After confirming Cities Skylines 2 has performance issues, developer Colossal Order clarified what problems and fixes players can expect. The studio recently held a Reddit AMA, answering questions and going into specific details regarding the performance issues.
According to Colossal Order, it’s working on improvements from the launch experience. The AMA hosted a sizeable amount of players asking about fixes, ranging from complaints about performance optimization to those eating away PC memory.
“The plan is to flush out all the performance issues that come our way as quickly as we can,” wrote chief technical officer co_damsku. “Several of those have come to our attention only recently due to certain hardware setup that yielded unexpected results.”
Specific issues the developer is prioritizing include removing stuttering caused by a “synchronization condition” that varies between CPUs. Certain visual effects like Depth of Field, Global Illumination, and Volumetrics were among settings the team is working on now. Any CPU optimizations they did not finish are also prioritized alongside the other fixes.
Colossal Order also clarified that the most discussed performance issues are “not deep in the game foundation and in the release version, decreasing the quality of visual effects mentioned in my original post already will get you to fair performances without affecting simulation, at the cost of some eye candy.”
In other words, reducing visual quality further should also improve performance without affecting your simulated city. This should be a temporary solution, as the developer noted, “With the upcoming patches, the situation will largely improve with default settings. It is worth mentioning for a game like this, the performance target is to run at steady 30FPS minimum (not 60 or more).”
It’s unfortunate the hotly anticipated city-builder is launching in this poor of a state. While admirable to acknowledge, it’s hard not to think it’s releasing too early. The issues present are evident in review builds and undoubtedly reflect how audiences react to Cities Skylines 2 on launch. Steam reviews are not pretty right now — the developer already has a deep hole to dig out of.
