City builder fans fear for Cities: Skylines 2 performance after console delay and raised PC system requirements

Cities: Skylines 2 has just suffered a pretty lengthy delay on consoles alongside a revision to its PC system requirements, and city builder fans are fearful about what all this means for the game's performance.

You'll still be able to pick up Cities: Skylines 2 through Steam and the Microsoft Store - including PC Game Pass - on October 24, but the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S versions have been delayed to an unspecified date in spring 2024. "The additional time allows us to focus on matching the quality and performance across all platforms," developer Colossal Order says in a statement. "We'll share more updates on the console release window soon."

If you've already pre-ordered Cities: Skylines 2 on console, you'll get an automatic refund, though the devs say "it might take a few weeks" for those refunds to process. You can get more details in an official FAQ.

On top of the console delay, the PC system requirements have also been raised. You can see the full specs at the link above, but the minimum specs have increased from an i7 4790K / Ryzen 5 1600X CPU paired with a GTX 780 or RX 470 GPU to an i7-6700K / Ryzen 5 2600X paired with a GTX 970 or equivalent. The recommended specs have increased from an i7-9700K / Ryzen 5 5600X with an RTX 2080 Ti / RX 6800 XT to an i5 12600K / Ryzen 7 5800X with an RTX 3080 or equivalent.

The devs say these specs are for "FHD" - which presumably means a 1080p target. "Cities: Skylines 2 is a next-generation title and therefore has certain hardware requirements," the devs say of the more demanding specs. "The recommended specs were set when the game was still in development. After having done extensive testing with different hardware we made the decision to update the minimum/recommended specs for a better player experience."

All this news has players getting nervous about the game's performance. "I don’t want to be that guy but my fear from the beginning has been optimization," one Reddit user says. "Every video I’ve seen from the devs seems to have the game running sub 30 FPS, which is fine, but I assume they’re recording on their super computers. I have a laptop with 2060 and an underpowered CPU and I’m really worried that the game will slow to a chug early on."

"Although this sucks more for the people on console, we on PC should be worried as well," another commenter adds. "The recommended specs got raised, and I won't lie when I fear an unoptimized game."

"Unoptimized" has always been a bit of a dirty word in the gaming parlance, since it implies a degree of negligence that's generally pretty unfair to game developers. One of the more exciting parts about Cities: Skylines 2 in particular is that it's going to let you absolutely melt your machine, so the stringent CPU requirements - and the trouble getting it to run on consoles - aren't that surprising. It is, however, pretty wild to see a city-building game with such intense GPU requirements. He's hoping the results are worthwhile.

Our list of the best city-building games has something to hold you over until Cities: Skylines 2 arrives.