People are going to make video guides for Paradox games. And Paradox games updates.
At least for the popular games. Have a contract with one of these people, a link in your games, make it official, and I don’t see why the company itself should have to do a tutorial.
It’s another thing to count on fans to do this without it being in any way official. Cheaper perhaps.
The impression I got from talking to him a bit at first
Economics background, which is why Paradox comes up with all this insane DLC. It’s like he’s constantly testing how far he can squeeze the fans. Extremely anti-communist.
Well, some of us hate video tutorials, you know. I’ve started watching more than one, and they’re just way too long winded and rambling, plus they’re almost never timestamped so if you’re interested in a particular aspect good luck finding it.
These just keep getting better. Wesker’s in the John Birch Society, I guess?
I don’t think he’d be a US Republican.
I agree with @vinraith that this mindset is more the norm than the exception in the industry. Gamers nowadays have been trained to not expect anything from a tutorial for a game that is regularly updated, even though I agree with Tom that we should expect more from developers.
I’m not so sure about this. Crusader Kings is the only Paradox franchise I’ve really kept up with, and the team for CK3 has been expanding since release according to their dev blog:
You might think that with the release of the base game, the amount of people working on the project would be reduced. We’re actually doing the exact opposite, and are in the process of expanding the team instead!
I think you’ll like this article if you haven’t seen it already, because it actually lists the amount of employees for each discipline that were part of the CK3 team as of February 2021. They total to 45 employees, not counting disciplines that spread their work across multiple games.
I have never been and probably never will be able to get into Deity Empires because not only is there no tutorial at all, a lot of the interface is counterintuitive and I couldn’t figure out how to do basic things on my own or even read the state of my holdings. I have absolutely no idea how the vid guys do it unless they get handheld by the devs first.
The paradox forums have attracted two particular types of gamers:
When you mix these two types of gamers with a bad/broken DLC, there’s going to be hell to pay even if everyone affected could have easily gotten a refund from steam.
I think the news of Paradox’s decline is greatly exaggerated. So the latest EU4 expansion after a year, which was developed by a new offshoot studio full of new hires in a completely different city during COVID, isn’t good. I am not very surprised. CK3 was an amazing release and will likely become their best game ever if they can churn out just a couple quality expansions.
Huh? The official forums tolerate pirates of their games?
I meant people who don’t like DLCs or expansions. Pirates are tolerated if they don’t talk about pirating, but forum accounts are blocked from the special subforums (modding, tech support, etc.) if they have not registered their key for the game with Paradox Plaza.
This attitude is so common and so infuriating. I get that it’s mostly young people who have extremely limited entertainment budgets, but c’mon kids. The ability to play the latest games isn’t an inalienable right that greedy corporations are denying you because they are jealous of your good looks.
I’ve seen some of the same attitude other places, like here. Its little things, like wording such as “Lazy” developers get slung around a bit, and its such a major trigger for me.
I am certain no-one here means any illwill, but words like these gets incorporated into our normal vocabulary, and we tend to use it without thinking, because its what we’ve seen so often - mostly without thinking about what the words actually mean.
Oh yes, absolutely, fully agreed. Look no further than the discussion of how one unfixed corner case non-game-breaking bug in a new game mode offered in a free patch years after release is evidence of lazy devs who literally cannot be trusted and whose work should never be bought again.
I’ll throw in “cash grab” as a derogatory term for a product a company offers for sale in the hopes of turning a profit on it. THAT IS WHAT COMMERCE IS YOU KNOBS. Luckily for you, nobody is holding a gun to your head and forcing you to purchase a sub-par DLC or some dumbass horse armor or whatever.
I think my most downvoted post on Reddit was replying to a guy who was encouraging everyone to do what he did and just pirate all the DLC because the price was too high, they failed to meet his lofty quality standards, etc. I suggested that if he thought the DLC wasn’t very good then why not just skip it or if it was overpriced, just wait for one of the frequent sales. Even using very mild language (I think the harshest thing I said was that pirating years of work wasn’t ethical) I guess I really touched a nerve with some very entitled people.
This was in the context of Leviathan. You know what I did when I heard it was a turd? I didn’t buy it, despite loving EU4. I can’t imagine having the level of entitlement to feel that I should just be able to steal the product without payment just because I thought it was very good, but I guess there’s a lot of gamers that feel that way.
If the Leviathan dlc for EU4 is in as bad a state as everyone says it is. It is a wonder people would even want to play with it anyway, haha. So, yeah, people baffle me sometimes.
This is the only Internet forum I’m on that is “normal”. The only Discord I am active on is a very small Axis and Allies Discord. It does have a Dev presence, but it’s not the official Discord. All others are toxic, especially the WoW forums.
I think it would be in Paradox’s interest to hire Quill18 to do a more structured tutorial series than his usual long plays. His EU4 series was wonderful, but I had a hard time getting into his Hoi4 series.
That said, releasing Leviathan in this state is signs of a systemic failure in PDX.
Agreed, and I’m so glad this place exists. Truly.
Yeah, after spending time away and having mostly contact with [gestures broadly] the rest of the internet, people are terrible and I had pretty much forgotten rational people exist that can hold interesting, calm discussions/debates. I haven’t played a Paradox game (in the EU/CK/ family) since EU III, but I love these threads. But I am going to have to get CK III or maybe CK II as I believe it is free right now.
I usually buy the previous DLC when the next one comes out - this one has me holding off on Emperor because Leviathan is such a mess. Is it just the DLC that’s a disaster or the accompanying patch, too? I had been thinking about firing up EU4 but now I’m kind of afraid to without doing a bunch of research about which patch to roll back to. My understanding is that Emperor itself was pretty good?
I’d just say screw it and fire up Stellaris instead but as I understand it the latest update broke pop growth so… as I was saying earlier, someone else needs to also be making these sorts of grand strategy games.
I would also like to see some competition (I think some is on the horizon for space GS?).
But wanted to note that the population issue in Stellaris 3.0 appears to be mostly solved in the latest opt in beta. Perhaps not perfectly to the satisfaction of forum grognards, but pretty good in my sense. I do think this latest DLC and features update is one of the smoother ones for Stellaris, and the beta patch one of the fastest and genuinely improving as well.
While the new pop system had serious balance issues, the endless wall of posts on the official forums are a tempest in a teacup IMO. The system is a good idea and will work great once the variables are balanced properly.
Very good to hear, it can certainly be hard to parse the signal from the noise on this stuff. I’ll go grab the beta and fire it up. Thanks!