No, Cities: Skylines 2’s wonky performance isn’t because it’s rendering everyone’s teeth, insists Paradox

Cities: Skylines 2 has got off to a bit of a rough, with many players complaining of performance issues following this week’s launch on PC. But while publisher Paradox has been forthright in acknowledging these problems (even prior to launch, somewhat unconventionally), it now wants to make it absolutely clear that, no, technical issues aren’t because the game is trying to render the teeth of every single person in your city.

All this apparently started with a post on the Cities: Skylines subreddit in which one Hexcoder0 claimed the game was rendering individual teeth with no LOD (level of detail) adjustments, even when viewed from far away. They even threw together a bit of a collage feature a screenshot, a couple of character meshes, and, vitally, two red circles, to illustrate their claim.

Two days later, Paradox – presumably in some kind of damage limitation frenzy given the not exactly glittering reception the game has received – has responded by firing a statement out to press drawing attention to the “bizarre story” and denying Molargate is true.

“Citizen lifepath feature does not tie to citizen geometry and does not affect the performance figures of the characters,” Paradox wrote. “We know the characters require further work, as they are currently missing their LODs which affect some parts of performance. We are working on bringing these to the game along general LODs improvements across all game assets.”

Paradox added that, “Characters feature a lot of details that, while seemingly unnecessary now, will become relevant in the future of the project.”

The publisher’s continuing admission that Cities: Skylines 2 is still far from being in an ideal state doesn’t do much to assuage suspicions the game was unceremoniously booted out onto PC way before it was ready to go – especially given that the Xbox Series X/S and PS5 releases have been delayed into next year. Still, Paradox and developer Colossal Order have pledged to improve things, and a first performance patch is already out in the wild.