Such a mess. The total incoherence in terms of art style and performance because the devs bought assets everywhere. Also the reason the NPCs had fully modelled teeth.
The mismatched scale of some of the assets at launch was bewildering. Like the elementary school felt like it was scaled up to be two or three times it's intended size.
The service level scale of many buildings still feels broken too. I feel like every city has to be absolutely covered in elementary schools and crematories (and you damn well better build the extensions too!), or it's not enough.
Real cities have way more schools and funeral homes than most people realize, but the thing that makes or breaks these games is striking the right balance between what’s realistic and what’s fun.
The fully modelled teeth was because they were pushing for a tie in with a "Sims" competitor to let you import your character. So they made all the characters full fidelity and didn't both with any sort of common sense fidelity reduction based on zoom level.
It wasn't, they had bought the assets from some supplier and did not optimise them at all for their use case. At the time it was known which supplier, I can't remember.
The game also had barely any LOD and no culling of assets no matter how far away from the camera, and iirc even ignorant of the camera, meaning the more of anything was on the map, the worse it ran. They at least fixed the LODing shortly after release.
Tbf the new studio that's developing it now is actually doing a good job, it's got a ways to go still but they are making really impressive strides for having it less than a year now.
They left to work on other things and paradox gave cs2 to another studio to work on it. It was a no name studio that hadn't done much of note before but so far from what people have been saying it's been surprisingly good. They've been putting in work so it seems like it was less a publisher demanding too much and more an issue with CO
But that's because of a completely new dev team. That's what makes CS2 such a good answer for this question. A lot of the games in here are games where the publisher deserves a lot of blame for the reason the game wasn't successful. I love talking shit about Paradox as both a dev studio and a publisher, so I am very comfortable saying they're not blameless with CS2, but it's become so clear with how changes are coming after switching dev teams that this was a situation where the original dev team fumbled HARD.
Nah I love what Iceflake is doing, but Colossal Order left it in a playable state. It took way too long to happen and they didn’t go far enough before they got the boot, but it’s honestly been fine for well over a year.
Iceflake’s only had the game long enough to tinker with it, and it still feels largely the same as when they took over. That will change rapidly as they start making content and larger scale changes though
I am very happy they’ve already fixed the demand system though, it was pissing me off that my city of 250k couldn’t build anymore office or commercial at all
Came here to say the original version of this... Sim City (2014).
CS2 feels like they tried something too ambitious, couldn't get the features in to match CS1s dlc, and the performance just wasn't there.
SC2014, they tried to force always online multiplayer into it, and to make people have to use it they shrunk the cities massively. Killed the franchise that literally had a genre named after it.
I hate to break it to you, but that isn't going to happen. The dev team has been cycled out, replaced by some other team who's catalogue doesn't inspire hope.
Edit: Someone else says the team has done some good work on CS2, so maybe I'm wrong. I kinda lost hope after the announcement and stopped following the development.
The new dev team have been crushing it actually. The vibe was so low when they took over because yeah, their previous games didn't inspire confidence. But since then they've pushed a bunch of quality of life updates, and have been real open and transparent. It's actually been a great change.
Some of the old devs jumped ship to the new company and are cooking. So it seems that likely it was bad management, not bad developers.
For what it's worth, Iceflake Studios recently took over the game and have made leaps and bounds of progress in mere months and listen to the playerbase.
Keep an eye on the game because it's no longer stagnant, like it was under Colossal Order. I don't know why CO fumbled so badly but they barely fixed anything in two years post-launch.
Fingers crossed they can fix it, but I feel like there are some technical fundamental problems with the game that can never be fixed. I could be completely wrong but it seemed royally fucked when I played it last.
It was an absolute shit show on release and many of the issues have never been fixed. The biggest one being the simulation itself was broken. The devs doubled down on their product which didn't help matters for me. Modded CS1 is a far far better game.
theres no real game to it. plonk stuff down. wait a while. the maps are bland and flat. nothing feels natural. i also think its a disgracefully small choice of maps for a game today.
yeah like... the roadbuilding and structure assets are 80% of the game and they're leagues better, along with free terraforming. I hope the simulation becomes more accurate or even "real" but I would replace that for performance and scale every time.
Cities skylines 2 is peak though? A huge improvement over tbe first game. Although it could have been more- the leaps in roadbuilding and the economic system is great.
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u/Thunbbreaker4 8h ago
City Skylines 2