Colossal Order and Paradox Interactive provided an update about the state of the PS5 and Xbox Series X|S version of Cities: Skylines 2, and if you thought it’d come soon, you better mitigate that expectation.
According to the announcement, the developers are encountering hardware limitations both on the CPU side and on the GPU side, affecting the simulation and the graphics. These become noticeable when the player takes actions that cause frame rate drops or memory overload, and addressing them is “particularly challenging.”
For instance, placing a large building including a lot of entities causes the system to struggle in handling the data load, causing noticeable performance bottlenecks.
That being said, the developers have managed to make the game stable and playable at the price of a significant reduction in visual fidelity. Unfortunately (or luckily, depending on the point of view) that’s not a compromise they’re willing to make, so they need to optimize things further before they’re willing to release the console version.
Until these issues are resolved, they won’t commit to a release estimate to avoid disappointing fans.
On the bright side, Colossal Order pledged that the release on consoles “remains a top priority” and “multiple solutions” are being explored with the help of experts.
If you’re unfamiliar with Cities: Skylines 2, it’s the successor of the popular Cities: Skylines. Following a rushed release on PC almost exactly a year ago, the game was slammed by critics and fans alike, while the console release was delayed indefinitely.
Yet, Colossal Order has been working hard to restore trust in their work, and they have been successful in improving things considerably. Recently, they have started releasing free region packs including France, Germany, and the UK.
The next is Japan, and we already know that it’ll come on December 9. If you know me, you likely can imagine that this old weeb will jump back into the game as soon as that happens.