Act 3 - so many bugs, inconsistencies, crashes. The issues leak into the first two acts aswell, but act 3 is a real mess. The game really struggles to keep up with itself by that point.
You brought fidelity and Counter Strike up. Cities Skylines 2 is not exactly an 'impressive' game to look at, a more stylised approach is better for this type of game, it doesn't need to look real and you spend hardly any time zoomed in anyway to notice fine details. Just looking at graphics the game performs horrendously for what it looks like. I don't think Cities Skylines was a bad looking game and I don't think Cities Skylines 2 trading off more performance for not a big leap in 'fidelity' is worth it. I think Cities Skylines looks better and more refined myself honestly, the art style fit it really well.
I can demand whatever performance I want? From FPS I expect higher than 120 even, it's just what is better for that game. For builders 120 as a baseline minimum is not a big ask and I would still expect it drop into the 90s and 60s once you build your city/whatever out. If you are fine stuck at 60fps or lower with all your games then congratulations, but I expect more from games these days that aren't exactly pushing the bar in other areas. I don't think graphics make a game, but games have been at a point where they don't need to look any better for years now, so performance should be the focus.
This is so incorrect though. Nobody is expecting every game to run on every system at 4K@120Hz. CS has more fidelity and higher framerate than Cities, Rainbow Six Siege has even more fidelity and even more framerate than the both of them (talking like 600+ fps). Cities bottleneck should be CPU as it was in the first game. It should run very well to begin with and slow down the bigger and bigger the city gets, but that's not the case, it runs like ass from the get go. They built it from scratch, which is the best time to make sure it is performant during development, but in most cases devs seem to rush for feature complete instead, especially in the current environment of consumers accepting half-baked games.
It's not entitlement to expect more and it makes no sense to defend lackluster performance in games, if you don't care then just carry on enjoying it and let others ask for better. Again 1080p@120Hz is hardly an ask these days, any GPU/CPU from the last 8 years can handle that shit perfectly fine, hell even mobiles can run that now.
Games should be built to run well on today's hardware, not built to let future hardware take over. Incentivizing upgrades is just going to create more e-waste.
60fps is not plenty. You have never used higher have you? Low-end hardware these days is ridiculously powerful compared to what it used to be. Don't let poor optimisation in games condition you to thinking otherwise, they could all be running a lot better.
Anything with lots of camera panning is an objectively nicer experience at 120fps or higher.
Perhaps that is the case, but it also swings in the opposite direction of games being overpraised when there are glaring issues - see BG3. Bad press usually causes change a lot faster though and I find it refreshing when people actually leave negative reviews with their concerns. Although I agree there are the people who take it too far and just jump on a hate bandwagon, which ruins actual criticisms.
Don't downplay peoples valid concerns, we should strive for better performance in any game. Just because some people can put up with low framerates doesn't mean others should have to. I think 120fps at 1080p should be absolute minimum performance we should accept out of a game given the power of PCs these days.
It's an attempt at a quick cash grab by some publisher, abusing the LOTR IP and it's current resurgence in popularity. Epic Games only too. I wouldn't be surprised to hear later down the line how the devs have been on crunch to get a game out in a ridiculously short amount of time.
My guy, how do you deal it out, but fail to see it