I've played some action games in the teens and was fine with it. Maybe lower frame rate at low resolution (1080) isn't as apparent as the high 4K, but I've never understood why people can't play with frame rates still far faster than film (if it's truly refreshing the frames completely and not ripping the picture of course). I suppose this argument goes the same direction as the vinyl/CD one, with both opinions dead sure they're right.
If the game is handling variations of frame rates during play badly, that's a different story. The goal is for the player to not realize there's a change and stay focused on the game.
I started out playing Doom on a 386, in a tiny tiny viewport, and until recently my hardware was apways behind the curve. I remember playing Oblivion at 640 x 380. And enjoying foggy weather in San Andreas because the reduced draw distance made my fps a lot better.
Over the years I’ve trained my brain to do amazing real time upsacaling, anti-aliasing, hell, even frame generation. nVidia has nothing on the neural network in my head.
But not everyone has this experience and smooth FPS is always better, even if I can handle teerible performance if the game is any good.
simple explanation: people get used to their monitors’ frame rate.
if all you’ve been using is a 60Hz display, you won’t notice a difference down to 30-40 fps as much as you would when you’ve been using a 144Hz display.
our brains notice differences much more easily than absolutes, so a larger difference in refresh rate produces a more negative experience.
think about it like this:
The refresh rate influences your cursor movements.
so if a game runs slower than you’re used to, you’ll miss more of your clicks, and you’ll need to compensate by slowing down your movements until you get used to the new refresh rate.
this effect becomes very obvious at very low fps (>20fps). it’s when people start doing super slow movements.
same thing happens when you go from 144Hz down to, say, 40Hz.
Some of the settings are messed up, I think. It definitely can run faster than that by toning down some settings on that hardware. They really should have changed the defaults or straight up removed some visual settings, given what they do to the game. In my experience, the volumetric clouds, reflections and GI presets are all messed up and cost a disproportionate amount of performance when maxed out.
Well I think the whole performance thing have been blown waaaay out of proportion by a vocal few. I have a relatively old pc with an rx580 8gb vram and the game’s been running fine for me. Obviously it needs some patches, but people have been saying it’s the second coming of ksp2, and that’s simply bullshit
Don't downplay peoples valid concerns, we should strive for better performance in any game. Just because some people can put up with low framerates doesn't mean others should have to. I think 120fps at 1080p should be absolute minimum performance we should accept out of a game given the power of PCs these days.
Don’t get me wrong. I wouldn’t want to downplay people’s experiences and performance issues ARE concerning, and I personally hold the belief that a company is responsible for the quality of the product they bring to market and ultimately a fault in their own processes if they couldn’t. BUT it doesn’t take away that the issue has been overblown. It simply, given the game’s circumstances, shouldn’t be getting the hate it’s currently harbouring. It seems to me that the internet’s found the new shiny thing to hate on, and the human psyche simply can’t resist just a smidge more of rage
Perhaps that is the case, but it also swings in the opposite direction of games being overpraised when there are glaring issues - see BG3. Bad press usually causes change a lot faster though and I find it refreshing when people actually leave negative reviews with their concerns. Although I agree there are the people who take it too far and just jump on a hate bandwagon, which ruins actual criticisms.
Act 3 - so many bugs, inconsistencies, crashes. The issues leak into the first two acts aswell, but act 3 is a real mess. The game really struggles to keep up with itself by that point.
Oh shit I haven’t experienced that personally but I’m sorry that you are! I did lower the graphics a little in the city since there’s so much more going on, maybe that’s made it more stable for me.
and the heart of the problem. Gamers have forgotten that games are tradeoffs. Counter Strike has high FPS and the expense is lower detail. Cities opts for higher detail and fidelity over having higher FPS. Of course studios would love to give every game 120FPS at 4K ultra, they didn’t just decide not to do that. Optimization and squeezing a few more frames per second is tedious work. It’s not some switch in the engine they forgot to flip. It requires pouring over millions of lines of code, deciding to create this class instance later, to move this memory allocation to another place, to deciding what to cut out to make it just a smidge faster.
I stand by my other comments. Gamers have become entitled that their systems should run brand new games at perfect ultra settings. That’s not how it ever worked. Brand new systems are out of date the moment you buy it. The only way to guarantee anything to run at perfect ultra for every game is to wait 5 years after it released on hardware that just came out.
This is so incorrect though. Nobody is expecting every game to run on every system at 4K@120Hz. CS has more fidelity and higher framerate than Cities, Rainbow Six Siege has even more fidelity and even more framerate than the both of them (talking like 600+ fps). Cities bottleneck should be CPU as it was in the first game. It should run very well to begin with and slow down the bigger and bigger the city gets, but that's not the case, it runs like ass from the get go. They built it from scratch, which is the best time to make sure it is performant during development, but in most cases devs seem to rush for feature complete instead, especially in the current environment of consumers accepting half-baked games.
It's not entitlement to expect more and it makes no sense to defend lackluster performance in games, if you don't care then just carry on enjoying it and let others ask for better. Again 1080p@120Hz is hardly an ask these days, any GPU/CPU from the last 8 years can handle that shit perfectly fine, hell even mobiles can run that now.
Games should be built to run well on today's hardware, not built to let future hardware take over. Incentivizing upgrades is just going to create more e-waste.
It is though. You’re comparing apples to oranges - you can’t compare an FPS to a top down strategy. Even Cities 1 never had a great framerate, even 8 years later on modern hardware it still chugs, and it doesn’t have nearly the fidelity that Cities 2 has. The only reason the GPU is the bottleneck is because of the fidelity. If you turn down the graphics settings to Cities 1 level, guess what, the CPU becomes the bottleneck again.
For another example, Age of Empires 4 locks the zoom level because they couldn’t handle showing too much on screen. You just can’t demand the same rates as an FPS. Completely different parameters. You’re expecting an M1 abrams tank to have the agility of a honda accord and the speed of a masarati, when you really needed something something that could seat 20 people.
You brought fidelity and Counter Strike up. Cities Skylines 2 is not exactly an 'impressive' game to look at, a more stylised approach is better for this type of game, it doesn't need to look real and you spend hardly any time zoomed in anyway to notice fine details. Just looking at graphics the game performs horrendously for what it looks like. I don't think Cities Skylines was a bad looking game and I don't think Cities Skylines 2 trading off more performance for not a big leap in 'fidelity' is worth it. I think Cities Skylines looks better and more refined myself honestly, the art style fit it really well.
I can demand whatever performance I want? From FPS I expect higher than 120 even, it's just what is better for that game. For builders 120 as a baseline minimum is not a big ask and I would still expect it drop into the 90s and 60s once you build your city/whatever out. If you are fine stuck at 60fps or lower with all your games then congratulations, but I expect more from games these days that aren't exactly pushing the bar in other areas. I don't think graphics make a game, but games have been at a point where they don't need to look any better for years now, so performance should be the focus.
It is not like we want low framerates, it is just that we don’t want to pay for the hardware to run those when regular framerate is more than enough.
60 fps is plenty for every game genre. You only need more if you are a professional gamer, or can splash the cash because you play all night every night.
I don’t want to pay for the hardware either. I have an old 750 Ti, and you would be surprised how many (not new) games are running perfectly fine on it. Amount them those like the last deus ex games. I don’t remember the framerate I had, but neither do I remember it as an unplayable laggy mess.
When I read that CS2 barely manages to run on a 2060 or some other powerhouse (in my eyes at least, but honestly for some reason I have the impression that 20xx is not much of a leap from let’s say a 1080 Ti) I can’t think anything else but that the game is a totally wasteful garbage technically.
60fps is not plenty. You have never used higher have you? Low-end hardware these days is ridiculously powerful compared to what it used to be. Don't let poor optimisation in games condition you to thinking otherwise, they could all be running a lot better.
Anything with lots of camera panning is an objectively nicer experience at 120fps or higher.
Agree. I’m several hours in and I’m honestly loving it. Face it gamers, y’all just like to hate things, it’s fun to be in the “in crowd” who knows better than everyone else to not buy something. Misery loves company.
I think the performance issue is not at all overblown, but the complaints about stripped features are overblown. The game is more complex than the original, but it does run like dogcrap right now.
Tbh, the game’s great. I’ve literally see someone compare playing a city managment game at 30fps to a slideshow.
Does it run well? No. Is it a disaster? Also no. Is every single other aspect of the simulation better than cs1? Absolutely yes. Most of the reviews are by far exaggerated
To me it’s win win. I can wait for it to go on sale and by then it will actually run on my PC. If it was finished on day one I’d be really tempted to buy it full price.
I have no issue playing. It runs smooth. I did encounter several bugs though. But that’s usual for games released nowadays. I hope those get patched soon. Although I’m happy it works for me, I’m sad to see so many people have much worse experiences. Game developers aren’t what they used to be. Except Larian Studios, they are great.
Places don’t feel as alive as they did in the original. The original was still deeply flawed, mind - but this goes even further than that.
A great example - when there was a firetruck putting out a fire in the original, you could see little dudes squirting water. CS2 doesn’t even have guys come out; the fire just magically goes away. Multiply this by… everything.
There’s no bikes (at least as far as I can tell), and the pedestrian path tooling seems to be a huge step back (the only dedicated pedestrian path I can find is technically considered a 2-lane road, but it doesn’t allow cars).
The music has these cute little segments inbetween. But there’s only like… 5 of them. Once you hear all 5, you’ve heard everything and they start to grate. The other 2 “radio stations” don’t have the NPR segments, but they do have “ads”… and by “ads” they mean exactly 1 ad that you hear every time for “Spaz Electronics”. You can turn the ads off but I’d expect more than just a single one.
Everything overreacts to anything you build. If you upgrade a road, it technically disconnects power + water + sewage for a hot second. Then you get a bunch of spam about “I don’t have any power!” blah blah even though the game was paused and they absolutely had power.
It’s really hard to see what trips Cims are taking. The original let you see the paths Cims took throughout your city, which let you make informed decisions around public transport. Now you can just see… how much traffic there is? Which doesn’t tell you anything about where Cims are going, just where you have bottlenecks. It very much encourages a “just 1 more lane, bro” kind of thinking.
Not having a wide variety of public transport options is a bummer. It feels like they left some stuff out for a future DLC (e.g. monorails).
There’s no light shining from the camera at nighttime, so it can get actually literally pitch black at night. Like “turn off the day/night cycle because this is unplayable” levels of dark. A subtle light coming from the camera when not in photo mode would’ve done wonders.
The zoning information is really hard to read. I can’t tell what areas I have zoned with something else because it colors areas from other zones as white and unzoned areas as clear… on a mostly white background. It’s really really hard to tell at-a-glance what needs to still be zoned in some cases.
The more I play it, the more it feels like CS1 is the sequel and CS2 is the original. There’s just so much that’s not done as well or that’s simply not there. The stuff they added is cool, sure… but like, I wish it was additive on top of what we had before, and not “back at square one”. It just makes me want to play the original.
Can you imagine how much slower the game would have been with bicycles, individual paths and subtle light coming from the camera at night? These were probably performance decisions, not gameplay (though it’s possible it was rushed and they cut out non essentials for release).
The original ran like shit too and its UI was garbage compared to any SimCity. Never understood the love for that game. SC3KU was the peak of city sim games.
When Interplay decided that Sim City needed goofy, over-the-top FMVs on a CD-ROM…I think that was peak Sim City. As a kid, I was disappointed 2k and 3k didn’t have professional, career-oriented adults yelling at you for your incompetence in FMV.
I hadn’t realised till just now, but I do miss SC’s bullying and harassment. I don’t unleash disasters near as much nowdays, and I wonder if that’s part of why. I don’t have department heads and politicians openly disappointed in me all the time.
The small masochist in me is trying to convince me to ask for that feature back.
And I literally use my computer to make me $ with Linux development, and IT consulting and game very very little, I’ve also got other PCs.
Edit downvote all you want, I’m just pointing out there’s other ways to use PCs, I’m just slightly annoyed by the stumble, it’s not like I don’t have an entire steam library that plays lol.
Yeah gaming on linux has gotten loads better - but it’s still definitely not quite there as a main gaming platform. Which is frustrating, because I vastly prefer linux as a desktop experience (and obviously for software development), but I just can’t ditch my windows PC for gaming yet.
I’m playing on Linux and it runs perfectly (nixos though). I wouldn’t even be able to guess it was on Linux if I didn’t know. have you tried the latest proton / proton ge?
Maybe don’t jump the hype train every time and instead choose to play proven and established games from developers who are known to deliver quality, which exist in abundance?
TBH it’s not really the end of the world. I remember the first one running like hot garbage on my PC. Granted maybe it was my shitty CPU being FX-8320 at that time.
On my machine I got around 40-70 with the default settings. For a city management game having a stable (meaning not crashing) game would be its first priority. Although I definitely see this as an early access release regardless of what CO is saying. So I played this on my Game Pass sub. My regional pricing for Game Pass is really good, as converted to the dollar is only tree fiddy. Although the minimum wage in my country is only 1/4 of the US so it all adds up to the same I guess.
Mate, if you’re paying 50$ and have a really good PC, the base level competency should atleast be that the game runs. Let alone the quality or content.
That doesn’t make the criticisms invalid. But, there’s always an option to vote with your wallet by treating this release as an early access and not buying it with the current condition and with full price.
Most people lambasting the game makes it seem that they HAVE to buy the game with the current condition no matter what. Just file this game as a play in Game Pass or buy it next year when there’s a sale. If more people skip from buying the game at full price the devs will get the message and will try to release the game when the game is ready to be released like Larian.
I actually do this by buying recent Larian games (D:OS, D:OS2, & BG3) at day one or close to it after the review embargo is lifted (to see whether it’s worth buying or not) to reward them releasing their games in a complete state. Even BG3 had some issues with performance and cut content with their 3rd act.
Don’t let new games hype you! Play the actually released, proven, Good games - Undertale, Ori and the Blind Forest, TOTK, God of War, The Last of Us, It Takes Two.
There’s a wealth of available, old, discount games! Don’t roll the dice on new shit
You’re not wrong. On the other hand, i would prefer mediocre game from Paradox over every single one of those that you listed solely on base of genre.
What is the OP about on? Cities Skylines 2? It have better reviews now that the first wave of negbomb passes. Also i wouldn’t even take those under consideration, paradox forum crowd have long and established tradition of negbombing on steam for petty reasons.
Maybe it was during the initial “generating textures” phase when you first launch it, but it should definitely not be lagging at the menu.
I’m on a 2080 S + 9700k and the game runs pretty decently, small city and it averages maybe 45fps with most settings on high at 1440p, run over 70 fps if I turn down the settings a bit, but I like the graphics and I can live with lower FPS on a city builder game.
At the same time I hear you but still I feel like it’s still not acceptable to release half done or poorly optimized products and hope that they’ll be done over time. For those who pay for the product it’s almost an insult.
I absolutely agree, but so long as it remains profitable developers will do it. Skip a whole lot of QC, rush to release the game, then use the launch to gather bug reports and fix those. Costs saved not hiring a ton of QC testers, get a return on the investment much sooner, get early players to pay to be QC testers basically. It’s a tried and tested formula now and it will keep happening until too many people won’t pre-order games.
Why do you care? Seriously, think about it. Shitty products in every possible category come out everyday and it doesn’t bother you. You do need these products. if they don’t meet your standards, don’t buy them and move on with your life.
Like, you don’t need to get on line and act as thought you have been personal insulted when there is a moldy apple at the grocery store. Just leave it and keep shopping.
I have thought about this for far longer than warranted I think it comes down to a combination of several factors.
The first is that substitutions among video games are indirect at best. Paradox for example makes strategy games but a fair portion of their fans call them “Paradox games” because of the particular connotations cultivated by their DLC campaigns, multi-year support and mechanical granularity. Also within the strategy genre are the Total War series of games produced by Creative Assembly, fans of that series are throwing fits on YouTube because the handling of the series has been dreadful in their eyes. No competitors have emerged yet to make an alternative Total War experience and several fans were excited about the final entry in a trilogy within the series so the sunk cost fallacy keeps them around.
The second is that any video game player born before about 2003 has witnessed the maturation of the video game industry as we know it. As the rate at which profit is earned in the industry falls, practices and standards change to recoup perceived losses. In video games this manifests in unusually tangible ways for the consumer. Instead of entering cheat codes left in for debugging purposes, you buy power ups with real money. Instead of unlocking alternate outfits and characters by completing challenges or secrets you buy them with real money. Instead of a game having to wait until it is finished to be sold, publishers leverage internet connectivity to ship first and patch later. Many of these practices are striking to the consumer because they are monetizing aspects of their hobby that they once enjoyed at no extra cost, and these practices are appearing in a context of escapism.
It’s a really solid Metroidvania, with beautiful design, music and story. It’s not the best Metroidvania (my vote would go to Hollow Knight) but the game is really good. The sequel is great too!
I don’t know how far in you went: the first half-hour or so is just slow storytelling. And just like all Metroidvanias, your set of powers at the beginning is very limited and isn’t so interesting. However, the game is well enough paced that as soon as you’re comfortable using your current power set, the game unlocks a new mechanic, and it never really stops until the end. It especially shines if you’re a completionist IMO, as being able to go back to each area to explore it to 100% with the whole power set feels really great.
I think the biggest issue here is that metroidvania as a genre is just far too tedious and not all that fun to play, unless you grew up playing Metroid or Castlevania. Hollow Knight has so many great things going for it, but after several hours of predictable power gaining and backtracking through the same areas to open new pathways just to do the same thing again I couldn’t take it anymore.
being able to go back to each area to explore it to 100% with the whole power set feels really great.
Nothing about this sounds fun to me. Perhaps when I was 8 years old, but not now.
I have both Ori games and spent even less time with them. They are prettier than Hollow Knight but even more dull unfortunately.
Ori unpacks itself slowly. At the beginning, I agree - A pretty basic platformer. Once you find yourself playing Galaga in it, it starts to prove how flavorful a platformer can be.
Gameplay aside, the music, world and story was so heart warming!
Some even Paradox ones. One can waste many-many hours in CK:DV with Mappa Regnorum mod, for example. Though CK2 is more complex, it lacks the relative simplicity and clarity.
There is a vast difference to other games. The core is fine, mechanics work perfectly, the game looks great, it has just bad performance. That can be fixed.
More complex but you have less control over what is produced, it’s more about getting workers to their jobs and transporting goods efficiently than making efficient production lines.
Yeah… but some people wish for more finished games and that includes performance.
Like I get it it’s playable… and some games release in much worse state but unless it’s an indie game with zero money that needs that early money to continue they should wait.
I am absolutely with you there. I do not like the fact that the performance is pretty bad. But a game that „just“ has performance issues is potentially fixable. Games where the core gameplay loop is broken are usually not getting better over time.
And I will play City Skylines for years to come so buying it right now and playing with lower settings and less then stellar performance is fine and I will hopefully be able to increase these things over time.
A company like Paradox should certainly be able afford testers who run the game on a variety of configurations to see if optimization is necessary.
One thing I would say and this is a broad statement - generally you don’t do optimization unless you know you need it. And you only do it after the thing you’re writing is working correctly non-optimally. Optimize too soon, or when you don’t need to just makes code an unmaintainable mess. That doesn’t doesn’t preclude writing efficient code in the first place but efficient is not the same thing as optimal.
I am so down for a sequel of this game and while it looks good the only thing making me hesitate are the performance issues. I’m tempted to just play the first one more and even pick up a DLC I want for that instead of putting the cash to this.
So far I’ve played 4 hours and I just think there’s a hate train on it. I have a 3000 series card and took the recommended steps from paradox and the game plays fine, I’m enjoying it. From what I understand VRAM is the choke point, so if you don’t have a ton then maybe hold off
I think it’d be very playable. Just follow all the steps on the forum post. (To the downvoters, what does my experience not fit your narrative? That I’m having a fun time in a game that I’m enjoying?)
I loaded up the 100k city and it was playable after following the various guides out there for me. It reminded me a bit of how Dwarf Fortress used to slow down and stutter when you had a lot of dwarfs running around.
That said, they should have kept it in the oven until sometime in 2024. Besides performance improvements there are a few rough edges especially Chirper and in the simulation itself that need more work. One example is civs complaining about healthcare excessively until you unlock the upgrade for the full hospital and build one. Also some of the new tools like the road one and the pipe system need more polish as they can be unintuitive and frustrating to use at times.
It’s ultimately not a bad game it just shouldn’t be released yet. They should have gone the early access route because that’s how it feels at the moment.
All they had to do was throw it in Early Access while they fixed it. The reviews would likely be stellar in that case. Releasing it fully in this state just feels like some corporate BS. Disappointed in dev and publisher, and they keep making it worse with their weird excuses.
“Built with modern hardware in mind”, homie this shit ain’t even running right on a 4090. And 30fps target? Idk what they’re smoking.
Mythbusters is a great thing that we would all love to experience again in another medium, but that just wasn’t going to happen. It’s hard to even point to an existing good game that has the mechanics that you’d want from a Mythbusters. They could have gone Factorio, or an Infinifactory, but a goal of “maximize this” or “build this intended output” still doesn’t capture the scientific intent of extracting some tiny nugget of truth from a cold unfeeling universe. Straitjacketing the whole process into something scripted, or throwing a sandbox at the player and walking away, are about the only two approaches that a game could do.
The myths all have different physics and some have some weird phenomena so coding a comprehensive physics simulation will all the scripts to trigger the mythical event when certain conditions are right would be expensive.
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