Cities Skylines 2 players furious over graphics downgrade after latest patch, but a fix has already been found

The latest update for Cities: Skylines 2 from Iceflake Studios (which took over from the original developers at Colossal Order) has sparked a wave of outrage in the community.

Instead of the expected improvements, players found that their cities had visually regressed to something out of the early 2000s. Before-and-after screenshots spread instantly across Reddit, with comparisons to GTA 3 and SimCity 2000 and despair from those who had poured thousands of hours into building their cities.

On paper, the patch sounded reasonable:

• shadow flickering fixes

• improved rendering at high settings

• fog adjustments

• night lighting tweaks

The key line in the patch notes – "disabling global illumination (GI) by default" – didn't raise any alarms at first.

But that was exactly what caused the disaster. GI was responsible for volumetric lighting, shadows, and the sense that buildings actually sit on the ground rather than being pasted on top of it. Without it, the entire cityscape became flat, overexposed, and shallow – felt most painfully at street level, where the game had previously come close to photorealism.

Professional developers and 3D artists in the comments were quick to diagnose the problem: Iceflake apparently disabled GI as a temporary workaround for shadow flickering while simultaneously cranking up ambient light intensity to compensate for the loss.

The result was predictable – white buildings literally glow, shadows have nearly vanished, and cities look "plastic," with no real contrast between light and dark. Some players also reported a drop in performance, despite the patch being marketed in part as an optimization update.

Opinions are divided, though most lean toward criticism. Some players admit they can now see layout details more clearly while building – previously, deep shadows obscured parts of the scenery.

Others are adamant – losing the sense of depth and atmosphere breaks half the point of the game, since Cities: Skylines 2 is not just a simulator but a visual experience.

"Simulation is at most 50% of the game. The rest is what we see."

Fortunately, a player by the name of PulverisNebula found a temporary solution through the developer panel – manually adjusting ambient light parameters restores depth and shadows almost entirely.

After the manual adjustment:

Those who applied the fix noted that the result actually looks better than the original – a brighter color palette combined with preserved shadows produces an optimal outcome. The downside is that the fix has to be applied manually on every launch through developer mode, which is obviously far from ideal.

Iceflake Studios has stated it is working on a proper fix. Given that the studio inherited the game in a difficult state from Colossal Order and has essentially been rebuilding it from the ground up, the community is largely taking a wait-and-see approach – hoping the next patch will restore global illumination to working order.