Cities: Skylines 2 might have performance issues on release, developer admits

Set and primed to release on October 24, the new Cities: Skylines game might launch with some potentially big problems, according to the developer. As per Colossal Order’s latest announcement, the studio has decided to hit its targeted release date even though this means launching with less-than-stellar optimization. In other words, early adopters of the long-anticipated city-builder may end up struggling to run the game properly on day one.

This information comes from Colossal Order’s recent forum announcement, where the post states: “Cities: Skylines II is a next-gen title, and naturally, it demands certain hardware requirements. With that said, while our team has worked tirelessly to deliver the best experience possible, we have not achieved the benchmark we targeted.” It’s really not phenomenal news, but the fact that Colossal Order is being up-front about it merits kudos, for sure.

Is Cities: Skylines 2 going to have bad performance on day one?

Colossal Order’s announcement that Cities: Skylines 2 might run poorly on PC on day one comes not long after the significant bump-up in the game’s system requirements. Colossal Order’s recommendation is now for players to come packing some serious hardware, all things considered, with the RTX 3080 and the Ryzen 7 5800X being the recommended GPU and CPU, respectively. The fact that the devs would go on to provide further clarification on the game’s performance even after this suggests that things could be rough early on.

“In light of this,” says Colossal Order’s announcement, “we still think for the long-term of the project, releasing now is the best way forward.” The statement also adds that “[Colossal Order] will continually improve the game over the coming months, but [the studio wishes] to manage expectations on performance for the coming release. Our ambition is for Cities: Skylines II to be enjoyed by as many players as possible, and we’re committed to ensuring it reaches its full potential.”

It’s not all bad news, of course. The very same post also goes into considerable detail on Colossal Order’s modding plans for Cities: Skylines 2, saying that “while the modding tool [for Skylines 2] will have a basic framework at its inception, we are dedicated to its continuous expansion and enhancement, making it a central focus of our development efforts moving forward.” Console players, too, will be getting access to mods, which is the silver lining to the fact that the console build of Skylines 2 got postponed, to boot.