Cities: Skylines 2 developer Colossal Order has released a new hotfix for the city builder that attempts to improve overall performance on PC while fixing several bugs and removing the “offensive” in-game radio ad.
Among the many improvements introduced in the hotfix was an update that reduced the accuracy of unnecessary large character textures for digital natives in the game, which was negatively impacting performance.
The developers had previously admitted that character models needed to be addressed after a Reddit post went viral for suggesting that the game was introducing individual teeth for individual simulated townspeople. Colossal Order later told IGN that the teeth were not the cause of the loss in performance, but admitted that the Citizens models had Level of Detail (LOD) issues.
Other tweaks to improve performance included improvements to lighting and changes to the way the game prioritizes displaying assets. The developers also addressed a number of issues plaguing the simulation’s economy, businesses, and public utilities. For example, companies no longer have to request resources when they don’t have enough space to house them, and elsewhere a bug that was preventing the consumption of certain assets has been removed.
Colossal Order also used the hotfix to remove the “Spasm Electronics” ad from in-game radio stations, after community members took issue with the sound effects used in it, which they say mimic the sound a person makes when having an epileptic seizure.
The developer warned that it will take some time for the fixes to take effect for players who continue to use existing save files. A complete list of hotfix improvements can be found below, Courtesy of Paradox Interactive.
- Increased entertainment potential to balance the “no customers” situation with commercial businesses
- Improving the balance of corporate profits
- Companies caught requesting input resources when their warehouses do not have enough space
- Fixed a Trade Resources bug that prevented some resources from being consumed
- Fixed a miscalculation in the college/university qualifying number
- Improving conditions for companies to recover from bankruptcy
- Fixed a plot value dependency bug causing potential instability
- Fixed an issue where loading a new map would cause the water state to not sync with the saved data
- Slight increase in Windows emissions intensity
- Improvements to area lights
- Prefer displaying small objects over large ones when possible to improve GPU performance in some cases
- Improved shadow LOD calculations to eliminate irrelevant shadow wheels earlier
- Reduced situations where truncated trees and objects might run out of virtual compositing space
- Fixed citizens who hang out in park areas in regular building lots never enter the building
- Reduced resolution of unnecessary uppercase textures
- Spasm radio ad removed (due to offensive content)
- Added missing translation ID for Paradox account linking
In the month leading up to the launch of Cities: Skylines 2 Paradox announced that the Xbox Series
The minimum and recommended PC specifications have also been raised significantly to account for the game’s “next-gen” features, and to allow for a “better player experience”, in a move that has raised concerns among some fans. In a subsequent joint statement, developer Colossal Order and publisher Paradox admitted that they “did not meet the benchmark” targeted for launch performance on PC.
Despite the warning, Cities: Skylines 2 managed to surpass 100,000 concurrent players on Steam on launch day, climbing to the top of the storefront’s bestseller list. However, a large number of these players have been frustrated by the game’s expected poor performance, along with a number of bugs, resulting in a “mixed” user score which at the time of writing has a 56% positive rating for City Builder. evaluation.
Anthony is a freelance contributor covering science and video game news for IGN. He has over eight years of experience covering breaking developments in multiple scientific fields and has absolutely no time to fool you. Follow him on Twitter @BeardConGamer
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