Cities Skylines 2 is not having the smoothest launch, granted, it’s not Sim City bad (yet), but it feels like the game wasn’t ready for release due to a severe lack of optimization. In a recent Reddit AMA, the chief technical officer of developer Colossal Order confirmed that 30 fps was always the performance goal because there is “no real benefit in a city builder to aim for higher fps”.
It’s safe to say that Cities Skylines 2 doesn’t demand you have one of the best graphics cards to run it, so why would the developer target a ridiculously high performance figure? Well, the issue noted by many attendees of this Reddit AMA is that 60 fps is the modern standard, and anything below, even for a city builder, is unacceptable.
We recently tested out the best Cities Skylines 2 settings to try and overcome the early performance issues, and while we were able to achieve performance well above the stated 30 fps, the clear lack of optimization can really impact long play sessions. General performance instability is also a pain and can see the game grind to a halt seemingly for no reason.
As you might imagine, this response from the devs didn’t get the warmest response on Reddit, with multiple users claiming they now plan to refund the game. A hotly debated topic within the replies appears to be not only the fps target, but the general approach to the Cities Skylines 2 system requirements, which were significantly increased right before release.
Players are now pointing out that they would happily accept 30 fps on their old hardware, but given that the specs were increased, the fact they may have to settle for 30 fps on an Nvidia RTX 40-series GPU is unbelievable.
You can read our Cities Skylines 2 review for an in-depth look at the game and to see our verdict. If you want to know if Cities Skylines 2 is Steam Deck compatible, we have you covered there too.