EDIT: A big update from CO today… “We see and understand the disappointment many have expressed after the release of Beach Properties and agree that this DLC felt rushed and should not have been published in the state that it was. We have therefore decided to make the asset pack a free addition to the game, compensate those who bought it to the extent possible (see the rest of the FAQ for further information on this) and provide additional content within the Ultimate Edition in an effort to repay the loyalty we've seen in the community since the release of Cities: Skylines II.” My original comment below… Nervous of putting this video out to be honest… I know it’s highly opinionated which ultimately stands for nothing, so please feel free to agree or disagree but as ever keep it civil in the chat! You can probably tell I’m quite irritated by this whole debacle, so I’ll probably give it a rest from more Cities Skylines 2 videos until I see some more improvements otherwise I come across as a proper Karen! Thank you as ever, love Reggie xxx

The comment I kept hearing after launch of CS2 was that "CS1 wasn't good (lack of content) when it first launched, so we need to give it some time". But why wouldn't you take everything you learned about CS1 and apply it to CS2?? They saw how big the community assets and mods were and decided to...completely cut them out? The whole situation is wild.

The game is technically in a playable state as long as you don't try to play the game.

The same ceo Mariina Hallikainen who called fans "toxic" also said: "we will not release new paid content for city skylines 2 before the outstanding performance issues are fixed", CO word of the week #2, 6/11/23

Perhaps "four palm trees" will gain a similar status, at lest among fans, like "horse armour" among games more widely.

Greed.... simple greed. Give me your money, but I won't deliver quality... greed is an illness.

Beachfront Properties DLC: Hype: Assets for a fantastic beachfront community Reality: No beach sand, four palms, and a bunch of properties that could be anywhere in South Florida, South Texas, Mexico, Arizona, and Southern California but are evocative of none of those places.

one thing i think the community is completely ignoring is how the game is purposefully lacking assets and variety. The whole point is for paradox to make the game insufferable without DLC so that you are desperately foaming at the mouth when they try to sell a handful of homes, trees, cars, etc.. for example they seemed to purposefully choose silly vehicles like Harley Davidson style motorcycles and smartcars to be the primary vehicle for the sims, that way your city looks like some goofy alternate universe where biker and smartcar gangs rule the streets.. so what they did is added more "exclusive" cars (6) which can ONLY be acquired if you purchase the ultimate edition ($90) or the whole "season pass" ($50). so if you dont spend $90 for the ultimate or $50 more for the pass, you cannot get the handful of "muscle cars" that come with the ultimate edition/season pass. Even then now you just have harley, smartcar and muscle car gangs ruling the streets. it's such an odd variety of vehicles that dont fit well in any kind of city on the subreddit i just saw a post with a whole bunch of parking lots portraying an "american style city"... half the parking spots were either Harleys or smartcars. yea, that's very "american" indeed... I assume they are doing one of these "expansion passes" every year and each expansion pass will have content exclusive to the purchase of the whole pass ($50). in 5 years they will likely be selling a bundle of everything in the game that costs upwards of 3 or 4 hundred dollars. soon enough there will be endless posts on reddit asking "what's the best DLC? should i buy them all? etc"

Played on release, Un-installed. Played after a few "updates", un-installed again. Played at dlc drop, un-installed again. Guess I'll try again next year.

Pretty rich to say it will hurt the modding community when they didn't even include modding support.

On point with this video man, I'm admin for Biffa and seeing him having to deal with Paradox has been a real test of patience, I can only imagine how scared of Paradox smaller creators must've been thinking their livelihoods could be cut off by breaking NDA or badmouthing the game.

Not gonna lie, you ate with this. Solid critique and the little detail of the footage of sewage treatment plants and garbage dumps at the end was top tier. Definitely deserve more views/subs.

The fact that CO and PDX have gone radio silent on the PS5 and XBS versions tells a lot about the performance. It's basically unplayable on anything other than a 4000 series or high end 3000 series GPU.

"As smooth as a bulldog chewing a wasp" cracked me up big time. Nice one.

when they upped the system requirments mere weeks before release I cancelled my pre-order, sad to see that it was the right choice

I am an OG GAmer. My first PC game was a helicopter simulator back in 1985. I enjoyed CS1 with the assets and mods. I pre-ordered the Ultimate Edition pre-launch. I played other games and did pay attention to the noise leading up to launch. I downloaded the game on day 3 or 4 after release and what a sh!t show!! I have an Alienware desktop with a 4090, 64gb of ram and I was lucky to get 50 FPS. Almost immediately they delayed all additional content promised in the ultimate edition. They knew when they launched the game, performance was a 2 out of 10, yet they released it. The should have done a $29.99 BETA Early Release and they would have had a lot more support and a lot less heat. They bent us over!! In all of my years of gaming, this has to be the worst launch of a game. It almost feels criminal… they knew, yet they released it with a big “So what?” “You don’t like it, well too effing bad, we have your $$$”

For me Cities Skylines II is just like if I installed a shader pack and 2 mods to Minecraft and called it Minecraft 2

I don't know if it really is the fault of Paradox or if it's just the devs. Remember, CO are the same people that already bungled Cities in Motions 2 and with how they communicate, they seem to dislike, if not hate their own playarbase by calling them toxic and stuff.

I was waiting for someone to finally get in to this DLC without making excuses for a multimillion dollar company. The real reason I think they released it is so they don't get sued for that ultimate £90 edition. Great video like always.

Seems reminiscent of Kerbal Space Program 2, which at least was marked as "early access".

SimCity 4 released in 2003 is still the best city builder. Especially with all the present day updates, patches, fixes and mods. CS2 cant even compare and SC4 fully updated blows CS1 out of the water. You want 15 million people you can. You want 50 million. You can. Transportation options are insanely deep and just get better as the NAM team releases more.

Top notch commentary and bang on the moolah - Cities Skylines 2 has the distinct pen and ink of other Paradox titles that became abandonware as soon as they'd pushed it out to pad their quarterlies. They turned Surviving Mars from a nice title from an small studio into a dead end. Ditto Surviving the Aftermath and more recently Surviving the Abyss. The excuse? They didn't get enough love (i.e. bunce) from gamers to carry on developing it, so they just abandoned the game. Cities Skylines 2 bears all the hallmarks of this strategy. Release a load of old pony, ignore complaints, farm DLC and then stick it on sale for one last raid of people's bank accounts before running off and saying that we're all mean and don't deserve nice things. Steam has to take some blame here too. It was clear from Day One that this was a scam. Nothing in the game resembled the ads they played in the run-up to launch. The simulation is nothing of the sort, content is woeful, gameplay terrible and performance egregious. The tagline "if you can dream it, you can build it" was utter codswallop - the dream was a nightmare and Paradox/CO couldn't even build their own game, let alone a city. Despite the massive backlash and overwhelming negative reviews, Steam continue to list the game and have taken no steps to warn potential purchasers that this game is really a late beta version at best. What Steam should really do is pull this game from the store and fire a warning shot across the bows of big developers that marketing wank, fraud and deception have no place in the Valve universe. As for me, I will not be buying another Paradox game unless and until they fire their entire senior management team and get some people in who give a monkey's about players.

Man I always forget how your channel has a relatively small amount of subscribers, you're videos are so professional it easily feels like I'm watching a channel with half a million subs. Thank you keeping it real and speaking your mind!! Can't wait to see your channel grow more!!!!!

This is a problem for CK3 also. Paradox just took the Sims business model of selling a skeleton first and then selling the organs afterwards.

Glad you brought up Biffa, I’ve been following him for years. He generally tries to find a positive side so when he was so honest it really hit hard. Also given he is currently playing so many other games right now and started a new CS1 city says a lot. He is still doing CS2 content but you can just hear his frustration.

I haven’t bought the game for these exact reasons. And I won’t until I hear it runs smoothly and on a wider range of computers.

I passed on preordering CS2 because I wanted to see the state the game launched in. To this day, even after the DLC, I still don't see any reason to spend money on CS2. It's also hilarious to see how Paradox abandoned the content creators who shilled their game.

Thank you. You are the first reviewer I have heard who has come out front and center saying that they do not understand their fan base. I think this applies not just to Paradox but also to CO. Steam Workshop showed what their customers wanted, what was important to them. They were ignored. CO had an unfilled wish list from ten years ago and that is the script they followed. And Paradox never questioned it. And their upgrades and releases and comments since show that they still don't fully understand the issue. Yes, the game was buggy and not ready performance-wise. But CS was a good game made great by mods and assets -- all the things on and downloaded from Steam Workshop. And it appears that all of this was was back burnered -- no modding, no asset creation, no map creation. And now as they struggle to get those editors up and running we still get inane comments from Paradox and CO. Personally, I feel that some of the problems were because PC and Console had to be siamese twins. A problem in one can't be fixed unless it can be fixed in both. I believe this is causing a lot of extra workload and is causing delays. And, it may never work. But if it does, it might be an unsatisfactory compromise, not optimized for either one. Neither PC nor Console users will be happy. Can they recover? I'm no longer sure.

This was literal poetry to my ears. I was one of the suckers who fell for pre-ordering, despite knowing how bad it is for the industry - I saw the early CC videos and was immediately sold. Since then I've clocked 11 hours in the game and haven't turned it on since. Absolutely abysmal behaviour from CO and PDX, not the way I expected C:S II to go at all. Fantastic commentary mate, laughed out loud at "about as robust as a chocolate teapot". You've earned a sub through me, hope this video blows up and delivers a hard hitting message to the clowns who pushed this on us.

I did a huge U-turn on this issue. I used to have the mindset of "oh, give it a year or so and it'll be better than CS1" but I just don't see that happening anymore. By the anniversary of the game's release I'd be surprised if my favorite creators are still playing, and if Paradox hasn't completely sucked their fanbase's bank accounts (or at least tried to!)

You said it perfectly. They need to sit down and say exactly what you said: "Fans, former fans, we messed up. We acknowledge it completely and we aren't going to apologize, we're going to do something about it instead: From this point forward, Cities Skylines 2 is considered an early-release beta version, please consider it to be nothing more than that for the time being. With the modding features being live now, also in beta, we want to work on this game to iron out the (many) problems. We've hired a different development company to work on a free expansion while our developers work on fixing the game." Followed up by: "We also understand that the game looks and feels like crap, so like our announcement trailer suggested, we are going to fully switch to Unreal Engine, while using the simulation engine from Cities Skylines 2. These will be two stand-alone pieces of software: the visual layer (UE) and the simulation layer (an API, basically). This should enhance the visual beauty of the game and will also allow us (and others) to develop other interesting VFX and UI layers!" And: "Lastly, we're opening up the sim-engine (API) layer to development by outside sources. We'll keep this in-house first (office spots available for those who want it), with the intent of going fully open-source later. Our business model would revolve around selling the game as a licensed product that is a complete package deal. We understand it invites piracy, but we welcome pirates to the mix, too. Pay what you can, when you want to." Grow the community to hundreds of millions of players. Make mad profits. Stellar reputation. Love from everyone. They will do the exact opposite.

CS2 is the reason why I will never pre order a game again. lesson well and truly learned. CO management should be in jail for fraud. I have said this before and I will say it again I am sure.. I bought the deluxe version or whatever it was called, installed it on day 1. I have 9 hours of game time and can not see me playing it again any time soon. Too much needs to be fixed. They complain about toxicity? Then stop making people angry!

You have to understand two things: 1. Higher ups at companies aren't used to hearing the complaints from people, they normally hide behind other departments for that and not giving a fudge. However with the gaming industry it more and more results in games not selling well anymore and suddenly the CEO is faced with losing money. Instead of looking at themselves and admit they were wrong in how they handled it, they play it on "Stop being toxic and leave our developers alone or we won't communicate with you much anymore!'". They always try to play on feelings of others. Never lay the fault at themselves. 2. It's 2024, having a different opinion is toxic these days. People have forgotten how to have discussions and that other views exist. It's at all times a "Us vs Them" thing.

I still kinda feel like CS2 wasn't different enough from the first one. It reminds me of those Train Sim games that come out every 2 years just to make you buy all the dlc again

City planner plays was VERY vocal

We need to stay critical of gaming studios putting out unpolished dogshit like this because video games have really started trending in the direction of "beta releasing" games as an excuse to not fix bugs. There's no reason you should have to pay for unfinished games because what always ends up happening is that the studio turns around and ignores all the complaints after the game sells well on release. Then they release shitty DLC to make more money off of the "dedicated” players that are holding on for bug fixes. And it really is telling that there were so many youtubers given CS2 beta versions to showcase on their channel so they could sing its praises. CO was probably banking on the hype to help meet their sales quota so they could ignore all the bugs and keep ripping everyone off

JFC, THANK YOU. The tip toeing and baselessly optimistic language, as well as the belligerent "IM HAVING FUN, LOOK!" attitudes while they are literally churning out the exact same content as each other has just got me in disbelief. So THANK YOU for being realistic. Even after the recent "apology", it's been 6 months and the game still feels like an Alpha with no constructive criticism given to the dev team by the testers and trying to push on to Beta, all while parading as a full release. Thank you.

Super helpful man and I subbed. Props to the Biffa shoutout - between his video and now this I have hesitated in buying CS2 and will continue to wait hoping they address the issues. I want it to be successful but I also don’t want to pay $90 to be a guinea pig.

THANK YOU! Finally someone voicing what needed to be said. From the moment I saw that first trailer I was like “wow this sure looks pretty but the game is gonna be nowhere near this, and in fact, I’m pretty sure it’s gonna be absolute shit”. I never bought or preordered it and by now I don’t think I ever will.

It needed to be said. Truth is even if the game worked exactly as they described, it still wouldn’t meet expectations. The amount of potential they left on the table is the saddest part for me.

This channel deserves more subs and reach. We need more tubers creating more hard hitting videos to make more devs accountable. Nothing wrong liking a game, concept, devs etc, but calling out where we feels standards arent met. Sadly to many creators are to affaid to hurt their connections with these devs. Top work Reggie, keep it up

Honestly, my thoughts on the matter is that it was Collassal Order that dropped the ball. CS2 was in development for seven years, and I think it was PDX's threatening them with a release date that got the game into the halfway playable state it was at launch instead of eternally stuck in dev hell and feature creep. Then again, it would have been nice to just have let the devs create the game they envisioned

I think this applies to all Paradox games not just CS2. as their DLC policies has become... questionable...

"You modders finish the game for us and we'll get to work on the $4,500 in DLC's we have planned... K?" -Paradox

In Total War we have Volound who speaks out against shills and the dev's bad attitude, we need someone like him in the paradox games

I can buy a DLC but I still can't put the Empire State Building in my city

They should add the ability to move oil by pipeline.

I've been disappointed by games before, and sometimes it was expected so it didn't hurt that bad. I was really rooting for Cities 2 to keep with the trend of changing the landscape of sim games, but... they tried to manipulate us into accepting an unfinished product and paraded around blaming all of us for speaking up about the issues the game was facing. A small amount may have been acting out of pocket, but that doesn't dismiss all the real problems with the game. Even though I've told myself I'll just play it when it's "finished" it still broke my heart and I don't see it the same way anymore (which says a lot for me and my very otherwise guarded ego lol). Such a shame.

If it wasn't for the fact that it's a video game, there could be a matter for a class action!

All AAA Companies are going to crap. Indies and classics are where it's at these Days. There's almost nothing new worth even following anymore. I used to have half a dozen games on my to-play list at any given time. I have none now, accept for maybe the Elden Ring DLC, but that's just DLC. And it'll probably be a while after that's released before I look forward to anything else- there's just nothing out there that tickles my fancy. I think it's about time I replay FFX, from 2002- there just aren't AAA games like that anymore.

CS1 was a functional package on release and the first wave or 2 of dlc were proper expansion packs that came with patches like weather and time cycles. After the park dlc, the soul of the company lived long enough to become the villan.

I realized the game was dead after they put out that December "traffic AI fix" and I watched my cars still: change lanes from a dead stop red light at the intersection, reverse on highways, block ambulances/fire/cops (things shown wouldn't be the case in the fake PR releases), and drive down pedestrian only networks (since that asset is just a road network copy/pasta).

great video. honestly, paradox should've put the game into early access, fixed all of the messes, and for 1.0 added mods and assets. but a dlc when the base game isn't even complete? thats just bullshit

I understand the criticism to a degree, because I never had any big performance issues or issues with the gameplay and an overall good experience. My problem is more the lack of content compared to the previous game. I really like the new system about the roads and like always I think the modders base will fix a lot of the gameplay issues the game may have.

Its so nice to finally be able to redirect some Private Division hate over to Colossal Order.

I Am Glad Someone Spoke Up Man And Nowdays Its Not Even City Skylines 2 Its Almost Everyone like Call Of Duty,House Flipper2,HellDivers2,Ecape From Tarkov. And Ect Its Sad To See The Gaming Industry Go To Shit.

As someone who worked on this DLC i tried realy hard to address the issues but no luck

Just seems to me like Paradox is bleeding the ol' cash and needed a quick injection, rushing CS2 out the door. Just conjecture, I'm on the outside looking in through a window for this one.

I came for the title, stayed for the accent (Abroad in Japan-esque) and thoroughly anjoyed the critique. I dunno if Colossal Order will be able to get back deep from where they dig themselves in.

At first i didn't think much of not buying it. I thought I'd let them work it out first. Now it's important to me to abstain because it's the only way i can cast my vote. Reading that tweet from the ceo a few weeks ago ticked me off even more. Everyone has their own opinion and mine is that this game deserves none of my money. Disrespect the fans is one thing. They take it a step further. Game dev is art, they disrespect the art and the entire industry.

I was nothing but critical of the game since they lifted the embargo a few days before release. I tried to warn people about the game before launch, but I only have so much reach as a console creator. I can't understand how people see all this happening and you still see comments like "console release when?" If it's this broken on PC I cant wait to see the mess that is the console version.

First video I’ve ever seen of you man, and I LOVE YA! Subbed, great video. I don’t even play CS but I loved learning about it.

I wrote off anything from paradox almost 10 years ago now. If they're involved, my wallet remains closed.

ragging on CS fanboys is one my fav pastimes, Colossal Orders made it too easy with their business practices too.

i remember being so hyped for this game before it came out.. sadly you can't trust any game these days to launch in a complete working state

This is the first video I have ever seen of you but I'll make sure it won't be my last! Your opinions are great and the way you layed them out was more facts based rather than just some spitting of your own anger. I really really enjoyed wathcing this and I think more people need to speak out in a similar manner!

Sad you have to bring biffa in to this but yeah, him not mention any of this in the beginning did raise a few flags but him answering you was such a gentleman move. Thank you both for raising these questions.

Love it how you don't mince your words! Just subbed to you channel after seeing this pop up on my recommendations and I've gone back to watch some of your other vids. I agree with you on how CS2 and the city sim that it could have been has fallen to 🤑greed. Can only hope that there is a spiritual successor around the corner from some other dev & publisher.

Glad to see how quickly they backpedaled and made it a free update, but the fact that anyone at Paradox/CO thought it was a good idea to begin with really doesn't bode well, and displays a level of tone-deafness that's difficult to even fathom. DLC (let alone paid DLC) shouldn't even be on the roadmap yet at all. Just let the devs finish making the base game first, there will be plenty of time to milk it dry later.

THANK YOU!!! Someone has finally said it! As one of the many die-hard fans, I was expecting something awesome. We didn't get it. I respect the fact that bug fixes take time, and can take a lot of man hours. I respect the fact that they're a business, and need to make money to pay the devs to fix the problems. All I'm expecting is for them to make the game that they advertised, that we all paid good (some would say "too much" money for. I don't think that's too much to ask

You f'ing nailed this. I loved the first one so much I bought the deluxe version. Haven't been able to play my 120k + city in months because it's utterly pointless. Total bloody turd and the bean counters are responsible. Product owners, bean counters and execs making scummy decisions. Then they'll sack all the dev's who were overworked and probably under paid.

Finally a reason to not regret buying the first one instead of the second one.

I'm a CK3 guy, first time getting your channel suggested. Have a look the steam ratings on our new DLC lol. Kudos to you. Great vid. Liked commented subscribed.

I loved the first one, got me again interested in city building games. While I hope that CS2 will have it's No Man's Sky moment, it seems it is going for a KSP2 moment. Sad, really sad.

the fall from grace is insane with this one

Unfortunately, so true. I've had the original game since around 2018 and honestly, I don't know whether I want to buy 2 any time soon. Performance still seems to be an issue and frankly I don't think I'd want to buy a game that could barely give me 30fps apparently with 10K population (granted my hardware may be considered fairly old but it runs what I want it to fine and it's fairly snappy and I'm not prepared to upgrade over a single game). This game is still extremely unfinished with massive simulation issues still taking place, awful traffic AI and things just not working as expected. On an unrelated note, as a fan of another video game series which had a partially unfinished game release in 2020, I'm concerned for where the future in gaming is going as a whole with unfinished games or digital-only always online games. I genuinely question whether I'll still be playing games in 10 years time.

Fire the managers and marketing department, let the devs run the company.

I bought Cities Skylines 1 nearly day 1. I bought Sim City on day 1 too and was severely burned, so seeing a new game that promised no online bullcrap and even better functionality and whatnot, I was all in. However, I still haven't bought Cities Skylines 2. I'm not even waiting for a steam sale for it or anything. I'm just waiting to hear that they actually improved the game rather than just add more stuff. To be honest, I didn't love Cities Skylines after the first while because each new addition became increasingly clear to me it was just a very thin layering of features with bigger and bigger pricetags each time. I think I only ever bought 2 dlc, and quit after that and just focused on mods to expand my game. So unless Cities Skylines can provide for me what my modded version of Cities Skylines (mostly gameplay wise, I'm not a stickler for all the cosmetic and stylistic stuff I modded needing to be in the game), I'm not interested in spending over another $100 for the same game

I went back to CS:1. While there's some nice visual polish to CS:2, the gameplay itself isn't very fun. The environments feel drab and a little depressing. The sims creep me out. There's a total lack of assets, and the cranes building even the tinniest of houses really bugs me. The simulation feels off. And really, it doesn't look that much better than CS:1 and adds very little to the original game.

Thanks. I am so tired of greedy and short-sighted publishers ruining entire franchises by pooping out stuff like this. The rumor is, the game was launched knowingly broken ONLY so it would bump up the quarterly earnings report of the publisher, and the DLC was probably also pushed out to meet a financial report deadline, not because it was done or anyone believed it was good. I don't mind spending money on fairly trivial things if I know what it is up front. I mean... I own almost all the DLC for Crusader Kings 2, and we all know how much THAT is. THIS, however, wasn't labeled as "palm tree assets" for $2.99. It was pushed as if it were a full sized DLC, when in reality it was all they had ready to go and was probably going to just be part of their Maritime expansion later.

2bcProductions is this you? Great video man, this type of content is what the NHL community needs as just with what happened between Skylines 1&2, happened to the NHL series. I know it’s two different games, but NHL 14 (like skylines) was the best hockey game/sports game (like skylines was the best city sim after sim city failed) dropped NHL 15 which was a alpha for 60$ ruining NHL games for a decade now as they have been essentially re-releasing NHL 14 ever since. Us NHL fans have spent thousands up to NHL 24 to have the same features as 14 as sad as the sounds. Crazy what’s happening to my favorite franchises in the last decade over greed. Bungie, EA, Activision, Paradox. Pain.

I read on one of the comments you put up on your video that the game was "only 50 dollars and not 90" it confuses me how some people are so up gaming companies asses that they don't realise 50 dollars is not a good price for an incomplete game with performance and gameplay issues

Very solid and honest review of the sorry state this game and paradox interactive are in right now, you did a very necessary job by speaking out without any filters about the absolute BS this game is right now, and I hope someone from pdx watches this and start getting their job properly done

Paradox needs to cool it with their DLC release structure. Every game they publish seems half finished till you buy all the DLC which adds up to more than the price of the base game.

I’m a console player, where the game had disappeared like snow in the sun. No trace of it anywhere. Like it never existed.

something HAS to have happened in Paradox during this launch. different creative director? different CEO? something huge changed, and it shows.

I mean, people even defended The Day Before with teeth and nails. It doesn't matter how terrible something is, there'll always be people incapable of admitting their belowed product is just cheap trash. I've really tried with this game, but it runs and looks terrible.

I agree with this 100%. They were so focused on how to make the most money they forgot to actually make a game.

After the big surprise that the first game was, i preordered the sequel on ultimate (with a lower price thankfully) but .... i don't know you guys but for me, they've lost my thrust. NEVER AGAIN (and even for any other games/companies now) i will buy on preorder. I'll simply wait a bit for PLAYERs reviews.

TAA completally glitched. Unplayable at this point thanks to latest update fixes. 😩 Flickering icons, Glitching, flickering artifacts when in Road build mode. Terrform out of sync (plus 4 palm trees... yey) All other AA modes looks terrible 😧

As a avid cities skylines 1 player, I have love the game since. I was so hyped when cities skylines 2 came out, I preorder it, and it made me cry. I've seen tons of great games die, some for ex, SimCity, Star wars, and burnout

You have my full respect for telling it as you see it. Fans deserve better for what they've paid.

The game clearly needed 2 years still in the oven, yet was released to the public. The reason this happened is because Paradox played spreadsheet simulator. They lost a Hugh chunk of money on a game that didn't sell as expected. And knowing that c:s2 would be a guaranteed success they released it. But in the end the entire community and the franchies suffered. Even their first game used to have a big chunk of players still playing. But since the release of c:s2 even its player numbers suffered tremendously. In the beginning, I also wanted to have the game ASAP. After they done the trailers and built the hype, it was a huge let down the experience the game in its current state I've come to realise that it's 10x better to let the devs just do their thing and get it finished. Colossal order had built up an amazing reputation. c:s1 was a banger. So when I got c:s2 I was ignoring most of the bugs and etc. Hoping that colossal would surely have it under control soon enough. That day never came. After 100 days since the games release, many people came out and showed their dissatisfaction. All the youtubers in the space and the majority of the player base too. They did release fixes and what not but its still mismanaged. Their releasing dlc (or rather an "asset pack") already while the game still has problems deep in its core. But to give you an example. Public transport doesn't have an effect on anything. A KZfaqr has tried it. He had a huge city built with great public transport. He deleted all of it, nothing changed. Maybe some money but it had no effect on the city at all. It felt faked, no impact. There is also problems with the core economy of the game, how that also feels faked and has no real meaning. And most of the stuff you do ingame feels like it has no meaning. Most stuff feels faked or temporary. People found the logic and features for the deep simulations that would make the game something truly great and unique. But it's either incorporates incorrectly or not used. I got the Ultimate edition, and I feel betrayed, left in the dust. I have played the game for 120 hours since launch. Most of which was within the launch month. I grew a city to 400k population I believe. I tried my best to enjoy the game and look past the issues, but in this case, you aren't even able to even if you wanted. Their focusing on everything else then they should. The graphics arent the issue currently, but the core simulation of the game. Not only its performance but its functionality. Mt prediction is that they will have the game ready after the next 2 years. That's when we will see what the game should have actually looked like on launch. In a perfect world they would have halted the production of expansions and DLC, apologised, realized the game is in a early access state, and admitted that Paradox or themselves forced the early release. Until then, my loyalty, trust, or any good relationship has been broken with the franchise and the people behind it. TL;DR: Please don't release the game early if it's not ready. They hurt their franchise possibly to their eventual slow death, if they do nothing about it.

So long as the game is not yet optimised, I will just download the game for free on some random game websites. If they do decided to fix the optimisation issue, that's when I'll decide whether to buy it to be worth the price or I'll just stay with the cracked version.

You know, besides being bang on, I think it's almost poetry to hear you and how you express yourself.

They are doing sims strategy with dlcs

You are spot on! I have played it for 1 hour on game launch and it was horrible. I refunded my money and i wanted to wait until the fix the problems.. Meaning normal gameplay high resolution with medium/high settinsgs (3440x1440 or 4K) Still they want us to play at 1080P Seriously? Its not 2010 anymore. If this game is a 'next gen game' as the say.. Playing 1080P for a crappy 30/40fps is NOT next -gen. So, i still havent purchase the game as not much has changed since launch.

I love your presentation style! I would listen to you talk about how grass grows lol!

The walled modded garden is what sealed it's fate for me...

10:27 you know what though? In my experience with playing beta games and being part of beta tests, I have never seen a beta suddenly get it's crippling performance issues fixed a couple weeks before full release, it just does not happen. There is such a thing as toxic positivity, if a company screws up that bad it's your responsibility as a customer to make the issues known. Yes devs are at the bottom of the chain but they are the ones actually making the product so they also need to take responsibility to deliver a good product, if they refuse something as a team there isn't much management can really do besides replacing the entire team or letting them do their job.