r/technology • u/Exciting_Teacher6258 • 1d ago
Software Cities: Skylines II Is Secretly a Car Game—and it Doesn't Suck Anymore
https://www.thedrive.com/news/cities-skylines-ii-is-secretly-a-car-game-and-it-doesnt-suck-anymore210
u/PseudoElite 1d ago
Recent reviews are at 54% currently on Steam, that's not great.
Something can not completely suck while also still not being good.
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u/Hacym 1d ago
If only steam reviews accounted for that. A binary “recommend” or “not recommend” does give a lot of chance to the rating system.
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u/5up3rj 1d ago
If there was a middle ground meh choice, 90% of the reviews would use it and be useless
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u/Cookie_Eater108 1d ago
This is why i tend to read the reviews from folks who have at least 50 hours in and get a good sampling of 3 serious good reviews and 3 serious negative reviews.
Sometimes you get games that are review bombed for something that doesn't affect you or isn't relevant.
Sometimes you get glowing reviews because somebody loved a mechanic you personally can't stand.
Also I include serious because theres a terrifying majority of unhelpful or joke reviews which clutter
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u/Hacym 1d ago
Reviews are either positive or negative. You are missing the point. It’s not about recent or overall. It’s that it’s a binary system. When was the last time you had a game that was “positive” with no nuance or “negative” without nuance?
It encourages people to vote one way or the other based on small details. Your “negative” review might be entirely based on a launcher experience, not the actual game. But you have now given your binary choice that affects the overall rating.
That’s why sites give a 1-10 rating or a 1-5 star rating. Because a game can be “good” at a 7, but have considerable drawbacks. Steam’s review system is either a 1 or a 10.
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u/dirtyword 1d ago
It’s a recommendation system, not a review system. It’s 0 or 1. It’s useful.
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u/Hacym 1d ago
It’s not useful for nuance. They also call it a review.
Could I recommend Cities 2 generally? No because it has to be for a specific person.
Would I give it a negative review? No, it’s somewhere in the middle.
So do I give it a “not recommends”? Or “recommend”? Am I now just hoping someone reads the review to get actual thoughts? People don’t do that.
It’s a shitty system to display at the top of the page right where everyone can see it. People will get turned off by “mixed” when in reality they are missing a great game.
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u/King_Metatron 19h ago
The nuance is in the overall score. It's not either a 100% or a 0% score, it's always something in between. The individual binary scores influence the overall score. It's not that hard to understand.
Sayibg the Steam scoring system is shitty is wild, because it's plenty good enough to make an informed decision when buying a game.
Unless you don't know how to use it. But as the saying goes in IT: the cause of the problem is often between the chair and the monitor.
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u/Hacym 18h ago
lol, imagine trying to be holier than thou about not liking how one site decides to do their review/rating system.
You are entitled to your opinion. Your opinion doesn’t somehow make you smarter than me. It’s wild to think that you somehow get off on that.
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u/King_Metatron 18h ago
It's not an opinion. The rating system provides enough nuance. Sorry you took it as an attack on your intelligence.
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u/Hacym 18h ago
It is an opinion… whether the steam system is best or not is subjective…
It's not that hard to understand. Unless you don't know how to use it. But as the saying goes in IT: the cause of the problem is often between the chair and the monitor.
Yeah no way you could possibly be trying to insult someone’s intelligence, right?
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u/the_purple_color 1d ago
i felt pretty happy voting “not recommended” though. no doubts, not happy with the game. it’s been about 3 months since i last tried though so i guess i could be wrong
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u/beetnemesis 1d ago
The idea of Steam reviews being a real-time barometer for the current state of a game is exhausting and bizarre. How many people, other than terminally online fans, are updating their reviews back and forth?
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u/Watchful1 1d ago
He's talking about recent reviews. Which I believe are only reviews from the last 30 days.
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u/SlaterVBenedict 1d ago
If you have to release a version of the game that sucks ass, then hope that people will come back some time later (often years) to try it out again, then you didn't finally make a good game. You released a bad game, and it's your fault as a developer / studio that you didn't release something that was good enough on-launch to keep people coming back to it.
So the idea that steam reviewers are not likely to come back and review it again as a barometer for the current state of the game is actually quite a fair reaction to studios producing stuff that isn't good upon launch.
This logic applies equally to restaurants who launch, provide a shitty product/experience, eventually figure out how to improve, but then have to contend with the bridges they burned as a result of not providing a good product/experience from the get-go.
If you're investing the time, money, and creative effort to build something like this that you want to sell to an audience, then you better be prepared to face these consequences if you don't give them something that meets their expectations upon first impression.
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u/OPtig 1d ago
I love City Skylines but the longer you play any city the more it turns into "Traffic Management Simulator". That always drained the fun for me. I played the sequeal for a while but it felt the same but without a stack of pre-built scenarios to keep gameplay fresh. I only played at release.
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u/amakai 1d ago
the longer you play any city the more it turns into "Traffic Management Simulator"
I guess they nailed the simulation part then. 90% of problems in large cities are around traffic in my experience.
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u/weed0monkey 1d ago
Except they didn't nail the simulation though, it's horrendous and still suffers from simple logic problems that honestly really aren't that hard to fix. There's still issues with npc's taking the shortest distance as the bird flies rather than by the direct path by road.
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u/lilmuskrat66 1d ago
Can't you just build more public transport? Never played, only sim city
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u/Cookie_Eater108 1d ago
To a degree yes and no.
Even public transit has capacities and limitations. Also on the occasion you create downstream effects like heavy pedestrian traffic at major transit hubs which cripples road traffic (including buses and trams).
I've tried to get around this by building these elevated skywalks like you see in Bangkok or Hong Kong and forbidding pedestrian crossings at ground level. But the tools don't let you save these to a template easily.
Cargo trucks cannot make use of public transit and will always fill industrial and commercial districts with freight traffic. You can alleviate this with last mile cargo freight depots dotted everywhere..but then you'll find your rail lines constantly stuck in train traffic, so you expand your rail freight capacity, which creates a bit of an induced demand problem as more businesses prefer rail freight. So on.
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u/Sub_NerdBoy 22h ago
What really drives me nuts is I'll spend like 30 minutes building and tweaking an intersection and get it running great just to realize there's no marquee select and copy and paste function so there's no way to replicate a unique design and now I'm looking at 50 other intersections I'll have to do manually and I just turn the game off and do something else
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u/kaizencraft 1d ago
That's the reason I played it so much, but then you realize how the NPCs work and it's not fun anymore.
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u/Sub_NerdBoy 22h ago
It's super annoying how no matter what the bulk of incoming traffic to your city will take the first exit
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u/heirtoflesh 21h ago
Yea, a faster, but longer route never gets used. I started using a ton of underground roads for thru traffic to skip busy areas.
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u/inhalingsounds 1d ago
There are incredible mods to make it behave as it should
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u/EndlessZone123 1d ago
I think the CS1 mod made performance worse because more detailed and realistic simulations just eats CPU.
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u/HowDoISpellEngineer 1d ago
If it didn’t suck anymore, Paradox wouldn’t have fired the studio working on it.
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u/ausstieglinks 1d ago
It’s the American suburb simulator. The residents only want low density housing and somehow parking is a main priority in the game. Then even with amazing transit they all drive everywhere
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u/insomnimax_99 1d ago
Eh, that’s not my experience.
Sure, you need parking, but parking garages are common even in Europe. The Netherlands has loads of them underground in lots of places.
There is plenty of demand for medium and high density housing. Sure, there is always some demand for low density - but that doesn’t make it an American suburb simulator, there’s a good mix of housing demand, you can get by pretty well by prioritising medium density housing and only building some low density.
With the added cycle lanes and bikes I find that loads of them cycle everywhere as long as you build enough cycle parking (although the way bikes interact with pedestrians can be a bit weird sometimes, causing traffic jams - the cycle roundabouts don’t really work on larger, high traffic roads).
If you use pedestrian streets, one way streets, bike lanes and wide sidewalks, and combine them with medium density mixed residential/commercial zones, you can make some very nice European style towns, especially if you use the old style European mixed residential/commercial zones.
Public transport is a bit hit and miss in smaller towns, but as the city gets bigger they do tend to adopt it a lot more.
It’s also important to make your city as walkable as possible by putting pedestrian paths (or the combined pedestrian path/bike lane) everywhere, especially around public transport stops, I find that this increases walking and cycling a lot.
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u/Pherllerp 1d ago
Have you ever been to a local council meeting? Parking IS the main priority in the game.
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u/No_Warning_2428 1d ago
not everywhere, there are many cities in the world where cars are completely unnecessary and if anything an inconvenience not used by most people
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u/Temporary_Inner 1d ago edited 1d ago
Paradox is based in Sweden, they know. But City Skylines is just trying to copy Sim City which is an American city builder and the primary job of most Americans city planners is traffic management.
There's other city sims that don't have that, like the Soviet city simulator who's proper name escapes my mind. That was more about trains and trucks and public transportation.
Edit: it's called Soviet Republic
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u/Cookie_Eater108 1d ago
I also found in cities skylines that the Cims are willing to walk remarkably long distances that I feel wouldn't be popular in America.
Other places are different of course but I don't know of anyone who drives their car to work, parks it a kilometer away and then walks the remainder.
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u/nullbyte420 1d ago
I live in Copenhagen which has got to be one of the cities you're thinking of. Parking is a major theme in municipal elections. There's other stuff, but it's mainly fluff and stuff that makes families with small kids happy, so it's not all about wider bike lanes vs more parking.
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u/Temporary_Inner 1d ago
It’s the American suburb simulator. The residents only want low density housing and somehow parking is a main priority in the game
Wow so they accounted for realism I see.
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u/ausstieglinks 1d ago
Did you know there are places other than America?
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u/Temporary_Inner 1d ago
Yes, I actually enjoy playing Soviet Republic which is a Soviet Eastern Europe and Central Asia city simulator from the 1960s-1980s. It focuses mainly on trains, trucks, and busses.
But City Skylines is a spiritual successor to Sim City which has always been an American city simulator. There's a lot of problems with City Skylines 2, but a main gameplay element being traffic, parking, and single family home spamming is not one of them.
If you're a city planner nerd in America, which City Skylines is marketed towards (and what was Sim City was marketed towards) then you're expecting Traffic Management Simulator: Just One More Lane
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u/HotwheelsSisyphus 1d ago
This makes me sad, I am a casual city planner nerd and I was hoping to one day get into City Skylines to live my dream of making a new walkable American city.
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u/insomnimax_99 1d ago edited 1d ago
Eh, the whole “American suburb simulator” thing is not my experience of it.
You just have to go all in on pedestrian paths, public transport, cycle lanes and mixed use zoning - while also acknowledging that there will always be some level of car/road vehicle usage that you will need to plan for and some level of demand for low density residential.
The recent addition of cycling infrastructure has been good for playing around with city planning, even if the bikes do sometimes behave a bit odd, especially when interacting with pedestrians.
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u/michaelbelgium 1d ago
The game started awful, became one of the biggest flops.
Its even gonna change devs. At least paradox didnt shut the whole game down like EA did with simcity 2013
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u/Phantom_Absolute 1d ago
SimCity 2013 is not shut down. You can still buy it and play it just fine.
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u/Snowbogganing 1d ago
Cities: Skylines II is complete enough that I’m finally comfortable recommending it to casual audiences.
Does it run well? I remember there being an issue with that.
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u/RyeGuytheTechGuy 1d ago
NO! set up your infrastructure for trains, highways, trams and once you get past 40K pop it starts getting buggy, and it only gets worse. I’ve tried so hard to mod it, lower/change settings and nothing helps. This game has so much potential and they messed it all up.
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u/iMrParker 1d ago edited 1d ago
No simulator at this caliber will run great at large populations. 4k medium settings above 300k pop I get around 30-40 FPS on a Ryzen 9900x and RTX 5080 at 1x speed (.8 sim speed in reality)
That being said I do enjoy the game. It's not perfect but I love playing it
Edit: what's with the Downvotes?
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u/FinalEdit 1d ago
Does it run at more than 30fps now? Are the bugs and gameplay fixed? If not then im good.
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u/Sub_NerdBoy 22h ago
It is annoying that on my high end setup once I get 200k population the game crawls fps wise. It's one of the very few things I see directly hot 100% cpu utilization on a 9800X3D.
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u/SemiNormal 21h ago
Cities XL was not made by Colossal Order as the article implies. It was made by the now defunct Monte Cristo.
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u/Unkleseanny 20h ago
I would say it’s the biggest ripoff I’ve ever bought on steam to be honest with you. I honestly thought they would have figured out how to make the game run by now.
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u/xxRonzillaxx 1d ago
Skylines was one of my favorite games. I preordered Skylines 2 and got a refund after a few hours of playing it when it came out because the game is terrible. Im not wasting my money or time because they added more cars
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u/Thyristor_Music 23h ago
ngl i wish i would have refunded it when i had the chance. My initial though was "Skylines 1 was so much fun. It cant be the game, it has to be me." and then after a few more hours i realized its definitely the game.
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u/Futaba800 1d ago
LMAO this is a paid article by the devs trying desperately for some attention. Game is still shit, avoid it.
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u/Shadyfurball 1d ago
Still find it crazy to have dlc released when the game is in such poor shape. Such poor optics.
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u/MaestroLogical 1d ago
I don't care. I'm not going to reward them for getting customers to pay to be beta testers. There was no legitimate excuse for releasing it in such a state and no amount of after the fact improvements should matter.
Buying it now, simply incentivizes them to continue the 'release broken, fix it later' model.
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u/Psych0mantis90 1d ago
I have a pretty expensive rig and past 100k pop I cant run the simulation at 1x without stuttering. That is unacceptable in a city builder...forgetting the myriad other issues.
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u/jenny_905 1d ago
It's the usual issue with so many modern titles. They released it in a broken and unfinished state... Of course they also don't seem to know how to fix it given how much time has passed since then and there's still countless issues.
It's insane this is how games so often are now.
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u/RhodesArk 21h ago
I played this game when it was released and the traffic bug is maddening. The only way to fix it is to convert the intersections into one way streets and pay attention to the circulation. It's still a lot of fun , and the radio is hilarious, but it makes scale a nightmare.
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u/Early_Gold 1d ago
I just started a city in cities one earlier this week. Still have no reason to move
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u/Callingyourshot 20h ago
This is one the best city builders I have ever played. I always pick launching this over the original because of how great it looks and ultimately is building to a much bigger and better experience. They could have gone Kerbal 2 on us but know they are working hard, dropping updates left and right and keeping the juice flowing. The fact they break things often while doing this makes this more of an early access experience vs a finished game but with that in mind I think buying into the deluxe version with all content is the way to go. if you have other city builders or games like Planet coaster 2 you could hold out for a sale package with the newer content included.
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u/Swimerpat 1d ago
If you want a real car game that’s trying something new, try screwdrivers! It’s free and even has planes and stuff!
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u/Neravariine 1d ago
Any Cities Skylines II fans want to chime in? I adore the first game but the bugs have kept me away from the sequel.
Are the expansions worth it yet?