Cities: Skylines 2 developer Colossal Order has released a new hotfix for the city builder that attempts to improve overall performance on PC while fixing numerous bugs, and removing an “offensive” in-game radio advert.
Among the many improvements introduced in the hotfix was an update that reduced the resolution of unnecessarily large character textures for the game’s digital citizenry, which were taking a toll on performance.
The developers had previously admitted that the character models needed addressing after a Reddit post went viral for suggesting the game was rendering individual teeth for members of a city’s simulated population. Colossal Order subsequently told IGN that the teeth wern’t the cause of the performance loss, but admitted that the citizen models did have issues with their level of detail (LOD).
Other performance improving tweaks included optimizations to lighting and changes to the way the game prioritises rendering assets. The developers also addressed a number of problems plaguing the simulation’s economy, businesses, and utilities. For example businesses should no longer order resources when they don’t have enough space to house them, and elsewhere a bug was removed that prevented certain assets from being consumed.
Colossal Order also used the hotfix to remove the ‘Spasm Electronics’ advertisement from the in-game radio stations, after members of the community took issue with the sound effects used therein, which they argue mimic the sound a person makes when experiencing a seizure.
The developer has warned that it will take a little while for the fixes to take effect for players continuing with existing save files. A full list of the hotfix improvements can be found below, courtesy of Paradox Interactive.
- Increased leisure probability to balance the “No customers” situation with commercial companies
- Improved balance of companies’ profit
- Tuned down companies ordering input resources when their storage don’t have enough space
- Fixed trade resource bug preventing some resources from being consumed
- Fixed miscalculation in college/university eligible count
- Improved conditions for companies to move away when bankrupt
- Fixed a dependency error with land value causing potential instability
- Fixed an issue where loading a new map would cause water state to get out of sync with the save data
- Slightly increased Windows emission intensity
- Optimizations for area lights
- Prefer rendering small objects after large ones when possible to improve GPU performances in some cases
- Improved shadow LOD calculations to cull irrelevant shadow casters earlier
- Reduced situations where trees and alpha clipped objects would lead to virtual texturing space running out
- Fixed citizens hanging around at park areas on regular building lots never getting inside the building
- Decreased resolution of unnecessary large character textures
- Removed Spasm radio ad (due to offensive content)
- Added missing localization ID for Paradox account linking
In the month preceding the launch of Cities: Skylines 2 Paradox announced the Xbox Series X|S and PS5 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 move that left some fans concerned. In a subsequent joint statement developer Colossal Order and publisher Paradox admitted that they had “not achieved the benchmark” targeted for launch performance on PC.
Despite the warning, Cities: Skylines 2 was able to surpass 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 resulted in a ‘mixed’ user score that at the time of writing has the city builder sitting on a 56% positive rating.
Anthony is a freelance contributor covering science and video gaming news for IGN. He has over eight years experience of covering breaking developments in multiple scientific fields and absolutely no time for your shenanigans. Follow him on Twitter @BeardConGamer
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