No major announcements until late October…
Disclaimer: We’re not quite ready to announce our plans just yet (we’re saving that for the big stage, PDXCon),
News is still sparse until the PdxCon reveal, but they did talk today about splitting Civics into Origins and Civics. So something like “Post-Apocalyptic” or “Life-Seeded” are now considered Origins and cannot be changed later in the game. It sounds like they’ve expanded the list of Origins to 16 and they may have a lot more impact on your start. Could be interesting.
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/stellaris-dev-diary-155-origins.1250456/
That screenshot definitely has the fingerprint of the current lead (Daniel Moregard) on it. With his UX background, the new Stellaris features are getting a lot more lively UI instead of the sterile presentation it had before.
Sorry, this made me chuckle. It’s a shaded box with a few boxy images inside it… Not that lively to me!
They’re large colorful icons instead of a text list, is what I was getting at. :)
The game has a surprising amount of nice art in it, but it’s all displayed in such tiny boxes I rarely even notice it.
I’m kind of anxious to hear some actual news, though I realize that’ll be a bit yet. I can’t help but think if Wiz were still running things we’d know an awful lot more than we do. The new game director doesn’t seem to enjoy the community aspect of the job.
Paradox is making a big effort in hiding things until PDXCON this year, it’s not just Stellaris. I don’t care for it, but it’s how the big boys do it.
I don’t think he’s as good a communicator as Wiz, but I think part of that comes down to timing. He took over after the release of their last major expansion, oversaw a whole bunch of patches just cleaning up the mess from that expansion, then it was a small story pack and off to enjoy the Swedish Socialist Summer. Then with PdxCon around the corner, they’re withholding details until the convention. So I think part of his lack of communication is circumstantial. I’m curious to see if communication is more forthcoming once PdxCon has passed.
True for Planetfall as well.
What’s this 96MB download for Stellaris on Steam? Surprise patch, mostly because of the new launcher, but a few nice fixes as well.
When is it? I really want more content for Planetfall. I think it needs more stuff.
Starts on the 18th.
Posted this in the PDXCON thread but thought it might be worth posting here too.
Some teasers for an upcoming pre-PDXCON announcement (I’m guessing their Thursday dev diary day?).
And @AK_Icebear can laugh at me all he wants, I still find the new UI work to be far more lively than the text lists with maybe a tiny icon we had before. :D
God, those bonuses are depressing me and I deeply hope they are a work in progress. Because there is literally no point to a .5% shipbuilding speed bonus. You would never notice it, not even situationally. If those are the kind of bonuses I’m managing, I really don’t care, which probably is not what they were aiming at from a design perspective. But I’ll just assume it’s a work in progress picture to show off the UI.
Watch it just be for a mobile port or something.
It looks like a mobile interface, and paradox started work in this format a couple of years ago so it’s around the right time they’d be announcing mobile games.
Yeah, I was going to say, these UI teasers look really good.
That doesn’t look like a mobile interface to me, it looks like the desktop game. Moregard is a UX guy and you can see from the archaeology stuff that the various screens have larger and more colorful artwork and that sort of thing. This looks like a trend continuing in that direction. That’s all just my take, though, I could be wrong.
There is something new coming along with the expansion, though. Switch or mobile game or something, maybe. That’s the speculation online, anyway. For me, Switch would be kind of cool but I have zero interest in any sort of mobile title.
Well the question is whether these menus take up a whole screen or a little window in the top-left of the desktop game. Notice that they have big buttons and not too much text? Ah well, we’ll see!
At this point, I don’t know what it will take for me to start playing Stellaris again, but I guess fixing the reported late-game slowdown would be a big thing. I’ve played a couple of games that were just too annoying to continue at a certain point and that isn’t a satisfying end to a run.
Speaking of lag, does anyone know how pop allocation system works? It should be a simple* bipartite graph problem with a quick and easy solution, not something that kills all the speed of the game.
* half-kidding, it’s only simple after knowing how it works, which may not be that common, but it’s one of those things that makes you feel dumb when you learn it. You do have to design the problem around some limitations, but I think it shouldn’t be a big deal.
There is no way those are mobile UI screens. Look at stuff like the Back button in the upper left, or the little icons above the political system cards. No way that would be the size of icons on a phone.
I can’t imagine wanting to play Stellaris again. I don’t know what they would need to do to make it worth spending time with over other games.