CO Word of the Week #5

[CapnBludd]

You said this would be the most realistic city building game ever created. What did you give us that is an improvement upon the first game? Lets see:

We can follow Cims life path - It is extremely boring, they sit at home all of the time, their appearance changes constantly and they are so ugly

Mail service - Cool I guess, once you fix it, maybe you already did, I haven't played for a few weeks, but it really in't a big deal or that interesting as a new game system.

Homeless people - Who we can't even track or help in anyway. The only way to find out who is homeless is looking at the parks, give us homeless shelters, assistance programs, soup kitchens and make the welfare office help these people and keep track of them.

Internet service - Not a big deal really, we just place antennas around the city

Better roads - I will say this is an improvement, but they are so clunky without mods, why do you consider a game that heavily relies on mods to fix your clunky things to be complete and acceptable?

Highly detailed cims - Who are horribly ugly. It would have been better if you kept the less detailed people from CS1. If you wanted highly detailed Cims then you should have hired an artist to create ones that actually look good instead of the goblins you bought as middleware or whatever.

Jaywalking - I remember this being talked about in the dev preview videos, oh boy, isn't this a fun idea?? Let's add some real life unpredictable behavior into the game! Whoopie!!! Yeah, if that only happened very seldomly it might be fine, but they jaywalk all of the time! I remove crosswalks and add pedestrian paths either as elevated walkways or tunnels and they still cross where I removed the crosswalks and cause massive traffic issues. Thankfully modders are already making mods and have given us a way to fix that nonsense.

Upgradeable buildings - Yeah, cool I guess, but with over $100M in my budget I just fully upgrade everything as soon as I build it now. It doesn't really make them interesting or unique, it just means we need to save space for the additions.

And beyond that there are so many systems in the game that are so broken and unbalanced. My city has about 130K people, there are like 30K in elementary school and that means I need a ton of schools. That many of the same buildings that all look totally identical looks terrible. There are people posting issues on Reddit all of the time, issues that seem to be ignored. The water physics are awful compared to the first game, the hydroelectric plant never works right. Trying to create bus lines and such is so extremely painful and difficult now compared to the first game. The whole tracking where people are going thing we had in the first game by seeing the path arrow things on roads is gone and it was so helpful.

Am I missing any other big new features that were added? Maybe, but to be honest with you, this doesn't live up to the hype. You made it sounds so much better in all of the dev videos and things that you put out before releasing the game. We expected bugs and performance issues, but making game systems that feel half baked and leaving them there while telling us that "If you dislike the simulation, this game just might not be for you" is shameful and Really???? REALLY!!!!!???? Come on CO, what an awful thing to say about your playerbase, you know, all of us who looked forwards to this game for years before it was even announced, those of us who keep you in business, those of us who you want to buy your expansion packs. This is not yet better than the first game.

All of that said, I'm still having a lot of fun with it and even if you don't fix the game as you should the modders are doing it for you. I'm looking forwards to when mods really start coming out because that is when this game will truly get fixed and balanced correctly.

One of the features of Deranged Teddy's unemployment tracker is that it has a counter for homeless families.

Unemployment Monitor v1.1.0

Displays various employment statistics, including unemployment per education level.

thunderstore.io

 

[UltimateOrb]

Let's just admit that the game is broken and not worth the money.

 

[Angius]

I mean, yeah, it certainly is quarter-finished and worth it maybe as a $20 early access title at most. Question is, will it eventually live up to the "DEEPEST SIMULATION YET OH MY GOD BEST CITY BUILDER EVER" marketing hype.

 

[UltimateOrb]

You bought the game for the full price, but it doesn't work well. The company uses you as a tester. How do they compensate for this? Free DLC?

 

[TrevorHall]

Looking at all the comments above, I can see a wide range of opinions, from joy that the game is being fixed, to constructive criticism, through various levels of disappointment to “give me my money back”.

But:

It’s not that that has led me to not play this game at all today.

I logged many hours, but I wasn’t playing many hours.

I set the game on low graphics, fastest speed and then went hiking with the dogs.

Later: I had more cash, and a day had passed in the game. The game runs 5x real time.

But even that wasn’t the issue for me.

The game just has no charm.

In the good old game, I would see lines of helicopters delivering vast numbers of tourists to my mega theme park, pedestrian paths packed with cims, rushing between the massive tourist attractions near the airport. Lakes and rivers that offered a waterfront paradise, with some exclusive homes.

But: Today, I have given up.

Goodbye slow, boring lifeless game. I think I’ll go clean some leaves from my gutters. At least that’s productive.

Bye Bye

 

[buda atum]

Looking at all the comments above, I can see a wide range of opinions, from joy that the game is being fixed, to constructive criticism, through various levels of disappointment to “give me my money back”.

But:

It’s not that that has led me to not play this game at all today.

I logged many hours, but I wasn’t playing many hours.

I set the game on low graphics, fastest speed and then went hiking with the dogs.

Later: I had more cash, and a day had passed in the game. The game runs 5x real time.

But even that wasn’t the issue for me.

The game just has no charm.

In the good old game, I would see lines of helicopters delivering vast numbers of tourists to my mega theme park, pedestrian paths packed with cims, rushing between the massive tourist attractions near the airport. Lakes and rivers that offered a waterfront paradise, with some exclusive homes.

But: Today, I have given up.

Goodbye slow, boring lifeless game. I think I’ll go clean some leaves from my gutters. At least that’s productive.

Bye Bye

Got to say you've reminded me to go get my fun with CS instead of agonising over the unplayability of 2.

Thanks.

 

[EggHeadBX]

Thanks for the update. And enjoy your holidays, there's a time for every thing in life and you deserve a break after this hard launch

 

[neroden]

Thanks for all the feedback. When it comes to the gameplay and simulation we set goals for the game and we have reached those goals.
Surely there are issues that we're looking into and fixing bugs, but the overall gameplay experience is what we aimed for. Cities: Skylines II is the better game compared to the first one. If you dislike the simulation, this game just might not be for you. If there is a bug that ruins it for you there's a good chance it's fixed sometime in the future. Games are a subjective experience and it is impossible to please everyone. There's a bugfixing patch on its way soon however, so hopefully we'll be able to resolve at least some of the issues that may be a deal breaker for some. We thank you for your patience!

For clarity the above is for the simulation and gameplay. The performance is not where we want it to be and we are hard at work to improve it. This is also the reason the consoles were delayed. The modding support is an important part of a Colossal Order game, so it will also be rolling out as soon as possible.
We are disappointed we couldn't make these aspects of the game ready for you on time, but we refuse to give up. The missing features and platforms will be available in the upcoming months.

You're joking. There are dead Cims wandering around moving from house to house. The economic simulation is simply not working due to *extensive* bugs in pretty much every subsystem anyone has examined.

If your goal was really to release a hopeless bugfest, oh, come on, even I don't believe that was your goal.

I'm sure there are solid simulation structures buried under the layers and layers of bugs, but this wouldn't have passed QA anywhere which had proper QA. You did not achieve the gameplay or simulation goals you set out to, because the systems are *just too buggy*.

I feel confident that you can eventually achieve your goals, but you didn't.

Nobody has "release a broken mess with massive game-breaking bugs in every core system" as their goal.

If you had said "We are pleased with the core structure of the game, but we apologize for the excess numbers of very serious, game breaking bugs and will work to fix them as fast as possible", that, I would have believed.

Cities: Skylines 2 is a far worse game than Cities: Skylines, everyone knows it, and it's not because of the concepts, it's because you released it with over 1000 game-breaking bugs, which fill the forum. I believe it *can become* a better game than Cities: Skylines, but it's just absurd to claim that it is a better game now.

Honestly I won't play the game again untl (1) the dead stop walking around, (2) unaccompanied minors and dogs stop living by themselves, (3) income and expenses actually start to reliably relate to taxes and services, (4) industries, stores, and residences actually start responding reliably to vacancies and demand/supply signals, (5) transport routings start making sense. I'd also appreciate decent information windows and visualizations (which are all hidden in the Developer Mode?).

I've reported a bunch of bugs, as well as serious UI/QOL issues, and they're "confirmed", and that's great, I'm glad you're working on them. The game will be playable when they're actually fixed.

It's clear the game is *supposed* to have good systems for all of this stuff, but we can't see them under the layers of severe bugs.

 

[neroden]

I understand this, but the issue is that this contradicts earlier communications. From November 1:

CO Word of the Week #1

Hi Everyone, welcome to our little weekly update, CO Word of the Week, where we share what Colossal Order is doing right now, and what you can expect for Cities: Skylines II as a result. CO Word of the Week originally ran from March 2016 until...

forum.paradoxplaza.com

How did CO run out of time if you controlled the decision on when release would be appropriate? Did CO run out of time with a firm deadline and released the game in the state it did, or did CO believe that the game was good to be released in that state?

I ask this because again it goes to the expectations that CO cultivates through its communications and marketing campaign, which I think is a large part of why people are upset; during the days before and after release, we were told that performance might be touch and go in the beginning due to optimization issues, but that the game is otherwise in great shape and that mod support will be out in a matter of days. But the release had such major issues with the gameplay and simulation itself that many believe it is fundamentally broken (I'm not qualified to answer that, but based on my experience with the game the simulation can function at a glance but when you get into the details it begins to break down, such as the export/mail issues, etc.). Then two to three weeks later we are told that CO actually ran out of time (implying that you weren't satisfied with the result but released it under pressure) and there's a ton of work that still needs to be done.

In an alternate reality, CO says in September/Early October that they aren't happy with the state of the game's performance and simulation. You say that because of that, we're laser focusing on those areas rather than mod tools, and will be releasing the game in Early Access on the scheduled date for those that have purchased it, and a full launch will happen in early 2024 when the issues have been ironed out. That would at least put expectations at a level that the game, in its current state, could more easily fulfill.

Would everyone be happy with that? No, some folks probably would have refunded their preorder to wait and see. But you would at least be honest with your customers and community about the state of the game and give them an opportunity to make an informed decision then rather than three to five weeks after launch. But as it stands, I think a lot of us feel that the communications we received from CO around launch were inaccurate at best and misleading as worst, and that's coloring a lot of the response here.

That would have been great, really appropriate behavior, IMO.