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Comment by theNJR | Hacker News Reader

While the complaints about performance are valid, I’m still having a blast with the game. Having an 11 month old means it’s hard to go deep into something like Cyberpunk since I only get short gaming bursts (ie 7:30 when she goes to bed until 8:30 when I turn off screens). Not enough to play a deep narrative game but plenty of time to expand out my industrial area, fix a highway interchange and figure out what’s going on with the tram line.

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The complaints are valid to some extent, but also overblown too. People complaining that 30-50 FPS is unplayable need to get some perspective on what is and is not playable. And even the article here drops some hot hyperbole when it says that the game runs worse than CP2077 with max settings and path tracing. I've run (tried to run) CP in such a configuration, and I get framerates in the teens. By contrast I haven't actually bothered to measure the framerate in CS2 because it's perfectly smooth for me.

I'm all for holding developers accountable for flawed games, but the level of negative hyperbole around CS2 has been a real stain on the community.

The CP2077 comparison is not hyperbole - it is literally how badly this game performs (or at least performed on launch) on top-tier gaming hardware (namely RTX 4090). I linked a source with the quote.

>The CP2077 comparison is not hyperbole

Except it was hyperbole how Cyberpunk was criticised. Or it wasn't, but it was no worse than most other AAA game, but somehow not all publishers/developers are criticised equally. I completed Cyberpunk and had to reload once because of a bug. That is already much better than Starfield (and every other Bethesda game) and the performance was just fine on my old PC. Something about Cyberpunks massive criticism smells funny.

I just got CP2077 along with a new system, where I experience frame rates regularly north of 150 - almost always north of 100 with PBR, everything maxed out. It runs incredibly smooth 100% of the time, and looks completely stunning on my 32" 2560x1440x144 monitor. Specs are 4090/7800x3d, 64gb 6000c30, 990 pro nvme, bought mostly for being able to run DCS World (and iRacing) on triple screens plus Star Citizen. The 4090 is beast, and absolutely worth it.

I haven't had time or perhaps motivation to load up CS2 much, with that superb Cyberpunk story to be explored (and planes to fly), but on the initial tutorial I noticed a weirdly low fps for what was not a super impressive image.

I installed Skylines 2 through my gamepass; my initial thoughts were to come back after some post release patch cycles.

It took the CP2077 team a lot of time but they completely turned a trainwreck into something rather magic, so I'm hoping Skylines 2 will experience the same. I did enjoy the original release years ago. (Edit: Gamers Nexus' video led me to City Planner Plays, which shows just what can be made - the scope of Skylines 2 looks amazing, given my hardware I could probably get into it sooner rather than later!)

Finally a kudos to the author for this in depth, well written article! I really enjoyed it.

FWIW I put a few hours into building a starting city, and no real issues with performance now in that a game like this clearly doesn't depend on smooth frames quite like a flight simulator does. I think there was at least one major patch since when I first tried it, which might have helped. There's lots of detail and modelling, this could be a bit of a dangerous time sink. :-)

I could certainly see why my old system (5800x3d / 3070 / 64) doesn't play it quite as nicely for my son's bigger 3440x1440x60hz monitor though; it certainly made the 4090 busy.

I’m also loving the game. There are a few issues, and performance could be better, but all in all it feels like a really nice entry with solid bones that should lead towards most of these issues being resolved with far less effort than—say—Cyberpunk.

I'm enjoying it too. It's fairly similar to the previous one, and have encountered a few simulation bugs, but I'm happy with it. I'm able to run it okay at 4K.

If I played the old one and enjoyed it, what's the pitch for the new one? e.g. why is it better? On the surface it kinda just looks like the previous one, but I haven't dug into it

I've played a lot of CS1 (and recently, lots of CS2), here are the biggest improvements for me:

- The simulation is much deeper than before, not basically just statistics on a page

- The game plays slightly harder, more management needed in order to have a proper budget. But like in the first, that disappears once you have 100/200K citizens, as it's hard to fuck up the budget at that stage.

- The control of roads is a lot better, compared to vanilla CS1. Nowhere near modded CS1, but it'll easily get there with some time, the foundation of CS2 is a lot stronger and easier to extend

- Able to build bigger cities will less lag compared to CS1. I'm sure this will improve even more in the future. Going ECS I'm sure made a huge difference in simulation performance.

The roads/transportation networks are better (baked into the engine more deeply now, such for roundabouts and multi-modal transportation) and the map is much bigger. But honestly CS:1 mods did a "good enough" job at addressing those shortcomings anyway, and CS:2 is missing a lot of the DLC stuff that the first one added. It's got a pretty minimal selection of buildings at this point.

I'd wait a few months/years if I were you. Personally I feel like CS:2 was more of an architectural rewrite (as in the simulation engine) was awesome future potential, but gameplay-wise, modded and DLCed CS:1 just has a lot more actual content.

I still enjoyed CS:2 a lot though, if only because it's been a hot minute since the first game, and I forgot how much I loved this genre.

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