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.