I'd be curious to hear what there looks like for everyone. What are the most important improvements to you?
This is a vague concept in name, but "game feel".
I can live with bugs, I cannot live with major design flaws that carry through the entire experience.
The game balance is so far off I don't believe the game was seriously playtested in a way where someone "played the game". Yes, someone tested "do buildings place right?" and "how do cars handle this kind of thing" and whatnot, but I don't believe anyone seriously sat down and played the game and took note of how it "felt".
The progression systems all feel off. The money all feels off. The speed all feels off.
In CS1, all of its flaws included, playing felt like you were constantly climbing a mountain and it was constantly getting bigger in front of you.
In CS2, playing feels like you're just kinda walking in circles at the base of a hill.
You unlock features within half an hour of playing that you'll not be able to afford, or need, for another 25 hours. You get progression points to spend on upgrades that aren't necessary until you have 100,000 people sitting around. It takes ages to get a higher population. You have citizens going to school for such a long, long, long time that you have to play for hours upon hours to see the impact the education system is even having on anything.
And by the time it has an impact on anything, you have placed 20 elemetnary schools to your 1 high school, because the ENTIRE education system is broken. It's broken, and we know it's broken, and modders have figured out why it's broken, and yet- no patch addresses it. No patch addresses the simple, objective, proven, cataloged, written-down-and-available-for-anybody-to-understand problem that kids spend a zillion times more time in school as teens who pop out of school nearly immediately, resulting in an extreme disparity in age development and in education progression. We've had this bug figured out for over a month, there's been mods to adjust it for over a month, and when will we see it patched? Who knows. We have no idea when to expect anything.
Your city of 50 people will suddenly start refusing to live in houses and DEMAND rowhouses meant for major metropolitan areas because they for some unfathomable reason unlock when you have been playing for 15 minutes. Then you unlock high density housing within the hour, and your small town wants to live in high-rises. Meanwhile your commercial stagnates as low density for another two hours, during which time you don't want to develop it anyway because all your existing commercial says there aren't enough customers and your entire city is too poor to buy anything anyway because their rent is too high because they move into whatever house they feel like without any attempt at trying to budget for it or actually make sure they can afford it.
Nothing in this game
works. It works! You tested whether or not the functions exist and do things, but nobody tested if it works.
I've been playing since launch. I have over 100 hours in the game. I have still yet to make a city where I actually need garbage services because every single service can be handled by outside connections for such a long time, and there isn't even a way to disable those services from coming over and helping. But in CS1 you unlocked garbage and BAM! Instantly every house needed its trash taken out! You have to build garbage services, hurry! And within a short time those services are overwhelmed. Did you plan space for more? Can you upgrade to something better? What are the tradeoffs? Quick, figure it out! People move out real fast if their garbage piles up!
But in CS2? You get 60k people and MAYBE you'll need garbage, which you've had access to for 25 hours, and it'll last you a lifetime before you ever need to consider any of the upgrades that you've been able to afford to buy since the first two hours of playing the game.
Same goes for basically every service.
It's just not balanced.
Not one single aspect of play feels like it's balanced and well organized, and I fear there's never going to be any significant look into this sort of thing to make it better- which really, really sucks, because if you guys had launched this game as early access, this is the feedback you'd be working on. But since you decided to launch it "finished" but absolutely loaded with problems and missing content, we instead get "Well, this isn't a priority at this time..." on everything because "actually finishing the game" takes precedence. And it should take precedence, but the idea that we're gonna be waiting a year or two for you to actually get to the smaller stuff that changes how the game *really feels to play*, if you ever get to it, is so depressing.
Balance is what makes games like this fun to play and it's just not there! There is no gameplay loop to this game. I'd even argue on some levels it's more of a "city painter" than the first game which is just so unfortunate when it really did seem like you guys were aiming to make it NOT that. The industry systems should be so fun to play with! To set taxes to influence what moves in! To get industrial sectors that all work around a couple of types of products, to specialize a la SimCity 2013, to encourage your city to thrive off the forest or to extract oil and produce computers and software! The pieces are there! But they don't *work*.
I'm just scared they're never going to. Or if they ever do, they'll be locked behind paid DLC.
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