A recent question and answer session brought light to why Cities: Skylines 2 runs at 30FPS.
PC gaming is known for not having boundaries when it comes to modding, essentially allowing players to run games at higher framerates with more powerful setups. While this is the case, some developers still forcefully employ FPS caps in their games, making some gaming experiences quite rough around the edges. High framerates mean faster responses and better overall gaming, which is what makes it special to play on a PC. Disabling them for unknown reasons can be irritating, even if it’s a deliberate choice made by the developer.
The same could be said for the ever-so-popular city-building game’s next installment, Cities: Skylines 2, came out and people were baffled to play it with a fixed 30FPS cap. The required specs for the games were not that high, so what gives? This question was answered in a Reddit AMA recently with a very reasonable response from the development team. While the high framerates would benefit a lot of players in adventure or action titles, a simulation game does not necessarily need a full 60FPS experience.
Furthermore, when the resources start to pile up, it puts a lot of stress on the CPU, making it more unstable as people start building cities bigger and bigger. As you all know, the Cities: Skylines 2 delivered more than the debut game in terms of graphics, general gameplay style, and being able to build a bigger city, so it is reasonably filled with more content than before. Locking the framerate to a standard 30FPS puts the game into a better and more comfortable spot and does not cause any issues when entities start piling up in the city.
Developers, the Colossal Order also stated that by locking the gameplay to 30FPS, it gives a smooth way for the engine to do calculations, thus removing clunky gameplay and stutters that nobody wants. Although the small development team is working on improvements to Cities: Skylines 2, not being able to push the limits of your computer by allowing 60FPS or more is a bit of a disadvantage.
Being able to set any game to 60FPS feels very exclusive to the PC platform; this way, Cities: Skylines 2 sort of loses its charm. Let’s hope that the publisher, Paradox Interactive, will ask Colossal Order to try out the 60FPS addition so that people can enjoy their massive cities in a smooth framerate.
