2051

Down to integrity and reputation I guess, I’d accept if most companies said that, but Paradox would release a hard copy manual one page at a time if they could get people to pay for it.

2052

Oh, I will also briefly chime in and say that I really hate the idea of games-as-a-service, insofar as I hate the idea of just-about-anything-as-a-service. I just wanna pay money, own the thing, and be done with it from there. Winding up on the hook for some kinda continuing commitment is icky enough when it’s just Comcast.

. . . one of a dozen reasons I never got into MMOs >.>

2053

I personally haven’t experience “gigantic DLC-sized holes”. I do think that adding too many mechanics through DLC can undermine the game over time. Loss of design focus is something I think I can see in some Paradox titles.

2054

I don’t think there’s been many games that would have ever matched that description.

2055

Before the invention of DLC? I would say that 99% of the games would fit that description.

2056

My feeling - and I’d bet its where KevinC was going as well - is that this part got short shrift. Heck, I feel it still does in many projects.

2057

Ok, I need to modify what I said / meant. I meant, that that many games that came out before DLC was a thing, were complete games unto themselves. However, were they actually achieving 100% of the original vision of the designers? I would say, no. There is always more you want to do and there will never be enough time and budget.

However, I would just like to contrast the seemingly complete games that came out before DLC vs the ones with huge gaping holes in which future DLC will fill, theoretically one day.

2058

This is what I was getting at. We were never getting the complete vision, we were getting whatever the devs were able to do. We never saw all the things that were partially implemented and removed or otherwise abandoned before the game shipped.

It’s an unpopular opinion here, but I largely think this is a fallacy on the part of gamers. I know there are bad actors/examples that can be pointed to, but I’m talking about the industry overall.

1995: “Oh man, can you imagine this game if they added Feature X? That’d be amazing!” Or “this game had potential, but these aspects of it really didn’t pan out. Oh well”.

2018: “You can tell they left a DLC-sized hole for Feature X”

Back in the retail days, those shortcomings or missing features of a game might never be realized. If the game was successful enough maybe you had a shot at an expansion, but that was about it. We took games as they were, whether it was good, bad, or just OK.

In the digital age, developers have a greater ability to distribute the content or changes that they just didn’t have time for when the game shipped. Now we see these “holes” being filled and cynically conclude that they were left out to sell DLC.

I think the primary things that have changed are:

  1. Developers have a much greater (and affordable) ability to add and improves features that shipped in the release game.
  2. Games are significantly more expensive to make. This can sometimes be made up for by an expanded market size compared to what we had in the 90’s, but not always. Yet game prices have remained largely flat for decades. Compare that to… just about anything else, and that’s very unusual. So the larger budgets have to be made up somewhere, whether it’s a larger market base or by having a longer tail after the initial box sale.

Paradox is often brought up as a DLC sinner due to the amount they release. Both CK2 and EU4 received glowing praise at release. The latter is the one I’m more familiar with, so I’ll speak directly to that. It has a 87 Metacritic score, and 88 user score. I put in probably 300 hours into the game before the expansion came out. Just focusing on the content expansions alone, there has been a lot of DLC released in the 5 years since the game released. Were these filling DLC holes? I would argue pretty strongly that they weren’t.

Now we can compare that to Stellaris, the much ballyhooed attempt at a more 4X-oriented game set in space. I don’t think anyone is going to argue with me here when I say that the game had some serious flaws at release. It’s just that in this day and age, we point to a flawed game and say “Oh I’m sure those bastards will just expect us to pay to fix it in DLC!”. Games can’t just be games we don’t like or aren’t very good, instead it’s a cynical method of mining DLC dollars on the developer’s part.

Now, I can think of one instance where I felt there was a “DLC-sized hole” and that was Civ5 when it shipped without Religion. The reason that one felt like that to me was that it was a prominent feature in Civ4, so it’s absence was very much felt by me. It felt like a feature that had been removed to make way for an expansion, since it was one that I was used to playing with in Civ games. The reality probably wasn’t really like that, though. Like has been happening since people started selling software, it was likely just a feature they lacked the time, money, and budget to address. When the game was successful, they were able to incorporate a feature they likely always wanted but couldn’t implement. But we’re jaded now, so we yell “DLC hole!”. :)

2059

This is how I feel about nearly every quality of life feature in EU4 but not in Stellaris. Not to mention relevant gameplay mechanics. It’s like they’re proud of trying to re invent the wheel, not realizing it’s a pejorative term.

2060

I agree completely with this. I’d also add that it’s easy to look back and forget that games used to get dumped out and if they had major issues, chances are they would never be fixed and you’d be stuck.

But I understand where people are coming from, I can go play a game I loved from 20+ years ago and have it be almost exactly the same as I remember. Whereas, I go to play EU4 today and it’s nothing like the game at release. Now, I’ve gotten way more enjoyment out of 2018 EU4 than I ever did at release, but if that hadn’t been the case, I’m pretty much stuck with something that’s different from what I bought into. I don’t like that I’m stuck buying the DLC or I’m stuck with partial “free features”, but I do really enjoy that they have the opportunity to go and experiment and play with their design and take it places it could never go with the previous model. Sometimes that works, and sometimes it doesn’t. They did kind of back themselves into a corner with Estates in EU4 and it took them awhile to figure out how they could address that due to it being a premium feature.

2061

I find myself falling pretty heavily in the KevinC camp. If I enjoy a game, it is inevitably absurd value per hour of entertainment when compared against a movie, for example. I’ve got no problem funding the ongoing development and updating of games I’ve got hundreds of hours invested in.

In fact, I really like following the ongoing development of games as patches and DLC come out. The only thing I dislike about things like “portrait packs” is that they are perhaps a bit predatory on people with OCD who feel like they can’t live without every piece of content for a game. But if you’re taking your meds regularly, a person should be able to say “I can probably enjoy this game without paying $10 for new portraits and a couple re-skinned unit models”.

All that being said, some of the best games are clearly those with limited scope as far as DLC goes. XCOM 2 is a fantastic example of a decent game that got turned into a pretty fantastic one with only one major expansion release. But only having one DLC is no more a guarantee of quality than having 15 is a guarantee that the base game is terrible.

As many people have pointed out Paradox, I think the base games (with no DLC enabled) of all their recent titles are far better than they were at release, due largely to the fact that development is basically always ongoing and funded by DLC. The Total War: Warhammer games are another decent example of games with a lot of DLC that have benefited from the DLC whether you own it or not, you still get to fight against the new armies they’ve added even if you don’t own them.

2062

I think KevinC puts it very well.

I wonder if dissatisfaction with DLC has a lot to do with what you are looking to get psychologically out of games. One thing DLC can rob you of is the idea of playing the definitive, complete game. There is always the thought that things can change, they might be better down the road, perhaps it is better to wait. The thought of a stream of improvements doesn’t satisfy the desire to have the thing now.

I am forever turning down credit cards and loyalty cards and subscriptions and membership programs because I don’t want to have another ongoing “relationship” cluttering up my mind. DLC sort of works against that.

2063

Perhaps I misunderstand you, but games that didn’t get any (or much) post-release support were usually not big sellers. If a game sold well, you could count on bug fixes and even free content patches back in the day until the expansion pack was released or the sequel was announced.

And this business model hasn’t died, by the way. It’s just sort of crowded out by the developers/publishers who are trying to foist “games as a service” on us, etc. (I’m also not a fan, @ArmandoPenblade.) Recent examples of games that are more “old school” in this regard include, going off what I have installed here and what I remember: Battle Chasers: Nightwar, Everspace (one expansion), Invisible, Inc. (one expansion), Mark of the Ninja (special edition), Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime, The Long Journey Home, Vikings: Wolves of Midgard (got a lot of free spit and polish after release), the recent Rayman games, and so on.

But yeah, that’s a lot of indie games and not many AAA releases (and whatever Paradox is considered these days).

Apologies if I derailed the thread with my earlier comments, by the way.

2064

Sorry, when I’m writing posts at work I tend to submit the rough draft version and my points don’t come across well.

Before the internet, you were pretty much stuck with what you got(and if they did put out a patch, getting your hands on it was its own thing). After that, you’d maybe get a few patches, which you had to manually go get, and then nothing until an expansion. Nowadays, even if you aren’t doing the DLC thing, people still expect you’ll continue to patch your game and even offer free content/QoL updates. I think a lot of that is because of platforms like Steam have made updating automatic for the user and patch management/distribution easier for the dev. However, I’d argue it’s also tied into the fact that DLC has enabled funding of long-term continuing development of games and that the expectation for ongoing support has bled into how we view every game.

EDIT: I’d also add, I believe certain styles of game are well suited to “games as a service” and others are far better suited for an experience that doesn’t evolve. Trying to cram the former into the latter is unfortunate.

2065

Yeah, I’d say that’s fair where at least vocal players are concerned. Maybe it’s also more of a concern for multiplayer games, where developers feel that they have continuously add more stuff to keep the interest of the players? Might be less of an issue for games that are strictly single player, which is basically all of the games I just listed, I realize now.

Ha, you added this while I was typing. Yeah, I think for multiplayer-focused games this is probably true. It doesn’t make much sense for singe-player games. Just give me the box (virtual or otherwise) and let me play my game. ;-)

2066

Totally agree. Path of Exile and Warframe are examples I can think of where a game as a service has been a huge success. Not just financially, but in terms of how damn good those games have gotten over the years. Neither title would have approached anywhere near the level they reached without their development model.

It’s definitely a square peg, though. It needs to fit.

2067

Quill18 has been doing a series of Let’s Plays for GalCiv III.

I enjoy his videos, so wanted to share the playlist. :)

2068

I have to confess that I am very very guilty of this.

It’s not intentional and I can’t speak for Paradox but I will tell you my story with regards to Galactic Civilizations III.

As you guys know, I designed GalCiv I and GalCiv II. But during the development of GalCiv III I was busy working on other things. Namely, Soren and I were founding Mohawk and other Firaxis alumni and I were getting Oxide Games going. So I was MIA for almost the entire time that game was being made.

Now, the original designer of GalCiv III was actually Jon Shafer. But he was really interested in doing a historical game about post Rome and I suggested he pursue that while he was “young and single” which later became “At the Gates”.

So once Jon was gone, I had my long-time friend and colleague Paul take over. He started with what Jon had but he really really liked how GalCiv II was, particularly the ship designer.

So anyway, they did GalCiv III and it came out and it sold well and got good reviews. But when it came time to do the first big expansion, Crusade, I now had time to return to GalCiv and I have a very different vision of what I wanted to do.

But with Crusade, I only had 6 months to do it so there was only so much that I could realistically change about that game (not to mention, I’m very aware that many people object to games being changed post release).

So anyway, Crusade came out and people seem to like it a lot. But it also is very different from the base game.

Should we have just taken Crusade + Intrigue and another year and done a GalCiv IV instead? I don’t know. We learned a lot about the way the market has changed and I now see that the growing awareness of what we can call “update fatigue”.

So anyway, I’m not sure what my point was other than to say, I am guilty of what Paradox has done too. Sorry!

2069

I got the impression that alot of the PDX dislike is because of the 10000 dlc.

And to be honest, I am slightly worried about how this will roll out for Planetfall.

I can see so much opportunity to locking cool stuff away and then releasing something “new” every 3 months, even if just cosmetics, which Triumph included fo free in one of the updates to AoW3 (around about Xmas time you got new hats)

2070

I think there’s a real difference between your way of doing it and Paradox’s.