Alternate title: Paradox discovers that players aren’t willing to buy a broken game with the promise that it will maybe get fixed within 1-2 years.
Yeah. Particularly for a sequel where you have a direct comparison to a prior version, it needs to be polished.
For a new title, this still applies if it is part of a family of games (see Imperator).
Stellaris was broken in many ways on launch but had so much promise that we were willing to go through that journey with Paradox to see what would become.
CK3 was actually playable out of the gate.
When I spoke to him separately, Fåhraeus admitted that Paradox knew that Cities: Skyline 2’s performance needed improvement before launch - they just miscalculated how much players would care.
The last time I played Cities Skylines 2 was in June 24th the day of their “performance” patch and it was STILL unplayable on my computer. My FPS was fluctuating between 20-40 on a completely empty map, all low graphics on 720p, and so I just closed the game instead of trying to play it. My computer isn’t amazing, but it isn’t bad either, I play Elden Ring 60fps, Bladurs Gate 60fps, Overwatch 200+fps, just to name a few.
As far as I can tell from the patch notes there has been no performance updates since then. If nobody can play the game, nobody is going to play the game. 20fps is not an issue you can just ignore and hope players ignore it too, what a hilariously out of touch statement.
Imbalanced mechanics can be charming.
Occasional bugs, even crashes, can be tolerated.
Missing content might not even be noticed.
Poor performance just fucking sucks. The entire time you’re playing, it’s a constant nagging problem. I make games on single-digit-megahertz systems, and even I obsess over smooth interaction. You can’t just release a game that chugs on god-tier PCs, even if it looks jawdropping… which this game does not. It’s nice! It’s not “40 FPS on a 4090” nice. Mostly you forgot to do LOD models, at all, in a game with a bird’s-eye view of an entire city.
Poor performance is the future of all big titles, so buckle up. They want to make games as quick as possible.
It doesn’t help when your scummy studio is infamous for it’s egregious DLC practices, nickel and diming basic game mechanics into a million separate packs. And then you have the gall to release a game as broken as that, after having the excellent prequel as comparison? And it’s still broken, a year after the initial release.
Yeah you bet your ass that customers won’t be accepting of that.
