The developer of Cities Skylines 2 has issued an update on the game, confirming a significant delay to a key feature and the slowdown of patch releases.
The city builder, which launched on Steam to a ‘mixed’ user review rating last month, does not currently have official mod support or the expected in-game editor. Without an asset import feature, mod makers are unable to import their own assets into the game. The original Cities Skylines enjoyed strong support from the modding community.
In a blog post, Colossal Order CEO Mariina Hallikainen said the studio’s goal is to release the editor “as soon as possible”, but expects it will take a couple of months to get into “a shape where we can release it”. “We don’t have a concrete timeline yet as we don’t want to make promises we can’t keep,” Hallikainen said.
Cities Skylines 2 has endured a tumultuous release. In the month preceding launch, Colossal Order and publisher Paradox announced the Xbox Series X and S and PlayStation 5 versions of the game were delayed to spring 2024 in order to allow the developers more time to match “quality and performance across all platforms.”
The minimum and recommended PC specs were also raised significantly to account for the game’s “next-generation” features and to allow for “a better player experience”. In a subsequent joint statement Colossal Order and Paradox admitted they had “not achieved the benchmark” targeted for launch performance on PC, but stuck to the planned release date anyway.
Despite the warning, Cities: Skylines 2 surpassed 100,000 concurrent players on Steam on launch day as it soared to the top of the storefront’s best-sellers chart. However, a great many of these players were left frustrated by the game’s foreshadowed poor performance, along with a number of bugs, which Colossal Order has worked to fix in the weeks since.
And just last week, Hallikainen questioned the reaction from some within the Cities Skylines community after the developer patched out an in-game radio advert it had deemed offensive.
In this week’s update, Hallikainen said the console version of the game, now slated for the first half of 2024, will have all the intended editor features in place for launch, and the editor itself will be on par with the PC version apart from code modding and asset importing, due to console restrictions. Console players will, however, be able to download user-created assets from Paradox Mods and create custom maps. The performance improvements Colossal Order is making to the PC version will also “benefit” the console version, Hallikainen said. “We’re actively working on the console versions so they will be ready for you in the first half of 2024.”
Now onto patches. Hallikainen said the quick pace of patches will slow down after the next one is released soon. Colossal Order will then focus on “bigger fixes that take longer to work on”. The focus here is on LODs (of Cities Skylines 2 teeth fame) and improving GPU performances. There are a “ton of tweaks and adjustments required”, Hallikainen admitted, but the expectation is a “relevant performance boost”.
“The workload is significant and unfortunately, there is no silver bullet to improve the performance at once, instead, it requires several tasks completed before we are happy with it,” Hallikainen explained. “This results in less frequent updates so we won’t have weekly patches going forward.”
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.
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