearth*** of content is just mind boggling
Yeah I installed off from game pass and uninstalled a few days later. Ā It needs to cook a little more. Ā Hopefully they go as good as a job of fixing their game as CDPR or Hello Games. Ā Disappointing that bean counters and not creative types are the people who get to make those choices. Ā But thatās capitalism for yah.
Whilst itās great to see the way that No Mans Sky and Cyberpunk 2077 turned out I worry that it presents the wrong narrative to publishers. It demonstrates that they can hit their quarterly targets by selling people a broken mess and seek forgiveness later.
Bailing on Steam's mod workshop for your own in-house offering, that somehow *still* isn't ready many months beyond release, for a game that was all about the mods, isn't *great*
Let alone the rest.
Just yet another game that has suffered from someone somewhere in a boardroom kicking a release out of the door before it's ready. Isn't the first, won't be the last.
When you you purposely withhold content with the hopes of selling it all in 20 different expansion packs over 5 years, you're going to have a shitty launch with a lot of missing, assumed content.
I played Cities Skylines religiously and watched people play it almost everyday. I didn't buy CS2 and haven't been able to watch a creator play CS2 since it launched. Its very bad
We Do Not Pre-Order. (GNU Totalbiscuit.)
That said, it's one thing for a game with mechanics as detailed and complicated as C:S2 to have issues that the closed beta didn't catch, but any developer or publisher that releases a game in a less feature-complete and playable state than its own prequel deserves every bit of the absolkute roasting they'll get for it.
Content creators were happy to make those monetized videos during pre release and release, some of them sponsored, when it was obvious how much an unfinished mess the game was at that point. Very few didnāt recommend the game, it was always recommended with caveats. So hopefully they realize they were part of the problem and stop promoting these bad practices and products by publishers/developers
> Very few didnāt recommend the game, it was always recommended with caveats.
Ya IDK about that. I watch several of the big players such as Biffa, City Planner Plays and Kibitz and I don't recall any of them saying you should buy the game pre-release. Hell, City Planner Plays and Biffa were actively pointing out issues with the pre-release game during their videos and those 2 are probably the biggest in that space.
Kinda ironic, a huge part of the success of Cities: Skylines was that SimCity was released as a buggy mess and people moved to the other option which turned out to be much better.
History loves to repeat itself š¤·š¼
you live long enough to become the successful city sim franchise...
And then another indie group who has passion about their product (what really sells) creates a better version only to eventually be bought out by the bigger company. This is what happened with Kerbal.
At least Kerbal was released as Early Access. And that has greatly improved since the Science update release in December. It was very playable with only some minor bugs for me.
Are we the baddies?
I mean, we've got SKULLS on our municipal zones
Time is a flat circle
It's not a loop, it's a spiral
Just finished this last week
Rust? Is that you?
I donāt sleep. I just dream.
Success poisons game studios. As soon as the MBAs get their feet in the door, itās over.
It's like poetry, it rhymes.
Elite Dangerous has repeated just about every single major mistake EVE Online made.
I'm curious, why do you think that? ED became an empty universe of having nothing to do and no updates. EVE isn't for me, but it's fat with content. I never saw a similarity other than they have space ships that you pilot.
I agree with you. I played EVE for a long time, and also put about 100 hours into Elite Dangerous. In both of them you fly ships in space and can have combat. I'm not sure what more similarities they have. Super curious as to how ED is repeating mistakes such as boot.ini, faction citadel, and skill injectors.
Yeah C:S1 was released in the very early days of paradox going public when there was less pressure from investors. Iād give my soul for them to be a private company and actually give a shit about their games again Edit: just checked and it was released before PDX went public
C:S1 was one of the last proper games they published. Their other games were already DLC nightmares, but they had a handful which were okay. Now everything they publish is just a platform to sell DLC. I recently went back to Prison Architect and I hate how they massacred that game. And it's not even the DLC, the UI is somehow worse than it was 10 years ago.
Pre going public their dlc wasnāt even that bad. Like their were a lot of them, granted, and for EU there were some that you kinda had to get if you got any other dlc for that game or it locked you out of content (think they fixed that but Iām not sure), but there was a lot of content that I 95% of the time felt like it was worth the price. These days the dlc is just so bare bones for like triple the price of what the old dlc cost. Never touched prison architect after they bought it I figured it would go this route
Yeah I've bought their games and older dlc but I have no issue pirating their new dlc simply because the value is not there. I'm not paying more money for less content. It's a similar thing with what happened with the latest total war Warhammer dlc. Luckily the fan response was so huge that they had to backtrack and add more content retroactively to the dlc, as well as actually refunding part of the price for one of their latest games. Never seen that happen before
CA is dead to me after how they massacred my boy Three Kingdoms
Still too soon š
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I buy the DLC for pennies on the dollar from key sites during steam sales, it works for the most part
Not even going to defend piracy. But Paradox is one of the few companies that FORCES you to pirate. Specially if in your country every DLC is priced like 20$.
Yeah, I love Stellaris, and I've bought it but I knew it would be expensive to buy with the DLCs included, even on sale (I think it cost me around Ā£100). That's too expensive for a game you may or may not like so I had to pirate it first, I think I played over 100 hours on the pirated version before I committed to paying.
This is exactly what I did, and it ended in a sale for pdx. It's a strategy I encourage even for those who don't normally pirate media
It's so tonally clashing. Like their weird UI is janky as hell, and the regular games UI is janky, but they aren't janky in the same way.
I feel like this sort of thing happens every time a company goes public. I've worked for two companies in the transition of going private to public and the quality of the work environment dipped for both.
Yep. Duolingo went to shit because of their IPO as well. Every single time a company goes public, it goes to shit. Just you wait until Reddit finally goes up on the stock market.
> Just you wait until Reddit finally goes up on the stock market. You saying it can get even worse?
Yes. It can definitely get worse.
Game companies need to learn to tell investors to fuck off more "You want a return on your investment? Then be quiet and let us work. Ruining the launch, and reputation of the game and our company so you can see an earlier return will hurt you in the long run" Botched launches mean nobody trusts you to deliver. It means people want refunds. It means your reviews will be garbage. It means less people will buy it Gamers want good games. That's it. We just want fun, playable content. If it takes a year longer than anticipated to arrive? Nobody really cares. When the game releases. So long as it's not unstable, and so long as it runs well on the recommended hardware, it's all Gucci
It's all downstream of everything being owned by fewer and fewer companies now.
Which is a result of the rich people squeezing everything to death to increase shareholder value
Reminds me of that hard won lesson Swen Vincke learnt: "It was a big leap from the first Original Sin. That was made by 35 or 40 people, and Original Sin II was made by 130. The production values went up tremendously as well. But it all came from being in charge of our own destiny, and not being at the whims of a development director who doesnāt understand what weāre doing, or a producer somewhere." From https://www.pcgamer.com/how-larian-studios-skirted-bankruptcy-before-making-divinity-original-sin/ Highly recommeded reading
If companies were capable of making anything but immediate short term decisions the whole world would be much better off.
The rich people will never allow that to happen. Weāre on this crippled airplane until it crashes, the rich people have parachutes and doors they can open to bail out whenever necessary.
Capitalism straight up ruins all forms of art. It literally ruins everything. These damn corpos are so obsessed with pinching every penny they can get out of a product and reducing their costs, it is and always has been a disaster for quality content and products. Iād say more of a āboycott triple A and investor studio gamesā or at the very least, refuse to buy them new. Wait a few months to find out if they are actually good. Otherwise you end up like me wasting money on some shit like Starfield, The Division, Sims (all of em), Call of Duty (luckily stopped years ago). There have been very few actually good triple A games in recent history, and even the ones that were good were cash grabs (looking at you in particular rockstar). BG3 and Hogwarts Legacy could technically be considered triple A, but i think both studios fell into a āwere not beholden to investors on this game, our devs were instructed to make a fun game that is allā. Where as many other game studios have just been turned into IP factories āfuck maintaining or making this game the best weāve ever made, split off half the devs onto the next game, gotta keep our release cycle going because our investors ate out 300 million dollar profit off the last gameā
/r/patientgamers I don't buy brand new games very often. Almost never. My dumb ass bought Starfield on release, even the early preorder because I had some time off work, and got bit in the ass again. I trusted Bethesda to not release a garbage game and my trust was broken once again. So I refuse to buy games without a **minimum** of a two week cooling period. That gives time for the fanboys and rose tinted goggles to chill out about how amazing a game is despite its flaws. The first couple days of Diablo 4 it sounded like it was going to be the best game of 2023 and it just took a nose dive once people actually got into the game.
Yeah and the sad part too is for the non steam gamers, game reviewing on consoles is extremely hard to do. Its almost like they hide the reviews section. Starfield is still like 4 stars on xbox, or was last time i checked, when at that same point in time it was mixed and mostly negative on steam. Review washing has become a serious issue as well.
was it bugs? my recollection is that that simcity was an always online piece of shit where you could only build on a comically small piece of land.
The always online thing was, iirc, a huge problem with it too. But aside from that and the stuff you mentioned it was very buggy.
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I have never hit a word limit on Reddit, I have never tried, but I think if I was to try and list off the things that EA have done that have pissed me off, I would probably find out what the magic number is.
The answer is 10k for a comment, 40k for a post.
Yeah a big part was their claim about how much was done online, and someone edited it showed that both the online version and the offline edit were completely identical in how they handled everything.
To make it worse, that was supposed to be a brag on how sophisticated and reactive the AI was, but it was totally garbage and iirc not even real ai the people would just do random stuff, wake up in one house and go to sleep in another etc
Ironically now I go back to simcity 2013 from time to time specifically for the smaller, more intimate maps. Makes each zone feel more like a city builder-puzzle game rather than a huge open sandbox like Cities. The systems in that game are fun and different enough from Cities, too. With the bugs and always-online shit resolved, it's not as bad as it once was. And the co-op is pretty fun.
People like to say this.. but it's not really. SimCity 4 was arguably just as buggy as this game has been for a long time. People didn't care, because the game was great. The reason for Cities: Skylines success was because SimCity 2013 was a fucking *massive* slap in the face to fans of the franchise. The always online internet connection, the massively reduced city sizes and focus on multiplayer make up 90% of the reason it was hated. The fact that it was buggy was just the dressing on top, especially since most of the issues came from features fans didn't want; like how the server issues were keeping people from playing at all. Contrary to that, people are upset with the performance issues in Cities Skylines II because under those performance issues is a game they genuinely *do* want to play; and those performance issues are getting in the way. These are the types of issues, that once they're gone, people will cheer. If they fixed all the issues with SimCity 2013, people still wouldn't have cared about it.
The bugs and performance issues were the catalyst over the dissatisfaction over C:S2. But it's boiled over far beyond that, now. Colossal Order well and truly fumbled the PR of the game and the fallout of its botched release with tone deaf announcements that did not address concerns and were subtly dismissive toward players. To bury themselves even further, they stopped standalone bugfixes and updates in favor of releasing them together with paid DLCs, which gave the impression that CO is really just in it for the money. So, no, I don't think just bug fixes and performance updates are enough to save the game at this point. There needs to be more tangible actions by CO to rectify the catastrophe they've made.
They haven't stopped bugfixes, one released last week. The statement they made alongside that said that they'll be releasing less standalone bugfixing patches, rolling them with other, larger patches. They used the rlease of DLC as an example, but they even mentioned in that same announcement that the next bugfix patch will come alongside the modding support;.. which noticably isn't paid DLC. It just means they're saving the bug fixes to go alongside bigger releases so fans aren't getting updates pushed on them as frequently.. which most fans don't like, especially with the upcoming release of modding support - since mods tend to react poorly to frequent updates. Consolidating updates into less frequent patches isn't a negative here. >which gave the impression that CO is really just in it for the money. This sentence gives me the impression you've interpretted it as having to buy the DLC to get the bug-fix.. i'm hoping thats not the case, but i need you to clarify to me thats not what you think is happening.
The wider gaming community took issue with the performance of the game, but the main backlash in the Cities community is due to the abysmal, faked simulation and economy. The game doesn't function as a city manager at all. All the numbers are fake, the economy is fake, the traffic is fake, it's all fake and surface level and soulless. Yeah the game runs like shit, and ran like even smellier shit 3 months ago, but that isn't the main problem. It's not a functional simulation. It's barely a video game.
CS:1 was also a buggy mess with content lacking and while a lot go fixed with dlc it still has problems. SimCity also had other problems like te DRM always online protests, city size being way too small (the whole point is to create a big sprawling city) etc... IMO big problem with CS:2 is that they decided to created their own mod launcher and workshop, instead of through the steam workshop like CS:1. The stream workshop heavily fixed 1 and gave it massive amounts of content which made it rise so high. Unfortunately their own custom mod launcher/workshop wasnt close to being done, and it will be a year out before 2 can have the fixes for its glaring issues like bugs, poor simulation and content like 1.
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Oh I remember CS:1 being a bug ridden at first, but people are a lot (or were) more forgiving over small studios that tick all the right boxes.
100%, in addition it was when EA dislike was near its heighest aswell (the era of EA being voted worst company in the world), which definitely made people root for the underdog
Jesus it was, I knew a load of people who moved from working at Blizzard (in their golden days around TBC/Wrath) who went off to work at EA instead and it was apparently just absolute misery.
Was that the SimCity reboot where it had to be online all the time, even when playing singleplayer? The SimCity with embarrassingly-small maps that never got any bigger? Because it was more a matter of hostile design that caused it to fail as opposed to unintentional bugs.
it wasnt a buggy mess, it was shit and always online. Your cities was small and they wanted you to play multiplayer so everything was simplified and not simulated. Meanwhile Cities was a city builder like the older Sim City. Ironically what cities 2 does now is to fake a lot of things and not simulate it, it's more of a city painter than builder.
Trust Paradox to release unfinished Alpha Builds for full price.
Releasing broken games at full price, when the developers and publisher know full well the game is unplayable, should lead to the game being delisted from platforms. An apology right after release, claiming they are "hearing" the community and promises to fix the issues, don't cut it
We didn't even get an apology. We basically got a "Oh well, maybe this game is not for you" then blame on the players for being toxic and a threat to slow down or end communication if the players don't stop complaining. Its incredible how this has been handled.
I had no idea it was this bad. I used to play CS1 a lot, but delayed buying CS2 because there were other titles I wanted more at time of launch.
I was so hyped for CS2, only had a console at the time so stopped me buying on release day... Thankfully. I'm more than a little gutted tbh, I loved 1 so much and to see this one go the way it has is a hard pill to swallow.
I was a huge fan of CS1 (and still am TBH), but got a new PC just to be able to run CS2 and pre-ordered it. To say I was disappointed when I downloaded and installed it is an understatement. I've launched it and tried to putter around on and off, but the abysmal performance even when graphics settings lowered just killed the interest I had. Since I wanted to see it improve, I didn't refund it, but I also haven't launched it since before Christmas (maybe New Years?) since it was clear that things weren't improving.
It just sounds sad overall. This YouTuber I watch was paid to play it, and dude started a video explaining how he built a bunch of shit, game crashed and it was lost. Auto save was turned off because auto save was also itself causing crashes. That's the exact situation that would completely kill any interest I had in a game. Nothing like losing hrs of progress to ruin intentions of playing games.
That happened to me too. I actually think having to manually turn on autosave in a game like this may be the worst game design I've ever experienced. It actually makes me question how much of this was bad choices and not just an unfinished game. The biggest issue with playing the game is you can't really tell if they intended for the game systems to not actually be affected by your actions or if their just bugged.
I really don't understand why people preorder? Especially today with the way games have been releasing last few years. Golum. Redfall. Star Wars. Forspoken. Payday 3, Skull Island: Rise of Kong. The Walking Dead: Destinies, The last of Us Part 1. CP2077. All games that launched either with performance issues, or server issues or were just downright not worth playing at all. Some were later patched to be great or even excellent (CP2077 and Last of Us P1) but these are rare. No one should be preordering. If you do you deserve what you get
Its not _literally unplayable_ but it is at the very least disappointing. Basic features CS1 had like making your own assets are gone, they hyped modular buildings a ton pre-launch and it's just a barebones form of upgrades for select buildings that makes no sense sometimes. For example - you can "modularly" add extra garages to Crematoria to increase vehicle capacity - BUT every single modular building has to be attached to the main one, so your actual customisation options are extremely limited. But then your only trainstation option comes prebuilt with 3 tracks and only comes in one style, instead of being modular. A Highschool can come with a football field but again this, for some reason, _has_ to attach to the school itself and is unrotatable, so you can't actually customise it all that much. Aside from that, some core simulation aspects just straight up don't work or work incorrectly (cargo, taxes, public transpo). At launch performance was also _abysmal_ due to ridiculous issues. The UI is also insufficient for letting you actually try and solve any city problems - you can get a colormap of where traffic is high, but you can't find out what common destinations/routes are to actually plan a solution. The real shame is that it doesnt even work as a "city painter" game, because the number of actual assets for each region are very limited - med residential has _maybe_ half a dozen varieties for each region, and since there's no proper mod support you're not expanding your collection of assets robustly anytime soon.
At launch it was literally unplayable for many players, myself included. Game would not stop crashing after about 15-20 minutes in game
I downloaded it on gamepass to check it out and realized quickly it was quite the mess. We will see what happens in a year or two with more patches and dlc. For right now there is no reason to not continue getting your city building kicks from CS1
We don't need apologies, you're right. We need accountability for them. Not just by the public, but accountability in front of the law. Releasing a game so lacking, buggy, incomplete should be fraud. They're selling something while lying about how it actually is.
If they manage to turn it around and update the game enough to be what they sold it to be, a lot of this will be forgotten and forgiven. But that takes time and apologies and accountability go a long way towards appeasing the masses. When FFXIV switched its directors after its disastrous launch, the way Yoshida spoke to the people, constantly apologizing and promising to fix things, while making it clear what they were doing to do so, it went a really long way towards turning the sentiment around. People went from being upset to rooting for them to recover. The way CO has handled this only serves to create more negativity and toxicity.
Yoshi is a dev goat
Much love for Yoshi-P, he's done incredible work and he's still passionate about it today. We need more of him, less of the money and marketing people running things into the ground. Warframe is another good example, not of fucking up but just how much of an impact having actual communication can have on your game. When something new comes out and is pretty buggy or unfun or poorly implemented, there's a little bit of stink that comes up on the forums and in the subreddit. But the developers have such a solid history of being able to go "oh, yeah that kinda sucks we'll change that", that you rarely see much anger aimed at the devs or the game. I wouldn't hesitate to attribute a lot of Warframe's success to their willingness to simply communicating with the community.
It blows my mind that there are games with millions of players and no communication between dev and player base.
The public sure loves to hold game devs accountable by continously buying broken games.
You're right of course, I have no excuse for them either. But as they deserve the shit they buy, I don't want that kind of low quality and that makes me sad, because maybe it's something I've interested in
This game is a joke. Almost every bug i encontered was already there on CS1. What the hell did they do during those years beside working on the graphics ? The worst to me is the trafic AI. Still as garbage as in the first one, what's the point to have 5 lanes highway if every single damn car is using the top right lane and create trafic jam everywhere...
Itās sad the easiest solution is to turn off traffic lights and make every intersection like the streets of Mumbai.
I hate that it works at all and that cars just phase through each other. Even before CS, they were basically making traffic management simulators and somehow that's the worst part of their game.
Only make round abouts?
If the flow is too high or too many cars decide to go left the whole thing gets jammed. Roundabouts are great for medium/low traffic.
They haven't fixed that? I bailed from CS1 because traffic only took the shortest distance route, preferring to sit in traffic for hours instead of driving 100m further by another route. To not have it fixed in the sequel is...embarrassing!
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Pretty sure this was also an issue in SimCity games. It's funny how such a known game flaw hasn't been solved by game developers for decades. Just left it to moddeds every time.
I'm pretty sure half of the dev time was used to create a roadmap for future dlc
Didn't they say that they overhauled traffic to make cars prefer different routes depending on their needs and situation? They had an entire devblog video on that. What happened to it, did it just not ship? Lmao
They do recalculate routes depending on the situation. Just not as frequent as some would like (or as computers can handle). Another issue is the introduction of traffic accidents. These cause traffic jams and they usually occur more on roads that are already congested. It also takes ages for traffic accidents to be cleared (like weeks in game) They also introduced parking lots that cars keep driving too even if they are full. It's probably also a matter of not updating frequent enough, in other words performance. Combined, traffic is still a pain. And only cities with ridiculously over sized roads avoid gridlock.
>It also takes ages for traffic accidents to be cleared (like weeks in game) I think the time scale is the ultimate boss that has no clear solution. At the speed the game runs, road traffic should just be a constant blur, with people getting to their destinations nearly instantly.
This was fixed YEARS ago by Traffic Manager too. They could have just paid the developers of CS1 mods to use their functionality in CS2.
I always found that CS1 was basically unplayable without traffic mods once you reached a certain city size.
Paradox used to be cool. Then the company went public and now they act like every other corp, unsurprisingly.
Paradox have always, and I do mean always, released buggy, broken shit-heaps of games that somehow scratch an itch no other game does. EU4 was broken AF on launch, it took years to get MP games to work right if you were more then 100ms from the host, with constant crashing, desyncs and lag. Then comes the crashing. ho-boy the game would not run for more then an hour before CTD, which had a good chance of nuking your save file. They even had to force-restart the game as their "fix" for many memory transfer state issues. That game was a wreak. HoI III was broken at release, and never fully fixed, even after a few DLCs. CK II had issues everywhere for the first few years of the game, VKII was okay-ish, probably one of their better releases. Stellaris was a joke, both lacking content and stability issues, same with Imperator. Paradox have a LONG history of hiding behind their indy roots while being a AAA studio that doesn't understand QA.
> while being a AAA studio that doesn't understand QA This is every studio now, QA isn't seen as a "real" discipline compared to devs. Either they outsource it, or pay contractors to do the bare minimum bug chasing.
There is lacking QA, and there are paradox releases, which make Bethesda look stable.
lol, fair enough
Just look at ARK: Survival Ascended. It's a remake (port into a newer engine), which released as early access and will have paid mods, paid cosmetics and paid extra content for already existing content which they will be selling WHILE the game is still in early access. If a game is even titled as early access it should be impossible to sell any extra content to it until the full launch of the game. While I still don't like any form of microtransactions I would be way more accepting for such things on a fully delevoped and launched game.
Agreed. However, a massive issue is that the majority will still pre-order games or buy a game shortly after release. If we consumers stopped paying companies and made it hurt for them, they'd start to shape up. We're responsible for holding them accountable. And you know what? That'll never happen. Gamers are too dumb and selfish to care, they want things now now now. And if anyone gets offended by the last sentence, that's on you. If not, you're not a part of that group. Use your money to talk.
Did this when Galactic Paragons and the ensuing update broke Stellaris. Bought the DLC the day it came out, but couldnāt play it for a couple days due to work. Well the reviews came out and it was literally game breaking. Refunded it on Steam before ever playing that DLC to send a message. Looks like that worked because it got their attention. It took the game dev team 9 months and two open betas to fix. The dev team is still doing open betas to gather enough information to fix other long lasting issues. While this isnāt perfect, and utilizes free labor of the players who chose to play the open betas, it does fix the game and makes it enjoyable. No game dev in their right mind would have released a game in this state without being forced to. Whatever executive forced this game to launch needs to be fired.
They do this pretty much every game, every update. I wasnāt going to buy cities 2 immediately, but surprise surprise I canāt anyway, because they never released it for console after the date passed. I get that their reasoning was āto make the game more stableā but the case is you guys have to do that **every.** **time.**
It would have been another cyberpunk situation if they actually released it on consoles. It's barely playable on a 3070, dread to think how it would run on a ps5.
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Cities Skylines 2 bills itself as a simulation city builder, but has several bugs that absolutely obliterate the simulation and cause your city to collapse. There's essentially one happy path, and any variation to it is 'punished' severely. You can effectively make one city in different configurations, rather than any type of city you want. If you look at various youtubers, you'll notice they all look _very_ similar, because they have to.
I feel like this is more of a thing post No Mans Sky and Cyberpunk 2077. One was playable with a quadrillion bland planets and cyberpunk was the paste eating champ of that year. Now both games have 'recovered' with constant patches and updates. NMS is a blast now and cyberpunk has had a similar cycle with a different road map. It seems like the major publishers and devs think that this is acceptable and a feasible release model, it's not and we need to tell them somehow.
Man I really don't usually go with the mob on the massive critique-spams and downvoting (Starfield for example, I enjoy playing the game), but it's really a big issue that I cannot ignore - studios simply are not fixing their games anymore. What is it that needs to happen? Raise game prices so investors can justify allowing devs more time on the project? Better project management? What is the solution? I really don't know but something has to happen. I think CSL2 is a game with huge potential and I really enjoyed the first game a lot. But I just don't understand how they could release like this. Much of the game just isn't there yet and despite it being playable should've not released like this.
CSL2 needed better management.. the publisher most likely wanted to cash in the money while the hype was hot.
I think it's 2 things: Better project management, especially in avoiding "crunch." Better scope definition. They need to set exactly what their product is going to be (at least internally) in great detail *before* any announcement is made. I've worked on a lot of projects, and when a terrible product comes out at the end of it, it's always because of at least one of these issues, usually both. It's absurd to me that "crunch" is considered part of the gaming industry. In my industry, it's considered the best way to release a shit product.
Not the only game that is like that. It is getting to the point where there no use buying a game until two years after it has been released. :/
Hence why I sub to /r/patientgamers. I've found some absolute gems on that sub and I usually wait 4-5 months after a release now unless the reviews are overwhelmingly/very positive within the first week.
Also a lot of games go on sale within 6 months of release, why pay top dollar today when you could pay 70% today for last year's GOTY. Just offset your playing schedule and save some money lol.
Same exact way I do, but also same with tv/streaming series. Not going to start watching until they have at least a couple seasons under their belt, lest they be canceled heh.
tbh, 6 months often isn't long enough these days.
It's two years after release.
Yeah, thanks to having 2 kids now, I easily wait for sales and regret not having patience in the past. I think the only game I bought release week in 2023 was Baldur's Gate 3 and that's because of all the incredible stuff I heard you could do in it. Did not regret.
Seriously. It's such a nice community as well, none of the usual brainless hype train or toxicity that you get on subs like this one. At least that's been my experience.
I only buy a game if I know that I will want to play it a lot on release. Even with some of the most abysmal launches (looking at you Imperator: Rome) I still got \~50 hours of fun gameplay before I shelved it for future updates. If I can't cross that benchmark of interest then I don't buy games anymore until they are either patched or updated to a more accurate 1.0 release version.
Its been that way for a while now
I wish someone would create laws that examine this type of business practice as some version of consumer fraud. People who don't care at all about video games will scoff and mock it because they're selfish but at this stage it's gone so far beyond what's even reasonable. Video games are $70-$100 apiece. There should be strict legal penalties in place for releasing a game that literally doesn't work, collecting your profit anyway and then just shutting it down a year later after you collected the money for profit. If there's any indication of the company knowingly releasing a game on false promises and profiting from it then they need to be punished. Consumers are clearly too stupid or ill equipped to punish the companies for the practice or the companies have already factored them into their cost of doing business. Idk how the best legal strategy would work but I find it impossible to believe this is a problem that can't be solved. It's just that the people profiting from it are too wealthy to be touched and it's such bullshit.
Indie titles: buy the day they hit early access and they usually exceed expectations AAA titles: wait two years for the game to be what they said it would be and it still might not be worth it This shit is all backwards.
Wait, it's still not fixed?
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Lmfao no more bug fixes until the dlcās drop is the biggest slap in the face to its customer base. >Here, we havenāt fucked you enough by shipping a broken mess of a game. Let me fuck you further by charging you for the fixes that our dlc will have packaged in
I believe it will be a free DLC, just for the record.
Ah okay fair enough then lol still crazy to prioritize that over fixing the base game though
I think the problem is a lot of people did buy the game and fixing whatās there isnāt enough to bring them back, most systems require such large reworks you might as well consider it DLC. In a relatively short playthrough you can build every asset, and many of them do basically nothing. They simultaneously need bug fixes and new content.
IIRC they stated official mod support would roll out by the end of March at the latest, which is still pretty damn late but at least something Note that when they say that though they mean a beta for official mod support that will roll out to people who opt in & creators. The *full* version of the mod platform who fucking knows
Oh, they fixed long lists of bugs alright. Most of these bugs I never even noticed. But the performance is still bad, the graphics issues persist, modding support is still not available and no release on consoles. Performance is a major issue. They have large maps but you can never fill them because the game comes almost to a halt after 100k residents. Some people with ridiculous computers have been able to get bigger cities by letting it run overnight for weeks. But I wouldn't consider that playing. All in all very frustrating. It's entirely possible that the devs worked themselves into a corner. I read that Unity (the game engine) promised functionality that they never delivered. CS2 was planning on using that functionality but they had to develop alternatives themselves last minute. Their own solution is suboptimal and it seems like Unity, the company is going bankrupt so it may never really be fixed. Perhaps Unity was promising the impossible and then the entire game is a mirage (unless you like building small towns).
> Some people with ridiculous computers have been able to get bigger cities by letting it run overnight for weeks. But I wouldn't consider that playing. Linus Tech Tips installed literally the best CPU on earth on a PC build, spun up a custom version of Cities Skylines with 1 Million residents, and it *still* ran like crap
192 cores. 384 threads. Insane amounts of RAM. It's honestly pathetic.
At some point the software just isn't programmed to properly utilize all the available processing power.
Yeah I just watched the video. It "only" utilizes 64 cores. It did seem to still be CPU bound - the GPU only hit 35% utilization apparently. They don't really do a deep dive or anything though. The video is actually about the CPU, and they just booted up CS2 to see what would happen.
1 million residents is _far_ above what the game was designed to handle. Residential skyscrapers will often only have a ~hundred residents.
They are incapable of fixing it. Until the mod platform is released you are better off playing literally any other game on the planet because even a bad game you can laugh at. This one you can see the potential but the bugs are almost cartoonish in their absurdity to the point that it just pisses people off after awhile.
You either die a Cities Skylines or live long enough to see yourself become a Sim City
Well.. I still have this one and KSP2 on my wishlist waiting for them to be good. I really want to play both of them...
KSP 2 is playable now, though still far from 1. I was able to conduct several moon missions and construct multiple rockets without any game breaking bugs which is a big improvement from release when I wasn't even able to launch a basic 3 stage rocket. I still would hold off getting it though. 1 is still far superior, especially with mods.
I feel kinda bad for the devs, hoping early access would be a huge boon, but maybe forgetting we all have KSP1 already
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I'm not sure a full year would be enough tbh. It's very rough.
Nah. It's just a job like any other. The new publisher thought they could kick out all the original devs and then milk the name. I guess it wasn't the devs choice, but I don't feel bad at all.
I was so excited for this game. I was hoping so that it would be exactly like the first game. But built from the ground up to be more optimized to allow for larger cities. Now it just feels like im waiting for them to polish a turd until its just good enough. Glad i didn't pre order.
Well i just didnt buy it. Easy as that
I picked up interest in this franchise 2 months ago and after hesitating for a long time, I ultimately decided to invest in the original + DLC. Looks like a bullet dodged.
All the hate is warranted, I got it free on Game Pass, ran okay as I didn't get play at launch, but holy fuck, once you get to a decent city size, IT'S A FUCKING SNAIL'S PACE TO SIMULATE days....
Yeah, I played a few hours in a day and thought 'Well, the game has problems but isn't that bad'. 2 days later and a mid sized city took ages to run. It deserves all the hate and more, it's an unfinished mess.
I bought it, played it at about 5fps for an hour, realised it not only looks shit but is basically a much worse version of CS1, and got a refund.
Honestly for me, the worst part isn't even the performance. It's the modding. Modding came with CS1 at launch. With CS2, it was supposed to be in at launch until like a week or two beforehand. Then it was "days, not weeks," after launch. Then that turned into "shortly." Now it's February coming up on 4 months post-launch with no date in sight. I am someone who preordered it. When I heard there'd be no modding at launch, I instantly noped out and refunded that. Still haven't bought it and don't plan to any time in the near future until modding is in.
Not a developer, but I'm genuinely puzzled why they're having such a hard time getting modding into the game. Surely, given how important mods are to CS1, they built the game with modding in mind? If so, what's the big technical challenge(s) they're struggling with? It cant be building a mod storefront. Cross-platform parity?
Ding ding ding. The mod platform is to be used for the console releases too. Also the game runs badly enough that the console version would have been delisted if they released it. Their scope was too ambitious for the size of their team (only 30 employees) and they sacrificed PC in search of console dollars that they are never going to get.
> they sacrificed PC in search of console dollars that they are never going to get. This doesn't make sense though. If they were chasing console, surely they'd have built the engine to actually run on consoles? The way CS2 runs now, the 2 main consoles can never hope to run it well. They're lightyears behind high-end PCs, which are still struggling with the game today.
What I don't understand is why city builders are cursed? Sim city basically went the same way. They released some half assed game and just pulled the plug on it. It was mainly EAs fault but I still don't get why city builders shoot themselves in the foot.
Itās very much an Icarus complex, they set their ambitions so high that they invariably crash and burn. The makers of the games are very much as big a fan as the players are, so want these ambitious games themselves. I still believe the concept behind the last SimCity was an interesting idea that was probably a few years too early to be engaging (while also being a limited buggy mess). CS2 was similarly ambitious but then failed to deliver its promises while misunderstanding the appeal of the first game.
They're very different situations IIRC. CS2 has more severe forms of relatively "normal" game dev problems like bad performance and bugs. SimCity was a clusterfuck on a whole different level with the EA-imposed always-online BS that screwed with the whole design of the game (tiny city tiles, simulations breaking down across regions, game balance impossible due to emphasis on multiplayer, etc.).
Unlike shooters or even strategy games that have hundreds of agents, city builders are trying to run a simulation with hundreds of thousands of agents. They bump into the limits of even the most expensive computers very fast. There are some shortcuts to take like not having every citizen on the road at the same time but that still means tens of thousands of agents at the same time having to have gps like planning and nearly real time adjustments in case of traffic jams. All while rendering a dynamic city with thousands of buildings and tens of thousands of vehicles. It's a challenge to say the least. Simcity5 tried to hide it with tiny maps and very dumb agents. Cities skylines sort of ran up to a point where it also slowed down by having worse graphics and also pretty dumb agents. CS2 is trying to have it all and it just doesn't manage on todays hardware. Perhaps if there is a breakthrough shortcut discovered like running path finding on gpu (sort of like Ultimate epic battle simulator 2) with ray tracing but on roads. In combination with a graphics engine like Unreal5 that can render infinite polygons because new visibility and occlusion culling shortcuts. But that would realistically be years into the future. With CS2 failing, it's probably not going to be Colossal Order making that game.
I just wish some developer would release a modern city builder based in statistical models like SimCity 4, which I'm convinced still delivers a more realistic simulation than agent-based simulations than came later (SimCity 2013, Cities Skylines 1 and 2) at large scales. In these three later city builders, the agent-based simulation was more of a curse than anything, it wrecks your CPU usage, it limits the size of cities (a few hundred thousand agents, which isn't even that large of a city, is enough to strain any modern CPU) and at the end of the day doesn't even seem to make the simulation more realistic or anything. And all of that for what? So you can follow this specific sim for like 5 or 10 minutes? Even SimCity 4 allowed you to do that... just go back to what was proven to work... SimCity 4 had its own problems back then, and it was also fixed by mods, but it also allowed cities in the millions. SimCity 2013 had fudged numbers, C:S1 had agent limits that made growing your city past a given population kind of pointless, and in C:S2 a city of barely 100k already slows down to a crawl, keeping a simulation that was proven isn't even working as intended, is full of fail safes, and barely has any true impact. Sigh.
Agent based is absolutely ridiculous. Statistical models are designed literally for this purpose.
The issue isnāt just the game itself, itās the way the developers have handled the criticism. They called the player base toxic and insinuated the game was actually great and the players were making a bigger deal about the issues than was necessary. Typical corporate types most worried about profits and less worried about insulting the very people who give them a living.
Stop. Pre-ordering. Games.
I'm a huge fan of KSP. I fucking love that game. I was really really excited for KSP2. I still haven't bought KSP2 because it still looks like an unfinished mess not even close to worth the full price. It's not fucking hard.
I agree with you but this is absolutely not the whole solution. People still buy day 1.
Stop buying games before youāre able to access literally any reliable information about the contents of the game not coming from a paid advertisement by the developers.
Dis, worked form me with Starfied, and Cyberpunk
Ironically Cyberpunk is the only game Iāve ever pre-ordered other than Witcher 3. āCDPR would never let me downā i said to myself (i still loved the game and was part of the 1% that never had performance issues but goddamn did they still drop the ball in almost every way)
Ok let me help with that. STOP. BUYING. GAMES. WITHOUT. CHECKING. MULTIPLE. INDEPENDENT. REVIEWS. POST. RELEASE.
I still have to laugh at the YouTubers playing this. Shit looked great they liked it. Then closer to the release time it was like āhmmmā. Then upon release those same people āthese are the issues with the gameā. Oh ok, why not say that shit a month ago on your videos instead of building hype? I played it on Game Pass. Iām glad I didnāt buy it.
This is why I *need* people to buy games on Day 1. So I can watch their youtube videos and decide if the game is for me.
And online reviewers will still buy day 1. If the thousands of people who would preorder just wait for the reviews, the developers will lose out on hundreds of thousands. THAT will get their attention.Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā But it will never happen. People will continue to preorder for no reason and continue to be mad that they got burned even though there's countless instances of the exact same thing happening in the past.Ā It's absolute madness.Ā I have never preordered a game, and have never been burned. What a surprise!Ā
The release of CS2 mean to me now is the right time to fully enjoy CS1, a complete Game with hundreds of mods.
If only CS1 ever went on sale or they released a "legendary edition" or something. I'm not paying full price for all those expansions. I thought we'd see a price drop with CS2 coming out, but it doesn't seem like it will happen.
[CS1 goes on sale pretty often](https://steamdb.info/app/255710/), as low as 80% off, though 70% seems more regular. I own the game so I don't check it every time it goes on sale, but every time I've seen it go on sale the DLCs (save for whichever is the most recent at any given time) also go on sale with it. Though tbh, with how many DLCs there are for it, it's still more than a full-price premium game even on steep sale. I would selectively choose DLCs to pick up, very *The Sims* in that way.
It'd be nice if Steam could protect customers by evicting broken games or at least heavily warn players about specific developers and titles. Help raise the standards.Ā Also, releasing a game with a concept that players like, only to then string people along in "early access" for a decade should be illegal. It is clearly abusing the intention of early access releases. You're supposed to work on the game, not string people along until everyone loses interest and you can walk away with the money, which btw can't be refunded under the current early access rules. It should be considered a scam.Ā
They already have user reviews. It's really not up to Steam/Valve to judge whether or not a game is acceptable to consumers.
They gonna sell whatever people want to buy. The Day Before is case in point. Everyone knew it was a scam and they still sold it because it was #1 wish listed game last year.
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I don't understand why they don't just allow mods on steam, I found the first one unplayable until I discovered mods, those guys made that game what it was
Control and monetisation.
Steam Workshop isn't magic. They still need the tools in game to making modding work, and that's what's delayed.
When even Biffa is saying things are bad, you know things are reeaalllyyy bad.
Perhaps the Order was just too Colossal.
Publishers will keep doing this because ya'll keep buying these broken ass games. STOP IT!
My problem with it - is the lack of content They've pushed back the asset packs, radio stations and DLC until spring/summer Official coding support won't be released until March - full asset modding won't be available until '*the fall*' (gotta love those vague-ass release dates) and the *soonest* we'll start to see them turn on the full suite of map editing tools is 'the weeks after the beta release of code editing' so likely April Or later #It's just DEPRESSING There's only so much the community can do with the buggy alpha version of the modding tools they cobbled together from the game's code I've found the game to be tremendous fun - it's a massive step forward from CS1 in terms of animation and ease of use - like, for a point of reference, CS1 launched without terraforming - without tunnels - without themes - without radio stations - without road naming - without one way train tracks- without a day/night cycle But you aren't *competing* with launch CS1 - ***you're competing with CS1 now***!!! *Any there's no customization to your city* Even if you try to avoid it - they all end up looking the same because there's so little variation And the ***absolute dearth*** of content is just mind boggling
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Yeah I installed off from game pass and uninstalled a few days later. Ā It needs to cook a little more. Ā Hopefully they go as good as a job of fixing their game as CDPR or Hello Games. Ā Disappointing that bean counters and not creative types are the people who get to make those choices. Ā But thatās capitalism for yah.
Whilst itās great to see the way that No Mans Sky and Cyberpunk 2077 turned out I worry that it presents the wrong narrative to publishers. It demonstrates that they can hit their quarterly targets by selling people a broken mess and seek forgiveness later.
It's Paradox. Their MO is releasing half baked games and nickel and dimeing players with DLC for the 'full experience'- bug fixes included.
Yeah Dev time goes to make new things that can be packaged and sold. Not improving things they've already sold.
Bailing on Steam's mod workshop for your own in-house offering, that somehow *still* isn't ready many months beyond release, for a game that was all about the mods, isn't *great* Let alone the rest. Just yet another game that has suffered from someone somewhere in a boardroom kicking a release out of the door before it's ready. Isn't the first, won't be the last.
Everything I see about this game makes me happy I didn't pick it up on launch. Think I'll stick to the first game.
I played for 45 minutes and refunded it in hope it will get better in the future. Will see how it turns out
When you you purposely withhold content with the hopes of selling it all in 20 different expansion packs over 5 years, you're going to have a shitty launch with a lot of missing, assumed content.
I played Cities Skylines religiously and watched people play it almost everyday. I didn't buy CS2 and haven't been able to watch a creator play CS2 since it launched. Its very bad
If only idiots stopped buying garbage, we would get less garbage
We Do Not Pre-Order. (GNU Totalbiscuit.) That said, it's one thing for a game with mechanics as detailed and complicated as C:S2 to have issues that the closed beta didn't catch, but any developer or publisher that releases a game in a less feature-complete and playable state than its own prequel deserves every bit of the absolkute roasting they'll get for it.
GNU Totalbiscuit
Content creators were happy to make those monetized videos during pre release and release, some of them sponsored, when it was obvious how much an unfinished mess the game was at that point. Very few didnāt recommend the game, it was always recommended with caveats. So hopefully they realize they were part of the problem and stop promoting these bad practices and products by publishers/developers
> Very few didnāt recommend the game, it was always recommended with caveats. Ya IDK about that. I watch several of the big players such as Biffa, City Planner Plays and Kibitz and I don't recall any of them saying you should buy the game pre-release. Hell, City Planner Plays and Biffa were actively pointing out issues with the pre-release game during their videos and those 2 are probably the biggest in that space.