No.31229
Anyone played it? I have gamepass so it's free for me, the performance is impressively terrible. On default settings for me the main menu was running at about 1 FPS, which is just crazy, there isn't even anything animated on it. Had to turn everything to low to get decent performance, apparently there's ways to tweak the settings to get it to look okay and run okay but I shouldn't have to do that in the first place. It's obvious now why it was delayed for consoles until next year, I have a 3090 so I would be surprised if it even run at all on consoles in this state.
As for the actual game, it's okay, I like how citizen economics are simulated a bit more in this instalment, but it feels pretty bland to be honest. There's a bunch of little things they didn't fix that annoy me, for example a cemetery is a huge plot of land and if you place it on a slight incline, instead of being stretched to fit over the incline it just remains perfectly flat and there's a huge terrain wall at the edges of the lot. Just lazy. I'm also not a huge fan of how you have to unlock everything super slowly, not even by population this time as in the last game but by 'XP' which you get for just placing buildings and doing stuff, which feels really silly and casualised/gamified. You also get a huge amount of money each time you level up so there's no incentive to run a balanced budget except for I guess RP reasons, you can just place every service in order to level up even though you can't afford the upkeep.
This is just a personal note but I feel very inadequate about creativity, I just end up making an American style grid city which is efficient but looks soulless, and I don't even really plan out my high density buildings to make them look nice and realistic-ish. I was never one to make the super aesthetic cities you see online but I feel like I used to be more meticulous than this. I guess I'm just tired in general and just play games to veg out and not think about things. Oh well.
No.31230
>>31229>the performance is badInstantly in the gutter. There’s less reasons than ever before for why games must run terribly.
No.31231
>>31229I kind of want it but I'm going to stick with the first 1 until they fix it. Looks like it's not much better than Cities Skylines 1 + mods. I'm always surprised there's no Cities Skylines thread here considering how much people love urbanism and public transit and shit.
No.31233
>>31229>the performance is impressively terribleIt's a sim game tho. You can't be a 60fps whore with a sim game.
No.31234
>>31233Like I said, there was like a 1 second delay in the fucking MAIN MENU, it's crazy.
No.31239
My computer struggles with middle sized cities in CS1, I'll have to wait until I get a new computer if I ever decide to play. It'll probably be a while before the mods are comparable anyway. I'm really disappointed they didn't do any kind of political simulation, here's hoping CS3 in 2033 has it.
No.31240
>>31239Honestly I think political simulation is a bit out of the ballpark for a regular city sim game, but I'm pretty disappointed by how flavorless the game seems to be. Chirper is even more barebones and has less variations of messages than last game (and now you get a chirp randomly when businesses open… why???) and that's the only mechanism of in-universe feedback from your city. Why hasn't any game even gotten to the levels of SC4 when you had the news ticker, and all your advisors who gave funny little anecdotes and so on about how things are going in your city and would be mad if it was messed up? Why have we gone so far backwards?
No.31272
Did they just not advertise for this game at all or am I even more out of the loop than I thought. Anyways seems like performance is awful so my ambivalence has been upgraded to contempt. Honestly CS1 was overrated anyway I would point people in the direction of the transport fever series or workers and resources instead.
Usually I would say "I'll play after it's optimized, had some DLC's released and is on sale" but PDX has been developing and producing a lot of duds lately so who knows
No.31278
>>31230performance has fallen
zero must buy
No.31447
Currently people are complaining on the forums that an ad for 'spasm electrical' or something is being removed from the game for offending some people. Lol.
https://steamcommunity.com/app/949230/discussions/0/3937895062999565488/Damn it sucks so much this was removed from the game it was so fun to listen to.
No.31538
>>314471. if you laughed (or, honestly, even cracked a smile) at any of the dogshit anodyne limp-dick GTA-ripoff radio ads in this game, you're a retard whose opinion doesn't matter
2. "spastic/spaz" is a hugely offensive slur in the UK despite it being kind of a goofy kid swear in the US, analogous to how "cunt" is possibly the single most offensive word in the US that isn't a racial epithet and yet people in Australia treat it as a playful term of endearment
the game is rated E, I wouldn't feel comfortable letting my 10 year old play SimCity 4 if there was a random radio ad where a guy screams "cunt" over and over, but it's okay because he's australian!!! woke PC police are at it again!!!
No.31553
>>31538I was being sarcastic dipshit.
No.31563
>>31229>As for the actual game, it's okayso it's still a map painter right
>This is just a personal note but I feel very inadequate about creativity, I just end up making an American style grid city which is efficient but looks soullessI hear that. It's just so easy to plop down a massive square and conversely it takes a lot of time to make anything look organic. Gridded cities can look soulful you just need to put some variation into it.
If you do want to buck the grid, building according to the geography is what I tend to do. Assuming it's not a pancake-flat map you can just put all of your roads on contour and have ur desired spaghetti without thinking much about it. At the very least it gives you a solid foundation to work with. If it is flat you just have to put a lot of thought into every little thing you do. Start the game, look at the whole map and make a rough mental sketch of where the big roads/railroads will go and work from there. Work slowly on one neighborhood at a time and when you start to feel lazy, stop playing. I think these games are best played slowly over many sessions
Regardless of what you do, taking inspiration from irl cities helps a lot. I've done more than a few runs in various city builders where I straight up try to recreate a city because no amount of creativity can even hope to compare to the real things
No.31570
>>31563I mean there is no particular challenge to the game if that's what you mean, the game even gives you subsidies if your city is unprofitable (kinda realistic but still).
As for non square cities, I think the big problem is that the game still lacks any kind of non rectangular zones/lots. This made sense in a game like SC4 that was literally built on an isometric grid but in 2023 it just feels incredibly lazy. Real cities (especially in Europe which this game claims to also represent) aren't just all made out of rectangular plots of land. I don't think it's really that much to ask for the game to include some kind of mild generative features which can create for example an apartment building which fits into say a triangular lot based on a standard template (same textures and objects in a different shape). Even failing that and saying that's not possible for technical reasons, why can't buildings have non rectangular gardens or plazas around them? Just fill up the available space with a lawn and some garden furniture/trees/shed/etc and then give the building a bonus to occupancy based on square footage. It doesn't help that trying to make perfectly rectangular road networks in this game is horribly fucking awkward and when roads aren't perfectly perpendicular and overlap you can't even pick which road the lot squares will be attached to which leads to everything looking horribly uneven
Ugh the lack of ambition in modern game design really is depressing. I'm sure a large part of it is due to commercial reasons and not just laziness but still.
Nice graph though, looks cool.
No.31571
>>31563>>31229Efficient for cars, sure.
No.31582
>>31570>Even failing that and saying that's not possible for technical reasons, why can't buildings have non rectangular gardens or plazas around them? JuYou can. You don't have to build on every tile the game auto generates for you lol. That's just base game too. With mods you want to use things like ploppable RICO and adjust or manually move buildings. As far as gameplay look at industries revamped(need the industries DLC) also get the population mod because Cities has terrible estimates for how many people should live in a building. Especially need it when you start bringing in custom buildings.
>>31563Cities isn't a map painter it's a builder game like roller coaster tycoon. Most of the fun is like model trains, but instead you have a living sim.
No.31601
>>31583Bro I don't want to make a city where I plop down assets one by one, I want to grow up a huge metropolis.