Cities Skylines 2 Launches Big on Steam, but Suffers Complaints Over Performance

ign.com:

Cities Skylines 2 has launched big on Steam, hitting over 100,000 concurrent players and sitting atop the best-sellers chart. But performance issues have marred the launch, which was met with a ‘mixed’ user review rating of 48% on Valve’s platform.

The majority of the negative user reviews include complaints about the city builder’s performance, which developer Colossal Order had warned would be a problem before the game came out. The current ‘most helpful review’ for Cities Skylines 2 on Steam, from user Ariegan, simply states: “Who would imagine that we would get another unoptimized mess of a game in 2023... I am tired, boss…”

Steam user CountCristo goes into more detail. “Sadly the game isn't ready for release, hold off for now - I'll be happy when the time comes to change this review! The game performs horribly, and on the settings that allow it to scrape by with 20fps it looks dramatically worse than Cities 1. There are also various bugs (especially around ‘not enough customers’) that fill the game with annoying bubble alerts for no reason.”

And here’s another Steam review, from user Stin: “Everyone already knows the performance is terrible, so I'll just share my experience so you have a further example to compare to. I have a 13900k, 64GB of RAM, and a RTX 4090, playing on a 1440p ultrawide monitor. I got 35fps at the main menu and in game on a brand new map w/o building a single thing. Turning off motion blur and depth field increased this from 35 to 50fps. Not a single other graphics setting changed the performance at all. I turned off every single setting I could or set it to the lowest possible, and still only got 50fps. This is impressively bad optimization, I actually can't recall another game recently where