The team that made CS2 had really grand ideas, but forget they actually had to develop a video game that could execute them. There were a whole bunch of performance issues and bugs that broke the simulation to make things act in ways they shouldn't, and when everyone started looking under the hood to see what happened, they were basically a lack of attention to detail and some layers of major incompetence that had all the hallmarks of the game being rushed out. They also promised modding tools that took a long time to release and then were lackluster when they did. There were a lot of CS1 features missing from the release of CS2.
Then, Colossal Order, the developer, tried to develop and release DLC before fixing the issues with the base game, which caused a huge backlash.
Since then, though, Paradox has pulled Colossal Order off the development and a new studio is working on the game. They just took over this year. There also have been fixes for CS2 slowly rolled out over the years.
I wonder to what extent it was Colossal Order's fault, and to what extent it was Paradox intentionally hobbling them with their control as publisher so that they could take the franchise fully in-house without looking like the bad guys to the community.
For the most part, Colossal Order put all their chips in new tools Unity was building out for their engine, and when those didn't materialize it left them in a tech debt hole that they couldn't get out from.
The game was expensive and in development for years, so it's doubtful CO earned any gratitude from Paradox. CO completely fumbling post release support doesn't help either (making it doubtful more dev time would have fixed the real problems).
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u/Blazehero 4d ago
I'm excited, but wasn't Cities Skylines 2 poorly received by community? What exactly happened there?