Quick note: I'm posting this and future CO Word of the Week on behalf of Mariina.
"Hi Everyone, welcome to our little weekly update, CO Word of the Week, where we share what Colossal Order is doing right now, and what you can expect for Cities: Skylines II as a result.
CO Word of the Week originally ran from March 2016 until early 2018 and was mainly written by me, Mariina, the CEO of Colossal Order, but we also had some other team members as guest authors every once in a while so I can’t take all the credit. Now, in the name of transparency, it’s time to dig this old concept from the toolbox and start sharing!
To write this very first Word of the Week (please feel free to suggest an abbreviation) I needed to go back to the source. I searched the Cities: Skylines forum for the original posts and was extremely happy to find the very first one:
Hi everyone! I'm Mariina or better known here on the forum as co_martsu. I am the ceo of Colossal Order, the developer of Cities: Skylines. We work together with our publisher Paradox Interactive to bringing you the best city builder ever made and the quest toward that goal continues. Big part of developing the game further is communication with the players and the community. We have been active in reading the feedback but haven't had as much time to comment as we would have hoped for. Therefore the idea is that I will be writing an update on a semiregular basis on what Colossal Order is up to so that you players can hear first hand what is going on in the development of Cities: Skylines. Disclaimer: Some things are secret and I will try not to get assassinated by the Paradox marketing department so we'll keep this strictly to the points I'm allowed to talk about. I understand you probably don't value my life as much as I do, but we'll make this work, I'm sure!
The mission remains the same: We want to bring you the best city builder ever made!
And as I have grown older I am no longer afraid of the marketing department so no holding back.
As you may have noticed Cities: Skylines II was released last week and we are happy the game is finally out! However, the launch was overshadowed by technical issues which caused disappointment, and rightfully so. We are happy to see that many players do enjoy the game and for those who are currently unable to play, I want you to know that we are working on a number of fixes and improvements to address your reports.
The first hotfix patch was quick to roll out on Steam last week and this morning the patch for Microsoft Store and Game Pass finally made it live. We will have to see how we can speed up the patching process so we don’t have players waiting for these important fixes longer than necessary. The patch included optimization for LODs, or Level of Detail, which means that the game renders fewer details when the camera is far away from the object. Finding optimal LOD levels is a balancing act between visual fidelity and performance, and we’ll be addressing this in future patches. Yes, including the characters and their teeth! We also identified some offenders such as the depth of field, global illumination, and fog, all now tweaked for improved performance. Additionally, the patch included fixes for a few crash bugs and stutter cases.
This week we will continue to go through the forum reports and fix the most urgent issues. The work on the assets and LODs continues, but it’s a task spanning over a longer period of time as there are quite a few different types of assets needing special attention. On top of the performance work, we are looking into gameplay issues you have reported. We have fixes being tested for education, where college/university eligibility is not shown correctly in the UI, and for trading, where it looks like the citizens are not consuming all different commercial types correctly resulting in not enough customers for the local business. We are currently investigating a garbage problem and it seems that some citizens are abandoning their dogs resulting in a huge dog pack just stranded in the city. Not cool, citizens, not cool at all.
The performance improvements and bug fixes take top priority until we have reached a level we are satisfied with. All the performance improvements will benefit the development of the console platforms and we hope to bring the game to Xbox Series X/S and PS5 as soon as possible!
I want to thank everyone for the reports, they’re very helpful and we appreciate you taking the time to provide us with the information we need. We will go through all of the reports as fast as we can. If you are experiencing a crash or performance issue please create a report on our support forum found here: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/forums/cities-skylines-2-bug-reports.1162/
I will be back next week to give you an update on how the work is progressing. Until then, thank you to everyone for the patience and support, it means a lot to us.
Sincerely,
Mariina"