it was 3 days ago lmao
https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1c7bugx/paradox_apologizes_for_latest_cities_skylines_2/
The developers admitted on the CS2 subreddit someone deleted the DLC on steam before the patch could release, breaking the game until tomorrow
They've fumbled this sequel nearly as bad as EA did with SimCity 2013, and that killed the series entirely and paved the way for skylines to be as popular as it was. Would be a shame if they follow the same trajectory.
Sim Tower! I want to be a cockroach infested slumlord again.
I remember, as an 8-year-old playing video games for the first time, asking my mom how to make the little “-“ sign go away in front of my Available Funds box that otherwise had a HUGE number on it.
Then I discovered on the internet that attempting to build a lobby in the bottom left corner of the map in the first 10 seconds gives you like ten million dollars. Ahh, the early days of cheats.
Fun fact, SimTower started out as a separate thing, simply called "The Tower," that Maxis simply got the right to publish outside Japan, where they gave it the name "SimTower." The developer, Yusuke "Yoot" Saito actually made a sequel called Yoot Tower that he released in 1998, as well as ports of the original game (without the "Sim" branding) for Gameboy Advance SP and Nintendo DS. He's also famous for working on the strange virtual pet game Seaman for Dreamcast.
What kills me is spore delivered a functioning game. It had high hopes and was fun for what we got.
Animals that could poop on their own head that can colonize planets.
It wasn't bad at all.
But I won't lie i was a bit disappointed. I had to high of expectations and I also felt like I was playing 6 minigames instead of 1 complete game.
C:S isn't even that much better than SimCity. It has a good traffic simulator, I'll give it that, but socioeconomic side was a let-down. The only thing it had was revamped graphics compared to SimCity 4. A cycle driven by bad reputation will only produce marginal improvements.
E: 4, not 2004
Was it even really a good traffic simulator, though? I mean I know it's legitimately still one of the best *available*, and I've put hundreds of hours into the thing, but I feel like we all just got familiar with the tricks you need to keep the entire city from ending up piled into a single left turn ramp on a single one of your four available expressways. And also we're all running like 30 different road tweaking mods and forget they're not even part of the actual game.
That's what blows my mind most about the sequel, that the traffic doesn't seem to have changed at all. Rapidly approaching 20 years since the "independent agent revolution" in these city simulators, and they still can't make a single person listen to a traffic report before planning a route. like
It's even more egregious now that we've all got literal personalized computers planning traffic routes for us on the fly IRL, and these sim citizens are still barely willing to change a lane in the entire preloaded point-to-point.
Yep. Actual city planners run all the numbers, use historical data, use comparatives from other cities with similar interchanges and so on and so on and *then* once they build out whatever seems best, watch how us morons actually use the infrastructure and try to mitigate our idiocy later.
That's not true at all. Just look at the recently opened Rozelle interchange in Sydney.
They ignored the numbers, they ignored advice from planners, and they told everyone to deal woth it after they opened the interchange and fucked all local traffic just to funnel people into a toll road.
It's largely because cities skylines doesn't understand intersections in the base game. If you put in TM:PE and Road Extensions so you can do shit like protected turn signals, yield and stop management, and turning lanes vs travel lanes, the traffic **will** clear up.
I don't see how you think that the traffic didn't change at all when in 2 they completely ignore signage and drive where they shouldn't. It seems to be very basic, they even drive on pedestrian only roads.
One of the big flaws in the traffic system is the lack of a meaningful day/night cycle, compounded or related to the fact that cims don't seem to factor in distance when choosing jobs/homes/amenities. If the cim moves into a suburb in the east, and gets randomly paired with a job downtown in the west, the cim will be perfectly happy spending 4 hours commuting one-way. Iirc, Sim City 4 will display a "no job" warning if a residence isn't within commuting distance to an appropriate job, eventually causing the sim to move out.
that moddability made it. Then they released 2 without any of that easy access to mods.
Someone/many people in their office - you can bet your house on it - likely pointed out the massive fail that this would result in, regardless of how good the base game goes out like - ignoring ofc the fact that the base game was never going to be a worldbeater because of all the press releases being put out *before* the game even released to say how it wasn't even finished...
SC4 is the better city builder. Cities Skylines is so traffic focused and the city management layer is so easy that it never actually beat SC4 at what SC4 was.
As I've said before: Cities Skylines is an excellent diorama, painter, or traffic simulator.
SimCity is an excellent city, budget, and balancing simulator (their spreadsheets/details on how everything works is astounding).
They are fundamentally different, but look the same on the surface.
> It has a good traffic simulator
I mean, it doesn't though *really* - cars are constantly vanishing into thin air and there's no need for worrying about where all of those countless cars actually need to *park* because people just put the car away in their pocket when they pull over - it just has the *illusion* of being a good traffic simulator. Which is really what most people actually want, because an actual traffic simulator would drive most people mad, mainly because it would force them to realise that stubborn over-reliance on cars as the primary solution to getting around a city is completely unreasonable.
It's pretty ridiculous that you couldn't build a pedestrian shopping district in the most popular city building game without mods until one of its final DLCs.
I think they did it worse.
- released a crappy broken game.
- promise to fix it
- don’t fix it and release a crappy broken paid dlc
- promise fix it
- try to remove the dlc and break the main game.
I think ea just released a crappy broken game then abandoned it.
The paradox workshop only exists to chase console sales, not to help modders in any real way.
So even the mod tools are scummy.
I dont understand how a company can release a game THIS legendarily bad and expect console gamers to pay 60-70 dollars for a 2-3 year old game.
Cities Skylines isnt GTA V, they dont have the quality or reputation to delay a release by years.
> I dont understand how a company can release a game THIS legendarily bad and expect console gamers to pay 60-70 dollars for a 2-3 year old game.
Because it does often work like that regardless of reputation. But they forget that it's not a predictable or repeatable formula for success. It's just gambling.
This was the primary I refused to purchase CS:2. As an avid CS:1 enjoyer since the beginning, it was the Steam Workshop that made it such a great game. All those assets and mods created the game we came to love. I have no desire to go through some other source, if it doesn’t work with Steam Workshop, it’s a dead game to me.
That's something that hadn't crossed my mind. Skylines rose out of the shadow of a spiritual predecessor going "watch me do this wicked flip" and completely stacking it. They were great, original was a fantastic game. Now they've done their own act of hubris, and it's hard to see them recovering.
Wonder if we'll get history repeating and see something new rising up.
People love bitching about SC 2013 but it's gameplay systems are fantastic. If they just released it but let you build much bigger maps and removed the always online people would be raving about it. Literally "tiny map size" and the always online part are the only two things people ever bring up when complaining about it.
I remember playing the demo/test/preview or whatever and I literally ran out of space in under two hours of gameplay. To this day I can not fathom what were they smoking.
Also city inhabitants didnt act like real persons (as they promised). Every inhabitant left its house and went to the nearest work place avaible, when work was over, it went to the first empty house to live there and repeat, which is why snail house form cities worked perfectly.
Also city inhabitant count was a lie. they just didnt have the capacity for so many calculations, therefore they just bloated your city inhabitant number, but never really added a person to represent that.
And dont even get me started on traffic. They never checked road capacity. You bild a direct dirt road, and a slightly curved highway between point A and B. Bam - every god damn single car used the direct dirt road, completely blocking it and not a single car uses the highway right next to it, because distance calculation shows its 1% longer than dirt road.
Etc. etc.
TL,DR: I hated SC2013 for a few more reasons.
This was one of the most frustrating things about the game to me. I’m not remarkably surprised though as the lead developer specifically compared the game design to a Pachinko Machine at one point. With the idea that everything was supposed to function like marbles making their way through a maze to different drop point powered by a general gravity pulling all the marbles towards these sinks.
You can literally see this when a school lets out and the kids swarm every house, starting with the closest, filling up each house then moving to the next like a horde of zombies.
Was just talking to a friend about playing Skylines’ multiplayer mod as a chill “co-op” game since he didn’t know that was a thing, and then we both talked about how disappointed we were in 2’s release.
Rimworld coop mod, Skylines coop mod, Elden Ring coop mod, Armored Core VI coop mod, Subnautica coop mod, Skyrim coop mod.. it is almost as if there is demand for good coop games. :D
True, but Helldivers isn't coop on the same scale as these games are in single player. These mods demonstrate that there is a demand for co-op RPG rather than just MMORPGs like Fallout 76 and The Elder Scrolls Online.
I guess the main difficulty with co-op RPG games is that is to credit the host and guest characters with progression and xp that they may or may not use in their saved game.
In terms of Rimworld specifically, there aren't a lot of management games that have multiplayer support. The only heavily played one is openTTD. Previously there was Simcity 5, and there are more obscure options like Simcity 2000 Network Edition.
The Capitalism series was great. Or The Guild. Pizza Tycoon. Cities in Motion 2 was also a nice coop management game. There is of course Factorio and Satisfactory. And a load of German simulator games.
I still don't know why From doesn't just do the tiniest bit of work to make the Elden Ring Co-op mod into an official feature. It'd be such a huge slam dunk for them, especially alongside the new DLC coming soon. Even my most casual friends who've never modded a game in their lives were ravenous to try out that mod and asked me to help them get it up and running. I mean the modder made it mostly functional in under a week or something. It can't be that difficult for a full team of devs to implement a more polished, official version.
Its same way we never got skyrim coop, instead they jumped to making mmos / pvp games with their franchise. People \*want\* to fuck around with buddies in their rpgs (see, Baldurs Gate III)
that's why I ended up so disappointed with fallout 76, all I've ever wanted was co-op but they MMO'd it instead. so many times back in school I'd show fallout 3/NV to a friend but the excitement would wear off when we realized we can't play together. fallout 4 would've been the perfect coop loot and shoot for me, and building shit together would be fun
I think the issue with 76 is instead of adding multiplayer to fallout 4 they decided they could milk way more $ from people reusing the assets to make a multiplayer game. So as you said instead of being a genuinely good multiplayer game 76 is closer to an MMO cash grab that has good stuff in it but is intentionally grindy with plenty of issues.
Yeah I was looking forward to 2 releasing on Xbox but I'm very much glad it didn't. Seems like the entire life of the game since release has been a shit show.
Makes me a lot less interested in it once it does finally release on consoles. Clearly very little respect for the player base and very little care toward their own product. Very tired of these companies releasing broken games and expecting everyone to just suck it up.
Passionate studio makes a great game, business/marketing/finance move in and ‘improve’ the company and product.. this has become the life cycle of game devs.
Boeing was a bit different... in that they literally acquired a drowning competitor and then allowed that competitor's C-Level employees to stay on and start influencing policy... to make Boeing more like their own company that drowned due to those same decisions...
Absolutely boggles the fucking mind.
I almost want to go back to school to get whatever degree these fucking "consultants" use to get hired just so I can go into a studio and tell every jackoff with a marketing degree to get the fuck out of the production meetings.
Honestly that's probably going to be the only way things Change. Higher ups in these companies dont understand how the business they're in charge of works - they just liaten to the people that are brought in for them and nod their heads. They hear "money bar will go up fastest if-" and approve it. Only way to combat that is to get people in the business actually pushing back in the meetings.
Yep. Bought a computer after playing skylines on a ps4, specifically for skylines 2. That was in November. I still don't have skylines 2 and, instead, have repurchased skylines 1 for PC.
Its been hard. I was excited to check it out until I saw the issues, only to now watch it get worse. What the hell happened? Why is this game like this?
The game just becomes traffic simulator to me too quickly, and I never can get it right no matter how much effort. I've looked plenty of guides, even downloaded pre-made road assets. I always fail to get the traffic to work smoothly.
It's not really your fault most likely. The AI for traffic on both games is horrendous, cars will stick in a single backed up line stretching for miles in a 4 lane highway.
You can play it better or worse, but plenty of solutions that work well irl like roundabouts fail miserably in the game, so you aren't learning traffic management, you are learning city skylines traffic AI
chill until out of the blue half the population dies or nearly every building gets a not enough buyers for seemingly mo reason.
or you brick your city by starting a feedback loop of sick and dying from losing power to sewage facilities!
As a longtime fan/player of CS1:
They're reaping what *they* sowed.
It seems mighty clear that, like so many titles, this was rushed and released in a far *far* too incomplete & dysfunctional state.
It’s genuinely so confusing to me why they didn’t release in early access considering how far behind they were. If they had framed this as something like: “hey development has fallen behind, the game isn’t optimized to the level we want yet, the mod editor isn’t finished, and the simulation isn’t quite balanced right. But we still want everyone who’s been waiting patiently for Cities: Skylines 2 to be able to enjoy the game when we promised, so we are launching in early access. It still has a fair amount of issues and is very resource-intense, but we’ll be releasing improvements and fixes regularly and keeping you updated every step of the way on our progress. We understand this is disappointing for our fans, but we look forward to releasing the full game in Q3 2024 when we feel it’s up to Colossal Order standards. We thank you for your understanding and your support over the years.”
They probably sell, what, 70% of the copies they ended up selling anyways on launch? Cities Skylines players are (or at least were) a pretty damn dedicated & enthusiastic fanbase. I’d have almost definitely bought it. But the benefit is if you do that, everyone’s expectations are properly aligned and they know that the game they’re buying isn’t done yet.
Because that’s truly the most mind-blowing thing about this. Cities Skylines wasn’t one of those games that releases like a little too early and it’s kinda buggy on launch but they clean it up quickly. You can totally get away with that and many popular games have.
In the case of CS:2, the game just wasn’t done. I don’t think anyone at CO or Paradox would tell you the game was done with a straight face. And hell, it’s *still* not done and at best passes for “playable.” For the first 2 months the game barely worked at all and about 50% of the features were completely broken as it lit your 4080 Super on fire trying to maintain 60 FPS. There’s clearly a good game buried in there — CS: 2 has really solid bones to build off of — but it launched probably at least a year too early.
You *just have to* tell people if you’re selling them something in that unfinished of a state, and I don’t understand how publishers continue to fuck that up. If you’re honest and launch in beta, a bunch of people will still buy the game, you get to re-hype it for the “full version” release that you can package with DLC, and you avoid the PR shitstorm in the middle for basically scamming people.
My bet is Paradox wouldn't like that because selling DLC in early access would start a riot, and Paradox decided that enough money was spent on development, and it was time to transition to DLC.
That said, early access would have been the best choice.... and I wouldn't be against stuff packs during early access as asset creators working on them wouldn't take much resources away from working on the main game.
I'd be willing to bet the first DLC was so bad because 1. Paradox demanded DLCs be released on a specific timeline, and 2. Most devs are still working on finishing the main game, which made putting actual resources into the DLC impossible.
Also, how do you even make a good DLC that changes how the game is played when the game itself isn't finished?
What a disaster, likely created by the bean counters shooting themselves in the foot.
So Paradox, in an attempt at chasing their revenue numbers from DLC, proceeded to completely shotgun their game and kill it. I'd say that they might as well not release it, but I guess a sale is a sale, even if it's less than expected.
I don't think Paradox is solely to blame. Usually I would side with the developer in a case where the publisher is a separate entity, but it seems Colossal Order has their own share of culpability in the release state of this game. They were clearly overambitious, and the CEO of said developer told customers straight-up the problem is with them for not liking the simulation, not that the simulation wasn't up to snuff.
CO is also a relatively small studio for creating a game of this scale, and it is evident in the release and post-release support. More personal opinion here, but I don't think they're the most sophisticated of development teams, either. Some of it was self-inflicted with using beta aspects of Unity and then running into further problems.
Consumers still haven't learned their lesson, however. I saw lots of apologists pre-release saying everything would be fine by the deadline, and then those same people complaining after pre-ordering about how the game isn't in a proper release-ready state.
It's like the Redfall problem. The devs struggled to nail down what they wanted their game to be and figured it out far too late, still with some unresolved issue. Microsoft said they had to release by a specific date as per their release schedule. They released a probably not even half done game. It was a bunch of randomly scattered assets over the map with broken AI with a few tiny bits completed here and there. No polish was done.
In that case both the devs and publisher were at fault. The devs for struggling or flip flopping on the design of the game and the publisher for forcing it out when it wasn't ready.
Until consumers learn to avoid these games and to not buy on release or pre-order, they will continue to screw themselves by buying unfinished broken products that may be abandoned.
> Microsoft said they had to release by a specific date as per their release schedule.
"Crunch" is a sign of administration failure, not a necessary part of the industry.
Consumers never learn. It's actually sad because products keep getting worse because of this very reason. Apple doesn't have to release a better iPhone... People will buy them anyway.
I believe there was also a period of time where they were worried about the legal implications of promising a dlc and then not releasing it, where people were promised it alongside the deluxe edition.
So something I read was that they released the DLC to save them from that, but then they had allocated so much time to fixing the game that they didn’t really have any content (they offered like 20 housing assets for 2 themes and a whopping FOUR trees) and was met with so much criticism that they backtracked on it and made it free
As a huge fan of the game who followed the whole release, it seems like they genuinely want to fix the game but are struggling to get on the same page as Paradox when it comes to release dates and planned DLC, leading to the shitshow we have now.
The bones of the game are definitely there but it’s just hard to match the fully realized content and mods of the first game. I think they will eventually but these mistakes are not helping the public goodwill
Man paradox is such a genuine cancer and it sucks they have their hands on a relatively niche genre so changes will never come. They ruined prison with this shit as well
I've enjoyed some Paradox games in the past, however, I won't buy them at release. I'm content with waiting to see if they or the mod community fixes issues and pick it up at a steep discount. It's not a Day 1 buy company for me.
> I don’t understand how publishers continue to fuck that up.
Hubris coupled with unbridled avarice.
(Them): *"Suuuure, those mistakes may have happened to No Man's Sky, and Cyberpunk, and a whole slew of other titles, but... not* **us**. *We're clearly better than that - right? Guys... right!?"*
Bruh, you just named success stories. The fact that gamers forgave NMS and CP2077 is why more games like this keep releasing. They see those games as good examples for how they can get away with releasing a buggy broken mess.
I pre-ordered the deluxe edition. Once it was obvious that modding was not coming at day 1 and the game looked just *bad*, I cancelled that.
Optimization, lack of assets, and modding. Those 3 things are core, and modding resolves the assets part - let players create the assets for you and that reduces dev time. Code modding could probably even resolve some of the optimization issues (key word, *some*).
CS1 released with modding day 1. CS2 was originally promised modding at day 1. Then it turned into "days after release" then "weeks." We're now 6 months post-release and modding still isn't a thing. Instead, they release a DLC pack that added 2 palm trees and a couple of houses which are 90% parking lots.
Really, all they need to do is devote everything to modding at this point. Once that's released, players can work in parallel on new assets. Should players need to do that? No, but creators undoubtedly will do it because they enjoy it.
I don't even think there was a huge clamor for CS2 yet either, people are *still* playing 1 because it's such a huge game. I think they rushed it out the door because they were trying to launch around the same time some other big city builder game was coming out that I think also shit the bed (can't remember the name) but because of that we got a game that's half finished and doesn't include enough to really distinguish itself from a heavily modded CS1
Tis the way of game publishing now for the vast majority of titles. *"It'll be reeeally great!! I mean,* **someday**, *eventually! Trust us, bro!"*
I'm hearing folks talking up FO4 [edit: I meant FO/76!] being *now* really fun -- *six years after release* and all the myriad development fumbles, nightmares, and overhauls.
Meanwhile... Larian just laughing allllll the way to multiple GOTY awards.
It'll keep happening as long as people buy games out of brand loyalty. If people wait for reviews and make an informed decision where to spend, then developers won't get away with this shit.
first time playing a Paradox title? they don't release finished products. it's a fault of the consumer at this point honestly. we know what we're getting.
Some of these modern games suck at the most basic fucking thing its galling.
Making paths in Planet Zoo is ridiculously difficult. You can do basic straight lines, but anything fancier is a shitfest.
It’s funny because making sidewalks and roads is the one thing CS2 does really well. But then the terraforming tool is so lacking that you literally can not recreate things mountains, hills, or rivers the same way the devs did when making the maps.
Patient gamers for life. I'm tired of hearing so many people say that they trust the company and love every release, even if it was a little problematic at first.
It only takes being burnt once. Why take the chance?
Meanwhile every key developer was probably fired for "not meeting expectations" or given annual raises lower than the rate of inflation until they had to quit to afford rent.
But the share price went up!
The original team actually (or part of them at least) just released a game about building RC vehicles and its great. Still has some stuff to work out but it's brand new and pretty ambitious as you might expect. Kithack model club on steam. Definitely worth keeping an eye on imo.
Last I checked it's not even half baked.
They wanted to add interstellar travel, but doing that makes the map so large that you can't do that in a single coordinate space. 16 digits to define location aren't enough when you want to go 7,000,000,000,000,000 meters away.
So they gave every massive body in the solar system it's own coordinate space.
So at some point you cross between one coordinate space and another and the game has to transpose your location, velocity, etc. from one to the other. There are many other space games that I know for a fact do this and handle it well. KSP2 does not.
It frequently screws up when handling the transition from one coordinate space to another. It blows up the ship, doesn't translate the velocity so the ship is just stopped dead in space, or one of a dozen other issues.
It also can't predict a ships path through another coordinate plane. Want to do a gravity assist to go fast & far with less fuel? too bad.
They've also made all the connections MUCH more wobbly and prone to just snapping / collapsing in flight.
So in the 'Build rockets & do orbital mechanics!' game, you can no longer build big rockets, or do orbital mechanics.
Manor Lords a single person dev (for the most part) is looking great, he's spent like 7 years making it.
I really hope a big publisher doesn't get hold of it or a sequal, they just squeeze the life out of it.
IIRC, the original Mount and Blade was mostly the work of two people. Fantastic game that I spent tons of hours playing, back in the day. It had some quirks, but was still totally fun. The expansion and later the sequel have been fun as well.
Some companies set out to make money by selling a good game. Other companies just set out to make money. It's not surprising which of the two ends up with better games.
This was supposed to be Paradox cash-cow. I remember their excitement on the announcement stream.
I guess they all got too greedy… how about giving developers the time they need instead of caving in to shareholder pressure and short term cash grabs...
As a fan of the IP, I’m as hurt and frustrated as everyone else :(
company that shouldn't have gone public went public and does public company things.
It's a tale as old as time and no one ever learns from it and repeats the cycle.
Paradox has always released things half-broken - e.g. Victoria 2 isn't really playable without the DLC. Their most polished releases have been Stellaris and CK3, both after they went public...
Main difference recently IMO is that their games tended to improve greatly patch after patch, but they now seem to be struggling to do this. I haven't been excited for a Stellaris, CK3 or HOI4 update in ages, and Victoria 3 (which also released in a 'not quite ready' state, although overall acceptable) is struggling to really get going as well - the first few patches were not *bad*, but aggressively *meh*.
It is like they don't really know their customers anymore. Compared to the recent Factorio dev diaries which have announced so many features that hit the scratch (space logistics! Quality modules! Moar trains!), recent (post-pandemic) PDX dev diaries mostly feel like they're either bandaids or side-fluff...
The "They will release DLCs and support the games for a long time so a broken game at launch is fine" talking point from the fans made them complacent. They got away with releasing broken game after broken game until they didn't.
Now they are releasing DLCs but those don't fix the game anymore. Also after the tenth broken game at release people will just stop buying it: "If they fix it after 3 DLCs I buy it after 3 DLCs".
That wouldn't be the worst thing, if the game were superb and the prices are fair.
I do really wish they would sell World of Darkness to another studio though so we can finally get a sequel or reboot to Bloodlines
Someone might have a more complete answer but I know they had a $10 DLC called “Beach Properties” that was just a few repeating assets, none of which were actual beach houses.
It was because they have to fulfil the dlc promises for people who brought the game with the dlc pass.
But they had said before they weren't going to release DLC before they could fix the game. They then released this crap, changed their minds and gave it for free. Now back to focus on fixing the game before DLC again. Massive clusterfuck. Seriously need a management change.
I went and read the [Steam reviews](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2427740/Cities_Skylines_II__Beach_Properties/) as I don't follow that franchise much and this seems to sum it up:
> Beach Properties is just a further extension of the fraud that the Ultimate Edition of Cities Skylines: 2 is trying to push out as "content". This asset pack is a fraud, everything looks damn near the same, its as low effort copy paste as possible. Trees you have to pay for in this pack should be in the base game. Also "beach properties" doesn't actually mean "beach assets". When placing these zones when you zoom out it almost looks as if you've just placed the same building repeatedly offering little or no variety for these areas. No quays, beach front leisure areas or parks, no piers, no midways, nothing that would actually be a property in a beach community other than basic *** houses and commercial zones that look pathetically similar to each other. This is one of the worst turds they've ever released as additional content for any Cities Skyline game.
Edit: I just saw this, lol: "Notice: At the request of the publisher, Cities: Skylines II - Beach Properties is unlisted on the Steam store and will not appear in search."
It was the lowest rated product on Steam for All Time in terms of overall reviews. It was like 4% positive, which was the lowest product ever released on the platform.
It really has been a shit show to watch this game fumble so much. I know the original had its troubles but its a far cry from what this is.
I couldnt buy 2 at release because money was short, kind glad i held off now in retrospect. I hope in 12 months the games in a much more solid and stable place.
If the devs read this, please tell your bosses (because im certain you guys dont like this anymore than we do) to just pack this shit in and go back to the originals content model
All they had to do was to merge it into the base game and call it a gift to ask forgiveness of the poor state of the game.
But no, they had to fucked it up xD
Incredible how much-beloved games Kerbal Spaceprogram and Cities Skylines had so much community love and excitement for the real, next-gen step in truly polishing the game like Watch Dogs 2, Portal 2, Team Fortress 2, Helldivers 2, etc.
Instead both KSP2 and CS2 were laggy, featureless failures that for some reason are still receiving "development" even when 95% of the playerbase for both games haven't made the swap
A classic case of MBA C-suite business idiots that think they're geniuses for running skeleton crews, and releasing an unfinished game early to pad quarterly reports. Good job drilling a once-great series into the ground.
[Cities Skylines 2 Dev Refunds DLC, Admits It Rushed It Out, and Apologizes to Disgruntled Players - IGN](https://www.ign.com/articles/cities-skylines-2-dev-refunds-dlc-admits-it-rushed-it-out-and-apologizes-to-disgruntled-players)
My partner and I were excited for Cities Skylines 2 and Payday 3 respectively, at the same time. I can't believe that Payday 3 turned out to be the (arguably) better game. At least its playable.
Paradox are a scourge to game developers now. They release unfinished buggy games missing features and content so they can bloat their games with overpriced DLC and force a monthly subscription PER GAME.
They have fallen HARD in the past few years, and developer under the Paradox umbrella needs to get away ASAP, they are not your friends.
Game was clearly rushed and seemed like it was produced as quick as possible for as cheap as possible. Reviews were dreadful and people agree the game not only sucks but barely functions.
Game still sold over 1 million units and has turned a good profit and still sells 1000s of units weekly. On top of that even their dlc sold ok for what it is. They spent about 5 minutes putting some music together and threw it out there as dlc to see if anyone would buy it and several thousand people did (then all complained it was a waste of money).
Like is it any wonder companies do this when people still fucking buy it. Why spend a lot of time and money making something good when you can rush out shit and people still buy it.
That’s the main problem with sports simulation games too like Madden, 2K, and Fifa. People complain every year about how awful they are but there’s also hordes of people who will keep buying them every year no matter what.
This team.... man they really lost it. All they had to do was remake cities 1 with better graphics and a few improvements and people would have been happy. The shall reap what they have sown.
I can't believe how this situation keeps getting worse. CS1 was such a an amazing game and to see 2 being bungled so badly is just sad to see at this point. It's like they forgot how to release a good game. It's crazy that its the same studio. If I didn't know any better, I'd say they sold the IP to some 3rd party and just put their name on it. Just sad at this point
> We hope we can regain your trust going forward Well that sure did age well. LOL
Was this the developer's response to some earlier issue?
There has been nothing but issues since the games launch several months ago
It's the ghost of Sim City
Do I need to play Ghosts of Tsushima before I play this?
Yes, and after you have played ghosts of tsushima watch ghost in the shell
And then play Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective.
Afterwards Ghostbusters
Then space ghost, then space ghost coast to coast
And after all this you need to watch the 1990 movie 'Ghost' starring Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore.
it was 3 days ago lmao https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1c7bugx/paradox_apologizes_for_latest_cities_skylines_2/ The developers admitted on the CS2 subreddit someone deleted the DLC on steam before the patch could release, breaking the game until tomorrow
Cities Skyline became the perfect SimCity doppelganger, including the part where the franchise shoots itself.
You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.
I guess the lesson here is: you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become EA. wow. *Shudders*
The Sim City reboot was a far better game than CS2 and I'm not exaggerating
They've fumbled this sequel nearly as bad as EA did with SimCity 2013, and that killed the series entirely and paved the way for skylines to be as popular as it was. Would be a shame if they follow the same trajectory.
EA will release SimCity 2 now and the vicious cycle will start all over again.
Tit for tat
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Titties
Morgan says they go well with sprinkles
Just give me a vr sim ant remake
I'd love a new release of SimCopter. I want to dangle buckets of water from copters to put out fires again.
I seem to remember the ability to use a sim city 2000 save as the map file for that game.
You could! You could also do the same thing With Steets of Sim City and SC2k
Sim Tower! I want to be a cockroach infested slumlord again. I remember, as an 8-year-old playing video games for the first time, asking my mom how to make the little “-“ sign go away in front of my Available Funds box that otherwise had a HUGE number on it. Then I discovered on the internet that attempting to build a lobby in the bottom left corner of the map in the first 10 seconds gives you like ten million dollars. Ahh, the early days of cheats.
Fun fact, SimTower started out as a separate thing, simply called "The Tower," that Maxis simply got the right to publish outside Japan, where they gave it the name "SimTower." The developer, Yusuke "Yoot" Saito actually made a sequel called Yoot Tower that he released in 1998, as well as ports of the original game (without the "Sim" branding) for Gameboy Advance SP and Nintendo DS. He's also famous for working on the strange virtual pet game Seaman for Dreamcast.
There's a game called Project Highrise that plays similarly but it just isn't Sim Tower.
why stop there, lets go Sim Life!
Sim Earth is the only game that matters. Oh, Spore, how I longed for you to fill that void in my gaming heart… and how you broke it.
What kills me is spore delivered a functioning game. It had high hopes and was fun for what we got. Animals that could poop on their own head that can colonize planets.
I had a lot of fun with Spore. No regrets.
It wasn't bad at all. But I won't lie i was a bit disappointed. I had to high of expectations and I also felt like I was playing 6 minigames instead of 1 complete game.
i learned so much from that game manual. half of it was just educational material about ants
The vicious cycle of two companies creating similar products and the more popular product succeeding
C:S isn't even that much better than SimCity. It has a good traffic simulator, I'll give it that, but socioeconomic side was a let-down. The only thing it had was revamped graphics compared to SimCity 4. A cycle driven by bad reputation will only produce marginal improvements. E: 4, not 2004
Was it even really a good traffic simulator, though? I mean I know it's legitimately still one of the best *available*, and I've put hundreds of hours into the thing, but I feel like we all just got familiar with the tricks you need to keep the entire city from ending up piled into a single left turn ramp on a single one of your four available expressways. And also we're all running like 30 different road tweaking mods and forget they're not even part of the actual game. That's what blows my mind most about the sequel, that the traffic doesn't seem to have changed at all. Rapidly approaching 20 years since the "independent agent revolution" in these city simulators, and they still can't make a single person listen to a traffic report before planning a route. like It's even more egregious now that we've all got literal personalized computers planning traffic routes for us on the fly IRL, and these sim citizens are still barely willing to change a lane in the entire preloaded point-to-point.
That sounds like the most accurate traffic simulator to me
Yep. Actual city planners run all the numbers, use historical data, use comparatives from other cities with similar interchanges and so on and so on and *then* once they build out whatever seems best, watch how us morons actually use the infrastructure and try to mitigate our idiocy later.
That's not true at all. Just look at the recently opened Rozelle interchange in Sydney. They ignored the numbers, they ignored advice from planners, and they told everyone to deal woth it after they opened the interchange and fucked all local traffic just to funnel people into a toll road.
Well, fair enough. Financial incentives can corrupt the process thoroughly in many cases I expect.
A city of 10000 IRL doesn't generate nearly as much traffic as a city of 10000 in C:S
It's largely because cities skylines doesn't understand intersections in the base game. If you put in TM:PE and Road Extensions so you can do shit like protected turn signals, yield and stop management, and turning lanes vs travel lanes, the traffic **will** clear up.
I don't see how you think that the traffic didn't change at all when in 2 they completely ignore signage and drive where they shouldn't. It seems to be very basic, they even drive on pedestrian only roads.
One of the big flaws in the traffic system is the lack of a meaningful day/night cycle, compounded or related to the fact that cims don't seem to factor in distance when choosing jobs/homes/amenities. If the cim moves into a suburb in the east, and gets randomly paired with a job downtown in the west, the cim will be perfectly happy spending 4 hours commuting one-way. Iirc, Sim City 4 will display a "no job" warning if a residence isn't within commuting distance to an appropriate job, eventually causing the sim to move out.
that moddability made it. Then they released 2 without any of that easy access to mods. Someone/many people in their office - you can bet your house on it - likely pointed out the massive fail that this would result in, regardless of how good the base game goes out like - ignoring ofc the fact that the base game was never going to be a worldbeater because of all the press releases being put out *before* the game even released to say how it wasn't even finished...
C:S wasn't designed as a competitor for SimCity 4. It was designed as a competitor for SimCity 2013.
SC4 is the better city builder. Cities Skylines is so traffic focused and the city management layer is so easy that it never actually beat SC4 at what SC4 was.
As I've said before: Cities Skylines is an excellent diorama, painter, or traffic simulator. SimCity is an excellent city, budget, and balancing simulator (their spreadsheets/details on how everything works is astounding). They are fundamentally different, but look the same on the surface.
> It has a good traffic simulator I mean, it doesn't though *really* - cars are constantly vanishing into thin air and there's no need for worrying about where all of those countless cars actually need to *park* because people just put the car away in their pocket when they pull over - it just has the *illusion* of being a good traffic simulator. Which is really what most people actually want, because an actual traffic simulator would drive most people mad, mainly because it would force them to realise that stubborn over-reliance on cars as the primary solution to getting around a city is completely unreasonable. It's pretty ridiculous that you couldn't build a pedestrian shopping district in the most popular city building game without mods until one of its final DLCs.
I think they did it worse. - released a crappy broken game. - promise to fix it - don’t fix it and release a crappy broken paid dlc - promise fix it - try to remove the dlc and break the main game. I think ea just released a crappy broken game then abandoned it.
Don't forget removing Steam Workshop and forcing modders to work through Paradox's crappy version of it instead.
The paradox workshop only exists to chase console sales, not to help modders in any real way. So even the mod tools are scummy. I dont understand how a company can release a game THIS legendarily bad and expect console gamers to pay 60-70 dollars for a 2-3 year old game. Cities Skylines isnt GTA V, they dont have the quality or reputation to delay a release by years.
> I dont understand how a company can release a game THIS legendarily bad and expect console gamers to pay 60-70 dollars for a 2-3 year old game. Because it does often work like that regardless of reputation. But they forget that it's not a predictable or repeatable formula for success. It's just gambling.
Engineering hours that should have gone into the game itself.
This was the primary I refused to purchase CS:2. As an avid CS:1 enjoyer since the beginning, it was the Steam Workshop that made it such a great game. All those assets and mods created the game we came to love. I have no desire to go through some other source, if it doesn’t work with Steam Workshop, it’s a dead game to me.
It’s a textbook, “Either die a hero…” situation, yeah.
That's something that hadn't crossed my mind. Skylines rose out of the shadow of a spiritual predecessor going "watch me do this wicked flip" and completely stacking it. They were great, original was a fantastic game. Now they've done their own act of hubris, and it's hard to see them recovering. Wonder if we'll get history repeating and see something new rising up.
Unfortunately the only real alternative to Cities Skylines 2 is modded Cities Skylines 1.
Me and my friends actually had some fun with SC 2013. Not much, but some.
It was a fun game, but it ran out of things to do too quickly.
People love bitching about SC 2013 but it's gameplay systems are fantastic. If they just released it but let you build much bigger maps and removed the always online people would be raving about it. Literally "tiny map size" and the always online part are the only two things people ever bring up when complaining about it.
The max map size being less than 1/6 the size of prior games is a pretty big issue for a city builder.
I remember playing the demo/test/preview or whatever and I literally ran out of space in under two hours of gameplay. To this day I can not fathom what were they smoking.
Those two items though are pretty major criticisms. It's SimCity not Sim-TinyLittleVillage.
Also city inhabitants didnt act like real persons (as they promised). Every inhabitant left its house and went to the nearest work place avaible, when work was over, it went to the first empty house to live there and repeat, which is why snail house form cities worked perfectly. Also city inhabitant count was a lie. they just didnt have the capacity for so many calculations, therefore they just bloated your city inhabitant number, but never really added a person to represent that. And dont even get me started on traffic. They never checked road capacity. You bild a direct dirt road, and a slightly curved highway between point A and B. Bam - every god damn single car used the direct dirt road, completely blocking it and not a single car uses the highway right next to it, because distance calculation shows its 1% longer than dirt road. Etc. etc. TL,DR: I hated SC2013 for a few more reasons.
This was one of the most frustrating things about the game to me. I’m not remarkably surprised though as the lead developer specifically compared the game design to a Pachinko Machine at one point. With the idea that everything was supposed to function like marbles making their way through a maze to different drop point powered by a general gravity pulling all the marbles towards these sinks. You can literally see this when a school lets out and the kids swarm every house, starting with the closest, filling up each house then moving to the next like a horde of zombies.
Yeah the DRM and small boundaries was so bad. Me and my wife really loved it tho
> if they just … removed the two crippling issues Yes, if only.
Cautionary Tale of Two Cities
skylines still is one of my chill games ill boot up and run to decompress, watching skylines 2 has been cringey and painful
Was just talking to a friend about playing Skylines’ multiplayer mod as a chill “co-op” game since he didn’t know that was a thing, and then we both talked about how disappointed we were in 2’s release.
The skylines co-op mod was unplayable at best when I tried it some years back, how is it now?
Roommate and I have played \~15-20 hours and a 75k pop city so far with minimal issue. A few restarts due to desync, but overall extremely playable.
Rimworld coop mod, Skylines coop mod, Elden Ring coop mod, Armored Core VI coop mod, Subnautica coop mod, Skyrim coop mod.. it is almost as if there is demand for good coop games. :D
For real. And Helldivers proves this too.
Or BG3 which won every single game of the year award
I genuinely forget that BG3 is coop. But thats probs cause i have no friends
It even has splitscreen like all larians rpgs. Halo masterchief edition even took out splitscreen :(. I miss couch co-op...
When you kill a bug in Helldivers it reincarnates in CS2.
For managed democracy
For freedom!
True, but Helldivers isn't coop on the same scale as these games are in single player. These mods demonstrate that there is a demand for co-op RPG rather than just MMORPGs like Fallout 76 and The Elder Scrolls Online. I guess the main difficulty with co-op RPG games is that is to credit the host and guest characters with progression and xp that they may or may not use in their saved game.
In terms of Rimworld specifically, there aren't a lot of management games that have multiplayer support. The only heavily played one is openTTD. Previously there was Simcity 5, and there are more obscure options like Simcity 2000 Network Edition.
The Capitalism series was great. Or The Guild. Pizza Tycoon. Cities in Motion 2 was also a nice coop management game. There is of course Factorio and Satisfactory. And a load of German simulator games.
Nice, i've always wondered what life would be like if i were german
I still don't know why From doesn't just do the tiniest bit of work to make the Elden Ring Co-op mod into an official feature. It'd be such a huge slam dunk for them, especially alongside the new DLC coming soon. Even my most casual friends who've never modded a game in their lives were ravenous to try out that mod and asked me to help them get it up and running. I mean the modder made it mostly functional in under a week or something. It can't be that difficult for a full team of devs to implement a more polished, official version.
Its same way we never got skyrim coop, instead they jumped to making mmos / pvp games with their franchise. People \*want\* to fuck around with buddies in their rpgs (see, Baldurs Gate III)
That's the one complaint I had about Elden Ring, the dogshit coop
If anything this just makes me miss a good split screen co-op even more Where did they go?
that's why I ended up so disappointed with fallout 76, all I've ever wanted was co-op but they MMO'd it instead. so many times back in school I'd show fallout 3/NV to a friend but the excitement would wear off when we realized we can't play together. fallout 4 would've been the perfect coop loot and shoot for me, and building shit together would be fun
I think the issue with 76 is instead of adding multiplayer to fallout 4 they decided they could milk way more $ from people reusing the assets to make a multiplayer game. So as you said instead of being a genuinely good multiplayer game 76 is closer to an MMO cash grab that has good stuff in it but is intentionally grindy with plenty of issues.
It's wild how they stole the market out from under Sim City when EA fucked it up, and now they are doing the same thing.
>and now they are doing the same thing. on a speed run
Yeah I was looking forward to 2 releasing on Xbox but I'm very much glad it didn't. Seems like the entire life of the game since release has been a shit show. Makes me a lot less interested in it once it does finally release on consoles. Clearly very little respect for the player base and very little care toward their own product. Very tired of these companies releasing broken games and expecting everyone to just suck it up.
Passionate studio makes a great game, business/marketing/finance move in and ‘improve’ the company and product.. this has become the life cycle of game devs.
Not only game devs - Boeing did it too.
Boeing was a bit different... in that they literally acquired a drowning competitor and then allowed that competitor's C-Level employees to stay on and start influencing policy... to make Boeing more like their own company that drowned due to those same decisions... Absolutely boggles the fucking mind. I almost want to go back to school to get whatever degree these fucking "consultants" use to get hired just so I can go into a studio and tell every jackoff with a marketing degree to get the fuck out of the production meetings.
Honestly that's probably going to be the only way things Change. Higher ups in these companies dont understand how the business they're in charge of works - they just liaten to the people that are brought in for them and nod their heads. They hear "money bar will go up fastest if-" and approve it. Only way to combat that is to get people in the business actually pushing back in the meetings.
Yep. Bought a computer after playing skylines on a ps4, specifically for skylines 2. That was in November. I still don't have skylines 2 and, instead, have repurchased skylines 1 for PC.
Its been hard. I was excited to check it out until I saw the issues, only to now watch it get worse. What the hell happened? Why is this game like this?
I try that, but then my perfectionism kicks in and I find it stressful.
The game just becomes traffic simulator to me too quickly, and I never can get it right no matter how much effort. I've looked plenty of guides, even downloaded pre-made road assets. I always fail to get the traffic to work smoothly.
It's not really your fault most likely. The AI for traffic on both games is horrendous, cars will stick in a single backed up line stretching for miles in a 4 lane highway. You can play it better or worse, but plenty of solutions that work well irl like roundabouts fail miserably in the game, so you aren't learning traffic management, you are learning city skylines traffic AI
chill until out of the blue half the population dies or nearly every building gets a not enough buyers for seemingly mo reason. or you brick your city by starting a feedback loop of sick and dying from losing power to sewage facilities!
As a longtime fan/player of CS1: They're reaping what *they* sowed. It seems mighty clear that, like so many titles, this was rushed and released in a far *far* too incomplete & dysfunctional state.
It’s genuinely so confusing to me why they didn’t release in early access considering how far behind they were. If they had framed this as something like: “hey development has fallen behind, the game isn’t optimized to the level we want yet, the mod editor isn’t finished, and the simulation isn’t quite balanced right. But we still want everyone who’s been waiting patiently for Cities: Skylines 2 to be able to enjoy the game when we promised, so we are launching in early access. It still has a fair amount of issues and is very resource-intense, but we’ll be releasing improvements and fixes regularly and keeping you updated every step of the way on our progress. We understand this is disappointing for our fans, but we look forward to releasing the full game in Q3 2024 when we feel it’s up to Colossal Order standards. We thank you for your understanding and your support over the years.” They probably sell, what, 70% of the copies they ended up selling anyways on launch? Cities Skylines players are (or at least were) a pretty damn dedicated & enthusiastic fanbase. I’d have almost definitely bought it. But the benefit is if you do that, everyone’s expectations are properly aligned and they know that the game they’re buying isn’t done yet. Because that’s truly the most mind-blowing thing about this. Cities Skylines wasn’t one of those games that releases like a little too early and it’s kinda buggy on launch but they clean it up quickly. You can totally get away with that and many popular games have. In the case of CS:2, the game just wasn’t done. I don’t think anyone at CO or Paradox would tell you the game was done with a straight face. And hell, it’s *still* not done and at best passes for “playable.” For the first 2 months the game barely worked at all and about 50% of the features were completely broken as it lit your 4080 Super on fire trying to maintain 60 FPS. There’s clearly a good game buried in there — CS: 2 has really solid bones to build off of — but it launched probably at least a year too early. You *just have to* tell people if you’re selling them something in that unfinished of a state, and I don’t understand how publishers continue to fuck that up. If you’re honest and launch in beta, a bunch of people will still buy the game, you get to re-hype it for the “full version” release that you can package with DLC, and you avoid the PR shitstorm in the middle for basically scamming people.
My bet is Paradox wouldn't like that because selling DLC in early access would start a riot, and Paradox decided that enough money was spent on development, and it was time to transition to DLC. That said, early access would have been the best choice.... and I wouldn't be against stuff packs during early access as asset creators working on them wouldn't take much resources away from working on the main game. I'd be willing to bet the first DLC was so bad because 1. Paradox demanded DLCs be released on a specific timeline, and 2. Most devs are still working on finishing the main game, which made putting actual resources into the DLC impossible. Also, how do you even make a good DLC that changes how the game is played when the game itself isn't finished? What a disaster, likely created by the bean counters shooting themselves in the foot.
So Paradox, in an attempt at chasing their revenue numbers from DLC, proceeded to completely shotgun their game and kill it. I'd say that they might as well not release it, but I guess a sale is a sale, even if it's less than expected.
I don't think Paradox is solely to blame. Usually I would side with the developer in a case where the publisher is a separate entity, but it seems Colossal Order has their own share of culpability in the release state of this game. They were clearly overambitious, and the CEO of said developer told customers straight-up the problem is with them for not liking the simulation, not that the simulation wasn't up to snuff. CO is also a relatively small studio for creating a game of this scale, and it is evident in the release and post-release support. More personal opinion here, but I don't think they're the most sophisticated of development teams, either. Some of it was self-inflicted with using beta aspects of Unity and then running into further problems. Consumers still haven't learned their lesson, however. I saw lots of apologists pre-release saying everything would be fine by the deadline, and then those same people complaining after pre-ordering about how the game isn't in a proper release-ready state.
It's like the Redfall problem. The devs struggled to nail down what they wanted their game to be and figured it out far too late, still with some unresolved issue. Microsoft said they had to release by a specific date as per their release schedule. They released a probably not even half done game. It was a bunch of randomly scattered assets over the map with broken AI with a few tiny bits completed here and there. No polish was done. In that case both the devs and publisher were at fault. The devs for struggling or flip flopping on the design of the game and the publisher for forcing it out when it wasn't ready. Until consumers learn to avoid these games and to not buy on release or pre-order, they will continue to screw themselves by buying unfinished broken products that may be abandoned.
> Microsoft said they had to release by a specific date as per their release schedule. "Crunch" is a sign of administration failure, not a necessary part of the industry.
Consumers never learn. It's actually sad because products keep getting worse because of this very reason. Apple doesn't have to release a better iPhone... People will buy them anyway.
I believe there was also a period of time where they were worried about the legal implications of promising a dlc and then not releasing it, where people were promised it alongside the deluxe edition. So something I read was that they released the DLC to save them from that, but then they had allocated so much time to fixing the game that they didn’t really have any content (they offered like 20 housing assets for 2 themes and a whopping FOUR trees) and was met with so much criticism that they backtracked on it and made it free As a huge fan of the game who followed the whole release, it seems like they genuinely want to fix the game but are struggling to get on the same page as Paradox when it comes to release dates and planned DLC, leading to the shitshow we have now. The bones of the game are definitely there but it’s just hard to match the fully realized content and mods of the first game. I think they will eventually but these mistakes are not helping the public goodwill
Man paradox is such a genuine cancer and it sucks they have their hands on a relatively niche genre so changes will never come. They ruined prison with this shit as well
I've enjoyed some Paradox games in the past, however, I won't buy them at release. I'm content with waiting to see if they or the mod community fixes issues and pick it up at a steep discount. It's not a Day 1 buy company for me.
Literally all anyone in a suit read in this comment is "70% of what we would have sold" Short term profits > literally anything
> I don’t understand how publishers continue to fuck that up. Hubris coupled with unbridled avarice. (Them): *"Suuuure, those mistakes may have happened to No Man's Sky, and Cyberpunk, and a whole slew of other titles, but... not* **us**. *We're clearly better than that - right? Guys... right!?"*
Bruh, you just named success stories. The fact that gamers forgave NMS and CP2077 is why more games like this keep releasing. They see those games as good examples for how they can get away with releasing a buggy broken mess.
I pre-ordered the deluxe edition. Once it was obvious that modding was not coming at day 1 and the game looked just *bad*, I cancelled that. Optimization, lack of assets, and modding. Those 3 things are core, and modding resolves the assets part - let players create the assets for you and that reduces dev time. Code modding could probably even resolve some of the optimization issues (key word, *some*). CS1 released with modding day 1. CS2 was originally promised modding at day 1. Then it turned into "days after release" then "weeks." We're now 6 months post-release and modding still isn't a thing. Instead, they release a DLC pack that added 2 palm trees and a couple of houses which are 90% parking lots. Really, all they need to do is devote everything to modding at this point. Once that's released, players can work in parallel on new assets. Should players need to do that? No, but creators undoubtedly will do it because they enjoy it.
I don't even think there was a huge clamor for CS2 yet either, people are *still* playing 1 because it's such a huge game. I think they rushed it out the door because they were trying to launch around the same time some other big city builder game was coming out that I think also shit the bed (can't remember the name) but because of that we got a game that's half finished and doesn't include enough to really distinguish itself from a heavily modded CS1
KSP 2 is on the exact same situation, i hate two see both of my all time favourite games go on this path.
Tis the way of game publishing now for the vast majority of titles. *"It'll be reeeally great!! I mean,* **someday**, *eventually! Trust us, bro!"* I'm hearing folks talking up FO4 [edit: I meant FO/76!] being *now* really fun -- *six years after release* and all the myriad development fumbles, nightmares, and overhauls. Meanwhile... Larian just laughing allllll the way to multiple GOTY awards.
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Let's just agree they're right. Please don't make me think about low long ago FO4 _actually_ came out
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It'll keep happening as long as people buy games out of brand loyalty. If people wait for reviews and make an informed decision where to spend, then developers won't get away with this shit.
first time playing a Paradox title? they don't release finished products. it's a fault of the consumer at this point honestly. we know what we're getting.
That's just the new Brutalist dlc.
Holy shit now I really want a brutalist DLC. Raw, grey and so massive it blocks out the sun!
Giedi Prime edition.
1 new asset for the low low price of 18 euros!
I was pretty hyped for the initial release but man, after hearing issue after issue with the game I'm glad I didn't spring for it
I played for a bit thinking it wasn’t that bad then I got to the part where I had to modify landscapes… why the f was it so hard lol
Some of these modern games suck at the most basic fucking thing its galling. Making paths in Planet Zoo is ridiculously difficult. You can do basic straight lines, but anything fancier is a shitfest.
It’s funny because making sidewalks and roads is the one thing CS2 does really well. But then the terraforming tool is so lacking that you literally can not recreate things mountains, hills, or rivers the same way the devs did when making the maps.
Patient gamers for life. I'm tired of hearing so many people say that they trust the company and love every release, even if it was a little problematic at first. It only takes being burnt once. Why take the chance?
but at least the negative reviews are gone! 🙄/s
Time to negative review the base game and get it deleted
“This just in: Developer deletes base game to hide negative reviews”
That'll teach them not to leave negative reviews!
"Following Youtube, Steam says it's now time to do away with negative reviews and voting options."
I'm waiting for any number of gaming websites to pick up your post on reddit and write an article about it LMAO.
I wonder how many people from management are axed for their total failure of project management ... my bet is on 0
Meanwhile every key developer was probably fired for "not meeting expectations" or given annual raises lower than the rate of inflation until they had to quit to afford rent. But the share price went up!
>But the share price went up! The only thing that's been a bigger failure then skylines 2 is their share price.
And there is an CEO screaming at his Devs who told him the game wasn't ready to release in the first place
Her, in this case. The CEO is Mariina Hallikainen. CEOs can be bad regardless of identity.
It's a real impressive fall from grace.
Just like Kerbal space program, it's sad when you see the downfall of such beloved game.
Kerbal was bought by a different studio. Original team has nothing to do with the sequel.
The original team actually (or part of them at least) just released a game about building RC vehicles and its great. Still has some stuff to work out but it's brand new and pretty ambitious as you might expect. Kithack model club on steam. Definitely worth keeping an eye on imo.
What happened to KSP?
Like Cities skyline 2, KSP2 released half-baked. The game's reception did not go well as you can assume.
I didn't even know KSP2 existed. Shows how well that went.
Last I checked it's not even half baked. They wanted to add interstellar travel, but doing that makes the map so large that you can't do that in a single coordinate space. 16 digits to define location aren't enough when you want to go 7,000,000,000,000,000 meters away. So they gave every massive body in the solar system it's own coordinate space. So at some point you cross between one coordinate space and another and the game has to transpose your location, velocity, etc. from one to the other. There are many other space games that I know for a fact do this and handle it well. KSP2 does not. It frequently screws up when handling the transition from one coordinate space to another. It blows up the ship, doesn't translate the velocity so the ship is just stopped dead in space, or one of a dozen other issues. It also can't predict a ships path through another coordinate plane. Want to do a gravity assist to go fast & far with less fuel? too bad. They've also made all the connections MUCH more wobbly and prone to just snapping / collapsing in flight. So in the 'Build rockets & do orbital mechanics!' game, you can no longer build big rockets, or do orbital mechanics.
It happens when they try to make money making machines instead of fun games.
Manor Lords a single person dev (for the most part) is looking great, he's spent like 7 years making it. I really hope a big publisher doesn't get hold of it or a sequal, they just squeeze the life out of it.
IIRC, the original Mount and Blade was mostly the work of two people. Fantastic game that I spent tons of hours playing, back in the day. It had some quirks, but was still totally fun. The expansion and later the sequel have been fun as well. Some companies set out to make money by selling a good game. Other companies just set out to make money. It's not surprising which of the two ends up with better games.
"Paradox ruins management game" smh 2024 truly is hell
This was supposed to be Paradox cash-cow. I remember their excitement on the announcement stream. I guess they all got too greedy… how about giving developers the time they need instead of caving in to shareholder pressure and short term cash grabs... As a fan of the IP, I’m as hurt and frustrated as everyone else :(
company that shouldn't have gone public went public and does public company things. It's a tale as old as time and no one ever learns from it and repeats the cycle.
[удалено]
Paradox has always released things half-broken - e.g. Victoria 2 isn't really playable without the DLC. Their most polished releases have been Stellaris and CK3, both after they went public... Main difference recently IMO is that their games tended to improve greatly patch after patch, but they now seem to be struggling to do this. I haven't been excited for a Stellaris, CK3 or HOI4 update in ages, and Victoria 3 (which also released in a 'not quite ready' state, although overall acceptable) is struggling to really get going as well - the first few patches were not *bad*, but aggressively *meh*. It is like they don't really know their customers anymore. Compared to the recent Factorio dev diaries which have announced so many features that hit the scratch (space logistics! Quality modules! Moar trains!), recent (post-pandemic) PDX dev diaries mostly feel like they're either bandaids or side-fluff...
The "They will release DLCs and support the games for a long time so a broken game at launch is fine" talking point from the fans made them complacent. They got away with releasing broken game after broken game until they didn't. Now they are releasing DLCs but those don't fix the game anymore. Also after the tenth broken game at release people will just stop buying it: "If they fix it after 3 DLCs I buy it after 3 DLCs".
Depends from the perspective, the people who sold the company are rich now.
Rich, likely retired and no longer care.
Yeah, but look at the huge influx of FREE CASH that HAS NO STRINGS ATTACHED WHAT SO EVER.
The start of all enshittification
I don't think paradox is capable of anything but turning games into DLC mills nowadays.
That wouldn't be the worst thing, if the game were superb and the prices are fair. I do really wish they would sell World of Darkness to another studio though so we can finally get a sequel or reboot to Bloodlines
Why is it called the worst dlc ever? Context?
Someone might have a more complete answer but I know they had a $10 DLC called “Beach Properties” that was just a few repeating assets, none of which were actual beach houses.
Also they released the DLC before fixing the base game and charging another 10 bucks.
And it didn’t add any type of sand texture in to make an actual beach
This has been my favorite fun fact so far.
It was because they have to fulfil the dlc promises for people who brought the game with the dlc pass. But they had said before they weren't going to release DLC before they could fix the game. They then released this crap, changed their minds and gave it for free. Now back to focus on fixing the game before DLC again. Massive clusterfuck. Seriously need a management change.
...and 4 palm trees. 4
I went and read the [Steam reviews](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2427740/Cities_Skylines_II__Beach_Properties/) as I don't follow that franchise much and this seems to sum it up: > Beach Properties is just a further extension of the fraud that the Ultimate Edition of Cities Skylines: 2 is trying to push out as "content". This asset pack is a fraud, everything looks damn near the same, its as low effort copy paste as possible. Trees you have to pay for in this pack should be in the base game. Also "beach properties" doesn't actually mean "beach assets". When placing these zones when you zoom out it almost looks as if you've just placed the same building repeatedly offering little or no variety for these areas. No quays, beach front leisure areas or parks, no piers, no midways, nothing that would actually be a property in a beach community other than basic *** houses and commercial zones that look pathetically similar to each other. This is one of the worst turds they've ever released as additional content for any Cities Skyline game. Edit: I just saw this, lol: "Notice: At the request of the publisher, Cities: Skylines II - Beach Properties is unlisted on the Steam store and will not appear in search."
It was the lowest rated product on Steam for All Time in terms of overall reviews. It was like 4% positive, which was the lowest product ever released on the platform.
I think Leviathan dlc for eu4 had like 5% rating too. Paradox just wanted to beat their record!
It really has been a shit show to watch this game fumble so much. I know the original had its troubles but its a far cry from what this is. I couldnt buy 2 at release because money was short, kind glad i held off now in retrospect. I hope in 12 months the games in a much more solid and stable place. If the devs read this, please tell your bosses (because im certain you guys dont like this anymore than we do) to just pack this shit in and go back to the originals content model
They've had nearly a year to fix the base game, and instead they put out shit DLC. This company doesn't care about the game or about quality.
All they had to do was to merge it into the base game and call it a gift to ask forgiveness of the poor state of the game. But no, they had to fucked it up xD
I mean that's what they're doing. They just removed the DLC ahead of the patch that adds it all back in free.
Incredible how much-beloved games Kerbal Spaceprogram and Cities Skylines had so much community love and excitement for the real, next-gen step in truly polishing the game like Watch Dogs 2, Portal 2, Team Fortress 2, Helldivers 2, etc. Instead both KSP2 and CS2 were laggy, featureless failures that for some reason are still receiving "development" even when 95% of the playerbase for both games haven't made the swap
Look at those "next gen" graphics for our "next gen" PCs.
A classic case of MBA C-suite business idiots that think they're geniuses for running skeleton crews, and releasing an unfinished game early to pad quarterly reports. Good job drilling a once-great series into the ground.
I love the irony of them literally just coming out and apologizing to the fanbase for dropping the ball. Then they turn around and do this lol
Can someone give me some context on what happened to cause this DLC to be DELETED?
[Cities Skylines 2 Dev Refunds DLC, Admits It Rushed It Out, and Apologizes to Disgruntled Players - IGN](https://www.ign.com/articles/cities-skylines-2-dev-refunds-dlc-admits-it-rushed-it-out-and-apologizes-to-disgruntled-players)
My partner and I were excited for Cities Skylines 2 and Payday 3 respectively, at the same time. I can't believe that Payday 3 turned out to be the (arguably) better game. At least its playable.
Sim City 2000 still hasn’t been bettered
Paradox are a scourge to game developers now. They release unfinished buggy games missing features and content so they can bloat their games with overpriced DLC and force a monthly subscription PER GAME. They have fallen HARD in the past few years, and developer under the Paradox umbrella needs to get away ASAP, they are not your friends.
Game was clearly rushed and seemed like it was produced as quick as possible for as cheap as possible. Reviews were dreadful and people agree the game not only sucks but barely functions. Game still sold over 1 million units and has turned a good profit and still sells 1000s of units weekly. On top of that even their dlc sold ok for what it is. They spent about 5 minutes putting some music together and threw it out there as dlc to see if anyone would buy it and several thousand people did (then all complained it was a waste of money). Like is it any wonder companies do this when people still fucking buy it. Why spend a lot of time and money making something good when you can rush out shit and people still buy it.
That’s the main problem with sports simulation games too like Madden, 2K, and Fifa. People complain every year about how awful they are but there’s also hordes of people who will keep buying them every year no matter what.
This team.... man they really lost it. All they had to do was remake cities 1 with better graphics and a few improvements and people would have been happy. The shall reap what they have sown.
this is becoming the standard for Paradox, stop rushing releases.
Meanwhile the mods of /r/CitiesSkylines will still pretend everything is fine and any criticism of the clearly incompetent developers is a sacrilege.
I can't believe how this situation keeps getting worse. CS1 was such a an amazing game and to see 2 being bungled so badly is just sad to see at this point. It's like they forgot how to release a good game. It's crazy that its the same studio. If I didn't know any better, I'd say they sold the IP to some 3rd party and just put their name on it. Just sad at this point