Cities: Skylines 2 CEO "no longer afraid of the marketing department," admits the city builder's launch was "rightfully" overshadowed by technical issues

In the wake of a messy launch for Cities: Skylines 2, Colossal Order CEO Mariina Hallikainen has published a new blog post addressing the game's issues and detailing some of the fixes that are now in the works.

Hallikainen says that the studio's mission has stayed the same: "We want to bring you the best city builder ever made! And as I have grown older I am no longer afraid of the marketing department, so no holding back," she jokes.

"As you may have noticed, Cities: Skylines 2 was released last week and we are happy the game is finally out! However, the launch was overshadowed by technical issues which caused disappointment, and rightfully so. We are happy to see that many players do enjoy the game and for those who are currently unable to play, I want you to know that we are working on a number of fixes and improvements to address your reports."

Last week, Cities: Skylines 2 got a patch with some substantial performance improvements, though that patch has only now been made available for the Microsoft Store and PC Game Pass versions of the game. Hallikainen notes that the team is working to "see how we can speed up the patching process."

That patch included a number of tweaks for the game's level of detail settings, which help improve performance by efficiently swapping from high-detail objects to low-detail versions of them as they move further away from the camera. "Finding optimal LOD levels is a balancing act between visual fidelity and performance, and we'll be addressing this in future patches. Yes, including the characters and their teeth," Hallikainen says, referencing a minor controversy over how the game rendered the molars of each individual citizen.

Hallikainen says that work on LODs and asset details will continue "over a longer period of time" as more performance patches come in. On top of that, the devs are also working on several reported simulation bugs.

"We have fixes being tested for education, where college/university eligibility is not shown correctly in the UI, and for trading, where it looks like the citizens are not consuming all different commercial types correctly resulting in not enough customers for the local business. We are currently investigating a garbage problem and it seems that some citizens are abandoning their dogs resulting in a huge dog pack just stranded in the city. Not cool, citizens, not cool at all."

As I wrote in my Cities: Skylines 2 review, it's a promising city-building game that's unfortunately been completely overshadowed by its technical problems - which, of course, is a sentiment that Hallikainen is now echoing. Here's hoping that those patches continue to roll out quickly with meaningful improvements because I'm still desperate to play a version of Cities: Skylines 2 that's managed to reach its full potential.

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