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It's a bad day for enjoyers of games with decent performance, as today's biggest new releases - Cities: Skylines 2 and the Metal Gear Solid Master Collection - are both getting pummeled on Steam for some serious technical limitations.
For the Metal Gear Solid collection, this package includes basically none of the features you'd expect to see from a PC game. I don't just mean support for arbitrary resolutions or extreme frame rates - these games don't offer any options whatsoever, not even the ability to swap from the default resolution or switch between fullscreen and windowed modes.
The Master Collection is technically just a set of games running on emulators - not true ports - so a certain set of limitations are to be expected. Yet some Steam reviews report that the older games in the collection - including MGS1 - don't even offer scaling options, and the default bilinear filtering mode turns the pixel art into a blurry mess.
As other Steam reviews note, you'd get a better experience just playing these games through an emulator, where you can change resolutions and display modes to your liking. You don't even have to pirate the games to do it - old PS1 and 2 discs run just fine in most PC disc drives, and you can still get many of the games in this collection much cheaper on eBay than their asking price here.
While reviews for the individual pieces of the Master Collection are mostly 'mixed,' owing to the sterling reputation of the original games, Cities: Skylines 2 has a 'mostly negative' response with just 36% positive reviews. Developer Colossal Order has been up front in saying that city builder's performance will be rough, and you can read our Cities: Skylines 2 review if you want to hear about my own experience with just how bad it runs.
Still, many players are taken aback by how bad it is. As one reviewer says, "Cities: Skylines 2 should not be released. It pains me to say as a big fan of the original game, but the sequel here is simply not in an acceptable state."
There's admittedly not much to connect Cities: Skylines 2 and the Metal Gear Solid Master Collection beyond their release date and the hope that both will eventually get the updates they need to meet players' standards - but if you're getting a bit tired of waiting for patches to make games worthwhile, well, you're not alone. "Who would imagine that we would get another unoptimized mess of a game in 2023," as another reviewer says. "I am tired, boss." I'd tell you which game that review is for, but honestly the fact that you probably can't tell is the most damning thing.
