"Built for the future with modern hardware in mind": Cities Skylines 2 responds to performance complaints on launch

Cities Skylines 2 brings a new era of city-building goodness to modern hardware, but the reception has been less than stellar. On top of technical shortcomings, players have been citing poor performance across the board, even on high-end PCs. The developer has responded to these claims, claiming that the game is aiming to be next-gen.

The official statement posted on the Paradox Forums has seen mixed reactions from players, with some deeming the performance to be unjustifiable while others are okay with it.

In short, this is what they had to say:

"Cities: Skylines II is built for the future with modern hardware in mind, allowing us to add more depth and detail to the game than its predecessor had."

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Cities Skylines 2 publisher clears up the controversy surrounding performance issues in their latest city builder game

The Community Manager from developer Colossal Order further continues in the PR statement:

"Earlier this month, we shared a note on performance as we had not reached the benchmark target we had set for the game. Following this, we have seen some concerns about performance and what it means for the game as a whole. We’d like to give some context to the issues the game is currently facing, what we’re doing to address them, and what you can do if you are among the players experiencing performance issues."

This is followed by assurances that many of the issues players are facing are intended to be fixed as the game undergoes further tweaks and adjustments. In particular, there will be a series of patches that will segregate problems and fix them as required. Some problems seem tied to specific hardware combinations.

For the time being, the developers suggest players scale back settings such as graphics and resolution to accommodate a playable experience. Examples of this include lowering the resolution to 1080p, reducing Global Illumination quality, and so on. While much of this is fine, it is the subsequent statement that has left fans bemused.

The statement continues:

"With the upcoming patches, the situation will largely improve with default settings. It is worth mentioning that for a game like this, the performance target is to run at a steady 30 FPS minimum. There is no real benefit in a city builder to aim for higher FPS (unlike a multiplayer shooter) as a growing city will inevitably become CPU-bound. What matters more with this type of game is to avoid stutters and have a responsive UI."

In a nutshell, Colossal Order is aiming for 30 FPS to be the benchmark that the core optimization will be centered around. A portion of their reasoning makes sense to this effect. Cities Skylines 2 is a complex city-builder on a scale never seen before, so as players build more advanced settlements, this will further drop performance due to the CPU-bound nature of the game.

So, in a nutshell, the developers are not really wrong when they say Cities Skylines 2 is indeed built with the future in mind. But that should not come at the expense of unstable performance, which is the case right now.

Fans are in the right when they claim the game needs more time in the oven to cook. Graphical issues, design problems, and, yes, performance also need to be addressed as soon as possible.

And it does seem like they will tackle these issues. For one, the developers will be implementing more image upscaling techniques into Cities Skylines 2, like DLSS and FSR2. Both are currently unavailable due to the team encountering incompatibility issues with rendering certain objects under these image reconstruction techniques.

With that said, it remains to be seen how the future console ports of Cities Skylines 2 will perform.

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Cities Skylines 2 is currently available on PC, with PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S versions arriving later in 2024.