Cities: Skylines II is out now, but it could’ve used a couple more months of polish. The latest forum post by developer Colossal Order has revealed that the team are delaying the release of upcoming DLCs and expansions as they focus on making performance improvements, bug fixes and shipping the mod tools.
The release roadmap for new content has been revised to be as follows:
- Q1 2024
- Beach Properties Asset Pack
- Deluxe Relax Station Radio Station
- Q2 2024
- Modern Architecture creator pack
- Urban Promenade creator pack
- Bridges & Ports Expansion
- Soft Rock Radio Radio Station
- Cold Wave Channel Radio Station
The Bridges & Ports expansion was previously scheduled for release in Q1 2024.
Performance improvement works includes adding missing level-of-detail (LOD) levels and improving the currently available ones. Simulation performance is also being worked on to reduce CPU stutters.
The city builder game now has 100 reproducible issues (bugs or glitches that can consistently happen, and how they happen has been been understood), plus 100 other reported issues. So the dev team are working on sorting out those before any new improvement or new feature can be implemented.
The mod tools, which includes the map editor, is still in the works, but they will only have a release scheduled once the performance and bugs situation the game currently is in is sorted.
Since launch, Colossal Order has released weekly hotfixes addressing prominent issues (like how the garbage disposal simulation was borked). Future patches will not be on a weekly basis as the team needs more time to test out fixes that involves a whole system to see if it requires a balance pass. Mail Service, where in the state of it is right now mails are only collected but not necessarily delivered because the Post Sorting Facility is sorting the mail weirdly, is cited as an example.
The console version of Cities: Skylines II were previously delayed, and now we know why. Even the PC version of the game is not yet in a good state of playability.
Cities: Skylines II boasts tons of improvements and small changes to make the urban city-builder feel bigger yet more refined than its 2015 predecessor. But as it currently stands, there’s so many issues that really stops this game from being what looks to be an easy recommendation.
Cities: Skylines II is out now on PC (Steam, Microsoft Store), and available on PC Game Pass. It’s coming later to PS5 and Xbox Series X|S.