I guess we are a bit behind on posting dev diaries:
Overall, this looks good. I still wonder if lack of fine-grained control of tariffs will feel restrictive. The commitment to not having stocks of stuff like convoys still feels weird. Or are convoys built up over time like naval fleets and military units?
I like the content of today’s dev diary. China has always been an interesting challenge for the designers of Paradox games as the raw numbers would always make China pretty much unstoppable and in general any mechanics that allow big empires to fracture aren’t enjoyable to the player. In this case the Opium Wars tie into the rest of the game while also being linked to the very transparent fracturing possibility that’s always looming. Qing falling apart won’t be a surprise if you’re playing as them, the conditions are clear.
And not a single mention of Imperialism II !! :(
Nor a hint of when the game my be released. Do you think that development is falling behind schedule, and that why the last month or so of dairies have been pretty underwhelming?
I like this one a fair bit. I’m hoping that it delivers on this:
A design goal we have kept front and center is that outright armed uprisings should be rare but still feel threatening .
I hope that the point of a revolution breaking out isn’t too predictable. I feel like the player should need to sometimes operate under threat of revolution but not know exactly where the line is.
“Rare but threatening” would be a huge improvement over Vicky 2 and a lot of other Paradox games.
It’s also how I’m going to order my next steak.
Oh wow this really, really sucks.
As the saying goes: We’re not mad, just disappointed.
Last week the Victoria 3 dev team was alerted that streams of an in-development build of the game shared with a small group of testers was being broadcast within a small online community. As these things go, this footage quickly ended up in public. As hype grew around the leaked video so did demands for more, and before long links to download a cracked version of the leaked build started getting shared around.
We understand you’re excited about the game - we are too, and we’re anxious to share it with you properly! But there’s a reason why we haven’t yet launched Victoria 3 in open beta, Early Access, or similar. Yes, the game is technically in a playable state, but its current lack of balance and level of polish obscures many aspects of the mechanics and how they interrelate. Some interfaces are tedious or just not fun to engage with yet. It lacks a lot of crucial AI work, contains game-breaking bugs, and has only the most rudimentary tutorial and player guidance. Especially in an interconnected game like Victoria, just a single deficiency like that can have a negative domino effect on the whole experience of playing the game.
We can explain at length in dev diaries how our mechanics work and what our intentions with them are, but once you get a feel for how the game mechanics work in action, all those words lose their meaning. So when something isn’t fully realized in the game yet, you’re going to come away with an inaccurate impression of what we intend it to be. That’s not good for either of us, and it greatly damages our ability to have an open dialogue with you. If what you want is less interaction between developers and community and a more closely guarded development for future Paradox projects, then leaks like this are the single best way to try and make that happen.
We have (of course) read many of the posts community members have made since playing the leak, both positive and negative ones. Fact is, no matter how in-depth or insightful, none of them identify anything that’s new or surprising to us. Many of the concerns raised were already scheduled to be addressed in the development plan up to release. Even the most positive posts about how fun and engaging the game is even in an unbalanced, unpolished state are tainted with the knowledge that this first impression is still a let-down compared to what it ought to have been. For this reason, none of the feedback we’ve gotten as a result of the leak is really actionable or of any real use to us. It has mainly served as a hit to the team’s morale and a distraction from finishing the game, and in fact made it harder for us to act on your feedback, tainted as it is now by all the factors mentioned above.
Once the game has reached a state where we could really benefit from and respond to your feedback, we’ll be eager to be able to properly show it to you. Paradox has always maintained a quite open development process, and in the Victoria dev team we intend to double down on that responsiveness to community input because we think that’s what’s best for the game. But for that communication and trust to work, you have to also trust that if we’re not showing you something yet it’s because it really isn’t ready to be shown.
Before the leak, we were already looking forward to streaming the game in the near future, and to focus more on showing off in the game in motion, and we’re of course still planning to do this! We understand your curiosity and how excited you are for the game and what has happened isn’t going to change our focus on delivering a great game at release. However, while doing so, we can’t help feeling disappointed and demoralized by how all of this went down.
The Vicky 3 dev team
This is why we can’t have nice things.
Reading the subreddit when this cracked copy got out was ridiculous. The amount of hyperventilating people were doing, like it was a finished product they were playing or something. Sheesh.
I feel really bad for the Vicky 3 team. It’s pretty messed up to have your creation dumped into the public like that before you were ready. I’d imagine the group of testers was pretty small at this stage, so it was likely someone they knew/trusted.
Victoria was always going to be a hard game to develop and test. With so many moving parts, the game won’t come together unless everything is tuned just right and work well together.
It’s always rough to see trust abused like that. Despite what they wrote in the post, hopefully the ‘backlash’ on certain mechanics push them to the top of the list to be fixed prior to release.
Looking forward to playing the finished product. With age I understand less and less the desire of people to play leaked builds, early access, or beta test games. There are so many amazing finished games that I have yet to play, why not wait for Victoria 3 to be a complete experience before enjoying it?
Hear hear. I remember in the early years of 3D technology new betas of games showed you a brand new world. Half Life 2 was legitimately sold by pirates on CDs in the marketplace near my home. It was a glimpse into a new technological era.
But nowadays?.. I’m looking forward to Starfield and Victoria 3 and Baldurcs Gate 3. But I won’t touch any Early Access versions or anything. I have so many great games available I don’t understand why would anyone want to play games even devs don’t think are worthy of EA release.
I have zero interest in an early version of Victoria 3, way too easy for one broken thing to ruin the whole experience. That being said, I do think early access is a fine format for a large number of games, just not as large of a number as actually try it.
Back on topic, today’s dev diary is on the American Civil War
Based on the description of the event decisions it seems like it’s going to be too easy to guarantee the opposing side is weak during the war? I hope that’s not actually the case but it’s also maybe basically impossible to make an “interesting” leadup to the civil war in a game of this timescale. The player knows it’s coming and pretty much where so preparing for it is pretty easy.
The bit about knowing it’s coming is always the problem with historical games. That’s a tough problem to solve. But it seems to me that compared with, say, EU, this game pushes less toward historical outcomes, and so it seems like a good long step in the right direction.
Your affecting which side is stronger strikes me as inevitable. The presidents preceding Lincoln were sympathetic to the South, and so it make sense that if the player tilts more towards the North during those decades, the North would be in a more dominant position. Of course, that points to the other problem with such games – you, as the player, have to have at least a good amount of ongoing agency to make it a game. In real life, no one person has that sort of long-term agency.
Seems pretty good. Generic/system mechanics plus the story system. Alt history stories (e.g. a slavery civil war in another country) can be added through modding if someone wants. And in the meantime, those countries have their unique crises through the same system+story combination.
While I feel bad for the team. I feel worse for us fans. I figured since they were running out of Developer diary topics, we had to be close to a release date. My guess was sometime in summer, based on the report it sounds like we will be lucky to get the game this year. Anybody have better info?
They just announced that Vicky 3 will be ‘playable’ for fans at PDXCON 2022, so it definitely isn’t releasing before the con which is sept 2-3. I have seen some people speculate that if Paradox is making the game publicly playable then, release must be very soon after. So current guesses are late september/october release, but we all know it could easily slip into 2023.
The leak is code from late March, and there was enough still missing that it wouldn’t come out soon (because things done well take time, that’s all). With the history of PDX announcing dates and launching media campaigns about 2 months before launch, at the very least it would mean late August. Wiz mentions that, actually, they’re changing big parts of mechanics anyway, so you can probably push it a bit later.
And they probably wanted PDXCON around when they can show the game, having no announcement, and post HOI4, they don’t want to do it when it isn’t close to done, as media will be writing about it then too, and the utter lack of understanding of what’s a WIP wouldn’t be any different.
So, there isn’t any public reason at the moment to think it delayed it, or that it’s an unreasonable time away.
I say “Don’t rush.” Don’t want a repeat of Distant Worlds 2.