When Cities Skylines 2 launches on October 24, don’t be surprised if there are performance issues. That’s the word from the game’s developer, Colossal Order. In an announcement covering modding and performance, the devs said, “we have not achieved the benchmark we targeted,” on performance. Here’s the full quote:
“Cities: Skylines II is a next-gen title, and naturally, it demands certain hardware requirements. With that said, while our team has worked tirelessly to deliver the best experience possible, we have not achieved the benchmark we targeted.”
This comes a few weeks after the PC requirements for Cities Skylines 2 were raised for minimum and recommended. The old requirements looked like this:
MINIMUM:
Processor: Intel Core i7 4790k / Ryzen 5 1600x CPU
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 or RX 470 GPU
RECOMMENDED:
Processor: Intel Core i7-9700K / Ryzen 5 5600X
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti / RX 6800 XT
Here are the new requirements:
MINIMUM:
Processor: Intel Core i7-6700K / Ryzen 5 2600X
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 / AMD equivalent
RECOMMENDED:
Processor: Intel Core i5-12699K / Ryzen 7 5800X
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 / AMD equivalent
The devs also touched on why they are still releasing the game and not delaying until the performance issues are resolved:
“In light of this, we still think for the long-term of the project, releasing now is the best way forward. We are proud of the unique gameplay and features in Cities: Skylines II, and we genuinely believe that it offers a great experience that you will enjoy.”
“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.”
The developers said they wanted to be as transparent as possible about the game when releasing today’s statement. I appreciate the honesty, but questions remain. What kind of performance will the minimum/recommended specs offer? It would be nice if devs started giving us target resolution and FPS when releasing these specs, especially with so many PC games having performance issues lately.
The silver lining is that Cities Skylines 2 will launch on day one on PC Game Pass. If the statement about performance issues is giving you pause, you can try the game out for $10/month. There’s also Steam’s refund policy, but I imagine these performance issues won’t be noticeable until you start putting together a big city.