Paradox’s Cities Skylines 2 performance issues are due to myriad issues with the recent city builder. However, some fans have discovered the unpolished simulator is currently rendering its human NPCs with full sets of teeth no matter what distance they’re at.
In most games, objects have multiple Level of Detail settings depending on how far they are from the camera. This means that anything from buildings to plants to humans will have increasingly worse models the further they are from the player’s view.
As pointed out on the Cities Skylines subreddit by user Hexcoder0, all NPCs in the game’s virtual cities have full sets of high-poly teeth at any given time. Even if they’re rendered at the edge of the game camera’s viewpoint, they’re still graced with a complete set of chompers you’ll never even see.
Fans have claimed that Cities Skylines 2 has extremely poor or nonexistent level of detail management. No matter how far away the camera is from an object, the game is still bringing in extremely expensive models into memory. While objects like vehicles appear to generate automatic LoDs depending on distance, other objects, including citizens do not.
The rampant performance woes for Cities Skylines 2 were announced by Paradox prior to launch, but fans are still understandably unhappy. Following release, the game has been bombarded with negative reviews on Steam for its horrid performance, wealth of bugs and a lack of content compared to the first game.
With the reveal that Cities Skylines 2 performance may be somewhat related to its poor level of detail management, fans are even more unhappy. While rapid framerates aren’t necessary for a city builder, and the genre itself is known for being very intensive, this news feels like a lack of care towards the community.
“Dude I work with high resolution 3D models in Blender that have less head polygons than that,” one fan said. “Who the f**k thought it was a good idea to make citizens that detailed?”
Cities Skylines 2 is available right now on Steam, Xbox and PlayStation 5 storefronts. The game’s performance woes are present on all platforms.