Cities: Skylines 2 launched too early, says Paradox deputy CEO, but early access wouldn't have been a solution: 'A dev team that thinks they're going to have a nicer ride on an early access game, I think fool themselves'

Cities: Skylines 2 should have been one of Paradox's safest sequels. The blueprint for success already existed, developer Colossal Order had been iterating on the original for years, and the sizable fanbase was buzzing with excitement over the prospect of a new one. It didn't quite work out the way everyone was expecting. 

Performance issues, bugs, the wonkiness of the economic simulation, the absence of modding tools—Cities: Skylines 2 had a rough launch. And despite a lot of fixes and some notable updates, it's still missing things fans were expecting. Even now, more people are playing the original. 

«Cities—that's the one that bugs me most,» says Paradox deputy CEO Mattias Lilja, «because it's part of what we do.» Lilja's been chatting to me about Paradox's tumultuous year—tumultuous few years, really—which has seen it struggle with a variety of experiments outside of its wheelhouse. But Cities 2 is different, since it's very much one of Paradox's core games. 

«There were parts of the Cities 2 launch that I am not proud of,» he adds. «I am happy with how we responded to the feedback from the fans, just like we did with Victoria 3. We didn't exactly hit what we wanted, but we're working with the fans to remedy that over time.»

When it launched last year, the consensus among players and a lot of critics was that it was released far too early and felt like an early access game, at best. But Lilja says that Paradox was not pressuring Colossal Order to release it before it was ready. «We were in agreement with the devs,» he says. «It was not the publisher saying to the devs, 'We don't care, kick it out the door.' We were very in agreement that it was time to release it.»

For Lilja, the main oversight was performance, specifically on some combinations of powerful hardware. «We knew that the system requirements were going to be pretty high, but what we missed, which is absolutely our fault as a publisher, is that certain combinations of high level hardware also didn't