Well at least now I know not to hold off on any runs waiting news for their next focus. Didn’t want to start a game with a country that would be part of the next patch. Guess I can play them all now!
Paradox really needs to get a handle on this post-release development dance. It’s driven me away from their recent games. I honestly just don’t have the desire or mental energy to get a game, play it, decide how it works and how i feel about it, only to come back 6 months later for 50% of the systems to be “revamped”. It feels like a studio that doesn’t have a overarching “idea” of what they want their games to be about.
The whole point of a game is to be about something, that system is about simulating or simplifying some core conceit. When you change what that core conceit is it doesn’t feel like the developer ever really knew what the game was supposed to be.
What you describe is one reason why I might finally dive in to Imperator Rome with gusto - no sense of it being on the verge of a massive update.
Personally I would prefer the overall DLC train shift to one expansion per year (with mechanics), and a few content packs per year (country or region flavor). Predictable, so I know when to dive in. A whole new game after 3 years or so to restart with lessons learned. But I realize that probably doesn’t maximize their profits as efficiently…
I feel like they’ve gotten trapped by their own patterns and successes. The race to allow you to play every nation in the world has now established a pattern that’s hard for them to break. Should it be interesting to play every nation in the Imperator timeline? Of course not. We barely know anything about most of those nations. But there’s no room for the design to breathe – it has to tick the boxes of being “EU in ancient times”. I don’t think that current Paradox, given the expectations of it (both gameplay-wise and profit-wise), could experiment with a design as radically different as CK.
I:R is about as close as we’re going to get to a pop system in a modern Paradox game anytime soon - really disappointing.
But Vic 3 is on the cusp of being announced?!
Darn it. I started a tribal game in Imperator: Rome a few weeks ago and was thinking, “The tribal start feels in need of a personality. I bet it’s the next thing to get updated.”
I think this really depends on the game. The two worst examples of that have been Stellaris and Imperator. The first was the first time they attempted a non-historical game and also tried a 4X/GSG hybrid instead of their usual fare, so there has been a lot of figuring things out. For Imperator I think they clearly wanted one thing (a sequel to EU: Rome) but the playerbase loudly demanded another. The work up through 2.0 was addressing that and taking it into a simulation direction. I don’t think that change in direction would have happened if it wasn’t as poorly received as it was, though. They didn’t really have any other choice between abandoning the game or trying to adjust to player feedback.
But I feel like HOI4 clearly knows what it wants to be, it’s a WW2 grand strategy game. CK3 knows what it wants to be, it’s a medieval dynasty game about characters and the stories they tell. EU4 is a “map painter” / empire builder.
I think that’s the intent, at least looking at the last few timelines. The problem is that some choices didn’t entirely work or weren’t well received. But, even if it was just 2020, they have been fairly static within a large number of months.
Even if some new stuff in EU4 (when fixed) seems a bit… why is this a core mechanic? (which isn’t the same as, say, Stellaris espionage, you can mostly ignore it) Or state edicts, who even remembers they exist when playing?
Anyway, I finally liked the new IR, even if it had some rough edges and I was still a bit lost, and even if I dropped my game for some shiny new reason. I hope they can go back to it.
And it’s odd that they have 29 open positions with such a passionate unique things that do fairly well.
It’s dead. This is Sengoku all over again. Which is sad, really.
I agree, the game has come a long way but I was excited to see where else they could go with it. Trade and tribal game especially.
Older fans of Paradox games might remember how EU: Rome was abandoned in a similar fashion, with the latest version being a beta that was never declared as “final”. Same thing happened to Crusader Kings 1, pretty much.
In the best Paradox games, the game mechanics are making a historical argument about what the era was about. CK is saying under feudalism, there weren’t really states and everything was driven by this tiny number of landowning families, Victoria is about industrialization and the rise of mass movements, HOI is saying WW2 was all about industrial production. I guess EU is making the case that in that period states were embodied in their monarch in a l’etat c’est moi kind of way. Or maybe that the era was about map-painting.
But (as a history dilettante, to be sure) I couldn’t tell you what point Paradox was trying to make about the classical era at all. Disloyal generals being a thing is particular to the era and pretty cool. But I never felt in any of the versions that they had a take on the era that was driving the bus, if that makes sense.
Typing this just made me think about how great Victoria 2 was. The whole scramble for Africa being all about boosting your arbitrary Prestige number, which was pretty much what the real Scramble for Africa was about! The crisis system, that made you do things you didn’t want to do, again to protect your stupid prestige score, leading to world wars where no one in the war really ever wanted to be there, just like in real life! The game mechanics encouraged you to make the exact same catastrophic decisions the real actors did, which was neat.
I was going to post what Kevin said, of course, I would have used twice as many words.
In addition to being unfocused. I argue that both IR and Stellaris were fundamental broken upon release, while the other games weren’t. (In large part cause they had 3 previous versions of them). Tom’s scathing review of Stellaris was exactly right. IR wasn’t as much broken as just not fun and in neither case could the AI even pretend to play the game.
Stellaris is an ok game after 3.0 and I’m willing to give 4.0 a shot. There are too many good games to play, that I’m not sure it even makes sense to give IR another shot. So I hope they just shoot it, and try again.
Apparently, Imperator 2.0 was the highest rated DLC in the last 5 released by Paradox but I guess that didn’t translate into sales.
I feel bad for the (granted) small but dedicated I:R community. There’s a contingent who really think it’s Paradox’s best strategy game - and of course there are people shitting on them for that opinion on various YouTube threads because gamers fucking suck.* While it’s not my favorite for a variety of reasons, I liked it i well enough. It’s too bad.
*generally speaking, and to be clear not in response to anyone here.
Same here. I played Stellaris and understood the game, but they’ve revamped it and when I start up a game… my eyes get glassy and I can’t move forward.
It’s admirable they continue to update games but it has its issues.
I think this is ultimately the problem. In a crowded game market, with so many deep and good choices, it’s really hard to capture gamers’ attention. If you mess up that first opportunity and give your customers a weak impression of a game, you’ve created yourself problems with future revisions. Your marketing has to get people’s attention a second time with a game that’s more than a year old, get them to forget their initial impression, and get them to take an honest look at the new version.
That’s a hard marketing challenge in today’s marketplace.
I think Stellaris is a game where they changed stuff for the sake of changing it and keeping it fresh. I liked the original vision of the game, I kinda liked when they changed it to starlanes-only, but you know, it always feels like you play 1.0 version of the game with mechanics never getting tested and polished properly. This means people come back to check out the game all the time, myself included. “Is it good now?” It has different issues now, except you have the same issue since 2.0 of the game mostly consisting on waiting to get enough influence to build another starbase cause that’s what you do in that game.
EU4 had its share of revamps but there’s some logic behind it all. They give players more “horizontal” choice and they often on specific cultures and countries more often than not.
I think Paradox has made a good move by shelving Imperator. The team did a good job improving the game enough so that everyone who bought the game would feel that they got their money’s worth, I certainly did. I could imagine a version of Imperator that has been revamped so much that it becomes one of Paradox’s best strategy games, but why not just start development of an entirely new game that gets it right from the start with excellent foundations?
Not every Paradox game needs to have such a long tail that development is active for years and years and years, only the best ones (i.e. please give me 20 CK3 DLCs lol).
Now please Pdox, shelve Stellaris as well and shift all available resources to Vic 3.
I’d love to see Paradox do a 4x Space game, but probably not Stellaris II. But definitely give me a Vic 3.