Games

I haven't been following the issue or played the game, but to me, it sounds like they could probably put in short-term fixes for some of that -- if imperfectly -- without a lot of trouble.

• I don't know how much time the typical player spends zoomed in in the game, but if it's like C:S1, I imagine that the answer might be "not very much". Frankly, I have a number of games where the developers have spent time modeling and building rendering for stuff that I never look at, because I'm spending time looking at the high-level overview. Cold Waters, a submarine sim, could completely eliminate the 3D rendering portion of the game, all of the 3d models, and it'd have little to no impact on how I play the game, because the only thing that particularly matters for playing the game is a 2d sensor plot and some insets showing numerical data. This is what I'm virtually always seeing when playing the game, whereas the promo screenshots and video mostly show the 3D views. I don't know what the situation is for C:S2, but frankly, I didn't really ever pay attention to individual characters in C:S1; I'll only click on a person to get an idea of what many people in the city might be experiencing with travel difficulties. I don't really care what they look like. It's vaguely-nice to have little specks crawling around, makes the city look a little more realistic and maybe gives some idea of where congestion might be, but it honestly doesn't matter that much, because I'm looking at the city from high altitude. I suspect that C:S2 would be completely playable if they at least had the option to render every drawn character as an untextured rectangular solid, maybe drawing the closest one or two if zoomed in.

• I don't care much about three effects (depth-of-field, motion blur, and volumetric effects) that he cited as having poor performance (on his system, things which he said disabling caused rendering the main menu to go from under 10 FPS to about 90 FPS). Frankly, the depth-of-field blur in C:S1 I turned off because I didn't like the look of it. Just turning those off by default, at least on lower-end systems, probably makes sense and shouldn't be hard.

• Putting in lower definition models is a technically-straightforward approach, though it's going to cost modeler time. But if you are having your system run at 10FPS, that's unplayable. I'd rather have a game that has buildings that are just untextured, opaque, flat polygonal boxes in the distance -- especially if they intend to keep working on the game, since "ugly but playable" is preferable to "unplayable but pretty". That's one LOD level, and I imagine that the engine shouldn't have any problem with that.

As a stopgap fix, I'd personally rather have that and then have patches go in over time to prettify things than to be running sluggishly and waiting for patches to improve performance. Plus, benefit is that you at least have the option to run the game on a very low-end system. Maybe someone wants to run the thing on a laptop without a discrete GPU or something.

Now, is that acceptable to other players? I don't know. Maybe some people are really upset if they get a game that has pretty screenshots and on their system, it instead has stuff on par with placeholder assets. But I can say that for a city simulator, I'd definitely rather have something that runs smoothly than something flashy. For me, the interesting bit of a city simulator isn't sitting there admiring the view down a street, but in figuring out how various mechanics interact with each other.

When I look at screenshots of the game, they seem to usually be at street level, looking down the thing. And yeah, it's all highly-detailed and such, but that's not how I've ever played a city simulator.