Cities: Skylines 2’s troubled launch, and why simulation games are freaking hard

The worst factor about Cities: Skylines 2 is that it was lately launched.

If this massively formidable metropolis builder simulation would have been launched a while in the past, patched again and again, and up to date with some gap-filling DLC, it could be much better off. It might be on its slow-burn second act, like No Man’s Sky, Cyberpunk 2077, or Final Fantasy XIV. It might have settled right into a disgruntled-but-still-invested participant base, like Destiny 2 or Overwatch 2. Or its technical money owed might have been slowly paid off to let its underlying strengths come by way of, as with Disco Elysium or The Witcher 3.

However Cities: Skylines 2 (C:S2) is regrettably accessible now in its present state. It has severe efficiency issues, each acknowledged by its 30-odd-employee developer Colossal Order and studied in-depth by others (which we’ll get into). It has a rough-draft look when in comparison with its predecessor, which has amassed eight years of fixes, DLC, and mods to cowl a dizzying array of concepts. Worst of all, it was extremely anticipated by followers, a few of whom have high-end techniques that also cannot correctly run the sluggish sport.

“My coronary heart goes out to the devs,” stated Robert Zubek, a sport designer, developer, and cofounder of simulation-focused indie game studio SomaSim. “You’re on the mercy of two huge competing pressures there.” One among them is testing—infinite, every-edge-case-covered testing. “No simulation sport is ever completed, it simply will get shipped sooner or later… You will get your mannequin nearer and nearer to some excellent actuality, however ultimately, it’s a must to put it in entrance of individuals and see, ‘How does this truly play out?’”

Why ship the sport, then? Oh, proper, This fall.

The opposite huge competing stress is the fourth quarter, with which Zubek is intimately acquainted. Earlier than creating City of Gangsters, Project Highrise, and gold-rush city-sim 1849, Zubek labored on CityVille, FarmVille 2, and different on-line video games at Zynga and Digital Arts/Maxis, the house of the SimCity franchise that Cities: Skylines very a lot supplanted.

At any sport writer, however particularly a publicly traded one, the strategy of the all-important vacation season (and fourth monetary quarter) places huge stress on any sport launched on this window. Although video games are not shipped on gold grasp discs to publishing vegetation and placed on cabinets for the season, it’s nonetheless when extra individuals purchase video games for one another—and themselves. And the fourth quarter is when many corporations shore up their monetary yr, which they report back to buyers and shareholders. Avid gamers could not appear beholden to the calendar yr any longer, however companies, and the builders they make use of, actually do.

When he was at EA, Zubek noticed how a sport slipping from one yr to the subsequent might imply a complete division falls wanting expectations. All of the personnel hours for that sport are bills, and now there’s no revenue to offset them for that yr. Slipping could make it more durable to persuade a writer to rent or reassign the individuals you actually need to complete a sport. Monetary points make it harder to rent builders in any respect. “I need to say that I want I might give the Cities group one other half-year,” Zubek stated, “however I’m not truly certain if that might’ve been a very good factor.”

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