With the Paradox convention starting this week (October 18th), it’s been fun speculating on what Paradox may or may not be working on next. The discussion has been split up across a bunch of different game threads, though, so I thought I would start up a thread to talk about it!
What we know so far:
There will be a new internally developed grand strategy game announced. They have said this will not be Victoria 3 but I wondered in another thread if they could be playing with words and if it might be a successor under a different name, similar to how they called EU:Rome 2 “Imperator”.
I do think there’s a Victoria sequel coming, I just don’t know if it’ll necessarily be announced at this convention. The reasons I think that are A) it’s the only Paradox franchise that hasn’t been done in the current engine/development model and B) Martin Anward (Wiz) left Stellaris a year or so to go work on an unannounced project. Around the time he started goofing off on a personal hobby project, a dating sim called Victorian Secrets. He also worked on a patch to Victoria 2 over the holidays a couple years ago, which tells me he was probably in that code for a reason. My suspicion is that the project he’s been working on has been a Victoria sequel, but is it ready to be announced yet? That I don’t know, I’m guessing not.
What Paradox has teased about the new GSG is this (removed embedded link because it not rendering correctly in Discourse).
She is standing in front of a medieval suit of armor and a giant sword, so does this mean Crusader Kings 3? It’s the oldest of the current generation of games that have been made and is probably ripe for a new take. Or maybe it’s a new franchise entirely?
For EU4 there is continued work on the mega (final?) expansion which I’m sure they’ll talk about, as it is due in the first half of next year. I suspect we will get a title for it and an infodump. HOI4 also has an unnamed expansion in the works where they are redoing partisans, suppression, etc, so I expect new information on that as well.
Out in space, Stellaris has been teasing some new things via Twitter.
https://twitter.com/StellarisGame/status/1182717785551654918
https://twitter.com/StellarisGame/status/1182943938996506625
My speculation: The legs they are teasing about means that they will be expanding ground combat in the next expansion. There’s also a giant space citadel in the screenshot. Is that a galactic UN? The assumption is that the next update would focus on diplomacy, but who knows? The structure doesn’t give me a diplomacy vibe, or looks almost like a fortress with the sharp edges. The right part of the image looks like it could maybe be a mobile version of the game or something, which I probably wouldn’t have much interest in. The only reason I say mobile is that the graphics of the star look lower quality than what we have in game and there’s larger icons. That would also meet the “new and familiar things” description.
That’s about all I’ve got. My money is on CK3 given the teased twitter video above, but were it not for that my guess would have been a Victoria game or something set in a different time period entirely.
