Cities Skylines 2: Broken & Unfinished 1 Year Later...

Hello everybody and welcome to Bull Technology. When I think of the perfect city builder, Cities Skylines comes pretty darn close. Yes, it has it’s issues, and I documented them thoroughly several years ago, but no other game allowed me to do more with my urban-planning itch than the original CS. But Cities Skylines 2—Skyline’s successor—was not the sequel many of us had hoped for at launch—with its many game breaking bugs, performance issues, and missing features. So 1 year after its initial announcement and 8 months since the game went on sale, I wanted to see if Skylines is a better game and what’s changed. Let’s get started.
-
Please Like and subscribe for more Bull Technology!
-
Music:

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License

-
Follow me on Social Media!:

Instagram: @bull_technologyy
Twitter: @bull_technology
-
#citiesskylines #citiesskylines2 #paradoxinteractive #games #video #viral #foryou

[justmavi]

"Just get a 4090 bro industry is moving forward"

We came from praising roller coaster tycoon for being made efficiently to blaming people for not throwing money at obvious problems.

[zollotech]

I keep going back to Cities Skylines 2 just to be disappointed by its tediousness, slowness despite having a very high end PC (5950X overclocked, 32GB RAM, RTX3090) it just runs terribly even on lower settings. It has some good ideas, but Skylines 1 was all we wanted with updated graphics, some new features and additions. It’s like they tried to fix something that wasn’t broke.

[brandoncollins]

To the people commenting "Well just get a new PC": I'll forgive performance issues because every PC setup is different and the devs couldn't anticipate every scenario (not just the hardware, what background apps are running, whether or not drivers are updated, etc). What ISN'T passable are the wealthy, highly educated homeless people who refuse to move into the built yet empty houses yet are 'shopping', level 5 buildings suddenly losing road connections because a new round about near them corrupted the road geometry, parking lots with 'no pedestrian access' (yet cars can enter them, and those roads have pedestrian sidewalks...), mail processing facilities that suddenly stop processing mail yet are at 100% efficiency or service buildings dispatching more vehicles than the max. Apparently they can simulate electricity 'traffic' with stupid bottlenecks but couldn't implement code for "IF calculated vehicles to dispatch > max vehicles THEN set calculated vehicles to dispatch = max vehicles". THESE are simulation / design flaws, not something that can just be fixed with buying a new PC.

[JarNO_WAY]

The game content is barebones because they want to sell it to us in future DLC's

[userreview]

Colossal Order would be out of business if it weren't for the amazing modders that have had to step in and fix their game for them. Seriously, that road builder mod is a game changer!

[vladibalan]

Paradox game: come back 5 years later and start buying DLC's on sale. Year 7: it becomes a playable game. If you buy on "release", you're more like an investor in the title.

[jer]

I'm sticking to the original Cities Skylines.

[DissonantSynth]

This game was such an immense disappoint precisely because it's not just a soulless Call of Duty or Assassin's Creed. The success and super high quality of the first CS was Collosal's own downfall. They built all trust and a great reputation among their players, only to tear it all down with a sequel.

[ricker]

As a software engineer I just don’t understand WHY for the life of me they decided to make individual cims so freaking complex. This is primarily the reason why even after all the patches the simulation speed is still immensely slow because the calculation load on the CPU is so unnecessarily high from the onset and it is a common software engineering principle that as you increase load, the more complex to complete a calculation set the more time it takes. It is clear as day that this simulation engine has an exponential load to time completion relation or >O(N) and looks to be closer to O(N^2) time where N is the size of input data or calculations to run on the CPU. The simulation is fundamentally bad at large scales and would require a complete reworking of the calculation complexity. Optimization will not fix this game.

If they really wanted to emphasize working at large scales then the simulation should have been a hybrid of statistical simulation like SC4 grid based system but modified to work with surface geometry and non-linear road nodes in addition to Agent simulation like with CS. You could reduce complexity significantly that way while still preserving detail where it’s needed.

[victorpagotto]

Im a dev, and, having this perspective, it seems to me what plagues CS 2 is a directional problem. Poor leadership, for instance, having resources and hands badly used on things which do not matter; details which do not affect the big picture having more attention than important stuff, such as cims having so many characteristics and decisions simulated, but things are teleported or ignored when they cant simply go to the grocery store, or even how they ve built a whole resources system but there is no real supply and demand.

Thats why, after all these years, SimCity 4 still is the best simulator, even though it had way less resources and innovation up until then.

[ageoflove]

I think the absolute worst part is that the game lies to us. So many of the stats and numbers are just... made up? And are not in any shape or form represented in the simulation or shaped by the simulation and how you build your city. All the game seems to do is to say: Well, your city has 100k population, 8 buslines and 100 busstops so that means you have 10k riders per month! That makes playing the game almost pointless because it really doesnt matter how you build things.

Buslines that go absolutely nowhere see the exact same rider numbers as clevery designed routes bringing people from home to work, to shopping and restaurants, whatever... You connect them to train stations, parking lots, you make sure denser areas have more stops... pointless.... I have even seen experiments of players setting their transportation budget to zero, so effectively sutting it down. And even after letting the game run for an entire year the number of users was still exactly the same. There were even people walking in to the subway stations even though there werent any trains running for an entire year at that point.

So what this means is that there simply is no game. Almost everything you build and design is just graphical and no actual simulation takes place, and to hide that fact they just trown in some random numbers that make sort of sense. And once you really start to notice that, its just no fun anymore because you are basically just using a graphics tool and you are not playing a game at all. And thats not something you can just patch because its missing the foundation the entire thing should be build on. Its like a car without an engine that has a speaker under the hood that makes vroom vroom sounds....

[Francois]

Dodged a bullet with this one. After taking one with KSP2, I learned my lesson
Thanks for the re-review !

[rko.]

your game starts to lag at 200k population, because Colossal Order added teeth to every citizen and more than 5 million polygons for one human model.
i won't talk about how ugly people are in this game, it feels like the developers have NEVER seen real people.

but
WHY TF THEY NEED TEETH????

[tmg]

They released it too early. They broke off more than they could chew, or their eyes were bigger than their stomachs (my mother always told me this at the buffets). But me their worst problem was not knowing their audience and what their customers wanted. We wanted an improved CS where the game incorporated many (most) of the mods that we downloaded and used. Back in 2023 I predicted that it would be 2025 before I would be playing it and I still hold to that schedule.

[thegamingworld]

I sincerely hope they work hard on fixing the game. While there are several significant fundamental improvements from the first game, it currently falls short in terms of content. If the developers can pull together and put in the effort, I truly believe it has the potential to become an outstanding game

[farinozcelik]

It'll finally be playable in ∼8 years.

[MrGfpf]

There is no supply chain in CS2 as well 👽

[Praisethesunson]

The game devs have never been to a walkable European city and it shows.

The City skylines games have both just been glorified traffic simulators.

[christopherr.]

It is insulting that they pushed this out to their fans.

[VerityFraser]

CS2 at launch felt like Early Access. Today it feels like an Early Access title the devs have abandoned.