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Cities: Skylines 2's troubled launch, and why simulation games are freaking hard
- nine_zeros 3y agoWhat is becoming more and more clear is that software of any kind that is developed by publicly listed companies is suffering from quality.
- number6 3y agoBanana Software; Ripes at the customers
- woleium 3y agoGames are unique that folks seem to want to purchase on release. I have friends who will wait for the 3rd point release (or service pack/ whatever) of windows to upgrade, but will buy a game as soon as it’s available and complain bitterly about the bugs. Games aren't like they were when they were pressed to cd/dvd anymore. They don't seem to see the irony of this.
- dagmx 3y agoThose are very different things though in terms of risk assessment . If you upgrade to a broken OS version, that affects a massive number of things you do on your system including possibly your livelihood. If you install a broken game, the issues are almost always completely isolated to that single game, and games are things you can live with being broken.
- crtasm 3y agoI think the point is that these are people well aware that a new release of any software is going to have issues, yet they still buy the games at launch.
- squeaky-clean 3y agoIt's because games are more like media than software from a consumption perspective. People want to watch a movie while it's still new, which is why theaters want up front exclusivity. Songs are "hot" for a while. TV shows are better when you're watching it around the same time as a lot of other people. Sure you can watch Breaking Bad for the first time right now, enjoy it, and have some good conversation about it with a few people. But it was different when every week half of your office or classroom was talking about the latest episode. I still don't recommend buying games on launch date most of the time because of the current state of the industry. But it makes sense to me why people do it.
- ted_bunny 3y agoIf this isn't a common term, it needs to be. Bananaware?
- V__ 3y agoThere seems to still be a lack of incentives to write good software. Until the fines for data breaches or bad releases become dangerous to the existence of the company, this won't change.
- nine_zeros 3y agoWell, there is a lack of incentive - many customers are not buying cities - skylines 2. It clearly undershot its targeted sales numbers.
- ralusek 3y agoI think anything of any kind from publicly listed companies increasingly seems to suck. Only exceptions are a handful of companies where the brand identity or a very ambitious personality at the helm (Apple, Tesla, NVidia) allow them to make the kind of bold moves that private companies do. Apple doing Apple silicon probably would’ve made shareholders very uncertain, but they just did it and it was a great call. Tesla doing Dojo, Powerwall, Optimus, etc, is only because everyone can just point to Elon and say “he’s making us.” That’s private company energy.
- rychco 3y agoNot sure why you’ve been downvoted when your statement is largely true. This isn’t even controversial. As with most public companies, the products WILL gradually get worse over time as the shareholders attempt to extort more profit from each customer while adding as little value as possible to their product.
- hesdeadjim 3y agoIt’s briefly hinted at in the article, but this game uses Unity ECS. Unfortunately, the rendering side of things of that tech has been… garbage for a long long time. Even 1.0 comes with the caveat that it might be (ha) worse than the standard rendering paths. It seems that their team fundamentally underestimated that risk and backed themselves into a corner of having to write their own rendering bridge layer — and failing quite spectacularly at it. Bummed for them. I’ve shipped one very high profile game and another much less so that use ECS. For both games I was never so crazy as to commit us to any ECS packages outside of the core and NetCode. From the start of each project I knew that we’d be bridging the ECS sim with regular Unity GameObjects for visuals — which sounds crazy but actually works quite well . I hope that there is a day when a game can be full DOTS without caveats, because despite the tech’s struggles I remain quite a proponent of the design patterns.
- ripper1138 3y agoWhat’s the high profile game?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Pulcinella 3y agoDid you ever encounter performance issues when converting between ECS and GameObjects?
- hesdeadjim 3y agoDepends, if you just need to update position/rotations you can use a TransformAccessArray which is supported with jobs+burst. When you need to pull data out of a dozen components to keep a renderer in sync, yea that’s not cheap. But there are ways you can flip things around, like have a job that outputs a native array containing condensed info about the entity that will be used for rendering. That avoids non-bursted random data access into the entity, but of course adds some additional complexity. This approach won’t naively scale to thousands and thousands of GameObjects like all the (boring) “look ECS can do 10000000 entities at once” demos. I get so, so, so tired of “scale” being the only sexy reason why you pick DOTS. Both my games have a resident set of a couple hundred entities at any given time and still, DOTS works great for how we use it.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- FranksTV 3y agoThe problems in this game are vastly overstated. I've been playing for a couple weeks and it's great. Does my framer ate occasionally drop? Yes. Does it matter? No! It's Cities Skylines, not Counter Strike.
- LargeTomato 3y agoI haven't played the game but this makes sense. Gamers love clickbait and game journalists will blow everything out of proportion.
- natdempk 3y agoHonestly, as time passes the bigger issue is seeming to be issues in the core simulation. Parts of it aren't implemented, parts of it are tuned very weirdly, parts of it are just bugged, parts of it don't display information to you accurately, etc. You can find more and more complaints and weirdness as people dig into the game implementation via decompilation and manual testing. There's also issues like the mod system being promised right after launch (weeks/days?) and getting pushed back months. I think these are the issues people are more frustrated with at this point. None of this is the end of the world, but as someone who bought it, it kind of doesn't feel worth spending time on the game when it's clearly half-baked.
- cowthulhu 3y agoStrategy gamers are incredibly whiny and entitled in my opinion. I struggle to remember a strategy game or DLC released by a major studio recently that wasn’t review-bombed on release. And yet studios aren’t going out of business, indicating that people are getting value out of these products and repeatedly buying and enjoying them. This really frustrates me because it makes it very difficult to actually determine what games or DLCs are worth buying. If every release is reviewed "mostly negative" on steam, then the reviews don't help inform you about the quality of a game. If you look at steam reviews, it’s even more frustrating - you’ll get negative reviews with 20, 40, even 80 hours of playtime.
- LightHugger 3y ago80 hours is a good number to review a game at though, you even saying this means you don't understand the basis for why people review games. If someone puts 80 hours into something and regrets it, it's useful information to know. The opinion of someone who only put in an hour and got bored will be shallow. At best they can complain about new user experience, but that's it. an hour isn't long enough to understand the game systems of a sufficiently deep strategy game
- giancarlostoro 3y ago> Why ship the game, then? Oh, right, Q4. This is how you get people to never buy your games again. Please whenever you plan to release a game, add an entire year to that date, but work as if its due in exactly 1 year prior, and internally re-adjust and figure out "if I were to release in a month, what's the MVP", once you have a stable game, use the rest of your 9 months or so (assuming it takes 3 more months) and polish and add in any nice to haves that make the game feel more complete. I feel like Starfield could have used with maybe 6 months of content-only additions. Cities don't feel like in Fallout or Elder Scrolls, too many useless NPCs running about. I liked being able to stalk people into their homes and know their routines, its a little harder in Starfield to figure out who even is a non-useless NPC. I got sidetracked, my original point was going to be, anytime Bethesda releases a new Elder Scrolls, Fallout or now Starfield esque game, the first thing I hear about is all the bugs, despite being a day 1 player and rarely running into bugs that really mean anything crucial (like crashing). Once you leave a rotten taste in your customer bases' mouth some of them will refuse to buy your game even if its the GOTY. If you are a PM at a major game studio, start making a shift in how games are poorly made. It is really embarassing. I used to justify not pirating games because I know a lot of hard work goes into them as a developer myself, but with how crappy some games come out, I'm not sure I can justify buying or pirating games anymore, they're just so awful. Also all the DRM that does nothing to pirates, and ruins gamers systems in various unexpected ways.
- SeanAnderson 3y agoThis strikes me as a rather idealistic viewpoint. Let's say we wanted to adopt this stance. The world doesn't stop turning. How do you fill the year of gap you've now introduced? What do the quarterly financials for the next year look like? Is your plan to just tell all shareholders, "Our company plans to make $0 in the next year because we want to implement this practice which might make you more money in the long run - but no guarantees on that except that we'll definitely take longer to build"?
- rsaesha 3y agoYes, exactly like that, but instead of using a sarcastic tone, use a matter of fact tone. "You want A game or you want THE game?" Maybe add a slide showing how much concentrated toward the very best game revenues are.
- robertoandred 3y agoAnd still no Mac version on the horizon.
- bastard_op 3y agoMaybe if Mac didn't make for such an anemic gaming platform with weak hardware. Even the most powerful pc's can't run this, I don't expect any arm-based platform to ever outside some hobbled mobile variant.
- dontlaugh 3y agoSome of the fastest CPUs you can buy are made by Apple and their GPUs are good enough. Hardware isn’t why there are few macOS games.
- dagmx 3y agoIt actually does run reasonably on a Mac if you run it under crossover with a patched DLL [1]. Even with the overhead of multiple translation layers I’ve seen people hit 30fps as a baseline. Not saying that’s great by any means, but it’s got three translation layers at that point. Importantly, the game is largely CPU bound and that is something that the Macs are really good at. The game is really bad at taking advantage of high end GPUs but it actually scales reasonably as you go down the tiers precisely because it’s so bad at using the GPU. And yes I know it currently has bugs and comical oversights that thrash the GPU, but it does so pretty equally, seemingly responding better to more VRAM (which makes sense given the nature of their inefficiencies) I’d also push back on the “anemic” wording. A base M series Mac is probably the best iGPU performance vs Intel/amd iGPUs. And the higher end MBPs (not accounting for value) are very performance competitive against similar form factor laptops. Where they fall behind is when you start comparing against larger desktop replacement laptops or on the desktop end against the top end GPUs. But I wouldn’t call them anemic by any stretch of the imagination either. https://www.reddit.com/r/macgaming https://www.reddit.com/r/macgaming has a surprising number of people you can see messing around with running ports natively. I wouldn’t get a Mac for the express purpose of gaming but they are reasonably capable, and largely held back by lack of software not hardware. [1] https://github.com/Whisky-App/Whisky/discussions/560#discussioncomment-7566751 https://github.com/Whisky-App/Whisky/discussions/560#discuss...
- erehweb 3y agoWhy are simulation games so hard? Because they try to do too much. Ideally a game should be from the point of view of one person - a mayor, a general, a President, ... Instead many such games go down into multiple levels, so you're not playing just the President, but all her cabinet members and technical experts.
- FFP999 3y agoPerhaps nobody has told you yet, but other people might have different tastes than you do.
- erehweb 3y agoThat's definitely fair, and the sales for these games prove that point. Still, if you're making a game that has a high level of detail from multiple perspectives, that's going to lead to high performance requirements - Vic 3 being another example.
- FFP999 3y ago> Vic 3 being another example Isn't that the truth...I love Paradox games as a rule but you have to accept that they'll be slow.
- _joel 3y agoChris Sawyer seemed to manage it.. although that's some level of skill
- jeroen79 3y agoTts a pitty strategy games focus so much on graphics these days, i for one do not care about zooming in seeing people and cars in a city sim.
- dang 3y agoRelated. Others? Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38153573 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38153573 - Nov 2023 (563 comments) Cities Skylines II renders invividual teeth of all human models - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38100643 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38100643 - Nov 2023 (31 comments) Cities Skylines 2 runs with 20fps on an Nvidia RTX4090 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38029479 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38029479 - Oct 2023 (406 comments) Cities: Skylines 2 to target 30 FPS: 'there's no real benefit to aim for higher' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38008876 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38008876 - Oct 2023 (15 comments) Cities: Skylines II Development Diary #1: Road Tools - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36391857 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36391857 - June 2023 (4 comments) Cities: Skylines II [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36293462 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36293462 - June 2023 (91 comments) Cities: Skylines II - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35044355 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35044355 - March 2023 (253 comments)