Cities Skylines 2 dev disputes claim that detailed NPC teeth impacts game performance

Responding to fan speculation online, Cities Skylines 2 developer Paradox Interactive has said high-poly teeth on NPC models are not the cause of the game’s rough performance.

Cities Skylines 2 is off to a rough start. Following developer Paradox Interactive’s pre-release announcement that “we have not achieved the benchmark we targeted,” players have noted overall poor performance from the long-awaited sequel.

Some online have speculated that the issues are in part caused by a strange, seemingly unnecessary detail: high poly teeth on the game’s many NPCs.

However, Paradox has pushed back on these claims in a statement that alludes to a future explanation for these highly-detailed teeth.

Paradox

Paradox says Cities Skylines 2 NPC teeth “will become relevant”

The concerns arose when players noticed just how detailed all the game’s NPC’s teeth are. Normally, a game would render something like this with little detail, especially when zoomed out, but Cities Skylines 2 keeps them detailed despite how unlikely it is anyone is going to spend that much time looking into their citizens’ mouths.

Considering how many characters can fill a city, many have speculated this has an effect on how the game runs.

But in a statement shared by Eurogamer, Paradox says “Citizen lifepath feature does not tie to citizen geometry and does not affect the performance figures of the characters.”

The dev goes on to say, “We know the characters require further work, as they are currently missing their [level of detail adjustments] which affect some parts of performance. We are working on bringing these to the game along general LODs improvements across all game assets.”

Paradox’s statement also claims there’s a reason for the hyper-detailed NPCs. “Characters feature a lot of details that, while seemingly unnecessary now, will become relevant in the future of the project,” it says. This implies some future content, perhaps DLC, that will somehow rely on high-poly NPC teeth.

Cities Skylines 2 clearly has a look of work to live up to fan expectations, but Paradox has promised to make improvements following the PC launch and ahead of the game’s Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5 release sometime next year.