Cities Skylines 2 – release time, preload, and recommended specs

23 October 2023 , 10:26

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Cities: Skylines 2 comes out on Tuesday, October 24 on PC, with the console versions coming in 2024 (Image: Paradox Interactive)

Cities: Skylines 2 is arriving on PC later this week, with a console launch set for 2024. Here's the exact time you can jump into the PC version.

Cities: Skylines 2 – as the name implies – is the follow-up to the critically acclaimed city building title Cities: Skylines. In an era where the last SimCity was EA's disastrous 2013 reboot, 2015's Cities: Skylines was a breath of fresh air; now, eight years later Cities: Skylines 2 is almost here – on PC at least, Xbox and PS5 players will have to wait until 2024. The game is launching day one on Xbox Game Pass as part of the October 2023 Xbox Game Pass lineup, so subscribers on PC will be able to jump in free of charge.

Cities Skylines 2 is set to be a fairly demanding title, with the game's developers even admitting via the official Cities: Skylines 2 forums that the performance at launch isn't up to the standards the team had hoped. While this level of transparency is well appreciated, it may be worth erring on the side of caution before pre-ordering the game.

Cities: Skylines 2 release time and preloads

Cities: Skylines 2 PC release time is Tuesday, October 24 at 5pm BST / 12pm EDT / 9am PDT. That is according to the page for the game on the Xbox PC app, and the Steam store page. Sometimes Steam and Xbox will take a couple of minutes before the game actually becomes accessible as the servers update, so if your copy doesn't work right away, don't worry.

Cities: Skylines 2 preload is available now on the Xbox Game Pass PC app and requires 56.76GB of disk space. However, those of you who have pre-ordered the game on Steam will sadly have to wait until the launch of the game to start downloading.

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Cities: Skylines 2 PC requirements

The following are the minimum Cities: Skylines 2 minimum PC requirements, as posted on the game's Steam page:

• Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
• OS: Windows 10 Home 64 Bit
• Processor: Intel Core i7-6700K | AMD Ryzen 5 2600X
• Memory: 8GB Ram
• Graphics: Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 (4GB) | AMD Radeon RX 480 (8GB)
• Storage: 60GB available space

The following are the recommended Cities: Skylines 2 PC requirements, as posted on the game's Steam page:

Again, Cities: Skylines 2 will have some performance issues at launch according to the developers, so it may be worth waiting until performance patches have been released, or picking it up on Xbox Game Pass to see if your PC can handle it.

Scott McCrae