Why did Paradox remove the apology that was posted? I didn’t see anything necessarily bad in it apart from the fact that they had to apologize for a broken-ass DLC in the first place.
I think people were piling on to the apology in the Paradox forums.
I’ve seen a version of the apology letter that was turned into a generic boilerplate template that Paradox could use after every new DLC release by just inserting whatever the relevant version numbers are for the new release and just recycling the letter over and over.
What I don’t understand is CK3 did exceedingly well. So why the need to rush out Leviathan in such an abysmal state?
I’d love to see a developer AAR of how the DLC was published with it being so obviously broken.
Because they’re lazy.
/ducks
-Tom
…or maybe they were just too cheap to do any QA whatsoever? Did I read somewhere they got rid of their QA people?
This is the most probable.
We can’t even use the “boost quarterly sales” since Q1 ended in March.
I remember listening to the Firaxis QA guy talking about how once a game is out in the wild, the sheer scope of hours users can play the game quickly exceeds the hours they can spend the testing the game. Which is how some late-game balance issues and the like don’t show up in testing.
Which, even if you apply the same scaling to Paradox, how the hell does “missing graphics” get through any sort of QA? I mean, I can see somethings related to the DLC messing up the core game – especially a smaller country that a lot of people might not play. Sort of a “if you play this new country, and they are aligned with this country, and that country becomes a rival of…” weird slippery slope.
But missing graphics?
Also, and @tomchick can also see how these two comparisons tragically line up, but I always considered Paradox to be a like Fantasy Flight: game companies whose work I generally like and am likely to buy a game sight unseen. Both of them seem to be on parallel paths with pumping out “meh” content.
I totally totally get that. But the list of critical problems and issues posted seem to be things you’d notice within an hour of any given game start. This is why it makes sense to have an opt-in beta for strategy games. Gamers are often more than happy to not only kick the tires, but tear the engine apart to make sure the product they’re getting isn’t going in the wrong direction. I mean, it’s practically distributed computing for free.
Hmm, isn’t this a repetition of history again? Didn’t HOI2 (or was it HOI3? or EU3?) have some terrible expansion packs made by external studios back in the day that changed how Paradox did QA? Leading into the successful CK2 launches (and then EU4)?
I doubt that, in fact I nearly applied for a QA position Paradox was advertising not long ago.
But there’s no way the QA team didn’t find missing graphics or the like. Either QA is entirely automated and it’s looking solely at scripts for crash bugs, or the project manager(s) decided to release regardless of whatever state it’s in. At my own tiny software company, project managers and the managing CEO wanted new updates released ON TIME regardless, and they didn’t seem or want to understand that haranguing the software devs and/or QA to work faster isn’t a solution to their mismanagement.
I went off at a retro a month or so back when some joker put “more velocity” as a “longed for” item.
Great post. I’d like to reiterate I wasn’t blaming QA, I just wondered if Paradox had shelved their dedicated QA entirely since I’d read something along those lines. This would out all the blame squarely on management and executives.
Sorry, but that was very intentional.
Damn, it was better if accidental. Still, kudos. :D
Edit: Mea culpa that I didn’t post the PC Gamer article instead, if only for the byline:
They shelved their publishing QA department, which did testing on games that were published but not developed by Paradox. They didn’t get rid of their internal QA departments.
It doesn’t seem like their internal QA testers are treated well based on the article, though. That unfortunately seems to be standard in the industry.
My experience supporting LotRO tells me that QA almost certainly did find those bugs and almost certainly labelled them “show stoppers” but it was passed for release anyway…
Yeah, this wasn’t a dev oopsie or QA being blind. Something shipping in this state is management.
I haven’t had problems with the HOI4 expansions. Bugfixes and balance tweaks after an expansion of course, but nothing like what’s been described for Leviathan.
I have been involved in (non-dev) these types of screwups
- Minions: if we go live like this, it will be a disaster.
- Minions: if we go live like this, it will be a disaster.
- Management: we are going to live
Shockingly, it’s a disaster - Management: Why didn’t you tell us this was going to be a disaster. No waaaay we would have gone live if we knew it was a disaster. This is on you guys; not us.
Yeah, I hear you, I’ve been in that situation as a developer. Funny how you ring the alarm bells as loud as you can, raise it up the chain as far as you can, beg and plead with the decision makers that it’s not ready, going to be a disaster, etc. and they turn around and push the button anyway. Then they somehow have the gall to haul the developers in to demand to know why it was a disaster and what you are going to do to fix it. Such an infuriating position to be in.
“Oh, I’m sorry, did the server crash after about an hour? Well, please refer to the last 37 emails we have sent warning you that if we were to go live we’d be lucky to stay up an hour”.
HoI4 went off the rails for me and honestly I forgot why. Navy micromanaging maybe.
I think both Man the Guns and Le Resistance made the game less playable for me. The ship designer in Man the guns was sort of fun, but the number of capital ships most countries make (other than the US and Britain) is pretty small. But the naval micro was brutal. Similarly La Resistance didn’t add a lot except more busy work. I may very well disable it my next play thru. Still I’m optimistic the Barbarossa DLC will be good.
However as KevinC says the the QA on the DLC was adequate, no major bugs after hotfix.