The biggest problem with CS2 at this point is that it's been out for two months and still has not gotten a patch that fundamentally solves anything.

[Co Starring]

Short memories...

I think we can be happy about the patches we already received, considering they are putting a lot of their resources into making the game playable on consoles.

Everyone who thinks there is no direction went into hibernation or is just ignoring the facts...

It's all about me, me, me.... And, right naow!!!

 

[humorpalanta]

They did release a few patches but they did not solve the problems, tbey just covered them up. Sure, they are not easy to spot right now and don't make the game unplayable but it is just a mere minimum for an alpha test...
Such a shame. Literally so mad, playing anything else.

 

[tom_mai78101]

I'm still optimistic the game will improve within a few more updates. When do we expect the next patch do we know ?

Beyond January 15th, maybe next next week at the earliest (if having super optimistic outlook). CO devs said starting this week, they just started work today after a long holiday break, and will have more updates/info in the CO of the Week next Monday.

 

[homerCCCP]

I don't get that much the city painter point people bring up permanently. Indeed the simulation has many flaws and is (yet?) badly balanced.
But the development put clear focus here. Issue is not that the developers put the wrong prioritises, but definitely that the development time was strongly underestimated.
Considering City painting with out mods, considering the graphic issues, the comparably low number of assets and the very very limited customization options, CS:2 might be a bad (Not in my opinion, despite the issues I had quite some fun with it) city Simulator, but it is an even worse city painter at this point.

 

[atitlan]

Things are a real mess at the moment. The game clearly has a lot of potential, but it is not in a good place right now for either those who are playing for the simulation or those who want a 'city painter'.

What concerns me most at the moment is that CO have clearly got a high priority focus on getting the game fixed to allow a console release, but at the same time reputational damage is happening as PC gamers are left with a game that needs extensive patching and updates to fill in lots of half-finished aspects of the game and the longer that goes on, the more negative reviews and the more people will drift away from the game.

At the same time the fact that PDX mods and the editors aren't here are leading to Thunderstore becoming an established modding community and the lomger that goes on, the more likely we will end up with a permanent split in mod supply - there will come a point where people will have a mod dependence on Thunderstore and will not want to redownload all their mods from the official platform. Worse, some modders could choose to be Thunderstore exclusive causing a permanent rift in the community. (I remember when SC4 mods were split between Simtropolis and SC4Devotion and it was a far from ideal solution especially for those of us creating buildings at the time).

I don't know what state things will be in by the time CO get the console release issues fixed, but they should probably start looking to the history of No Man's Sky, because they may have to do a similarly massive job of reconnecting with the player base and rebuilding the game's reputation. And that will not go down well with Paradox given their business model of milking DLCs to the max.

 

[[Delta ²k5]]

I don't get that much the city painter point people bring up permanently. Indeed the simulation has many flaws and is (yet?) badly balanced.
But the development put clear focus here. Issue is not that the developers put the wrong prioritises, but definitely that the development time was strongly underestimated.
Considering City painting with out mods, considering the graphic issues, the comparably low number of assets and the very very limited customization options, CS:2 might be a bad (Not in my opinion, despite the issues I had quite some fun with it) city Simulator, but it is an even worse city painter at this point.

Something to add here, the "underestimation" is not COs fault. Part of the issue is that Unity offers fancy stuff like virtual texturing which in the end is not supported by them because of the infinite "beta" status of such things, effectively forcing developers to come up with their own implementation if a "beta" feature breaks after a core update. Another factor is Paradox which wanted to have the game being finally released after 3 additional years of development (plan was to release the game in 2020), so they released it in some playable state. The core issue however is that marketing was sticking to this being a feature complete game and not labeling it as being "early access" which would have been the better choise as CO mainly currently is interested to gather additional feedback and bug reports. However as CO is not responsible for the marketing campaign it's something to blame Paradox for.

Also I don't actually even think the simulation is badly balanced - instead there are single point bugs which may make the whole simulation appear to be broken or out of balance. However comparing to the less complex simulation of C:S1 things within C:S1s limits work better in general (actual simulation of agents stalled at 64k citizen units because that was a hard limit, leaving roads empty when more citizen and service vehicles had to show up. Citizen then were only beamed to their destination). In QA on such complex things it's likely that some issues/bugs are simply masked by other bugs, so if a bug is fixed some other bug may be toggled which was invisible before. Some bad or good side effects may also occur because of code changes.

When comparing the amount of assets and functionalities provided on the C:S1 base game of the first release version with the C:S2 base game there are more assets and features available on C:S2 already. C:S1 did also not provide a way to place props at the beginning (some proof from 2016 https://steamcommunity.com/app/255710/discussions/0/352788917748873201 - the original "more beautification" mod needed to place props has been removed since). "City painting" was also just as hard in the beginning and took around a year to develop as mods came out. On C:S2 already mods are available to enable prop placement in different forms. Even if the game is named "Cities Skylines 2" nothing actually was reused from C:S1 - it's a whole new game with new simulation rules, new scaling and a new engine version with much customization code wise.

The current form of customization on C:S1 took also 2+ years to develop (thinking about core mods to be released like "More Beautification", "Road Anarchy", "Prop Line Tool" and "Move It!").

 

[Skeksis25]

Short memories...

I think we can be happy about the patches we already received, considering they are putting a lot of their resources into making the game playable on consoles.

Everyone who thinks there is no direction went into hibernation or is just ignoring the facts...

It's all about me, me, me.... And, right naow!!!

Why do people say this thinking they are being some mature level headed members of society or something? They released the game and took money from the customers "right naow!!!". Heck they even sold future DLC which no one had any idea about when it will come out "right naow!!!". They made it sounds like mod support and editors were coming out soon after launch and they still aren't out, but they gladly deposited the money "right naow!!!".

But sure, its the players who are being unreasonable. They didn't ask us to pay a fraction of the game's price in October. They gladly took the full price including money for future content right away. You are saying the players are being unreasonable for expecting what they paid for THREE MONTHS after they paid for? That is being all about me me me and "right naow!!!"? Jesus christ man.

 

[Richard Schaller]

I loved playing CS1 and when CO videos showed us what to expect in CS2, I bought it before release.

That was a mistake. CS2 was delivered unfinished.

CO is trying to improve it. Unfortunately, after the fix18f1, the game is still not great to play. It crashes for me and only after I restart the computer can I start the game again, until the next crash.

So the game is no fun and I won't play it again until it's finished, whenever that will be. Fortunately, there are other games that run and are fun to play.

 

[Krazel]

Why do people say this thinking they are being some mature level headed members of society or something? They released the game and took money from the customers "right naow!!!". Heck they even sold future DLC which no one had any idea about when it will come out "right naow!!!". They made it sounds like mod support and editors were coming out soon after launch and they still aren't out, but they gladly deposited the money "right naow!!!".

But sure, its the players who are being unreasonable. They didn't ask us to pay a fraction of the game's price in October. They gladly took the full price including money for future content right away. You are saying the players are being unreasonable for expecting what they paid for THREE MONTHS after they paid for? That is being all about me me me and "right naow!!!"? Jesus christ man.

YES, 100% yes and I'm glad I'm not the only one who doesn't understand this perspective. It is not okay to take money from customers and come out with an unfinished product. Period. BUT, if you do, you need to win back your loyal community members by giving us some tangible fixes and updates quickly for reasons explained in this thread already. Unfortunately, that hasn't been the case.

Here's an example nobody asked for:
If I sell you a TV and only a few channels work (and some are just fuzzy screens), you'll obviously be upset. Then a couple weeks later I open up a few more channels. I could say "I understand, there's some work to be done here. Here is a video of how the TV was made and the great people that worked on the TV." And you go "awe" and it buys some time. Then a few weeks later a couple more channels are unlocked, but some of the other channels that were originally opened then close back up. Then you get on the forums and a lot of people say things like "Just go watch another TV until it's done!" or "It's made by a small company" or "I'm enjoying the channels I have now, it's fine!" or my favorite, "Sure, it's not perfect. Just be patient! It'll get there " I can't help but laugh a little. It's completely unacceptable to release any other product like that.

The OP said it much better than I could have. It's so disappointing to run into the bottlenecks in the game that make it hard to play as intended, or whatever intended is at this point. I'm still hopeful (despite what it seems like), but that doesn't excuse the release of an unfinished game. "Just be patient! It'll get there "

 

[BoraBora]

The current form of customization on C:S1 took also 2+ years to develop (thinking about core mods to be released like "More Beautification", "Road Anarchy", "Prop Line Tool" and "Move It!").

CS was a new game from a pretty much unknown tiny company, with no following and no modding community. CS II may be new code but it's a sequel from a 30 employees company, with a huge modding community. So yes, we expect much more from a sequel and still have much less at the moment. Fact: a bunch of top-notch well-known modders are ready to release 2500+ assets (the so-called "region packs"). But CO isn't ready to release the editor and the platform so we have to play with a handful of boring assets, most of them american-styled.

I never thought CS II would be so terribly unoptimized, so terribly bug-ridden or so terribly unbalanced. But most of all, I never thought a CO game, and the sequel of CS, no less, would be released without officiel modding support and would still be without 3 months later.

 

[Wade20]

The number of buildings that are still outright broken is very frustrating. If it doesn't work remove it from the game until it does. More frustratingly the lack of official mod support is likely delaying these fixes by months for folks that don't want to use unsupported mods.

I appreciate the work CO has done in what is likely a trying time for them balancing corporate priorities against quality of work. Hopefully we can get a couple early patches that address the basic functionality now that performance is passable for smaller cities.

 

[Potoroo]

I dunno. Lost interest soon after launch. I'm waiting and watching. Hoping the next year addresses some of the issues and actually makes C:S2 fun to play.

My partner and I are the same. We've put CS2 on hold because it's not enjoyable when the most challenging part of the game is working around bugs.

 

[Rarzie]

CS was a new game from a pretty much unknown tiny company, with no following and no modding community. CS II may be new code but it's a sequel from a 30 employees company, with a huge modding community. So yes, we expect much more from a sequel and still have much less at the moment. Fact: a bunch of top-notch well-known modders are ready to release 2500+ assets (the so-called "region packs"). But CO isn't ready to release the editor and the platform so we have to play with a handful of boring assets, most of them american-styled.

I never thought CS II would be so terribly unoptimized, so terribly bug-ridden or so terribly unbalanced. But most of all, I never thought a CO game, and the sequel of CS, no less, would be released without officiel modding support and would still be without 3 months later.

This. All that CO had to do was take C:S1 and make it run better on more advanced hardware. Polish up the rough sides and that would have been a machine printing money. Instead we get a completely new code-base and a re-imagining of the mechanics. It is not clear if the weird behaviors are bugs or just what the devs wanted it to be. It boggles the mind.

Right now CO is burning the goodwill they garnered with C:S1 by the truckload - and people once burned are not likely to return. (The entire 'we need to regain your trust' is just to keep the people currently here engaged - the ones that already left aren't going to return). Also, because they have to release the game for the consoles soon, we're not not likely to get any overhauls or improvements beyond bug fixes. Whatever the vision is for C:S2 is what we'll have to deal with for the foreseeable future.

The whole situation just depresses me. This is not what I wanted for C:S2.

 

[Collector78]

It seems to me that the feedback loop between Content Creators who just want pretty, the number of views they garner and game design has been detrimental to a good single player experience. The game seems to be what the sandbox CCs wanted to help them make videos... not the game players wanted.

On one hand I'm tempted to agree with you, but when this is the obvious result...:
Water
Tunnel

So no, I refuse to believe that too much focus on a good looking game is the issue (although Colossal marketing department did an absolutely great job by fooling all of us with great looking movies).
I rather believe they got too much ahead of themselves by making wrong design choices to simulate reality. There is no such thing as zone suitability in real life. What does exist is spatial planning and municipal regulations, which is us (the players). But in CS2 they made the huge mistake to base the whole economic mechanism on a zone suitability mechanism that doesn't exist. Every skilled lead developer will tell you that not following the rules of life usually means you are heading for disaster.

However, what I don't understand is that scrum teams test their own work and have a common commitment to deliver quality. A game this size must have many scrum teams, but only very few took their responsibility? Game creators usually are obsessed with their work, so I can't imagine so. Scrum masters are looking at all the post-its, and they will see that the majority of them has not been moved to the 'ready' column. Not even a CIO or CEO will overrule them if they show them their backlog. I suppose no one will ever tell us, but something went really wrong from a communication point of view.

 

[Tropod]

I rather believe they got too much ahead of themselves by making wrong design choices to simulate reality. There is no such thing as zone suitability in real life. What does exist is spatial planning and municipal regulations, which is us (the players). But in CS2 they made the huge mistake to base the whole economic mechanism on a zone suitability mechanism that doesn't exist. Every skilled lead developer will tell you that not following the rules of life usually means you are heading for disaster.

I don't have the game. Can you elaborate on this zonnig suitability thing you mention?

 

[Collector78]

I don't have the game. Can you elaborate on this zonnig suitability thing you mention?

Very good question. Believe it or not, but this is about all the information there is on one of the most important things in the game:
zone suitability

After reading it you might be tempted to believe that zone suitability is mainly related to land value, however that is not true. Zone suitability can be great while having low land value. Companies can do great with low land value, and bad with high land value. I'm not sure anyone already figured out what combinations of Zoning Type + Land Value + Suitability do well. I tried hard, but after 200 hours of CS2, 1200 hours of CS1 and about 200 hours on the Paradox+Steam+Reddit forum I still don't get it.
Please follow the zone suitability thread for more information.

 

[anydaytv]

On one hand I'm tempted to agree with you, but when this is the obvious result...:
Water
Tunnel

So no, I refuse to believe that too much focus on a good looking game is the issue (although Colossal marketing department did an absolutely great job by fooling all of us with great looking movies).
I rather believe they got too much ahead of themselves by making wrong design choices to simulate reality.

Some simulation ideas were great, zone suitability definitely wasn't one of them. It's like having an arm tied behind your back by a nonsensical bully.

The taxing changes, I think they make sense. When your city gets bigger, they actually come into play when you're trying to balance your city workforce.
The road tools? Great! Huge improvement.
Increasing the agent count astronomically? Fantastic - and I think with a little tuning it'll run great. (seriously!)
And hey, whoever did all the model work for the buildings and such... Amazing work.
... but then comes the GAME part.
Industry? You're better off pretending you have industry than you are trying to make it work. There have to be at least 4-5 critical game breaking bugs that cause whatever simulation under it to fall flat.
Commercial? Pretty broken, in part because it depends on industry. Mostly prices just soar for things and they go out of business.
Office? Broken, but you probably wouldn't know it because it's the opposite of every thing else. Every office is obscenely profitable, raking in millions.
Residential? Broken due to zone suitability, and that's broken most likely due to the obscene other financial things happening.

There are a litany of very obvious gameplay issues that crop up, and mostly they're always there but hard to notice because you're still trying to get your bearings.
I mean, these issues / bugs are a "I could throw a dart across a football stadium, blindfolded, and hit a bullseye" kind of obvious.

I'm staring at the City Statistics chart for "Household Wealth", and apparently everyone in my city is in debt for -90 billion dollars.
I look at my crime rate, and it's reporting 0%. I have zero prisoners, and no crime for months in the game. Mostly because everyone is raking in millions from office jobs.

If they had come out and said this was alpha, beta, or early access -- alright, sure. But as it stands, the fundamental changes needed to even make the simulation make sense means the end product is going to end up vastly different, and the people saying it's going to take time aren't lying.
We could be looking at years.

So I mean... Who was the game ready for exactly? Painters. Mostly painters.

 

[BoraBora]

So I mean... Who was the game ready for exactly? Painters. Mostly painters.

No so-called city painter (I prefer detailer) can play this game. I gave up after 10 hours. It's missing pretty much everything necessary to build graphically realistic and/or beautiful cities. At the moment, the game can only please players satisfied to see their population grow. The game is so easy you just need a high-end PC able to overcome the terrible optimization. Then you zone, add roads, plop a service from time to time and watch the pop number increase. That's not city painting. Painting is being creative and a lot of CS cities are work of art (while being 100% functional, simulation-wise, for a lot of them), as demonstrated by hundreds of screenshots along the years.

City painting will be possible when CO will support modding. Then we'll have buildings, services, props, trees, themes, maps etc.

 

[Johnnysims]

It seems to me that the feedback loop between Content Creators who just want pretty, the number of views they garner and game design has been detrimental to a good single player experience. The game seems to be what the sandbox CCs wanted to help them make videos... not the game players wanted.

It's not fun to watch someone else dither in real time over the kind of decisions that make the game fun.

Example: when you have limited funds and have to decide between building a school now or a police station. The single player experience should be filled with a bazillion little decisions that have consequences for how your city grows or develops.


But successful content creation doesn't highlight that; it only seeks to paint, or build the ultimate _________. Those videos are great for helping players, entertaining viewers and hyping the game - but the game should not have been designed around their wants.

It should have been designed with GAMEPLAY as the first priority and painterliness secondary.

I bought into all the hype about deep simulation - but then started getting concerned when I saw how the organic industries were presented. Gone were placeable buildings - instead we just define an area and stuff pops up. Yes - I know it's likely a placeholder for future DLC... but it was a fly in the early release ointment.

Now the 'cannot fail' guardrails mean there are no consequential decisions. Sure - there's some exploits like getting ahead of the education curve early, but otherwise? Very few challenges.

...

The gameplay flow also kind of bugs me. If you want to start out recreating modern day London or New York, the game supports that. But if you want to create a small community and watch it grow and expand organically? That's not really there.

I'd really like to see Farming, Logging and Gravel be early unlocks. Almost every small town that grows into a city started out as a farming community. Logging and gravel industries are some of the first developed as nearby towns need wood and roads.

People move in and the town grows and begins to have its own local industry. Rail is a huge part of that - and there should be many more sizes of railyard available - from single station and sidetrack cargo all the way up to the huge city commercial cargo hubs the game currently offers. Local farms get bought up and turned into residential and commercial areas, pushing farms further out (for the player via unlocked tiles). City planners and community leaders constantly have to balance space needs, old infrastructure and the need for new in the community. That should be part of the fun for the gameplay.

There's a real disconnect between the current assets and how population works. Population starts off small and grows - but all the assets are designed for medium to big cities. So if I know I'm starting out to build a London or New York - sure, I can just place the gigantic train station where I need it - but its really odd if I want to play any way other than 'Build a HUGE city as fast as you can'.

I dunno. Lost interest soon after launch. I'm waiting and watching. Hoping the next year addresses some of the issues and actually makes C:S2 fun to play.

I like the first part you were getting at, people that have the early access are too much of a painter mindset, hence the way some things just look really good. You can even see it now in some of the videos that people don't even get how all the new mechanics work (ones that are explained and working) because they are building city painter style like CS1. Definitely need more gameplay that rewards your decisions or has effects that are noticeable.

 

[Collector78]

The road tools? Great! Huge improvement.

Is it? Is was mainly taken over from a well-known mod, but in general I can't say traffic is better.
- in contrary to the mod a no-left-turn-allowed really means no-left-turn-allowed, except:
* they forgot to take the roads with a divider into account
* they forgot to take roundabouts into account
- pathfinding: improved a lot
- lane changing: disastrous - the almost 90 degrees lanes switches cause a lot of traffic jams
- car crashes: although I hate them, I must agree they add reality to the game
- road maintenance services: idem
- parking places: no matter what I try (resembling real life), they are causing huge traffic jams during the first month(s) after placing them. On top of that, even busses and oil trucks keep visiting my parking places, even the underground ones.
- unexpected behavior: cars making U-turns on roads where turning is not allowed cause a lot of traffic jams
- user friendliness:
* traffic lights are useless (in this game) to my opinion, so why adding them by default on any junction you make?
* snapping: it was soooooo much better in CS1

When I compare it to CS1: it's a little bit better, since now I manage to solve traffic jams. But is it great, no sorry. If you want to be the best traffic manager game than this is not nearly close enough.

And hey, whoever did all the model work for the buildings and such... Amazing work.

Agree, in general it's great, although I must say it's a bit boring to have thousands of houses without ever seeing anybody in a garden, swimming pool, behind a window, whatsoever.

Industry? You're better off pretending you have industry than you are trying to make it work. There have to be at least 4-5 critical game breaking bugs that cause whatever simulation under it to fall flat.

So far I seem to manage my industry, but indeed there are some major issues (although I'm counting only two):
Industrial suitability
specialized buildings

Commercial? Pretty broken, in part because it depends on industry. Mostly prices just soar for things and they go out of business.

So far I did not run into these problems. Is there an existing thread / bug report for it?

Office? Broken, but you probably wouldn't know it because it's the opposite of every thing else. Every office is obscenely profitable, raking in millions.

This is a confirmed bug and indeed completely taking away any challenge from the game. My city is relatively small (45k inhabitants) and I'm already making 150k an hour. All testers and developers must have been asleep before releasing the patch.
But, apart from the financial aspect I have to say office works pretty well.

Residential? Broken due to zone suitability, and that's broken most likely due to the obscene other financial things happening.

Low rent housing is disastrous, but I'm not having issues with low, medium and high residentials. What are yours?

I look at my crime rate, and it's reporting 0%. I have zero prisoners, and no crime for months in the game.

Even with high crime the prison gets 0 inmates. I mentioned this in several threads, but so far zero confirmation from Colossal. Huge bug indeed.

At the moment, the game can only please players satisfied to see their population grow. You zone, add roads, plop a service from time to time and watch the pop number increase. That's not city painting. Painting is being creative and a lot of CS cities are work of art (while being 100% functional, simulation-wise, for a lot of them), as demonstrated by hundreds of screenshots along the years.
City painting will be possible when CO will support modding. Then we'll have buildings, services, props, trees, themes, maps etc.

I understand what you are saying and where it's coming from. But it's also not entirely fair. Landscaping tools are quite good, and I've seen movies of people creating amazing things with it. Indeed, some things look horrible (like the earlier mentioned water and tunnels), but when looking at landscapes from far away I'm often flabbergasted how good it looks (when not paying attention to thousands of icons above all your houses). For sure, modding will enable more creativity and absolutely provide creative minds with the tools to make everything look better, but at least you have to give CO some credits here. Don't forget they wanted to make the best city building game; no one said they wanted to make the best painter's game.


On top of these issues I might have to add grain production. Even when using all the fertile land on the map to produce grain, I'm still on a huge deficit (remember: my city is only 45k)

Strangely enough I'm still optimistic. It only took the two of us a few hours to write this down. Hopefully CO is paying attention, and from now on taking this as their priority list ;-)