Cities Skylines 2 Dev Addresses Character Teeth Controversy

The developer of Cities Skylines 2 has addressed a rumour that in-game teeth are causing performance issues with the game.

A reddit post that went viral this week suggested the city builder renders individual teeth for each of the thousands of people who walk around your city — despite the fact the player cannot see them.

Redditor Hexcoder0 found roughly 1,000 characters, including these “invisible teeth”, were drawn multiple times for the camera, and another time for the shadows, but without any LODs (level of detail), a technique that reduces the number of GPU operations required to render distant meshes.

apparently one of cities skylines 2’s many performance issues is that it uses high poly models for each of the thousands of people walking around your city. including their individual teeth pic.twitter.com/r23mTY6kV2

— tom (@tombomp) October 26, 2023

“I just wanted to post about the teeth because it’s kinda funny and represents at least some missed performance,” Hexcoder0 said.

While Cities Skylines 2 does suffer significant performance issues — indeed it was something developer Colossal Order felt compelled to warn players about ahead of launch — Colossal Order denied biting off more than it could chew when it came to the little people’s teeth.

In a statement issued to IGN, Colossal Order said Cities Skylines 2’s “lifepath” feature, which describes the major events in citizens’ lives, is not tied to the geometry of the characters and thus does not affect the performance of the characters. However, Colossal Order admitted Cities Skylines 2’s characters “require further work”, and confirmed they are currently missing their LODs, “which affect some parts of performance.”

Here’s the statement in full:

“Citizen lifepath feature does not tie to citizen geometry and does not affect the performance figures of the characters. We know the characters require further work, as they are currently missing their LODs which affect some parts of performance. We are working on bringing these to the game along general LODs improvements across all game assets. Characters feature a lot of details that, while seemingly unnecessary now, will become relevant in the future of the project.”

Based on this statement, it seems that the lack of LODs on the teeth is causing some performance trouble, but not the existence of the teeth itself. It’s a bizarre situation, made even more intriguing by Colossal Order’s line at the end of its statement about the character teeth potentially becoming relevant in the future. Perhaps the developers plan to add a character smiling mechanic?

In the shorter term, Colossal Order has kicked off its post-launch performance improvement plan with the release of a new patch, with the promise of more to come.

Cities Skylines 2 launched big on Steam this week, hitting over 100,000 concurrent players and sitting atop the best-sellers chart. But performance issues marred the launch, which was met with a ‘mixed’ user review rating of 53% on Valve’s platform. Colossal Order has insisted it targeted 30 frames per second, even on the most powerful PCs, because there’s “arguably no real benefit in a city builder to aim for higher fps”.

Image credit: Reddit / Hexcoder0.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.