Cities: Skylines 2 should have been one of Paradox's safest sequels. The blueprint for success already existed, developer Colossal Order had been iterating on the original for years, and the sizable fanbase was buzzing with excitement over the prospect of a new one. It didn't quite work out the way everyone was expecting.
Performance issues, bugs, the wonkiness of the economic simulation, the absence of modding tools—Cities: Skylines 2 had a rough launch. And despite a lot of fixes and some notable updates, it's still missing things fans were expecting. Even now, more people are playing the original.
"Cities—that's the one that bugs me most," says Paradox deputy CEO Mattias Lilja, "because it's part of what we do." Lilja's been chatting to me about Paradox's tumultuous year—tumultuous few years, really—which has seen it struggle with a variety of experiments outside of its wheelhouse. But Cities 2 is different, since it's very much one of Paradox's core games.
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"There were parts of the Cities 2 launch that I am not proud of," he adds. "I am happy with how we responded to the feedback from the fans, just like we did with Victoria 3. We didn't exactly hit what we wanted, but we're working with the fans to remedy that over time."
When it launched last year, the consensus among players and a lot of critics was that it was released far too early and felt like an early access game, at best. But Lilja says that Paradox was not pressuring Colossal Order to release it before it was ready. "We were in agreement with the devs," he says. "It was not the publisher saying to the devs, 'We don't care, kick it out the door.' We were very in agreement that it was time to release it."
For Lilja, the main oversight was performance, specifically on some combinations of powerful hardware. "We knew that the system requirements were going to be pretty high, but what we missed, which is absolutely our fault as a publisher, is that certain combinations of high level hardware also didn't work."
He contends that if it had just been a matter of needing "a really good computer to play this on some level" it would have been "acceptable". It would have just needed some optimisation. "But we also had these outliers that people who had really good hardware got really mad for good reason."
Outliers do not explain the barrage of criticism the launch faced, however, nor the Mixed rating it has on Steam a year after launch. Despite this, Lilja says that, aside from the issues with these hardware outliers, "we were actually in agreement that iterating this live was probably the right way to go".
All that said, Lilja does now regret releasing the game back in October '23. "I think the lesson learned is that we should probably not launch that early."
But he doesn't think that early access would have been the right way to go. It's a "marketing tool" he says, which has "zero impact on the depth". And players don't really treat early access games as works-in-progress. "You're in a live environment with actual people who want stuff in the game, which is the same as if you launch it. A dev team that thinks they're going to have a nicer ride on an early access game, I think fool themselves."
I think it's important to make it clear to prospective players what they're in for when they buy a game, and if your plan is to iterate on a game that's not ready for prime time, then it shouldn't be sold as a finished product. That's what the early access label is for. But I do still find myself agreeing with a lot of what Lilja's saying—early access games are often treated the same way as 1.0 games, and the Steam user reviews for them are rife with complaints about missing features and bugs, despite that being part of the deal.
"Most of the successful early access games the last three years really sold the product on early access," he adds. "They might as well have launched them."
So—Paradox is going to be more cautious about when it launches games. The proof is in the pudding, of course, but the publisher has already been putting this into practice. It just came at a bad time. In August, hot on the heels of Life By You's indefinite delay and subsequent cancellation, it announced the indefinite delay of Prison Architect 2.
Naturally, these two events, so close together, invited comparison. But it needed to be done, says chief creative officer Henrik Fåhraeus. "It's a fun game, and it's been fun for quite a while, but it's rough. It has a rough UI. It's a little unclear why things are happening. It crashes. So it needs that love."
While no new release date has been announced for Prison Architect 2 yet, Lilja and Fåhraeus are adamant that this is not another Life By You situation.
Cities: Skylines 2, meanwhile, seems to be heading in the right direction. The Economy 2.0 patch was a substantial improvement, and Colossal Order is still working on getting full modding ready, "but it also needs a really solid base game," says Lilja, "because modding is going to slow down performance quite a lot, as it always does". Modding was so central to what made the original great, so it could be the change Cities: Skylines 2 needs.
