When Paradox Interactive announced Cities: Skylines II earlier this year, fans eagerly awaited an expanded city-building experience. The trailer promised new gameplay mechanics and a toolset that would make any city planner’s heart race. But now that the game has hit the shelves, it seems the only racing hearts are those of frustrated gamers.
Developer Colossal Order has stated that 30 fps is the target for this city-building simulation. Its reasoning? Apparently, a city builder doesn’t need higher frame rates. Now, I’ve heard some wild claims in my time, but this one might just take the cake.
Check out the comments from Chief Technical Officer co_damsku on a recent Reddit AMA:
“The target is 30fps because of the nature of the game, (arguably) there are no real benefit in a city builder to aim for higher FPS (unlike a multiplayer shooter) as a growing city with inevitably become CPU bound. What matters more with this type of game is to avoid stutters, and have responsive UI.”
“For that reason, our simulation is also built around an expected update rate given 30fps. However, it does not hurt to get 60 fps as it can contribute to better visuals in relation to temporal effects so while our target is 30fps, we don’t intend on limiting or stopping the optimization work just because we reach it on recommended hardware, we just don’t believe there would be a long term benefit in setting the target to 60fps, especially because we face rendering challenges both from close up and far distances.”
It’s not that 30 fps is inherently bad, but when your game feels like it’s being played on a slideshow projector, then it’s a problem, especially when you’ve forked out $1600 for a high-end graphics card. Also, why are there some gamers who are defending this frame rate fiasco? If you’re justifying 30 fps at 1080p on a RTX 4090 in 2023, I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.
Before you jump to their defense, saying, “It’s true, a city builder does not need high fps!” let me stop you right there. Sure, we’re not talking about a fast-paced shooter where every frame counts, but there’s something to be said about the smooth panning of a camera across your digital city.
The developers have mentioned that as your city grows, the game becomes more CPU-dependent. This is simply not true, as PCGamesHardware has proven in a video that even with a high-end CPU, the game struggles to utilize multithreading.
The sad truth is, Cities: Skylines 2 is a solid upgrade from its predecessor, but the performance issues are a dark cloud hanging over it. It’s frustrating, it’s disappointing, and it’s not what the gaming community deserves.
So, to the developers, I say this: We get it, city builders are complex, but if you’re going to release a game, make sure it’s ready for release. We’re tired of the “we’ll fix it with patches” excuse. It’s time to step up your game, literally.
To the gamers, don’t settle for mediocrity. You deserve a game that runs as smoothly as your city’s traffic (assuming you’ve mastered the art of city planning, that is). Let’s raise our standards and demand better.
