Frustrations with Cities Skylines 2 are starting to boil over among city builder fans and content creators alike

GamesSimulationCities: Skylines 2Frustrations with Cities Skylines 2 are starting to boil over among city builder fans and content creators alikeWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works. GamesSimulationCities: Skylines 2Frustrations with Cities Skylines 2 are starting to boil over among city builder fans and content creators alikeWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works. (Image credit: Paradox Interactive) It’s been close to four months since the launch ofCities: Skylines 2, and the community is starting to run out of patience waiting for improvements. Ongoing frustrations with the game have been boiling for some time, and now that several of the game’s biggest content creators are starting to air their issues in a major way, it seems like the community is reaching a tipping point. Those patches have gone a long way toward making the game playable, but as city builder fans have spent more time with the meat of the simulation, they’ve been finding some pretty substantial issues with the systems at the heart of the game, too. At one point Mariina Hallikainen, CEO of developer Colossal Order,wrote that “if you dislike the simulation, this game just might not be for you.“An apology for that statement swiftly followed. Hallikainen has been posting weekly dev blogs for some time now, most of which boil down to continued updates on development of further performance patches, with bits carved out here and there toaddress “a growing tendency of toxicity” in the community. None of that really indicated whether players could expect more substantial work on the game itself, and with little of substance to say, those blogs were set to go on pause as of last week. Earlier this week, anextensive videocame courtesy ofYouTubechannel Biffa Plays Indie Games. Biffa laid out a pile of reasoned critiques about the underlying gameplay systems. In short, he argued that while there may be plenty of robust simulations driving the behaviors of your city, it’s impossible to see how those are reflected while you’re playing. New traffic models, production chains, weather, and seasons all suffer from purporting to have effects on your city, with no way to tell what those effects are. Sign up to the GamesRadar+ Newsletter Weekly digests, tales from the communities you love, and more “I often say that I hope Cities: Skylines 2 has a No Man’s Sky redemption arc,” Biffa said. “No Man’s Sky had huge potential. It promised a lot and under-delivered. What did they do? Well, Hello Games took the money and put it back into the game. They made it what it should have been on release, and more. They also took responsibility for the mistakes that they made, they showed humility, and they fixed it.” Clearly, the hope is that Colossal Order can do the same with CS2. This video in particular seems to have been a bit of an inflection point for the community, to the point where Colossal Order has responded directly to it onTwitter, saying: “Thank you for the constructive and concise feedback, it’s very much appreciated. And thank you to everyone who commented and sent us the video.” “I think we’re all reaching the same frustration point at the same time for different reasons,” City Planner Plays, another popular YouTuber, writes onReddit. “I’ll chat about mine a bit tomorrow, but it’s entirely different reasons and related to bugs. Don’t get me wrong - I want the game to be great and love a lot about it, but lots I really hope gets improved. And because my issues impact every build I have ongoing, I have to discuss it.” That’s ultimately the tone of these longer form critiques - quiet optimism that the game can get better mixed in with all the frustration about its current, prolonged state. But it doesn’t seem that the community is too interested in sticking with Cities: Skylines 2 while waiting for these updates. AsSteamDBshows, player counts for the sequel have quietly dipped belowthose of the original game, and while that’s not anabsolutemarker of failure, it does indicate that there are currently greener pastures for city builder fans. For its part, Colossal Order didn’t actually give up on its regular dev blog series, with Hallikainen writing that “there was an overwhelming amount of feedback from you wanting to hear from us developers weekly.” The newdev blogwas a long overdue explainer about how the game’s mysterious economic simulations actually work. It doesn’t make it any less frustrating to not see this sort of information in-game, but it is at least the kind of clear communication the community is hoping to see more of. There are still other options if you’re looking to play thebest city-building gamesout there. 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