Three weeks?
Fuuu …
Life. Over. :/
EUIII, CKII, and VicII were all huge improvements over their predecessors (well VicII less so). The way Paradox is going I’m really excited for EUIV. Their recent track record has me wanting a Rome II, even though the first one was pretty underwhelming.
Yeah, I’ve broken my long standing policy of never buying a Paradox game at release and pre-ordered this one. The horrible mess that was EU3 at launch is the reason I implemented it in the first place; now, six years later, EU4 is causing me to break it. Don’t disappoint, me Paradox! You’ve made great strides in quality of late!
EU2’s launch was even worse than EU3. Looking back, EU2 took a good 6 months to a year to actually get up to snuff.
EU3 took until the first expansion, IMO.
Regardless, I’m totally in day one on EU4. I don’t know if it’s separate internal Paradox teams or what but CK2 crossed over into a real sweet spot of awesomeness than one of their previous games reached and it has massively ramped my expectations for EU4 :)
Paradox has really changed their processes and matured as a developer, IMO. I think HOI3 was a wake-up call to them with the game releasing in such a state (as an aside, I find it to be a terrific game now with all the expansions), at least that’s when they said they were putting measures in place to turn things around. Since then they’ve made a concerted effort towards quality and polish and it shows in both the quality of their releases (Victoria 2 was the first time they hired a company to do technical QA for instance) as well as user experience improvements with the interface and things like that.
After getting used to the improved interface and mechanics of CK2 it’s hard to go back to EU3, despite it being my favorite in terms of game style / setting. I’ve been wanting to fire up that game for about a year but their weekly dev diaries during development have covered so many improvements that I’ve just been holding off to play EU4. Aug 13th can’t get here fast enough!
Nope, not even close. I’ll repeat my all time favorite example of how badly EU3 was broken: in my very first game, in 1480, Pommerania, Holstein, and Hannover colonized the Caribbean and the east coasts of North and South America. Japan joined them shortly thereafter. It was the most ridiculous mess of a Paradox game ever. The best that could be said for it is that it didn’t crash.
That was party (I stress partly) due to different design goals of EU3 compared to EU2. EU3 was meant to be far more of a sandbox game and less constrained than EU2. Now obviously it wasn’t constrained enough, but it was a result in their move towards more open-ended sandbox play. To people who came from EU2 it was a huge WTF, to people who came to it from Civilization it wasn’t so much of a big deal. My friends and I were the latter camp, having not played a Paradox game until then. We enjoyed vanilla just fine, at least once patch 1.2 hit (which fixed multiplayer desynchronization issues). Not to say it was perfect by any means and I do prefer where it ended up, but what you describe was only a ridiculous mess from certain perspectives… albeit a perspective most of their current fanbase probably had. :)
Sure, but it was still intensely stupid. There’s literally no plausible scenario that could justify Japan colonizing Cuba by 1482 in a game that started around 1450. Sandboxes are fine, but don’t throw historical labels on them if they’re nothing but window dressing. Japan as a 15th century Caribbean colonial power makes as much sense as giving the Teutonic Order Tiger tanks or Elizabethan England nanotechnology.
My first EU2 game France took over all of Italy, England, and most of Germany by about 1550, so I didn’t find EU3’s ahistoricality that big of a deal. EU2 just had broken systems at the start that they tried to paper over with events. Beyond that was the numerous technical issues, particularly the corrupted save files and CTD’s that seemed to happen after a hour or two of playing. It was a huge mess from the get go and never really completely gelled together. EU3 at least had a good foundation going when it launched.
EDIT: I’ve never found the EU games to be good historical simulations. What they do provide is historical verisimilitude that I think has continued to be enhanced by each entry in the series. I mean EU2 you could have English controlled Nordic countries, Teutonic South America, and a Ottoman Persia just to name some examples.
See, that, at least, is plausible. The tech of the time would enable a series of great French leaders to conceivably do all of that, and that sort of ahistoricity I can handle (Rome and Charlemagne’s empires were equivalent or larger, after all, and they existed centuries earlier). By contrast, the tech of the time would never allow Japanese colonization of Cuba, and that’s the key difference. As for the issues you experienced, I had none of them. EU2 was rock solid on my machine with literally zero problems.
Yes but Rome and Charlemagne weren’t 15th century France which wasn’t capable at all of doing any of that. France couldn’t have beaten the HRE at that time, yet in EU2 it could run roughshod over it. France couldn’t have invaded England at that time, yet in EU2 all it needed was a couple of ships and a broken English AI. As for conquering Italy, sure that was conceivable, they certainly tried in real life, but their attempts were a disaster in real life for a reason and I don’t see how EU2 dealt with those reason or even attempted to explain it.
The event system, the technical issues, even the base gameplay systems, all needed major work at EU2 release. The bugs alone made it nearly unplayable for a lot of people (my brother had to wait months to get it going). EU3, while there were tons of gimmicks and hiccups in the various systems, was at least a cohesive whole as a game when it was released.
(Separate response since you edited this in)
And that’s all perfectly fine. I can absolutely see alternate history taking paths like that if things had developed differently. EU2 was awesome for that–you could take pretty much any nation and do whatever you wanted with it, once you worked to overcome its original problems and handicaps. That’s how a historically-based game should be. What can you do differently, given the same start? EU3 threw that all away with its horrible launch. Anyone could do anything almost immediately, which was absurd. The game later became quite good, but it sure didn’t start out that way.
You seem to think I’m arguing that the games in this series are horrible if they don’t follow history like a checklist. I’m saying nothing of the kind. My argument is that the deviations from history have to be believable, and EU3 lacked that quality at launch. It deviated, all right, but so badly that it fell straight into absurdity.
I guess I’d put more emphasis on the game actually working at launch than problems with the various systems, which I agree were very much present. But at least I and most other people could actually get it working for longer than a hour.
What I’m saying is that in comparing the launches of the two games you had one, EU3, that was playable despite the problems with its system and another game, EU2, that was nearly unplayable for a number of reasons.
You might not like the approach Paradox took in EU3 but I don’t think that is a basis for saying EU3’s launch was worse than EU2’s. EU3 on almost ever level achieved more of what it was going for at launch than EU2 was able to achieve until a year after launch.
Again, only for you was EU2 unplayable. I experienced zero point zero problems with EU2 and played it basically non stop for a year. I wasn’t alone in this, either. The game was wildly successful and very well received by the strategy gaming community. I’m not calling you a liar–I’m sure the problems you experienced were real–but you belonged to an atypical minority and probably had some uncommon hardware or software configuration. PC gaming had way more compatibility issues fifteen years ago than it does today.
Sure, historic France couldn’t, but 15th century France was crippled by internal dissent and horrible monarchs. If you’re playing a game in which you take on the role of leader, it’s totally plausible for France to outstrip its historical performance using tech available to it at the time. In EU2, the unlikely was possible (with effort), especially for the human player, which was as it should be. In EU3 at launch, the impossible was routine, which is why it was a horribly broken mess. No Japanese ruler without access to a time machine could ever have colonized Cuba by 1482.
I disagree about being a minority issue. I was an avid reader of Paradox forums during that time and it was filled with players asking for help with technical issues. Than you have the various broken systems (trade and manpower come to mind), the horribly obtuse bad boy system, and the inane hard coded event system.
You mention that EU2 puts the player in control of a country and they can outstrip their historical performance, but this was only kinda of true. The event system meant that no matter what actions the player made certain events would fire no matter how out of place they were in the game. Spain would face a financial crises on the same date no matter how fine tuned I had the country humming at. That was one of the big problems with the game.
But again, going back to comparing launches, I think, and to Paradox’s credit, each iteration of all their series have had better launches than the previous (I don’t know about HOI). EU1 was a mess compared to EU2 at launch just as EU2 was a mess compared to EU3. EU2 was particularly choppy because the schizophrenia of the game design (keeping things on a historical path vs player freedom) was really apparent.
I was (and still am) a very regular reader and poster there. The tech forum is busy at every launch, and EU2 wasn’t an outlier at all for the number of problems. They existed, but at rates that were common in that era of software and hardware incompatibility.
Than you have the various broken systems (trade and manpower come to mind), the horribly obtuse bad boy system, and the inane hard coded event system.
You mention that EU2 puts the player in control of a country and they can outstrip their historical performance, but this was only kinda of true. The event system meant that no matter what actions the player made certain events would fire no matter how out of place they were in the game. Spain would face a financial crises on the same date no matter how fine tuned I had the country humming at. That was one of the big problems with the game.
Here we’ll have to agree to disagree. I never had problems with trade, manpower, badboy, or anything else. I found EU2 to be a very easy game to understand and play. Everything worked intuitively for me, for whatever reason. And the vast majority of the events people complained about had various triggers that meant they didn’t always fire and could be avoided, although there were some exceptions and I’ll grant that Paradox’s event scripting has become much more sophisticated over the last decade. Victoria II in particular has some very nice tools in that regard.
I would buy all three of these games. Fuck history.
Completely agree about the advances in the event system. Vic2 is a high water mark. I could get more into my problems with EU2 (a flawed game I ended up sinking hundreds of hours into, go Tuscany!) but we both seem pretty set in our views.
The only thing holding me back from pre-ordering EUIV is the new systems they are implementing. While I think Paradox is fantastic at fixing and improving on systems, when they are first introduced I find they can be pretty problematic. One of the things I really liked about EUIII is they spent a lot of time refining the systems already in place from EUII, while the new systems introduced took at least one expansion pack to really get worked out.
With that said, this’ll likely be a day one purchase for me.
Are there specific systems you are leery of or do you mean the fact that there are new systems, and thus may have issues?