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Comment by FranksTV | Hacker News Reader

The 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.

Nice that you must have an absolutely baller system to play it on. Most aren't so lucky

I play on a 6-7 year old pc. Ryzen 5 1600. Vega 56 GPU. Works fine. I don't care about maintaining 60fps. Its a slow simulation city builder.

Personally I don't like how games feel when they are hitting sub-30FPS. Nothing to do with action or reflexes, everything just lags. Games, especially, should feel snappy at the least.

I know what you mean, it starts to feel like software, instead of a game if that makes sense.

Honestly, 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.

Strategy 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.

80 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

I might have a lack of perspective here, but the line "If someone puts 80 hours into something and regrets it, it's useful information to know" just doesn't map for me. I can't imagine a game that someone is enjoying enough to play for 80 hours, but then they end up regretting it. That just doesn't seem possible. It might just be that I'm out of touch and experience games differently than others though.

To disagree a bit further - 80 hours is a really long time! If it takes you 80 hours of game time to notice an issue, it's probably not a major issue and rather you've gotten bored of the game and are now hyper-sensitive to every little bit of jank or questionable design. It's like the people who will leave a negative review on a survival game with thousands of hours played - the problem isn't the game, it's that they got bored! If after two weeks of enjoying playing the game full time you don't feel like you've gotten your money's worth, you might need to lower your expectations.

Oh - I'll throw a quick exception for games that are predatory. If after 20/40/80 hours the game changes such that you need to start dropping a bunch of cash to keep progressing, that's deserving of a bad review to warn others to stay away lest they end up paying much more for the game than the sticker price indicated. Addiction machines designed to absorb as much of your income as possible like some sort of drug-dealing mosquito suck and deserve to be called out.

Some sanity.

You watch the latest blockbuster at sub 30 fps and survive

That's not even remotely the same thing.

Interactivity changes things. A lower frame rate can also make input feel less snappy, which is obviously something you don't run into in film. The frame rate in a film is constant, so there are no variations or drops as there are in rendered games. Those drops and variations can be more noticeable at lower frame rates, even if they don't affect playability in a simulation game the same way they would in a fast-paced shooter.

Films also naturally have motion blur which makes fast movement look softer and less jerky even at relatively low frame rates.

With that said, frame rates being around 30 probably shouldn't really be that big an issue in a simulation game. People who are used to faster frame rates will notice the difference -- again, games are different than film -- but it shouldn't be that big a thing.

But it's worth noting that if those are the figures people get with new high-end systems, that probably means reasonable but less high-end or slightly older systems will have to settle for even less, to a point where performance could actually be an issue.

> interactivity

A city building game and a first person shooter aren't the same thing either

I haven't played the game but this makes sense. Gamers love clickbait and game journalists will blow everything out of proportion.

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