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Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

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Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#91

Post by solardev »

dvaletin wrote: post #79
solardev wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think their reviews are punishment enough. "Very Positive" for CS:1 and "Mixed" for CS:2. And if it improves over time, the reviews improve with them! Cyberpunk was a good example of that. And the graphs make it really easy to see how it's changed over time: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1091500/Cyberpunk_2077/#a...

Which only incentivize companies to publish unfinished products with “will fix it later” ideology.

Is that a big deal? That's easy to avoid if you don't pre-order games and just wait for the day 1 reviews. Even if you did end up with a shitty situation, Steam lets you refund the games with minimal hassle.

On the other hand, there are players who'd rather have the game earlier (like me) than a few months later, despite its launch issues.

The alternative approach -- Baldur's Gate 3 being in Early Access forever -- is fine too, but damned if that wasn't a long wait.

Maybe the compromise is bigger companies being willing to release in Early Access more often. That shouldn't be limited to just indie companies, but any publisher that wants early and broad public feedback.

Especially for a city-builder game (where there isn't really a campaign or spoilers), I don't see why not...

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#92

Post by Someone1234 »

wilg wrote: post #77

It sounds like these issues are relatively fixable. It's a classic victim of the Unity engine's tech debt though. I use Unity myself and they desperately need to decide on how they want people to make video games in their engine. They can't have three rendering pipelines and two ways of adding game logic that have a complicated matrix of interactions and missing features. And not great documentation and a bad bug rep…

It makes one wonder what their internal employee incentives are and if they're problematic.

Microsoft has a similar problem where nobody gets promoted from fixing bugs or maintaining stuff, everyone gets rewarded for new innovative [thing] so every two-three years there's a completely new UI framework or similar.

Although I feel like wanting to start-a-new is a common tech problem, where there are problems and everyone wants to just reboot to "fix" it rather than fixing it head-on inc. backwards compatibility headaches.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#93

Post by make3 »

candiddevmike wrote: post #2

> Quite a few YouTubers and streamers got early access to the game, but they were explicitly forbidden to talk about performance until the regular review embargo was lifted. This, along with games like Alan Wake 2 getting phenomenal reviews in the face of terrible performance and game breaking bugs, makes me wonder why folks trust the current corrupt review system, of which streamers are now part of too.

it should be illegal imho. You straight up shouldn't be allowed to tell reviewers what they can and can't review

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#94

Post by joe_guy »

hypeatei wrote: post #76
jrajav wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read the reviews and don't buy it. This works fantastically as a punishment already without ham-handed, opaque moderation.

Early access is not a "punishment" though. It's a system that already exists on Steam.

But when used in the way you're describing, valve forcing it in a developer instead of a developer opting in, it becomes a form of punishment.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#95

Post by solardev »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #86
solardev wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I love the review score histogram over time feature too, along with the "Overall reviews" vs "Recent reviews" summaries.

I wish there was a way to discount the first month of reviews from the overall score. I assume that the people who buy, play, and review the game immediately are the super fans who have extreme views on what makes the game good.

There is! You can click and drag on the review date graph to any custom timeframe you want. Then it'll calculate the overall rating of just your selected date range for you.

I wish I could post an image here for you :( But basically just go down to the reviews, expand the graphs (with "Show Graphs"), and click and drag a box on the left hand one.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#96

Post by adventured »

bhaak wrote: post #78

Is there any Paradox game that doesn’t have lots of obvious bugs and terrible UI at release? And only the former gets somewhat addressed over time. I really wonder how they develop at that place. And what kind of QS they have.I think even applying a crude pareto would improve their games a lot. Edit: I stand corrected. I wasn't aware that Paradox is also a publisher and even such a big company (over 600 employees!).…

> Is there any Paradox game that doesn’t have lots of obvious bugs and terrible UI at release?

It's not a Paradox game, they're the publisher. Colossal Order is the developer.

It's a small developer out of Finland, 30-50 employees.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#97

Post by ajmurmann »

kossTKR wrote: post #51
QuickMinuteOats wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pardon the snark, but the answer should be obvious: budget and deadlines. Producing well-optimized, “clever” code usually requires magnitudes of more time than the simplest, quickest solution. Hobbyists line yourself, and a few companies like Nintendo, are typically the only ones that can afford to spend time optimizing like you describe.

I get that to an extent, but it would literally take at max a day for a person to run thousands of meshes through an acceptable SimpifyGeometry function or sorting all models by vertice size and removing the most idiotic ones, or remove the teeth in one go.

Sure. Who is gonna prioritize that? Engineers likely have no discretionary time left and are even working weekends. Even on a web project I've been on, I had PM complaint every meeting about loading times of a admin interface. I told them every time that they should than prioritize the pagination ticket I had written. After a months of this shit, I took time out of my Saturday and just added it. I wouldn't have done that if I had already had to work nights and weekends.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#99

Post by solardev »

rychco wrote: post #66
athorax wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valve/steam should absolutely not be doing that

Why not? There's already a hardware survey & they could easily have an opt-in system that reports the user's average framerate while playing games. If the average hardware specs can't run that game >=60fps >=90% of the time on any graphical setting then it's beyond fair to give it a "Hardware reports indicate that this game performs poorly" label.

I like that!

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#100

Post by habinero »

Pannoniae wrote: post #56
ajmurmann wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Optimisations like this aren't even hard or time consuming (and they are fun) - can anyone clue me in on why you ship your stuff in this state - what happens in a studio like this? Business and survival is what happened. Read any of Jason Schreier's books on game development. Income is very chunky with games being in development for years. Postponing by a few months might sink your company, especially with interest…

They are wasting all that effort in the wrong things though. I fully understand the problem of crunch - but these poor devs wouldn't have to crunch as much if the game's budget wasn't wasted on "analytics" and useless features, instead of polishing the core gameplay, then adding the fluff after launch. In this game, they've focused on the superficial stuff, yet the core gameplay is still broken (instead of a city bui…

Nobody sets out to make a bad game or "waste effort" on "useless" features.

Things like this happen because the people giving you money have a hard deadline and you ship what you have.

Or you decide to use a game engine that was more difficult to use than expected.

It's insulting to say "well, just make the game better first, duh". I promise you, they know.

But they have to balance a lot of things you don't see.

If you ever find yourself saying "why don't they do [obvious thing]", stop and assume you don't have all the facts.

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