Honestly, that's not an issue if you can scale down.
I don't understand why people assume their hardware should be able to max everything out. The game should obviously target current consumer hardware, otherwise they'll have nobody to sell it to, but there's absolutely nothing wrong with allowing the engine to run with settings current hardware can't handle - but newer hardware in the future will.
If you buy your hardware to masturbate over the thought of setting the slides to "ultra" you might be disappointed. If you buy your hardware to game, turn the settings down and go be happy.
I have never in my 20 years of gaming not had to make some sacrifices even with new hardware. The only time I can max out all sliders is when a game is already 5 or more years old.
Yup even if you get top of the line everything PC games usually aren't meant to be maxed out settings at launch. A high resolution really takes a toll on the hardware too. Of course not every game is like this but for the most part they don't want the games to look outdated after two years. It's always fun revisiting games after a PC upgrade because of this. Though since even the devs or publisher said that they didn't hit performance targets this is noticably worse performance, least from all the articles I've seen. I enjoyed the first city skylines except the traffic so am looking forward to buying when it gets optimized.
The original cities skylines had atrocious performance after a certain city size as well, especially on hardware available at launch. Hopefully they can deliver on better performance over the next few months, I expect it to improve before they do their console release.
This is a good take. If I can play, maybe high settings, on my 1440p monitor I'll be happy. I don't need ultra day one. I'm excited for a refreshed city builder, I have hundreds of hours in the first one and I'm excited to see the improvements.
Yeah, I've always had hardware that's a step or two below top of the line for its generation. I had to go through two upgrade cycles before I could max out Far Cry. I had to buy more RAM to turn up the draw distance in Mafia. Hell, I remember my computer chugging when I built too many units in C&C Tiberian Sun...
there’s absolutely nothing wrong with allowing the engine to run with settings current hardware can’t handle
Sure, there's nothing inherently wrong with that, but if you want your product to sell and be successful, the period shortly after release date is where most of your sales will happen. If nobody can run your game at that time, you could lose 90% of the lifetime sales you're likely to make. It would make more sense to release a slightly pared-down version of the game that actually runs well now and improve it in the short-to-medium term with updates. Or, alternatively, release it when it can actually run well on commonly-used hardware.