Seems like this was likely from before the hotfix that was released this morning which has improvements for some of the more egregious issues mentioned like DOF, LOD, and global illumination: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/949230/view/37093367...
Still far from ideal but glad to see movement so quickly from the dev team and as has been mentioned the game is certainly playable albeit with some setting tweaks.
This is the week before go-live with a large customer. They've been doing lots of testing on their end (refreshing), and in the final stretch they found two glaring issues.
These two issues were glaringly, obviously wrong in core modules, and 100% reproducible.
Both were bad queries (static but parameterized). One resulted in an error from the DB server, and the other was a full join rather than filter by parameter (x=x vs x=:x), so spectacularly wrong results. Both were triggered by doing typical operations in our application.
Both issues had been in our code for many, many months, yet somehow the thousands of users we have across our several hundred customers somehow didn't report or experience these issues.
I fixed both issues in less than 15 minutes.
This isn't the first time. Sometimes I'm amazed how long such glaring issues manages to survive out in the wild amongst our customers.
Not saying they didn't know. Just saying that sometimes these things just happen.
I spent so much time in cities.exe I'm scared to check out the second one. How do you feel about the modding scene for it? I had probably 70GB of assets loading, converting the game into something altogether different.
After seeing this happen time and time again, it's kind of a wild decision to make. So many negative reviews I see these days are about performance issues.
You would think a little more time would be put into reaching at least some reasonable performance level.
> So many negative reviews I see these days are about performance issues.
Unfortunately, negative publicity from bad performance doesn't really stop these games from selling well, as proven by most AAA releases in the past few years.
Skylines isn't an AAA release though. And the first game was only really successful because the prior sim city was full of user hostile changes. The new game similarly banks on the accumulated positive image of the first one. To risk all that with a user hostile, awfully optimized early release is a risky game to play.
The studio already killed a series once with a bad second entry, cities in motion 2...
Exactly, and what the other replies to your comment don't understand is that: a; they'll patch performance over time b; humans forget things very quickly, initial bad reviews don't matter.
Oh yeah, everyone remember the Panama papers? Yeah seems the public have forgotten about them a long time ago. What was done about em? Humans only remember some things.
yep, performance issues are just less important than functionality issues in the lead-up to a release. You can fix performance with a patch. It's hard to walk back "game crashes when I trigger the main menu"
I think they released it without having a discussion about how bad an impression poor default settings could make. With a few adjustments it looks great and is very playable on my 3080 at 4K even before the patch. Really big blunder for sure.
They announced in advance of launch that it would have these issues so not unexpected, guess they knew the issue but no time to add it into the final release yet.
Still far from ideal but glad to see movement so quickly from the dev team and as has been mentioned the game is certainly playable albeit with some setting tweaks.