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Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

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Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#161

Post by Pannoniae »

ajmurmann wrote: post #131
Pannoniae wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would believe this.... if 1. games made 15 or 20 years ago 2. and indie games made today would not be able to manage it. It's always the bigger studios who utterly mess up in making an actually playable game, which indicates that the problem is not something inherent but a simple product of laziness and greed. (Latest example: see Creative Assembly's meltdown)

As scope increases all the organizational challenges balloon. Coordinating 10 people is much easier than several hundred. It's the same almost regardless of domain. What happens if your core game loop still is no fun, but you got 100 people rolling off a previous project and ready for the next phase of this new project to get to where you need them to start design levels and assets? It's much easier to fix if the add…

it's not like game studios have increased in size, it's just more bloat. look at old games' credits, you'll find maybe even bigger studios (making art and programming with limited hardware was much more time-consuming....) but they had good gameplay on a much smaller budget. Today, studios waste money on analytics, governance things and other fluff...

Best case study is Mojang, the company has over 800 employees but it is literally outperformed in game design and update quality/quantity by ten people at Re-Logic. (which includes managers and legal as well!)

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#162

Post by waveBidder »

Pannoniae wrote: post #111
habinero wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 y…

I would believe this.... if 1. games made 15 or 20 years ago 2. and indie games made today would not be able to manage it. It's always the bigger studios who utterly mess up in making an actually playable game, which indicates that the problem is not something inherent but a simple product of laziness and greed. (Latest example: see Creative Assembly's meltdown)

The indies that don't make a viable product, you don't see.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#163

Post by dymk »

cipheredStones wrote: post #124
Someone1234 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 everyo…

> 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. Is there any big (or even medium-sized) company where this isn't true? I feel like it's just a rule of corporate culture that flashy overpromising projects get you promoted and regularly doing im…

Facebook was pretty good about this on the infra teams. No, not perfect, but a lot better than the other big companies I was exposed to.

If anything, big companies are better about tech-debt squashing, and it's the little tiny companies and startups that are, on average, spending less time on it.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#164

Post by hutzlibu »

cipheredStones wrote: post #124
Someone1234 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 everyo…

> 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. Is there any big (or even medium-sized) company where this isn't true? I feel like it's just a rule of corporate culture that flashy overpromising projects get you promoted and regularly doing im…

I think it is a bit tricky to get the incentives right ( since the bookkeeping people like to quantize everything). If you reward finding and fixing bugs too much - you might push developers to write more sloppy code in the first place. Because then those who loudly fix their own written mess gets promoted - and those who quietly write solid code gets overlooked.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#165

Post by JCharante »

EMM_386 wrote: post #72

> A brief glance at the JS bundle reveals that they are using React and bundling using Webpack. While this is something that is guaranteed to make the average native development purist yell at clouds and complain that the darned kids should get off their lawn, When I first heard of this as being a thing, my initial reaction was indeed something like "wait what? HTML and CSS in a desktop PC game driving the UI? No, th…

Battlefield 1 was using React to render the UI in 2016!

Conference talk by dev: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pkf9H3XEMoE

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#166

Post by praptak »

MagicMoonlight wrote: post #105

100,000 vertices for a pile of logs and 10,000 for teeth inside a characters head is hilarious. It blows me away how bad everyone is at their jobs. Imagine spending all day working on something and then you just make it garbage.

My humble experience is that this scale of duckup is unachievable from line workers being bad at their jobs.

It is easily achievable from bad/misaligned incentives, poor leadership, no product vision and probably a dozen other organisation problems which make decent workers working on stuff that actively makes the end product worse. Think Boeing 737 Max.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#167

Post by misnome »

MagicMoonlight wrote: post #105

100,000 vertices for a pile of logs and 10,000 for teeth inside a characters head is hilarious. It blows me away how bad everyone is at their jobs. Imagine spending all day working on something and then you just make it garbage.

To the contrary: I’m sure all the developers worked very hard, and very competently.

It sounds like classic mismanagement. Some artists making this being told that there will be some automatic culling or LOD system so to go wild - it won’t affect the end result; and the system not being ready or being cut by another part of the organisation without the artists ever knowing about it.

I’m sure there were vocal developers who understood the problems and advocated for fixing - but a decision was made to release anyway; I can’t even say wrongly, because games being half-finished on release and polished later is not at all unusual nowadays even for flagship titles; and they do have a track record of supporting their titles for a long time.

I can well imagine a reasonable decision to get money coming in now for the cost of a couple of months of low level complaints that nobody will remember in a year.

It sucks, but I am willing to bet it’s not laziness or people being bad at their jobs.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#168

Post by MichaelZuo »

4gotunameagain wrote: post #135
MagicMoonlight wrote: post #105

100,000 vertices for a pile of logs and 10,000 for teeth inside a characters head is hilarious. It blows me away how bad everyone is at their jobs. Imagine spending all day working on something and then you just make it garbage.

Now that's a bit harsh. You don't know what is going on inside that company, and under what environment the development happened. This all could easily stem from a couple of key people leaving and chaos breaking loose, or from extreme time pressure by the publishers.

The default assumption is that the studio is not particularly different from the norm of the industry, unless proven to be otherwise.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#169

Post by slimsag »

wilg wrote: post #154
theNJR wrote: post #139

While the complaints about performance are valid, I’m still having a blast with the game. Having an 11 month old means it’s hard to go deep into something like Cyberpunk since I only get short gaming bursts (ie 7:30 when she goes to bed until 8:30 when I turn off screens). Not enough to play a deep narrative game but plenty of time to expand out my industrial area, fix a highway interchange and figure out what’s goin…

I'm enjoying it too. It's fairly similar to the previous one, and have encountered a few simulation bugs, but I'm happy with it. I'm able to run it okay at 4K.

If I played the old one and enjoyed it, what's the pitch for the new one? e.g. why is it better? On the surface it kinda just looks like the previous one, but I haven't dug into it
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