Game News Cities: Skylines released. Breaks Paradox sales records

[Whisky]

Tags: Cities: Skylines; Colossal Order; Paradox Interactive



Cities: Skylines has been released this week. It has already broken Paradox sales records with 250,000 copies sold in the first 24 hours.

It can be obtained on Steam in both normal and deluxe DLC versions.

 

[thesheeep]

Hyvää laatua myy paljon tietokonepelia.
Bow before my superior* knowledge of the Finnish tongue.

I'll definitely play this one. Now Maxis should feel extra bad about deliving such crappy Sim Cities in the past. Beaten by a small-medium sized Finnish dev team. Well, if Maxis still existed.

*Superior in relation to the 99% of the population not knowing Finnish at all.

 

[EG]

Looks great.

How long until Paradox gets sued into the ground?

 

[catfood]

Is it good?

 

[I'm Big Into Anal]

the buzz is strong in this one

 

[Angthoron]

It's good, but somewhat on the easy side, the biggest challenge is managing the traffic in larger cities, if traffic fucks up, all your services are worthless.

 

[EG]

Aye; very easy to get ahead early on; pretty similar to Sim City 4 in that regard.

Really do wish the grid remained visible, as setting down something like water pipes evenly requires you to drag them out, find out you're off, release them, and try to hit the mark from memory.

Kills my 4670k on anything but lowest settings at 1980x. You'll probably want a dedicated graphics card for this.

 

[thesheeep]

You'll probably want a dedicated graphics card for this.

Dude, you'll want a dedicated graphics card for any game with actual 3D graphics

[lecture mode]
But seriously, I am also currently working on a game that displays an absurdly large number of "things" on the screen. That is always hard on any PC, but especially on the GPU. So many meshes with shaders that have to be rendered, so many things that potentially have logic behind them and take away RAM.
There is a reason why open world games like Minecraft/Realm Explorer/Skyrim, that would actually have a lot of stuff to show, either reduce that stuff to a very close distance and show blank terrain in the distance (Skyrim) or have a very reduced viewing range altogether (Minecraft/etc.). It is not incompetence on the dev side. It is just not something any engine is good at, because it is absurdly hard to do.
[/lecture mode]

 

[EG]

You'll probably want a dedicated graphics card for this.

Dude, you'll want a dedicated graphics card for any game with actual 3D graphics

Aye; never bothered to order that longer cable for my old Radeon 5650 when I built the new computer. Up to this game, just the integrated graphics has been doing rather well. Always a bit disappointing to hit a limit.

 

[sser]

I'm seeing this game everywhere. Seems like a total hit, leapfrogging over the corpse of Sim City.

 

[Luzur]

So its Sim City but by Swedes?

 

[thesheeep]

Finns.
Paradox only acts as the publisher here. Hard to say how much influence they had on the actual development.

 

[Konjad]

I guess they let the developers mostly do what they want and release the game they want as long as they can later milk with dozens of DLCs

 

[Eyestabber]

Bah, my PC can't run this game (20 fps at best). Not sure if bad optimization is to blame, or 2011 Laptop is to blame. Anyway, this game has a 9.0 metacritic user score, looks and feels a lot like what Simcity should have been. Major all around.

 

[Angthoron]

Bah, my PC can't run this game (20 fps at best). Not sure if bad optimization is to blame, or 2011 Laptop is to blame. Anyway, this game has a 9.0 metacritic user score, looks and feels a lot like what Simcity should have been. Major all around.

Does it have dedicated wam a dedicated GPU? If your laptop only has a built-in Intel chip, might as well toss it out of the window for gaming purposes.

 

[Eyestabber]

Bah, my PC can't run this game (20 fps at best). Not sure if bad optimization is to blame, or 2011 Laptop is to blame. Anyway, this game has a 9.0 metacritic user score, looks and feels a lot like what Simcity should have been. Major all around.

Does it have dedicated wam a dedicated GPU? If your laptop only has a built-in Intel chip, might as well toss it out of the window for gaming purposes.

Nah man, I've a GTX 260M. Perfectly capable of running Crysis at maximum settings. This game, however, was unplayable for me and dumping configs to the bare minimum didn't help (went from 13 to 20 fps).

 

[Angthoron]

Bah, my PC can't run this game (20 fps at best). Not sure if bad optimization is to blame, or 2011 Laptop is to blame. Anyway, this game has a 9.0 metacritic user score, looks and feels a lot like what Simcity should have been. Major all around.

Does it have dedicated wam a dedicated GPU? If your laptop only has a built-in Intel chip, might as well toss it out of the window for gaming purposes.

Nah man, I've a GTX 260M. Perfectly capable of running Crysis at maximum settings. This game, however, was unplayable for me and dumping configs to the bare minimum didn't help (went from 13 to 20 fps).

After a quick googling:

The problem is with the Intel ® graphics cards. The game (and Cities in Motion 1, for that matter) simply don't like them. However, they are unable to automatically detect this and switch to an alternative graphics card (in my case, Nvidia).

You have to open the Nvidia Control Panel under programs.

Go to Manage 3D Settings. Under Global Settings select 'High-Performance Nvidia Processor'. Hit apply.

Then go to program settings, click add, find Cities.exe (Cities Skyline) and select it. Beneath it, select 'High-Performance Nvidia Processor' again. Then hit apply.

This'll force Cities Skyline to run using your Nvidia GPU and fix the issue. Can confirm the game runs perfectly fine after these steps.

I assume there is a similar solution for other GPU's, but you'll have to figure that out on your own.

Maybe this'll help.

 

[Eyestabber]

Will try that when I get home. If this solution works I will name you my "favoritest Codex Staffer", a huge honor, mind you.

I did not attempt to solve my perfomance issues because I thought the game was too new for my old Laptop, so I half expected it not to work. If it's not a hardware issue, but rather just a simple matter of "game refuses to run on Nvidia Card, runs on crappy onboard intel card instead. Beat it with a stick and force it to use the Nvidia one" I will be very, VERY happy.

 

[Eyestabber]

Bah, my PC can't run this game (20 fps at best). Not sure if bad optimization is to blame, or 2011 Laptop is to blame. Anyway, this game has a 9.0 metacritic user score, looks and feels a lot like what Simcity should have been. Major all around.

Does it have dedicated wam a dedicated GPU? If your laptop only has a built-in Intel chip, might as well toss it out of the window for gaming purposes.

Nah man, I've a GTX 260M. Perfectly capable of running Crysis at maximum settings. This game, however, was unplayable for me and dumping configs to the bare minimum didn't help (went from 13 to 20 fps).

After a quick googling:

The problem is with the Intel ® graphics cards. The game (and Cities in Motion 1, for that matter) simply don't like them. However, they are unable to automatically detect this and switch to an alternative graphics card (in my case, Nvidia).

You have to open the Nvidia Control Panel under programs.

Go to Manage 3D Settings. Under Global Settings select 'High-Performance Nvidia Processor'. Hit apply.

Then go to program settings, click add, find Cities.exe (Cities Skyline) and select it. Beneath it, select 'High-Performance Nvidia Processor' again. Then hit apply.

This'll force Cities Skyline to run using your Nvidia GPU and fix the issue. Can confirm the game runs perfectly fine after these steps.

I assume there is a similar solution for other GPU's, but you'll have to figure that out on your own.

Maybe this'll help.

IT WOOOOOOORKEEED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1111111


And I'm not even using the bare minimum specs either. Running things smoothly on medium quality. Also, I've a 670M, not 260M as I stated earlier.

Thanks a lot man! I will make sure to brofist your posts regularly in 2016.

 

[Angthoron]

IT WOOOOOOORKEEED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1111111

And I'm not even using the bare minimum specs either. Running things smoothly on medium quality. Also, I've a 670M, not 260M as I stated earlier.

Thanks a lot man! I will make sure to brofist your posts regularly in 2016.

Great - thought that the horrible performance sounded fishy. Incorrect defaulting is a somewhat common issue with laptop GPUs, I think. Have fun!

 

[Eyestabber]

So here's a view of my very first city. So far I have 3 districts: Ground Zero (LD Residential and LD Commercial), Metro Park (HD Residential, HD Commercial and Offices) and Little Detroit (Industry, Power Plants, Garbage).

I am really loving the game so far. Dealing with trafic is not a brainless exercise of spamming the biggest road you can buy, but rather an exercise of looking for bottlenecks and coming up with solutions. Good stuff. Setting up buss routes is kinda annoying, tho, but I'm sure there's a mod out there to "fix" this. And the subway seem to be REALLY effective.

At first I was raising taxes left and right, thinking the consequences were rather negligible. And they are...up to a certain point! After reaching the 15% mark, people just started to pack their things and LEAVE. I had to lower taxes BELLOW my former comfort zone to get them to come back. Bottom line: if your taxes are keeping you afloat, don't be a greedy asshole.

All things considered, the game really IS what the new Simcity SHOULD HAVE BEEN. If anyone is still on the fence about buying this masterpiece, watch this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJb7C2OE9xM

And, ofc, THIS:

 

[Shannow]

Thanks a lot man! I will make sure to brofist your posts regularly in 2016.

Did it for you. (Cause Ang is my favourite staffer, too.)

 

[Zarniwoop]

IT WOOOOOOORKEEED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1111111

And I'm not even using the bare minimum specs either. Running things smoothly on medium quality. Also, I've a 670M, not 260M as I stated earlier.

Thanks a lot man! I will make sure to brofist your posts regularly in 2016.

Great - thought that the horrible performance sounded fishy. Incorrect defaulting is a somewhat common issue with laptop GPUs, I think. Have fun!

Only for laptops with that piece of shit scourge on the planet, Optimus. My internal Intel HD Graphix is permanently turned off.

I might need to try this one, since every other city builder since Simcity 4 has been utter shit.

 

[Eyestabber]

I might need to try this one, since every other city builder since Simcity 4 has been utter shit.

Amen to that.

 

[Whisky]

Skylines is great. Game itself is easy, very easy, but the options for designing cities makes it the best successor to Simcity 4. Road elevation options alone make the design potential increase tenfold.

 

[Zarniwoop]

So I caved and bought this, closest to I've done in a long time. And I am not disappointed. The game is GLORIOUS.

Finally something that can replace SC4 as the gold standard city builder and it only took 12 years. Why the fuck EA couldn't release something like this is beyond me. SC4 with better graphics in full 3D and proper bendy roads along with zones that work with them. I like the attention to detail, such as the Twitter twits, complete with massive hashtag abuse just like real life. Also the game is very modular and designed to be community expandable. While SC4 had lots of mods available it was p. finicky getting them installed and different things to work together.

It's not perfect though, for example I don't know how it will handle properly big cities, or if they are even possible. Things like a population of 7000 being called a "Small City" worries me. I'd think everything up to at least 50 000 would still be a town. So maybe the game doesn't even go up to the level of millions, which would be in line with all other modern city builders where you basically build a tiny town. I want my fuckhueg metropolis of millions like in Simcity 4. Landfills also fill up ridiculously fast just like SC4, and by the time you unlock the incinerator plant, you've already got 3-4 of them filled to the brim/

Also there are only "light" and "heavy" zones, but the heavy zones seem similar to SC4's Medium zones, judging from the buildings being placed there. Or do the massive skyscrapers only come later?