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City Skylines forget they replaced a failing city building sim in the form of SimCity. It could happen to them.

Cities Skylines 2 going the SimCity route is so disappointing

"BUT THE STOCK PRICE" God forbid a company take a hit for *one* quarter to keep their operation sustainable.

imagine getting all the DLC in skylines 1 for hundreds of euros and then having to buy the same DLC on skylines 2 again and they havent fixed any of the bugs

The game really feels like a scam, players are discovering a lot of those graphs are faked and aren't actually influencing your city, it's literally smoke and mirrors.

We are going on 6-months post launch and there has been no material change in the game since launch. An absolute disgrace.

Imagine publishing "Beach properties" DLC as a first DLC to a game without beaches, and not including actual beach properties, but just a handful of houses. They are spitting in our faces.

My town of 40,000 people in low and medium residential only, has three universities, two colleges, two power plants, an airport, two trading docks, a dozen stations and barrels of parks and public services. I'm making $5m every ten minutes. The game is broken.

The DLC has a 4% (yep, four) approval rating on Steam. 96% negative. That should tell you everything you need to know about how the DLC is being received.

To be honest, the regret for the lack of modding was really just exposing how overly reliant they were on the community to generate free assets and mods for the game. They should’ve made a fully finished product that is fully stable and actually make the base game fun. They touted the game as the “most realistic city simulator” so they have to deliver on that front.

When I saw that 3 of the top 5 most used mods from CS1 were the top mods for CS2 right off the bat with the launch of their mod support, it was over.

Paradox has been circling the drain since they went public and became a publicly traded company. They went from being games developed by gamers, to, a corporate $$ printing factory, where quality has declined in favor of shitting out DLC after DLC for games that launch broken, and the issues are often never fixed, or, only fixed after the 8th DLC breaks the game so much that they need to go back in and stick stuff back together with some bubble-gum and duct-tape.

Seriously though, paying for 4 palm tree's is a spit in the face.

Paradox is starting to become a warning sign on new games for me. Which is a shame since they made some of my favorites. But I have been at least disappointed pretty much every game since Imperator.

It's Paradox as the publisher. Take it from someone who loves another Paradox game, Stellaris, to death, and own literally every one of its multiple hundreds of dollars of DLCs: Do not ever trust Paradox to not fuck things up.

Cities Skylines 2 players: "This game has like three times the base cost in DLC!" Anyone who has played literally any Paradox Interactive game: "first time?"

This game desperately, desperately needed one thing to be fixed: optimization. You do not need individual meshes for every person, who plays cities skylines for seeing a person's jaw in high res? But by not omptimizing to the best of their capabilities, this game becomes unplayable at a certain point for ALL pcs.

My experience of this game is great! Because I've never purchased or played it. And I've no plan to do so anytime soon!

It's Paradox, their favorite hobby is bleeding players dry through DLC. Just look at all the Europa Universalis IV DLC, it totals up to $420 USD.

this dlc should go free as a way of apology

Note it's "Paradox" Mods, not just Mods. Also the logo they plaster on everything. Just missing to sprinkle © and ™ on every other word for the perfect marketing overdose.

One thing I have learned is that if you are in the "Bonus Class" of making a gaming hit, Bank those bonuses and do not expect them again. That nest egg may have to make your money after burn out catches up with you. Never let a non-creative business type or money hound accountant into a position where they affect the product.

What made things worse is that they released the Beach Properties DLC on top of it all. A beach DLC.. with no actual usable beaches in the game. It’s currently sitting at 4% on steam right now, it’s like watching someone already on fire but rather putting it out they just pour more petrol on it.

And the moral of the story is: Don't buy games from Paradox

I want to see people playing on a beach. People going into the water, swimming, surfing, kayaking. I want boats dammit.

Paradox, the name says it all, i love their games for the potential but despise their DLC practices. "hey guys new DLC just hit, yeah there's a few new mechanics you can play with but it's mostly just new skins/assets for you to look at" meanwhile, they've ignored bugs and performance issues since the game's release, and no this isn't just CS2, every Paradox game is like this, EVERY DAMN ONE OF THEM!

You know a game is underwhelming when you won't even bother to pirate it. I have 1000s of hours in CS, was very much looking forward to sailing the high seas and trying CS2, until it launched. It was a big reason I upgraded my PC, even CS was a bit too much for the old girl. Their DLC pricing is just too much for me to stomach, I don't know how people can justify spending so much for so little. (most of the time)

Paradox involvement is quickly becoming a massive red flag for me.

I just had a bug yesterday that made all the UI vanish and I couldn't get it back so I had to quit without saving. The fundamentals of the game still feel completely broken after 6 months and they've been working on this DLC that no one cares about? Really tone-deaf decision.

“Our biggest regret is not getting free labor to finish our game”

The most insane thing to me is they released what was obviously an early access game for the full $50 USD price tag. If delaying the game was not an option for financial reasons I think players would be more understanding if they had released it as early access with a reduced price.

Paradox died between ck2/hoi3 and ck3/hoi4 when they couldn't be arsed to improve AI and instead went on the dlc train.

Paradox being on the receiving end of the community's frustration is well overdue. Even though I did enjoy my time with CS2 thus far, I'll be waiting until at least the end of the year before checking in on it again.

Paradox also clearly pulled the plug on the Star Trek 4x game that they just published, even though they never made an announcement about it. They've really lost a lot of reputation in my eyes.

Also the Beachless DLC is part of a pre-order upsale, so people who trusted it wouldn't suck paid 6 months ago for this and got burned anyway.

Lamplighter's League was rushed out without any marketing to generate cash for their earnngs call, it failed as expected which then led Paradox to rush out City Skylines II and now we are here... Do NOT blame this on the failure of Lamplighter's League, it was just the snowball that grew into this issue with City Skylines II. These failures lie SQUARELY on Paradox.

I won't touch any Paradox game until they get rid of their insane DLC policy. Cities Skylines alone has $400 worth of DLC, which should be criminal.

Paradox' business model is a pox upon the gaming community and it always has been. It's the same stuff that murdered Maxis and took out the Sims and SimCity: over-monitization of every possible thing in the game and breaking up essential quality of life features into dozens of expansion packs.

Without mods I find myself fighting to get anything done in the game for instance building a road over hilly terrain I can spend hours where if I had mods it would be minutes. I should not even have to download mods, the mods should've been integrated in the game to make it more pleasurable to play.

I'm so glad that I held myself back from buying this game. I wanted it so bad too Investors are killing gaming

Cities Skyline isn’t the only game to be pushed out incomplete by a major publisher. They pushed out KSP2 at about 15% complete. They slapped an EA badge on it to use as a shield but also slapped on a full complete game price to go with it. After more than a year of being released, I’d say it’s currently 20% complete. Game is an absolute disaster.

I expect the bicycles DLC to not contain bike paths. And the DLC for building your own theme parks to not have themes. Just parks. Haha that's such a funny joke, it would be almost as silly as making "beach front properties DLC" without beaches. LOL out loud haha. Colossal Order is so dead to me. It's a shame I can't get my money back from Steam anymore. They had it all (tens of millions of enthusiastic and loyal fans) and they blew it all.

Don't worry guys, I am sure paradox will learn from this and EUV will be a fine game at launch.

Yet another example why you shouldn't pre-order.

It's so frustrating that this good development team, and this highly anticipated game, are forever tainted by the impatient greed of the soulless suits at Paradox's board members. Fuck corporate gaming. This whole debacle was entirely avoidable if they just had some goddamn patience... but their quarterly number looked bad and they needed a short-term win, at the expense of *ruining* a fucking gold star franchise.

Conflicted interests always kills something fun "This is why we cant have nice things" is annoying but true sometimes, customers, devs, investors, are competing instead of cooperating 90% of the time If only there were a way 😮

This DLC mania is getting out of hand... I remember paying 35$ for a pc game in 2015 and it being the full game... Now the game is 90$+ and you need to pay twice as much to get a full game experience. Add to that that they now release unfinished games and you get a fkn shitshow...

CO CEO said it was her decision jointly with Paradox to launch the game. And said how proud and satisfied they were with the release before it was. Paradox did not make her blame the players, Paradox or accuse people of toxicity or “if u dislike the simulation, this game is not for you”. Or say that simulation is something no CO knows yet produced this crap. I think the blame lies both with the CEO of CO and Paradox for allowing this to happen.

Game is where I expected it to be. I'll check back a year from now.

Its almost like the publisher pushed the release because they assumed that the fans of the first game was used to continually buying into a building game. And we can argue about City Skyline's monetization and updates all we want, but the original, as I understand it, wasn't a broken unoptimized mess. Like even if you want to be really critical of the first game, its only unfinished by nature of lacking content that would later be added or very quickly modded in. I don't think the publisher understands their own fanbase or why people liked the first game, it was just a solid launching platform overall and that base needs to be impressively polished for either the devs or modders to build off of.

Cities Skylines 2 is going to cost over a hundred dollars by the end of this year and still be a mess.

CS2 makes me worried for life by you

Cities 2 is a like a Lego pack, but that small one. When bought, you discover some major pieces are missing. Well, that`s Lego, you still can do something with it whilst waiting for missing parts to be sent. You play, you enjoy. But later they send you a message saying "hey, we`re still working on your request, but meanwhile you can check out our new 10 blocks in various colours. And there`s a price to that". You can have fun with Beach assets but overall picture hasn`t been fixed yet.

This is the inevitable result of any company going public. Once you are legally indebted to shareholders, your company will slowly lose its soul. Whatever the company made will get gradually worse over time under the demand that every year be more profitable than the last. This goes on until the customers start to get unhappy, and then the company is forced to counteract that dissatisfaction with anti-consumer practices (that more-or-less trick people into spending good money on a bad product or service). It might take a while, but it will happen to every company that takes the first step.

This is the perfect time for EA to simply remake Simcity 4 and get all the profits (but they wont)

Cities Skylines 2 is a game that's not needed at all. Sure it expands city building but it doesn't do anything really that we couldn't do before already.

"I wish the developers the best, and to whoever made this decision, f*** you, because the players and the developers did not deserve any of this BS." WOW. When the usually level-headed Michael Bell just lets one fly like that, you KNOW someone dun f'd up.

This game has probably months to live knowing how the previous games paradox recently published were shut down months after they launched

Paradox somehow managing to be loved and despised at the same time depending on which one of their games your up to the elbows in.

The issue is working on thousand micro DLCs, instead of improvements of part 2. There is barely anything that's better and players won't switch for that.

Man, some Swedish video game companies have taken a huge nosedive in recent years. Paradox, Embracer, Dice, Starbreeze, Fatshark (after Tencent acq.), etc. Looks like after all these companies lost their autonomy to the financial division of their executive departments they went downhill.

It's going to be hard to get that full game price up to the Paradox standard of $500+ when they keep soiling the sheets like this.

it really is impressive how spectacularly Paradox continue to fuck this up. the modding support is something that could actually generate goodwill... so let's package it with a hilarious money-grab of a DLC to make sure that everyone still hates us!

They should have named it "Coastal Properties Pack" or "lemme get 10 more dollars till we get our act together Pack".

I really hope a new company takes the spot paradox is currently occupying, I love the concepts of the games they make but they consistently fall short and are obviously corrupted by corporate greed and we suffer because of it and don't really have good alternatives

The game is obviously lacking several QA passes with the glitches that are showing up. The interface works fine, but a lot of the background stuff is still having problems. It is a chore to play instead of fun, I hope thing improve RAPIDLY.

I really hate how my city of 140k, everyone is happy, no traffic issues, with a maxed out city income($2billion) nothing I do will result in negative income, i make a huge purchase on an expensive building i lost no money. When will this be fixed?

It’s a shame because it has good bones. If they had pushed the release and actually completed it. It would’ve been great. This is just insane.

7:14 "They used to make maps themselves" is a *very* low bar. CO hasn't ever released a properly good map.

You made some mistakes: "We waited some weeks" is actually MONTHS. "The paradox mod manager works" is NO it doesn't most of the time. "The map editor is pretty damn cool" is NO it isn't, so many basic things are still missing or in really stupid places in the UI like loading your previous edited map. "The performance is good now" is it's actually still [bleep] when your main menu asks like 80% GPU on a good GPU and to get reasonable fps you have to turn off or lower many graphic options. It is very obvious why their store page is burning with negative reviews every day, 6 months after release it still looks like nowhere close to finished. Most of us have now given up hope this will ever get fixed. The silence from CO also says a lot. Will they stop trying and call it a day?

no shade but like who the fuck bought the dlc after witnessing the launch and THEN went "oh it's bad" like do u have functioning eyes

Wait you're telling me that THE paradox interactive has released a game with performance issues and buggs? *cough cough Vic 3*

I bought all of the Cities Skylines (1) DLCs - apart from the music/radio station ones - and I've put a lot of pretty-engaging hours into CS. I was looking forward to what Collosal Order would do with what was basically a Golden Ticket game, what with the original doing so well and being so well respected. However, I simply cannot justify the purchase of this pseudo-early access dross. I don't even feel like having my Parrot download it (where's me Bottle o' Rum?!) as it just looks like such a disappointment. And in some respects, I don't care if it was Collosal Order who fumbled the ball or it was Paradox, this is just shoddy and they have squandered the future of a game that looked almost guaranteed to succeed. Sad times, but not exactly surprising any more.

I love your channel. Well said. Also as I have pointed out numerous time on my channel - CS1 still has a much larger and increasing player base than CS2. Not only have content creators returned to CS1 but so have a lot of players. CS2 needs another year.

Because of this game I will never pre order a game again. I got 9 hours of total game time over the weekend it was released and I just can not see myself playing it again until they fix the damned thing.. If that is this year then I will eat my hat.

I look forward to Jack Sparrowing this next year.

I think paradox should be the ones coming out and making the apologies not CO

They came to take the crown from EA and now they got even worse ... wtf they introduce stuff packs like in Sims 4. And they don't fix their game before they bring out "DLCs", pardon, "Stuff packs". Instead of giving the players their money back they have stolen by selling a pre alpha tech demo as full release game they now want even more money from us while the game is still not really fixed. They can keep it. I was a huge CS1 and Paradox fan since EUII but now they are just another EA and I wont by anything anymore from them, they are the new bad buys.

"Paradox sucks" Laughs in World of Darkness player...well. Yeah. Looks over at Werewolf the Apocalypse...at Bloodlines 2... 😭💔

I was hyped for the map editor… The trailer said it was gonna be “better, more powerful and simpler than C:S1, that was a fat LIE. Meanwhile you can import heightmaps… you need so many perfect things on the png to make it work. It has to be 4096x4096 and 16bit that you can’t get with heightmap tools. Only 8bit. So C:S2 can’t even see the file unless it full filles above requirements. In C:S1 you could literally put a black and white PNG in the folder and it would work… Also we wait until NOW for a beta editor. That should have been available on release. And there is no easy way to find your height maps in C:S2 took me over an hour while following a reddit thread because it was not where they said it was… now I have a shortcut if I try again in the future. I looked forward to map making in C:S2 but with this much hazel I can’t be bothered to handcraft a map several times bigger than in 1. >:(

the fact that we expect mods to fix broken games instead of the game devs is just sad

I am/was a Sims player, so I'm used to being nickel and dimed for everything by EA. But I learned. For CS2 as a big fan of the original, I was glad it was on gamepass because the price of the game on Steam was ufff. Tried gamepass and the game is ok, but nothing to call home about. I feel very EA on this dlc too. I probably will revisit the game in a few years down the line if it's not completely abandoned by then.

Also, the Beach Properties DLC was removed a few weeks ago.

Are you saying “Pam Tree”?

they screwed up bad, performance is shit, content is lacking, traffic bugs in particular ruining the fun, and lack of content to decorate the city and personalice it and modding support way to slow to arrive, this so called "DLC" should have been a free update and should have included a new map with proper beaches and ability to add beaches yourself in-game and more beach related content and very importantly, placable beach related props. before puching DLC's containing what the game should have come with for free at launch, they need to get their shit together and fix the simulation bugs and make all the graphs actually do something.

I have to admit, they seem to be on track to try to destroy their reputation that they had gained over several years to line their pockets. Game was released in an Alpha state and now they want more money for DLC AND they put items behind a paywall they never did in CS1 with putting environment assets in the DLC (palm tree's). In addition not only did they not just offer it for how badly the game was released BUT they ALSO asked more money for less content. I wonder what is going on over there that they think ANY of this is smart?

please, EA, thats ur chance! Bring SIM CITY back

Love your videos, but man always being told at the beginning why we should subscribe and why it benefits you gets old.

I promise I'll make a game better than Skylines in the next few years. Man I loved this game.

My issue isn’t just with the graphics, city 2 took away tons from the original, gone was thf easy play, gone was the workshop, gone was the I don’t need to read the q&a to build a great city, the changes took some Worksop assets like train and dumped them in to the game engine, real time traffic for instance item was included, BUT it broke so much , gone was the people playing in the parks, football grounds crowds , even improve such as simple things with farms, real character in school or or village. Restaurants with tables and bars With individuals congregate, no instead we have citizen complaint 24/7 with no way of fixing them , no one used sports events but they happily programmed homeless tents, even the values made zero sense add a shop and doctors suddenly your unaffordable., all this could have been fixed easily but in the months persistent problems such as the way traffic handled junctions was clearly set for rhd than left even thf way they merge for s junction wasn’t changed was for a rhd . Also homes are setup for big property you have to micromanage small property placement. Then we get on to transport metro is impossible to see it used to be select the relevant tool and it became transparent, but we don’t want to do that in city 2 oh no we want to make it impossible to see, bus routes were easy to set up , if you wanted an extra stop we we could easily make a tool for that but now make thf route remember where it when since you can’t see it clearly and then add the stops that were ea;y one click before , trains and metros we want you to take over your map with depot ITS A GAME NOT REAL LIFE , take this mechanic out of city 2 . The took city 1 and broke it . So now the first dlc comes out called beach front, so you’ll be able to plop sand No, we will see Miami strip style building , no, how about a bit of fish related commercial, no , a Pier no not even a fishing dock or harbour, we got some of the most run down boring designs with s club house woo hoo, not , as someone said they forgot the c in dlc , you even have to pay more for a radio station that’s just not worth it . The dlc should have been free what’s needed now is content not maps not bridges CONTENT. Then we get to the massive elephant graphic, if you can’t run it on two year old equipment you CANT RUN IT ON A CONSOLE with 5 year old hardware and integrated graphics of yesteryear .Linus proved this game eats cores up to 64 of them to be precise, most home owners have 6 or 8 performance cores , yet a 4090 at 4k gets not even 30fps half the time unless to downgrade to 1440 on quality . I don’t know what happened in paradox over lockdown but they have just lost the plot .

Why are they charging players for a DLC for a game that's not even out on consoles

Cool idea, but nothing was wrong with Workshop.

liked and subscribed, I thought I already was, KZfaq has been showing me your videos more than my actual subscriptions, lol.

I almost never give a bad review to any game, and I really have not with CS2 either..... but with that being said, I have come from a long, long line of games that lie in the "sphere" of Cities Skylines. I played SimCity in the MSDOS days, I played Civilization 1 in the same year(s), and fast forward to now, I have owned (except SimCity 2013) all SimCity games, all Civilizations games and ALL its expansions, I own Cities Skylines 1 and all of its DLC. I also have history with Railroad Tycoon and Transport Tycoon all the way going back to the DOS days, and I still play OpenTTD (an Open Source Transport Tycoon implementation) today. Other games I own include Tropico 4, 5 and 6, Transport Fever 1 and 2, SimAirport, Airport CEO, as well as the Paradox games Stellaris and Surviving Mars. So, since the release of SimCity in 1989, almost 35 years ago now, it is fair to say that I have some experience with the genre. And for the record, of all the titles mentioned above, I pirated only two of them: The original Simcity release, and the original Civilization 1 release, as you know..... teenager, exchanging floppy disks in high school. Until I made a move to the United States in 2002, leaving The Netherlands behind..... I still had the original boxes of Simcity 2000, 3000 and Civilization II and III. But.... I have never seen a game release so bad, so horribly mismanaged, and so insulting to the long time players of the genre, and in particular those who played Cities Skylines 1, and were expecting a thoroughly improved version of this game. I stopped playing after 1 month, and only came back about 2 weeks ago to check out Thunderstore before modding was announced to be released on the 25th this month. And I am still on the fence. The game doesn't feel ready. It's been SIX MONTHS since release, and modding is still in beta? I mean c'mon..... When they announced that the console version was going to be delayed, I thought to myself: If they postponed that, a version that is likely not going to have all that much modding, the base game must still be in a really poor state. They would have been better off delaying the ENTIRE game for all platforms until just about now. Now, will this game become the glorious successor it deserves to be? Yes, I still have faith. But someone at Colossal Order needs to call a management meeting, put the stop on everything, and figure out what they MUST do to make the players happy. I'm sorry folks at CO/Paradox if anyone happens to read this, but it is time to realize you have to sit on the blisters you created. You are going to lose a lot of money in 2024, you are not going to meet your sales targets, and you are 100% guaranteed not yet done with receiving the wrath of angry players, and I really, REALLY do not want to be one of them. Being in the engineering field, I know how big of a slap in the face it is to have worked your collective asses of to create a product, only for the public to treat you like dirt, and I do NOT want to be like that. But this..... is indeed an insult to the players, and you folks need to go sit in a room for a few hours, and come up with something that will act as a REAL apology to the players. Not a free building. Not a few free trees. Not even a free mini-DLC. Like I said, you are going to have to sit on the blisters in 2024, you are going to lose money this year, and hopefully..... in 2025 you will be able to fix this mess in such a way we can all be PROUD of you guys, just like I have always been on Cities Skylines 1. I know you can do it, but you need to feel the pain first, and you are not yet done feeling the pain. Now, things I recommend Paradox/CO does immediately: 1) Make "Beach Properties" 100% free to everyone, regardless of having bought Ultimate. Refund people who bought the stand-alone version of it. 2) To compensate for the loss of 1 DLC within the Ultimate version or the Waterfronts bundle, give them the NEXT content creator pack, whatever it may be, for free. (Those who did not get the Bundle or Ultimate will have to pay again). 3) Stop tying trees to DLC. This is a huge problem for map makers who may just want to make a desert map, and are not forced to require DLC to plant a few palm trees. Line 1 above will help with that. 4) Lay out a really clear roadmap for 2024. We already know what is coming Q2, Q3 and Q4 now of course, but make it more clear, and stick to it. I want to love this game, and I have started playing again, because I love city builders so much. But I think as a company, Paradox/CO still do not realize how badly they screwed up, and how much pain, including financial pain, they will have to suffer to make it right for the players. If you do the above, I think the players will start coming back..... provided some of the other bugs of course, are fixed. ;) Sorry for my long rant, I try to be as professional and non-toxic as possible. We, the players (or maybe just I, this player) am NOT saying all of this because we want you to fail..... I am saying this because I desperately want you to succeed. (And I think I am going to copy this into a forum post now, it is so long....)

I think Paradox fighting against themselves right know. You can see this also on their different project and that is Life by You, they already rescheduled the release date like 3x times now. So I think from devs point of view it is not their fault. Somebody above is pushing and wants money. About CS2 I bought this game at release day and it was horrible experience, it was of course lack of performance and I have to refund it, because it wasn't playable. I hope for comeback like No Man's Sky and they will deliver well made game with good performance.

Bellular knows there's an L in palm tree, right?

So, when exactly did EA take over this game?

Cities Skylines 2 did repeats Simcity 2013 mistakes Aside from lack of futuristic endgame buildings that Cities Skylines 1 had

This is what u get when u defend games like Dragons Dogma 2 for having mtx.