• 14 Posts
  • 13 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • I mean, there are some nits I can pick.

    Places don’t feel as alive as they did in the original. The original was still deeply flawed, mind - but this goes even further than that.

    A great example - when there was a firetruck putting out a fire in the original, you could see little dudes squirting water. CS2 doesn’t even have guys come out; the fire just magically goes away. Multiply this by… everything.

    There’s no bikes (at least as far as I can tell), and the pedestrian path tooling seems to be a huge step back (the only dedicated pedestrian path I can find is technically considered a 2-lane road, but it doesn’t allow cars).

    The music has these cute little segments inbetween. But there’s only like… 5 of them. Once you hear all 5, you’ve heard everything and they start to grate. The other 2 “radio stations” don’t have the NPR segments, but they do have “ads”… and by “ads” they mean exactly 1 ad that you hear every time for “Spaz Electronics”. You can turn the ads off but I’d expect more than just a single one.

    Everything overreacts to anything you build. If you upgrade a road, it technically disconnects power + water + sewage for a hot second. Then you get a bunch of spam about “I don’t have any power!” blah blah even though the game was paused and they absolutely had power.

    It’s really hard to see what trips Cims are taking. The original let you see the paths Cims took throughout your city, which let you make informed decisions around public transport. Now you can just see… how much traffic there is? Which doesn’t tell you anything about where Cims are going, just where you have bottlenecks. It very much encourages a “just 1 more lane, bro” kind of thinking.

    Not having a wide variety of public transport options is a bummer. It feels like they left some stuff out for a future DLC (e.g. monorails).

    There’s no light shining from the camera at nighttime, so it can get actually literally pitch black at night. Like “turn off the day/night cycle because this is unplayable” levels of dark. A subtle light coming from the camera when not in photo mode would’ve done wonders.

    The zoning information is really hard to read. I can’t tell what areas I have zoned with something else because it colors areas from other zones as white and unzoned areas as clear… on a mostly white background. It’s really really hard to tell at-a-glance what needs to still be zoned in some cases.

    The more I play it, the more it feels like CS1 is the sequel and CS2 is the original. There’s just so much that’s not done as well or that’s simply not there. The stuff they added is cool, sure… but like, I wish it was additive on top of what we had before, and not “back at square one”. It just makes me want to play the original.









  • Hey, that happened to me, too!

    I got scheduled for a mandatory meeting with 1 hour notice. During lunch.

    I asked my boss what it was. He didn’t know either. I joked that it was us being shut down.

    Sure enough, 1 hour later we were both writing LinkedIn recommendations and helping each other find jobs after it was announced that our whole studio was being shut down by corporate and myself plus all my coworkers were all now jobless.




  • Lol. Lmao even.

    The sequence of steps you need to see this stuff is absolutely bonkers. Like, 99% of players will never see this one voice line naturally.

    Unless “doing things in the game triggers voice lines” is somehow a spoiler now? Spoiler: when you beat this game, the credits roll showing who made the game!

    The title reveals nothing other than “hey there’s a sun ray that can nuke someone.” It doesn’t say anything about the nature of the ray, where it is, how to activate it, or anything. In fact, the thing mentioned in the title is such a niche thing in a niche location that most people will miss it, and can only be activated if you do this niche sidequest in a very specific way. You pretty much have to try to do it (assuming you even discover it in the first place - again, it’s easily missable).

    On top of that, this is something you can trigger within the first half-hour of the game if you tried. It’s firmly in Act 1. It has nothing to do with the story, it’s just a place you can find early on.

    Should I mention that this same act of the game has a wizard’s tower in it? Oh, no! Spoilers! A fantasy DnD game has a wizard tower! Hopefully there are no voice lines in there!











  • So the problem is that white noise doesn’t compress very easily.

    Compression algorithms are generally designed to reduce noise; if you have something that’s extremely noisy it’s really hard to compress because that’s not what the algorithms were designed to do.

    This means that these podcasts take up more space, which means they use more bandwidth than an equivalent non-white-noise solution.

    A middle ground would be banning these “podcasts” and then having a white noise generator built into the app. The white noise generator would run locally on your device (very easy to make white noise) and wouldn’t cost any bandwidth at all.