Cities Skylines 2 - One Year Later... Is It Better Now?

Cities Skylines 2 is one year old, having released on PC in October 2023. One year on... it's time to ask: how has cities 2 improved? Is citgies Skylines 2 better now? What exactly went wrong with cities 2, and how much more does it need to deliver before it meets expectations?

From early and persistent performance issues, crashes, and seemingly indefinite delays - it has not been a good first year for Cities Skylines 2. However every cloud has some silver lining, and this year also saw some decent free updates for the economy & buildings in Cities Skylines II. The (late) addition of free beachfront DLC, and the slow introduction of modding are also wins in my book.

One year on, reviewing the game, I believe Cities 2 still feels early access in many ways, even beyond the closed & open beta products like mods and code modding. What do you think? n a Cities Skylines vs Cities Skylines 2 face-off, is Cities 2 better now? #citiesskylines2 #citiesskylines #gaming #simulation #gamingnews

TIMECARDS
0:00 - Cities Skylines 2 - One Year Later
1:15 - Beta Mods
3:00 - From City Painter to City Simulator
4:07 - Two Steps Forward, One Step Back
5:16 - Paid DLC Woes
6:59 - Ultimate Woes
7:35 - Cities 2 on Console-lololol
8:19 - Mixed Communications, Free of Plain English
8:52 - Cities 2 in Review - Better Than 1 Now?

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[Myne]

Adding a Beach DLC when there are no beaches in the game was a really bold move on CO/Paradox's part

[dean._..]

It’s so sad… we will have to wait for another developer to step into the city building genre and replace Colossal Order the same way Colossal Order did to EA and SimCity

[Krishnath.Dragon]

CS2 was hurt immensely by being released in an unfinished state, had it been early access, it'd have been acceptable, but it wasn't. And it's clearly still in an unfinished state one year later.

[PoshJosey]

between CS2 and KSP2, 2023 was a rough year for sequels

[HistoryTeacherSteve]

my biggest gaming disappointment in years. I was so hyped, and so let down by this dumpster

[christiangraff]

At least this game taught me a valuable lesson: you can’t trust any development studio to release a good game just because their last one was good. I was shocked when I first started the game at release. Not only did it look bad, but there were also so many things broken. And let’s not even talk about the performance. It had issues even on my i9+4090 machine, so I was like, “How on earth is this supposed to run on a regular PC?” I always come back after patches and give it another chance, but so far, the game has not been a satisfactory experience. However, as long as they keep working on it, there is hope that it will one day be great. I purchased the version with all the DLCs, but I think they should just delay them and work on the base game instead. I don’t care about the DLC as long as the base has so many issues anyway.

[BeachLookingGuy]

feels like yesterday i was pointing out all the red flags in their marketing footage and everyone was telling me "it's not even finished yet".... now a year later they are saying "it's not even finished yet?"

[geofff.]

Sometimes I wish Hello Games had failed to redeem No Man's Sky. Not because I hate them or it, but because every dev and publishe seems to have taken away the wrong lesson. Now they all think with time they can turn it around.

[LongJourneys]

IMO if a game requires mods or DLC AT ALL to be playable, it's not "finished".

[owenlee]

I'm still baffled that bicycles aren't in the game yet. Nothing makes my cities feel emptier and more hollow than the bicycle infrastructure of Gary, Indiana. And this doesn't seem to come up in many assessments of where the game currently is or what CO should prioritize even though this is a core mechanic with assets already available in the code.

[LegionOfEclaires]

It's better but it is not the game most fans want, yet.

[Mogloth]

It never gets old watching the helicopter fly through buildings. 🙂

[ianbeck]

I remember, probably at least six months ago, referring to this game as an orphaned child. I still stand by that in that I don't believe that it is getting or will get, the love that it so seriously needs . The game needs a ton of money injected into it and the right people engaged so that it can be "quickly" improved. Trouble is, the player base and positivity is so low that it's almost a lost cause - and for all of the reasons that you have highlighted in your excellent video.

[Tagarav]

Marketing budget: insane hype
Game budget: ...

[noworries]

Unfortunately by the time they get this thing fixed they probably could have just started over and rebuilt the whole game

[LilaHikes]

No Man's Sky was simply missing content. SC2 is not only missing content, but also suffers from major performance and stability issues. When patches fix one thing but then break other things, consistently, there's bigger problems under the hood. You can always add missing content but you can't fix bad code/game design. And I do believe that is what CS2's biggest issue is. If I am right, there is no 'No Man's Sky' comeback for this title.

[sandmandf]

Another year of "Workers and resources: soviet republic"

[CrisMac]

Why don't they just admit, that not using workshop on Steam didn't work and just open that option up? Or is the game hard-coded to only work with the Paradox mod system? What do they have to lose?

[swedizzle]

At this point i just chucked into my I'll play it one of these days bucket. Also, when i've gotten a new computer

[kevnar]

I uninstalled this back in November last year. I keep checking out the progress videos. I'm looking forward to actually playing a finished game if it's ever completed someday.