It Doesn't Look Like Cities Skylines 2 Will Run Well on Steam Deck

Cities Skylines has been one of the best city-building management games I have played in recent years. It feels like this is what SimCity should be in this modern age, and it is still thriving thanks to the modding tools the developers put in and the diverse content the community releases. So, when Cities Skylines 2 was announced, I was extremely excited for the next iteration of this awesome series. And, while I am still pumped, it doesn't look like it will be great to play on the Steam Deck.

There are two reasons I am not optimistic about how it will run: performance issues and lack of controller support.

Last week, Paradox Interactive, the publisher of the game, changed the minimum requirements for the game, bumping the GPU requirement to a Nvidia GTX 970 and the CPU to a Ryzen 5 2600x. Regarding this, Paradox posted an update on Steam about the performance. They say the game didn't meet the targeted benchmarks, and with this being a long-term project, it will be released anyway. There could be some improvements, but they wanted to manage expectations.

This is a big issue as city-management games tend to have an issue on the Steam Deck. While they can start easy to run, as the city grows and there are lots of people moving around, systems being implemented, and buildings being constructed, the bottlenecks start to appear. Cities Skylines would regularly run out of memory as the game progressed, and I can't imagine how bad it will get in Cities Skylines 2 with the higher requirements.

Then, we have controller support. Playing city-building management games like this can be extremely hard using a controller, and without full support, building a control scheme for the community can feel quite awkward. Now, this hopefully won't be permanent since Cities Skylines 2 is releasing on consoles, but that won't be until the middle of next year. Until then, we are a bit stuck with controlling the game.

While a lot of people will undoubtedly try the game on the Deck, myself included, I don't have a lot of faith that this will be a good game to play on the device. The Steam Deck can do a lot of things, but the outlook doesn't look good for Cities Skylines 2.

If you still want to get the game, you can purchase it now on multiple storefronts, including:

• Steam - $49.99
• Fanatical - $43.49
• Gamebillet - $42.37
• Humble - $42.49 (depending on Humble Choice subscription)

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