Cities: Skylines from Colossal Order

After watching a number of Let's Plays this still looks like something I'd really enjoy, so I went ahead and preordered.

It helps that I happened to have $30 sitting in my Steam wallet from a gift card.

And I'll just go ahead and get this part over with :

BadKen wrote:

Chump!

So is there a verdict yet on large cities?

Yonder wrote:
kexx wrote:

Is it Tuesday yet?

Let me introduce you to a new game: Drink until it's Tuesday!

G'yah!! I want this game now!!! And all of it's DLC components!!

WizKid wrote:

So is there a verdict yet on large cities?

Not yet, from what I've seen. Quill did manage to get his city to 120K today. As D-Man mentioned, Quill is currently trying to get to 200K, so maybe he'll get there (or higher) tomorrow.

[edit]

I found a streamer names KingKongor who said he's been streaming for over 16 hours straight and just reached 155K. He's zipping around the map, zoomed in and out, and the game is running very smooth, so there's that.

Apparently, this here be the game manual...

WizKid wrote:

So is there a verdict yet on large cities?

What specifically are you asking?

Here is 105k city with a ton of skyscrapers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tm2P...

Granath wrote:
WizKid wrote:

So is there a verdict yet on large cities?

What specifically are you asking?

Framerate. Game breaking bugs like traffic stop working properly.

FeralMonkey wrote:

And I'll just go ahead and get this part over with :

BadKen wrote:

Chump!

I too am on Team Chump.

So if I was inclined to preorder this where would be the best place to buy it and still get a Steam key?

BadKen response in 3... 2... 1...

Tom Chick has quite the reaction to Chirper, naming it the Worst Videogame Character of All Time.

I get what the developers are going for. The idea is that this is an interesting way to represent the mood of the people, to communicate information about a population, to express social data. To tell me what’s trending, if you will. It’s not a new concept in citybuilders. From Simcity to Tropico, games that model individual citizens have shared with me their thoughts as a combination of useful information and flavor. My favorite example is RollerCoaster Tycoon, where an enthusiastic child might tell me a ride I’ve designed is “very good value”. Thank you, small child with weird grammar, for one of the hundred things that make me smile in that series. It’s a cute bright point of data, an animated info pixel in the pointillism of gameplay.

But modeling social media and then cramming it with pointless filler as if it were real social media is not a good idea. It’s like games in which you have to read people’s email on computer terminals that include spam among that email. What are you thinking, game writers? Fake spam? As if there’s anything funny to be done with spam? You’re not funny! Get off the stage! Hire better writers to do your fake emails!

Fortunately, Cities: Skylines is otherwise shaping up to be a solid enough city builder, with a smooth graphics engine, a metagame for unlocking unique structures, and enough sprawl to shame Maxis. Here’s hoping for a patch that let’s me silence Fake Twitter Bird. By which I mean “dispatch with extreme violence”.

One of the things that convinced me to pull the trigger is the fact that the biggest complaint so far is the chirpy bird. I mean, that's gotta be the *smallest* "big flaw" in a game I've seen in, well, years. That and the preview gameplay I've seen several hours of tells me I'm going to be happy with this as it is.

The fact that he'd dedicate three paragraphs to berating Chirper is indicative of why I consider Tom Chick one of the Worst Video Game Reviewers of All Time.

Sorry if I'm offending any fans, but I find him a pretentious toolbag.

And yes, Robear, if Chirper is the worst concern, this will be one of the greatest games "of all time".

He's not reviewing the game here...

Chirpy should be a toggle-able option. I actually kinda like it, but I can see where after a while it'll get old and possibly annoying.

Robear wrote:

One of the things that convinced me to pull the trigger is the fact that the biggest complaint so far is the chirpy bird. I mean, that's gotta be the *smallest* "big flaw" in a game I've seen in, well, years. That and the preview gameplay I've seen several hours of tells me I'm going to be happy with this as it is.

I feel the same way, but still am going to wait for final reviews. And even then, might have to wait a while just due to my budget. This game should have a long tail if it's solid, so I'm not worried.

As a PC gamer, the first thing I always do when I launch a new game for the first time is check the options menu. The first thing I'm going to do in the options menu for C:S is disable that damn Fake Twitter Bird.

Ruminating on why I am a chump but avoided Sim City 5 or whatever it was called:

* I love city builders as a genre.
* I have about as much information about Cities Skylines as I did on Sim City 5. Both sets of information this close to release are/were very positive.
* Cities Skylines is published by one of my favorite devs. Sim City 5 is published by a publisher I am neutral at best about. Part of that is trust that problems at launch (which there will be, probability approaching certainty) will get fixed. Paradox has a pretty good track record in this regard, EA has an uneven (at best) one.
* Cities Skylines is not always online, Sim City 5 is. I normally don't care one way or the other about this but for a city builder I guess I do.
* Cities Skylines is $30, Sim City 5 was $60 at launch IIRC. I am not normally all that sensitive to price but I guess I am/was for this type of game.
* EA decided to not make Sim City 5 available on Steam. That is fine, they can do what they want with their game. However, I would be fooling myself if that was not a decision point for not buying it. If it came out and ended up being the best thing since Sim City 4, I would have had no problem buying it on Origin and adding it to Steam. That it was not well received actually kept me from making a mistake had it actually been on Steam. So thanks EA! Cities Skylines on Steam made executing my pre-order decision almost a no-brainer, based on everything else, while buying somewhere else would have given me at least pause (yes I am lazy).

I guess it came down to publisher trust + cost + easy availability.

MeatMan wrote:

As a PC gamer, the first thing I always do when I launch a new game for the first time is check the options menu. The first thing I'm going to do in the options menu for C:S is disable that damn Fake Twitter Bird.

That's the problem. It can't be disabled. Not even by mods. My concern is that if Colossal Order can leave such a big, glaring, awful piece of design front and center (literally!) and even defend it from the complaints of interested players, what other horrible feats of misguided design are lurking in the depths of the game? Maybe it's just a stray detail. If so, I'll happily buy the game later.

I never agree with Tom Chick about anything, but I agree with him about this.

And all you preorderers are still chumps (no, I am not singling you out, tboon, you are a fine person... and a chump). The game is not going anywhere. Congratulations, you have been trained by publishers to dance for their benefit. Dance, monkeys, dance!

garion333 wrote:

He's not reviewing the game here...

No. He is just being his usual over-reactional, irrational and pretentious self.

That Twitter bird alone is one of he major reasons I won't be touching this game for quite a while. I was on the fence about picking this up too.

No! No compromise!
Death to evil blue bird! It's watching me! It's watching me!

BadKen wrote:
MeatMan wrote:

As a PC gamer, the first thing I always do when I launch a new game for the first time is check the options menu. The first thing I'm going to do in the options menu for C:S is disable that damn Fake Twitter Bird.

That's the problem. It can't be disabled.

You and I both know the extent to which the devs have said they're allowing us to disable Fake Twitter Bird's functionality, because we both commented on it a couple pages back, when the link to the official forum post was given. Knowing that the annoying parts can be disabled (the pop-ups and the accompanying sound) and that there will just be the small, static image of the bird at the top of the screen is an acceptable compromise for me, because I know I'll be able to ignore it. And just because the devs say that the bird can't be fully removed by mods sure as hell doesn't mean that a modder won't figure out how to do it.

[edit]

I also find it very encouraging that Paradox not only lifted the embargo for streamers and LPers a full week before release, but that they apparently have sent the game to a significant number of people. As I type this, there are 17 people streaming it on Twitch and almost 44,000 people watching them, making it the 5th-most-watched game at the moment, behind LoL, CS:GO, Minecraft, and DOTA 2. That's not to mention the total views of however many LP videos are on Youtube already.

Surely someone will be able to replace the visible bird with something less... garish, even if the rest of it's functionality remains untouched/

BadKen wrote:

That's the problem. It can't be disabled. Not even by mods. My concern is that if Colossal Order can leave such a big, glaring, awful piece of design front and center (literally!) and even defend it from the complaints of interested players, what other horrible feats of misguided design are lurking in the depths of the game? Maybe it's just a stray detail. If so, I'll happily buy the game later.

I never agree with Tom Chick about anything, but I agree with him about this.

And all you preorderers are still chumps (no, I am not singling you out, tboon, you are a fine person... and a chump). The game is not going anywhere. Congratulations, you have been trained by publishers to dance for their benefit. Dance, monkeys, dance!

Overreact much?

I am not too worried about 1 inch of my 24" screen being taken up by a bird. I have watched quite a few hours of Let's Plays and after about 30 seconds I do not even see it anymore. There have been far worse UI designs in my 40+ years of gaming.

As for being a "chump" (a little outside the Code of Conduct for these boards), I preordered the game for both me and my son. Why? Because I have seen enough to know I will like it and I received a decent discount.

In addition, I have no problem supporting developers who are open and honest in their development cycle. Many games are being released in Early Access so under-baked they are not much more than tech demos and prototypes. They are not even true alphas. Too many games are released with a "Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain" mentality. Limited reviews, limited Let's Plays, limited access (or none at all) before the game is ultimately released. After all, since the code is not final the developer runs the risk of users seeing bugs that are going to be fixed in the gold version - or they are just trying to make a quick buck on a bad game before the negativity pours in. See games like Beyond Earth or Cities XXL for recent examples of this.

But CO is doing this right. They have allowed pretty massive and fully open access to the game. They have jumped into Let's Plays to answer live questions and criticism. They have been up front about their development blogs, DCL strategy and other aspects about the game. So I am going to reward CO/Paradox with my money because I see this as a low-risk purchase and hopefully the large number of preorders (most preordered game in Paradox history) encourages other developers to adopt this release approach.

Please don't tie my reaction to the dumb bird to my reaction to preorders. They are not related.

If you can overlook the bird, more power to you. I can't. Waching previews, my eye is drawn to it. It is distracting, and for no good reason. There are plenty of ways they could have communicated the information in the faux tweets.

Preorders are another matter entirely. Once upon a time there was no such thing as a preorder. We bought games when they were released. Then publishers and Gamestop figured out a way they could pad their opening week sales numbers. Preorders are useful for publishers and game stores because they help gauge interest in a game, and help sell-in numbers more closely match sell-through. Preorders are of no benefit to players, except in such extreme obnoxious circumstances as cases where, for example, Gamestop won't even let you buy a game unless you preorder it.

Now games are no longer built to last. They are built to sell as many units as possible on the opening week. This is not to help the developer, or even more important, the player. It is only to help the publisher, who, in an ideal (to them) world, would ship a game, rake in the first week profits, then ship another game the next week, forgetting the first game ever existed.

Publishers have gone so far as to make developers create preorder bonus items and game features to encourage players to pad the first week sales numbers even more. Preorders also make release dates more firm, which is actually bad for developers. Developers should have the option of spending more time on a title if last minute problems are found. Because first-week sales are so important, now, though, developers are contractually obligated to meet their release dates or suffer serious financial penalties. This is very bad in a software development environment, because in software, sometimes the unforseen happens. There are things you just can't plan for in advance. That doesn't matter, though. Sometimes things get fixed post-release. Sometimes it takes months - sometimes they don't get fixed at all, because the publisher did not budget enough for post-release support.

In a world of digital game delivery, preorders make even less sense, because there is no such thing as "sell-in" vs "sell-through." Publishers sell every copy they "ship." So the equation is tilted even more strongly in favor of the publishers, and favors the players even less. In some cases, online stores won't even allow refunds for preordered items - the sales are treated as final, even though the customer receives nothing until the game has shipped.

2014 had many, many high profile release failures, which shined a light on a lot of these problems. As players and responsible consumers, we should pay attention to those failures and refuse to support a system that rewards fast-buck financial incentives at the expense of flexible and reliable software development, post-release support, and respect for customers.

That is why I have started calling people who preorder games "chumps."

BadKen wrote:

That is why I have started calling people who preorder games "chumps."

I have to agree with the intern here, though, that calling people "chumps" is a (mild) personal insult that's discouraged by the COC. I would certainly appreciate it if you kept the chump talk to the controversy forums where it belongs. When I go there, I expect to get insulted and assaulted by people with different opinions.

BadKen wrote:

Now games are no longer built to last. They are built to sell as many units as possible on the opening week. This is not to help the developer, or even more important, the player. It is only to help the publisher, who, in an ideal (to them) world, would ship a game, rake in the first week profits, then ship another game the next week, forgetting the first game ever existed.

While this may unfortunately be true for most publishers, there are still a few that are making their money off of building a reputation for long-tail, well-supported products. Paradox is one of those, so if someone is going to preorder a Paradox game to get a small discount in exchange for what basically amounts to a vote of confidence, I can't harsh on them for it. Hell, I preordered Europa Universalis IV (and each of its expansions when preorder discounts are offered) for precisely this reason. Paradox hasn't let me down yet; sure, they've had some bugs to squash at times, but their in-house developers are hardworking and, IMO, trustworthy.

In general though, I do agree with you; preorders (especially when we're talking about products for which scarcity is not a factor) are bad for the consumer and good for the publisher.

mateofalcone wrote:

I would certainly appreciate it if you kept the chump talk to the controversy forums where it belongs. When I go there, I expect to get insulted and assaulted by people with different opinions.

Mateo may be ugly, smelly, and possessed of a rancorous temperament, but he has a point!

I thought he was being funny with the "chump" stuff.

But I think a lot of BKs reasons are mitigated against by the fact that they've disseminated the pre-release far and wide. Not something you do with a game that's tested out badly.

I don't mind being a chump. I like preorders. I like early access and Kickstarter too. I like options. I am an Option Chump.