Just a week before the release of Cities: Skylines 2, developer Colossal Order and publisher Paradox Interactive have issued a warning to fans about the city builder’s performance.
The statement was posted on the Paradox Interactive forum today as both a news item and a FAQ, and the message is, essentially: lower your expectations.
“Cities: Skylines 2 is a next-gen title, and naturally, it demands certain hardware requirements,” the statement reads. “With that said, while our team has worked tirelessly to deliver the best experience possible, we have not achieved the benchmark we targeted.”
Despite this, the city builder won’t be delayed on PC as it was delayed on console. “We’ve taken the long-term vision of the project into account and feel that a release now is the right step,” the FAQ says—though no further explanation is given as to why they feel releasing now is the right move.
“We will continually improve the game over the coming months, but we also want 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.”
In other words, as is the case with a lot of games these days, the hope is to fix its problems after launch. I guess it’s somewhat refreshing to get a warning ahead of time that a game might not run very well, but it’s still pretty disappointing news.
As for what players can do if they still decide to buy the game upon release, more details will follow soon. “We have determined a few graphic settings that have minimal impact on the player experience but increase performance significantly,” the statement says. “We will provide more details shortly.”
Here’s the full statement and the performance FAQ. Cities: Skylines 2 releases on October 24.