Frustrations with Cities Skylines 2 are starting to boil over among city builder fans and content creators alike

It's been close to four months since the launch of Cities: Skylines 2, and the community is starting to run out of patience waiting for improvements. Ongoing frustrations with the game have been boiling for some time, and now that several of the game's biggest content creators are starting to air their issues in a major way, it seems like the community is reaching a tipping point.

Cities: Skylines 2 launched back in October, and was pretty much immediately raked over the coals for its abysmal performance issues. The severity of those issues varied from player to player, but it seemed not even the most powerful gaming rig was truly immune. Performance problems were certainly a big factor in the two-star Cities: Skylines 2 review I published for 12DOVE, and these sorts of problems continue to be the subject of most of the game's post-launch patches.

Those patches have gone a long way toward making the game playable, but as city builder fans have spent more time with the meat of the simulation, they've been finding some pretty substantial issues with the systems at the heart of the game, too. At one point Mariina Hallikainen, CEO of developer Colossal Order, wrote that "if you dislike the simulation, this game just might not be for you." An apology for that statement swiftly followed.

Hallikainen has been posting weekly dev blogs for some time now, most of which boil down to continued updates on development of further performance patches, with bits carved out here and there to address "a growing tendency of toxicity" in the community. None of that really indicated whether players could expect more substantial work on the game itself, and with little of substance to say, those blogs were set to go on pause as of last week.

You can go browse Reddit comments if you want to see the response to that last bit of dev communication, but you can probably guess the tone. Here are a few notable responses: 

• This reads like it was AI generated
• Welp. Just got my refund from Steam. I might try again in a few years when this leaves early access and [the devs] start being honest.
• I wish I had bought this game twice so I could leave two negative reviews on Steam
• I regret buying this game at launch. Can’t refund it now
• This has felt like a scam for a while now. CS2 should have been flagged as early access release.
• So the response to the anger, the demands for answers, and the requests for refunds… is to stop the dev diaries? And respond to none of the disillusioned customers? lol. lmao. I'm so done with this company.

Now, several notable content creators in the Cities: Skylines 2 community have independently started to offer big breakdowns of their critiques of the game, often accompanied by announcements of plans to end or scale back their coverage of CS2 until the game gets better.

Earlier this week, an extensive video came courtesy of YouTube channel Biffa Plays Indie Games. Biffa laid out a pile of reasoned critiques about the underlying gameplay systems. In short, he argued that while there may be plenty of robust simulations driving the behaviors of your city, it's impossible to see how those are reflected while you're playing. New traffic models, production chains, weather, and seasons all suffer from purporting to have effects on your city, with no way to tell what those effects are.

"I often say that I hope Cities: Skylines 2 has a No Man's Sky redemption arc," Biffa said. "No Man's Sky had huge potential. It promised a lot and under-delivered. What did they do? Well, Hello Games took the money and put it back into the game. They made it what it should have been on release, and more. They also took responsibility for the mistakes that they made, they showed humility, and they fixed it." Clearly, the hope is that Colossal Order can do the same with CS2.

This video in particular seems to have been a bit of an inflection point for the community, to the point where Colossal Order has responded directly to it on Twitter, saying: "Thank you for the constructive and concise feedback, it's very much appreciated. And thank you to everyone who commented and sent us the video."

"I think we're all reaching the same frustration point at the same time for different reasons," City Planner Plays, another popular YouTuber, writes on Reddit. "I'll chat about mine a bit tomorrow, but it's entirely different reasons and related to bugs. Don't get me wrong - I want the game to be great and love a lot about it, but lots I really hope gets improved. And because my issues impact every build I have ongoing, I have to discuss it."

That's ultimately the tone of these longer form critiques - quiet optimism that the game can get better mixed in with all the frustration about its current, prolonged state. But it doesn't seem that the community is too interested in sticking with Cities: Skylines 2 while waiting for these updates. As SteamDB shows, player counts for the sequel have quietly dipped below those of the original game, and while that's not an absolute marker of failure, it does indicate that there are currently greener pastures for city builder fans.

For its part, Colossal Order didn't actually give up on its regular dev blog series, with Hallikainen writing that "there was an overwhelming amount of feedback from you wanting to hear from us developers weekly." The new dev blog was a long overdue explainer about how the game's mysterious economic simulations actually work. It doesn't make it any less frustrating to not see this sort of information in-game, but it is at least the kind of clear communication the community is hoping to see more of.

There are still other options if you're looking to play the best city-building games out there.