Cities: Skylines II Devs Focus on Performance/Bugs over DLC/Consoles, Reveal New Roadmap
Cities: Skylines II didn’t arrive in a great state last month, with performance issues, bugs, and other issues dampening fans’ excitement. Around a month later, Colossal Order have issued a developer update, promising to continue working on the game’s performance, bug fixes, and early modding tools. That certainly sounds good, but it also means post-launch content, and possibly the console versions, will arrive later than expected. Colossal Order have provided this updated roadmap.
A variety of asset and creator packs will now arrive later, including Beach Properties in Q1 2024 and Modern Architecture and Urban Promenades in Q2 2024. Colossal Order is still promising Bridges & Ports expansion will be arriving in Q2 2024, but I have a feeling that may slip too. No word on when the console versions of Cities: Skylines II may arrive – last we heard it was slated for spring 2024 – but Colossal Order admits it isn’t the priority right now.
Here are some of the things Colossal Order are focusing their attention on…
Performance improvements
“Specifically, we are working on the level of detail models for the assets. This includes both adding missing LODs and improving the existing ones to improve the GPU performance. It might take more than one patch to address all of them, but we’ll roll out the first fixes as soon as possible. Following the asset and LOD fixes, we’ll work on improvements to CPU performance. This means focusing on the CPU stutters and simulation performance to improve simulation speed and smooth out the experience while scaling up the size of your cities.”
Bug fixing
“We continue to go through your bug reports and have logged around 100 reproducible issues that have been moved to the team to look into. There are another 100 reports that we are still investigating that require more information and a bunch of duplicates, some of which add valuable information so we’ll go through all of them. We are also checking suggestions for improvement or new features, but these requests are currently at a lower priority.”
Editor/Modding support
“The modding Beta group is testing the map editor and we’ll improve it based on their feedback before releasing it. Especially the placement of water on the map is under review since it’s currently too complicated. The UI will also receive a bit more love as it’s really difficult to find the available assets that can be placed on the map. We’ll keep you updated on the progress of the Editor and code modding and their release schedule, but the performance and bugs need to be sorted out first.”