https://www.pcgamesn.com/cities-skylines-2/ceo-apology
The CEO of Cities Skylines 2 developer Colossal Order apologizes to players after a statement regarding issues in the new city building sim.
That's a bit of a no-story? Doesn't even give examples on what people's problems with the simulation are?
The complaints I’ve seen are that the brand new economic simulation is largely fake. This was proven, though the developers denied this and said that it was a “bug”. I’ve taken a step back from the game until that sorts itself out.
Nah, a fake economy is fixable with a DLC, performance is a can that gets kicked down the road.
A fake economy wouldn’t be fixable with a DLC. It’s a fundamental and inseparable part of the simulation. If the economy is fake, then it’s fake for good I’m afraid. The thing about cities skylines DLC as well is that they’re all just bolted on. None of the CS1 DLC made any changes to the way the game worked, which made it so that DLCs didn’t even integrate with eachother. Thats why the fishing industries from the Sunset Harbor expansion didn’t function with the industries DLC. We are stuck with whatever the simulation is in CS2, for better or worse.
I mean they could update the economy with a free patch that goes along with related improvements in a DLC. Paradox's EU4 does that kind of thing a lot, and it works well. Whether CO will do that is another story though, but it's a proven model.
But good point.
You’re not wrong that it is technically possible. However historically speaking colossal order has not been willing or capable of doing that so I wouldn’t bet money on it. Half the reason CS2 exists in the first place is actually implement things that were added by DLC to CS1 into a bad game.
I'm curious from a gamedev perspective why you think any of the mechanics are sacrosanct - all economies are fake. they depend on mutual agreement of arbitrary values and systems.
Because the economy is the basis for the rest of the simulation. It’s not something you can just refactor in a DLC, you’d have to practically rebuild the game from the ground up around it. Which isn’t technically impossible, but the likelihood of it happening are slim to none. The proof of this is CO’s last game Cities Skylines, and in fact the very existence of CS2. They added snow and snow related services in a DLC, but they couldn’t/wouldn’t implement it into the base game, or even implement it into existing maps. Then they released the industries DLC which overhauled industry mechanics, but when they released DLCs later that added new industries, they couldn’t / wouldn’t integrate them with the same system used in the industries DLC. And those were incremental new features, not total rewrites of how the city’s economy works. Half the reason Cities Skylines 2 exists is so they could actually roll all the changes made over the years by DLC into the actual base game. CS2 is little more than a refactor at this stage.
And the economy isn’t fake in the same way all economies are fake. It’s fake in that it seemingly doesn’t exist. There are numbers and graphs and features in the game’s UI that don’t actually correlate to existing parts of the simulation. At least, that’s the way it appears, given extensive testing by the community. The developers have insisted these mechanics do exist, they’re just broken. We’ll have to wait and see, which is what I’m doing.
It looks like their stance was, "We made the game this way. If players are unhappy with the mechanics we implemented, this may not be the right game for those players."
It's apparently newsworthy that they're backpedaling from their previous statements; Now they might be willing to take a second look at the complaints.