A few days before the launch of Cities: Cities: Skylines 2, Paradox Interactive issued a warning about the game's performance, which may not be ideal, especially on lower-spec hardware. Sure enough, we experienced this: along with graphical glitches and complete crashes, "erratic fps drops, slowdowns, hitches, and sometimes complete freezes lasting several seconds. The larger the city, the worse the problem.

If you're struggling, there is a guide to changing five graphics options that will greatly improve the performance of Cities: Cities: Skyline 2, but hopefully the need for these adjustments will decrease in the relatively near future. In a "Post-Release Plans and Goals" update posted today, developer Colossal Order said that Cities: Cities: Skylines 2 is "built for the future with the latest hardware in mind," essentially a statement made in the pre-release performance warning. They repeated it, but promised to remedy the situation in future updates and, importantly, assured players that the problem could be fixed.

"First, we want to assure you that this issue is not deeply rooted in the foundations of the game. The problem we are currently facing is related to the rendering of the game, and by reducing the quality of visual effects such as depth of field, global illumination, volumetrics, etc., we can get a fair performance without affecting the simulation."

The studio "identified several issues related to specific hardware settings that led to unexpected results" and said it is currently working on an update aimed at specific improvements:

Colossal Order said the upcoming patch will improve game performance at default settings by "mostly improve" but warned fans of high frame rates that "the goal is a stable 30 fps. Optimization efforts are not limited to this upper limit, but "in city builders (unlike multiplayer shooters), there is no real benefit to aiming for higher FPS, as growing cities are inevitably CPU-bound," the studio said. 'What's more important in this type of game is avoiding stutters and having a responsive UI.' [Colossal Order and Paradox by Cities: The answer is simple: "We have concluded that the performance is not unbeatable for all players."

"For us, it would be more unfair to postpone the game," Colossal Order said, "because our top priority is for players to enjoy the game and we have seen enough feedback from players who are enjoying the game." We wanted to honor the announced release date and allow people to get started with the game because we know we will continue to work on the game and do our best to fix any issues as soon as possible."

This is an interestingly candid admission, and I think our review confirms it: also, that the game has been "greatly improved" by various updates and mods since release, and that user reviews on Steam are both positive and negative. He also mentions that it is almost 50/50. But not everyone is happy with Paradox's choice: the long Steam thread on the update is predictably mixed, with complaints, anger, insults, pleas for patience, and even support for the developers and praise for releasing the game knowing it was not fully complete This is the Internet. In other words, this is the Internet.

Cities: It is currently unknown when the first update for Cities: Skylines 2 will be released, but expect a patch soon.