It’s briefly hinted at in the article, but this game uses Unity ECS. Unfortunately, the rendering side of things of that tech has been… garbage for a long long time. Even 1.0 comes with the caveat that it might be (ha) worse than the standard rendering paths.<p>It seems that their team fundamentally underestimated that risk and backed themselves into a corner of having to write their own rendering bridge layer — and failing quite spectacularly at it. Bummed for them.<p>I’ve shipped one very high profile game and another much less so that use ECS. For both games I was never so crazy as to commit us to any ECS packages outside of the core and NetCode. From the start of each project I knew that we’d be bridging the ECS sim with regular Unity GameObjects for visuals — which sounds crazy but actually works quite well . I hope that there is a day when a game can be full DOTS without caveats, because despite the tech’s struggles I remain quite a proponent of the design patterns.
> Why ship the game, then? Oh, right, Q4.<p>This is how you get people to never buy your games again. Please whenever you plan to release a game, add an entire year to that date, but work as if its due in exactly 1 year prior, and internally re-adjust and figure out "if I were to release in a month, what's the MVP", once you have a stable game, use the rest of your 9 months or so (assuming it takes 3 more months) and polish and add in any nice to haves that make the game feel more complete. I feel like Starfield could have used with maybe 6 months of content-only additions. Cities don't feel like in Fallout or Elder Scrolls, too many useless NPCs running about. I liked being able to stalk people into their homes and know their routines, its a little harder in Starfield to figure out who even is a non-useless NPC.<p>I got sidetracked, my original point was going to be, anytime Bethesda releases a new Elder Scrolls, Fallout or now Starfield esque game, the first thing I hear about is all the bugs, despite being a day 1 player and rarely running into bugs that really mean anything crucial (like crashing). Once you leave a rotten taste in your customer bases' mouth some of them will refuse to buy your game even if its the GOTY.<p>If you are a PM at a major game studio, start making a shift in how games are poorly made. It is really embarassing. I used to justify not pirating games because I know a lot of hard work goes into them as a developer myself, but with how crappy some games come out, I'm not sure I can justify buying or pirating games anymore, they're just so awful. Also all the DRM that does nothing to pirates, and ruins gamers systems in various unexpected ways.
The problems in this game are vastly overstated. I've been playing for a couple weeks and it's great.<p>Does my framer ate occasionally drop? Yes. Does it matter? No! It's Cities Skylines, not Counter Strike.
Related. Others?<p><i>Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38153573">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38153573</a> - Nov 2023 (563 comments)<p><i>Cities Skylines II renders invividual teeth of all human models</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38100643">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38100643</a> - Nov 2023 (31 comments)<p><i>Cities Skylines 2 runs with 20fps on an Nvidia RTX4090</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38029479">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38029479</a> - Oct 2023 (406 comments)<p><i>Cities: Skylines 2 to target 30 FPS: 'there's no real benefit to aim for higher'</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38008876">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38008876</a> - Oct 2023 (15 comments)<p><i>Cities: Skylines II Development Diary #1: Road Tools</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36391857">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36391857</a> - June 2023 (4 comments)<p><i>Cities: Skylines II [video]</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36293462">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36293462</a> - June 2023 (91 comments)<p><i>Cities: Skylines II</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35044355">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35044355</a> - March 2023 (253 comments)
Why are simulation games so hard? Because they try to do too much. Ideally a game should be from the point of view of one person - a mayor, a general, a President, ... Instead many such games go down into multiple levels, so you're not playing just the President, but all her cabinet members and technical experts.