Cities: Skylines 2 – maybe finish it before you release it (Picture: Paradox Interactive)

Paradox has admitted there will be performance issues with Cities: Skylines 2 at launch but it’s still going on Game Pass and won’t be delayed.

Broken video games , like the recent Payday 3 , have been a problem for years now but as bad as it can be on consoles it’s much worse on PC. It’s now the expected norm for big budget games to launch with performance issues, but it sounds like it’s going to be even worse than normal for Cities: Skylines 2.

The sequel to the popular city builder is out on October 24 and yet publisher Paradox Interactive has admitted that it has ‘not achieved the benchmark we targeted.’

‘In light of this, we still think for the long-term of the project, releasing now is the best way forward,’ they added. In other words, they know it’s broken but they’re going to release it anyway, rather than delay it and fix it.

‘We’ve noticed the concerns raised about Cities: Skylines 2 performance, especially after our previous statement with raised minimum and recommended specs. As we’ve always believed in transparency, we’d like to further shed some light on the current state of the build,’ reads the full statement on the Paradox forums .

‘We will continually improve the game over the coming months, but we also want to manage expectations on performance for the coming release. Our ambition is for Cities: Skylines II to be enjoyed by as many players as possible, and we’re committed to ensuring it reaches its full potential.’

It’s an astonishingly cynical move, made to seem all the more unreasonable because the Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5 versions aren’t due until next spring, and it would surely have made more sense to delay the PC version till then.

However, the PC edition is part of Game Pass this month and it’s likely that influenced Paradox’s decision. So far, there’s never been a Game Pass title that hasn’t made it because of a delay and Paradox is probably counting on the money that comes as part of that deal with Microsoft.

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At the same time, Paradox has announced it’s abandoning support for Steam Workshop mods and will instead use its own Paradox Mods system, supposedly because it works for both consoles and PC.

At this rate though the most important mod will be the one that gets the game running at a decent frame rate.





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