Paradox Interactive Thread: V3 'Check out my sick Germany blob' - Games

Didn't see anyone post about it, but there's an E3 build out for Tyranny [video=youtube;k5s4Usksb9o]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5s4Usksb9o[/video]

[QUOTE=SeamanStains;50789718]It does seem like paradox is intent on squandering their success. I don't know many people who are happy with the way Paradox prices their games and does their DLC's, and a lot of the people I know have lost trust and are less and less willing to spend money on it.[/QUOTE] I cant even bring myself to get excited for Paradox releases now, they are bare bones and some of the DLC is pointless, the arachnid DLC for Stellaris consisted of one portrait (in 3 colours!). That pissed me off so much I skipped on HOI4 and instead got War In The West on sale for £50 safe in the knowledge the game works and won't need DLC. I dont even care that they seemingly have accepted Stellaris is a flop since it was less finished than a lot of open access games. For all the praise Paradox gets for being the last bastion of strategy games they sure did a great job poisoning their fans to the rest of the genre. Take HOI4 for example, it was £35 on release, for a game that completely fails at recreating WW2 and has some very basic systems with some major bugs and broken features. Now, Gary Grigsby's War In The East costs £61 for a game that has no major bugs and is possibly the most in depth war game ever made. For some reason Paradox fans like to treat the cost of WITE as a massive insult but by the time HOI4 will have a similar level of polish and content it will have cost far more. It all comes down to how they treat their customers, Matrix Games despite all their faults tries to keep customers loyal by not pushing for nickel and dime DLC, whilst Paradox just fucks you slowly whilst conditioning you to treat other strategy games companies with distrust.

[QUOTE=benwaddi;50801051]I cant even bring myself to get excited for Paradox releases now, they are bare bones and some of the DLC is pointless, the arachnid DLC for Stellaris consisted of one portrait (in 3 colours!). That pissed me off so much I skipped on HOI4 and instead got War In The West on sale for £50 safe in the knowledge the game works and won't need DLC. I dont even care that they seemingly have accepted Stellaris is a flop since it was less finished than a lot of open access games. For all the praise Paradox gets for being the last bastion of strategy games they sure did a great job poisoning their fans to the rest of the genre. Take HOI4 for example, it was £35 on release, for a game that completely fails at recreating WW2 and has some very basic systems with some major bugs and broken features. Now, Gary Grigsby's War In The East costs £61 for a game that has no major bugs and is possibly the most in depth war game ever made. For some reason Paradox fans like to treat the cost of WITE as a massive insult but by the time HOI4 will have a similar level of polish and content it will have cost far more. It all comes down to how they treat their customers, Matrix Games despite all their faults tries to keep customers loyal by not pushing for nickel and dime DLC, whilst Paradox just fucks you slowly whilst conditioning you to treat other strategy games companies with distrust.[/QUOTE] I still stand by that HOI4 is almost a WW2 EU4 mod. It really took an arcade route rather than what would be remotely historical possible while being bare bones. It's simply inexcusable lacking features that EU4 had. For example the message settings. Some people like the arcade stuff but i'm not buying HOI4 to get the same randomness as a EU4 mod. What is there for HOI3 fans to like in HOI4, it just feels degraded.

How was Stellaris at all a flop. Paradox hasn't fucked anyone. They've always made buggy slightly empty games at launch and one way or another improved them. People act like Paradox has suddenly collapsed into Ubisoft or something.

[QUOTE=benwaddi;50801051]I cant even bring myself to get excited for Paradox releases now, they are bare bones and some of the DLC is pointless, the arachnid DLC for Stellaris consisted of one portrait (in 3 colours!). That pissed me off so much I skipped on HOI4 and instead got War In The West on sale for £50 safe in the knowledge the game works and won't need DLC. I dont even care that they seemingly have accepted Stellaris is a flop since it was less finished than a lot of open access games. For all the praise Paradox gets for being the last bastion of strategy games they sure did a great job poisoning their fans to the rest of the genre. Take HOI4 for example, it was £35 on release, for a game that completely fails at recreating WW2 and has some very basic systems with some major bugs and broken features. Now, Gary Grigsby's War In The East costs £61 for a game that has no major bugs and is possibly the most in depth war game ever made. For some reason Paradox fans like to treat the cost of WITE as a massive insult but by the time HOI4 will have a similar level of polish and content it will have cost far more. It all comes down to how they treat their customers, Matrix Games despite all their faults tries to keep customers loyal by not pushing for nickel and dime DLC, whilst Paradox just fucks you slowly whilst conditioning you to treat other strategy games companies with distrust.[/QUOTE] To be fair you really can't compare HoI to WITE. The series has always been much simpler and arcadey than a wargame and the attempt to be more like one in 3 drove a lot of people away. That level of micromanagement can be tedious when playing at a global level. Just reorganizing the Soviet OOB on the western front took forever because Paradox couldn't quite develop a system that worked at both front level and global level.

[QUOTE=Anderan;50801566]To be fair you really can't compare HoI to WITE. The series has always been much simpler and arcadey than a wargame and the attempt to be more like one in 3 drove a lot of people away. That level of micromanagement can be tedious when playing at a global level. Just reorganizing the Soviet OOB on the western front took forever because Paradox couldn't quite develop a system that worked at both front level and global level.[/QUOTE] True, WITE is insanely in-depth if you want it to be and not exactly the best documented systems wise. But its a great game and you see people ask about more hardcore versions of HOI (usually after trying BICE) but they get scared off because of the cost more often than the complexity. [QUOTE=Atlascore;50801630]What? Where are you even getting this shit? It was their biggest launch ever.[/QUOTE] How many are playing it now? It had massive sales but the numbers of players has dropped off, players that aren't going to be pulled back in by cosmetic DLC and the ilk meaning they need to pour resources into making full expansions to pull folks back in. I know games always drop off in users but you would have to be blind to not see the multitude of complaints about the game having little to offer after 10-15 hours which is a frighteningly low amount of content for a sandbox game and people wont tolerate it. Maybe the damage was already done, HOI4 never had sales numbers released and looking at steamstats its peak player count [B]on release[/B] was 30k below Stellaris. [QUOTE=TheBloodyNine;50801536]How was Stellaris at all a flop. Paradox hasn't fucked anyone. They've always made buggy slightly empty games at launch and one way or another improved them. People act like Paradox has suddenly collapsed into Ubisoft or something.[/QUOTE] So why not delay it and put a decent amount of content and polish into the game then release it for a little more money? Paradox are glad to ship a game that has broken features (HOI4 Peace conferences) whilst players wait for a patch that might fix the problem without borking something else, with the big changes coming whenever an expansion hits. Then they waste more time "balancing" whatever is in the latest AAR which leads to them taking mechanics out.

[QUOTE=Atlascore;50802066]You do realize that this exact same scenario happened with EU IV, right? The base game was barren af and people left in droves, then they started releasing expansions and people came back.[/QUOTE] How often will people fall for that though? Maybe they fell for it with CK2 then did the same with EU4 then Stellaris and they start to think "Shit, I spent £35 on Stellaris and its barren, I guess the DLC made the others good I wonder how much I can be expecting to pay..... Oh £150 for CK2 and £200 for EU4. Fuck this shit" My point is they went too the well two too many times. Stellaris should have been a full game where mods and expansions should never be part of the initial pitch. They would have regained the trust of those who doubt them and made a good first impression on the new customers who they picked up the last year or two who never dealt with a proper Paradox launch. Then HOI4 comes out and the first thing people are saying in player reviews and forums is "Well mods and expansions will fill out the game" which is the same shit people just dropped Stellaris for. That or they are just incredibly incompetent and waste their time thinking of memes and WACKINESS~! to put into the games.

I don't think you understand a Paradox release. They don't only get good after they've gotten all their expansions. You play if you like the base game, even if it's a bit bare. Then when they start adding stuff it makes it really enjoyable and surpass the other ones. If you don't like the game at launch, you still probably won't like the game a year from then. I feel like this is just an excuse to whine. And lol from a modder, doing stuff like country names is one of the most simple yet menial tasks you can do. By the time they were getting to Fascist Australia, it was probably some bored ass intern numbingly typing away into an excel document. I've done lists of 20 countries for my mods and found myself completely blanking by the 10th. They didn't sit for hours and plan it.

The base game should always be good. No excuses. With expansions it should be better than only good, not just "fixing" the game. I don't want throw them more money when they should be able to do a good game from the start as any other developer.

[QUOTE=TheBloodyNine;50802756]I don't think you understand a Paradox release. They don't only get good after they've gotten all their expansions. You play if you like the base game, even if it's a bit bare. Then when they start adding stuff it makes it really enjoyable and surpass the other ones. If you don't like the game at launch, you still probably won't like the game a year from then. I feel like this is just an excuse to whine. And lol from a modder, doing stuff like country names is one of the most simple yet menial tasks you can do. By the time they were getting to Fascist Australia, it was probably some bored ass intern numbingly typing away into an excel document. I've done lists of 20 countries for my mods and found myself completely blanking by the 10th. They didn't sit for hours and plan it.[/QUOTE] That's a real shitty thing to be content with. "I know the $59.99 base game is shit but just wait a few months and $200 of DLC and it will be good!" It's a shitty practice and should be protested against, otherwise it will get worse as they try to find how far they can milk the consumer.

tbh their idea (and unfortunately most other game companies' nowadays) is that you need to buy an [U]additional[/U] dlc to [U]complete[/U] the experience. That antithesis is fucked up I miss the days when expansion packs were free and were released after a complete game

[QUOTE=EuSKalduna;50800607]Didn't see anyone post about it, but there's an E3 build out for Tyranny [video=youtube;k5s4Usksb9o]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5s4Usksb9o[/video][/QUOTE] Man I'm hyped for this RPG. I really want a story/decisions/morality'n'stuff-heavy RPG. There's really a lack of those, well made ones. EDIT: Hey, I just realized I could use the pricing policy of paradox as an example for my industrial organization subject this semester. Cool. They do really have some parallels with the monopolies/oligopolies described in the books I was told to read.

[QUOTE=TheBloodyNine;50802756]IIf you don't like the game at launch, you still probably won't like the game a year from then.[/QUOTE] Except this is bullshit. I fucking hated EUIV at launch and I liked it after it got expanded a bit. If someone doesn't like a game because it doesn't have enough content, how will they probably not like it after more content has been added? You don't have to like a game from launch to be able to like it later.

[QUOTE=benwaddi;50801051]I cant even bring myself to get excited for Paradox releases now, they are bare bones and some of the DLC is pointless, the arachnid DLC for Stellaris consisted of one portrait (in 3 colours!). That pissed me off so much I skipped on HOI4 and instead got War In The West on sale for £50 safe in the knowledge the game works and won't need DLC. I dont even care that they seemingly have accepted Stellaris is a flop since it was less finished than a lot of open access games. For all the praise Paradox gets for being the last bastion of strategy games they sure did a great job poisoning their fans to the rest of the genre. Take HOI4 for example, it was £35 on release, for a game that completely fails at recreating WW2 and has some very basic systems with some major bugs and broken features. Now, Gary Grigsby's War In The East costs £61 for a game that has no major bugs and is possibly the most in depth war game ever made. For some reason Paradox fans like to treat the cost of WITE as a massive insult but by the time HOI4 will have a similar level of polish and content it will have cost far more. It all comes down to how they treat their customers, Matrix Games despite all their faults tries to keep customers loyal by not pushing for nickel and dime DLC, whilst Paradox just fucks you slowly whilst conditioning you to treat other strategy games companies with distrust.[/QUOTE] As someone who knows very little about Paradox and Stellaris is the first game i've really been interested in by them (yet i haven't really got around to playing it yet) in what way is it considered a flop?

[QUOTE=TheBloodyNine;50801536]How was Stellaris at all a flop. Paradox hasn't fucked anyone. They've always made buggy slightly empty games at launch and one way or another improved them. People act like Paradox has suddenly collapsed into Ubisoft or something.[/QUOTE] Victoria 2 felt fairly complete at launch, its expansion honestly didn't even do too much in terms of gameplay alterations.

[QUOTE=SebiWarrior;50802848]tbh their idea (and unfortunately most other game companies' nowadays) is that you need to buy an [U]additional[/U] dlc to [U]complete[/U] the experience. That antithesis is fucked up I miss the days when expansion packs were free and were released after a complete game[/QUOTE] Other developers usually add something upon the game, not fixing what was lacking to begin with. Sure, it harder when it's a sandbox game. But it should never be bare bones, the basic systems should be there. Then they can be expanded upon and improved. In HOI4, things are missing from the previous game and some things has just been changed to be the most simplest and boring thing, they could have done (research). [editline]31st July 2016[/editline] [QUOTE=Atlascore;50802914]Expansion packs have never been free.[/QUOTE] Mostly, no. But some have been, can't remember specific ones. But for an example, Verdun. Which has since its released, gotten countless free content packs. Those could probably have been charged 5$ a piece, if the company really wanted to.

[QUOTE=Tureis;50803061]Victoria 2 felt fairly complete at launch, its expansion honestly didn't even do too much in terms of gameplay alterations.[/QUOTE] To be fair that was before Crusader Kings 2 where they arguably started adapting the practice. Victoria 2 is a nice game anyways but it's too segmented in what you can do. imho. Especially when you're playing as a german minor than insta-lose because Prussia unites everyone into Germany.

[QUOTE=nightlord;50802974]As someone who knows very little about Paradox and Stellaris is the first game i've really been interested in by them (yet i haven't really got around to playing it yet) in what way is it considered a flop?[/QUOTE] A flop in that it hasn't grabbed peoples attention like they hoped. It had a massive release and was highly anticipated and then people got bored with it. Paradox seemed to be hoping they could put a lot of cosmetic DLC into it, which is good if you like that stuff, but they couldn't capitalise on that initial buzz because they were still finishing HOI4 and fixing the gameplay side of Stellaris whilst players dropped out. Let's call it a tactical victory and a strategic failure. But don't let me scare you away from playing it or any Paradox game, if you enjoy them then its all good. I just don't want people to feel cheated like I did.

[QUOTE=Keyblockor1;50803259]To be fair that was before Crusader Kings 2 where they arguably started adapting the practice. Victoria 2 is a nice game anyways but it's too segmented in what you can do. imho. Especially when you're playing as a german minor than insta-lose because Prussia unites everyone into Germany.[/QUOTE] You still have a shot to form SGF with Bavaria. You can also do it with Wuttermberg, but since they lack population it's much harder.

[QUOTE=RB33;50802805]The base game should always be good. No excuses. With expansions it should be better than only good, not just "fixing" the game. I don't want throw them more money when they should be able to do a good game from the start as any other developer.[/QUOTE] But Stellaris, HoI4 are both decent games. They're not unfun to play. Bogged down by some poor decisions and some missing ones? Yes, but plenty of people thoroughly enjoy playing them as is, just like they did vanilla EUIV, CK2 and Vicky 2. Also Vicky 2's launch was a complete disaster and for the longest time it was notorious for legitimately just not working. It really needed the two expansions to become playable in any way.

[QUOTE=TheBloodyNine;50803760]It really needed the two expansions to become playable in any way.[/QUOTE] No? It was perfectly playable before AHD came out. Patches and expansions are two entirely different things.

[QUOTE=TheBloodyNine;50803760]But Stellaris, HoI4 are both decent games. They're not unfun to play. Bogged down by some poor decisions and some missing ones? Yes, but plenty of people thoroughly enjoy playing them as is, just like they did vanilla EUIV, CK2 and Vicky 2.[/QUOTE] Decent but a worthy sequel in the same style as 3, no. It tried to be something different, something much closer to EU4. But even EU4 have options that HOI4 lacks. It's not always about how good of a game it is but what kind of game it is. As me comparing it to 3, average. Just on its own, disregarding it being part of a series, decent.

[QUOTE=TheBloodyNine;50801536] Paradox hasn't fucked anyone. They've always made buggy slightly empty games at launch and one way or another improved them.[/quote] This isnt a good excuse. Why does Paradox get a pass on releasing buggy, sometimes unfinished, empty games when every other game studio in the world would get completely shit on. "Oh Paradox games are always bad at release, just wait 6 months and buy all the DLC, thats the [I]true[/I] CK2/EU4/Ect experience" Their DLC practice is absolutely horrendous, with 15-20 Dollar DLCs being released and 5-7 Dollar "Content Packs" or 2 Dollar "Face Packs" or "Unit Packs" being released that should've been included in the actual DLC. Stop giving Paradox a pass with shitty DLC and terrible launches because they've always done it.

[QUOTE=TheBloodyNine;50803760]But Stellaris, HoI4 are both decent games. They're not unfun to play. Bogged down by some poor decisions and some missing ones? Yes, but plenty of people thoroughly enjoy playing them as is, just like they did vanilla EUIV, CK2 and Vicky 2. Also Vicky 2's launch was a complete disaster and for the longest time it was notorious for legitimately just not working. It really needed the two expansions to become playable in any way.[/QUOTE] After playing a few games of HoI4 I felt like I've already done it all, the game is simply not engaging in the way HoI3 is.

-snip-

So my friend happened to send me this: [I]"Fascist Israel in the Axis?"[/I] [IMG]http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/260465617064797444/44F2992F98CABA216E6B8443CFF724F9F7C94E94/[/IMG]

[QUOTE=GordonZombie;50812645]So my friend happened to send me this: [I]"Fascist Israel in the Axis?"[/I] [IMG]http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/260465617064797444/44F2992F98CABA216E6B8443CFF724F9F7C94E94/[/IMG][/QUOTE] Well, it could be theoretically possible that Germany would create a 'state' for their Jewish People, rather than an outright final solution.

[QUOTE=Rowtree;50812949]Well, it could be theoretically possible that Germany would create a 'state' for their Jewish People, rather than an outright final solution.[/QUOTE] That was at one point the proposed solution, except it was in Madagascar that they wanted to use.

[QUOTE=Anderan;50812954]That was at one point the proposed solution, except it was in Madagascar that they wanted to use.[/QUOTE] How would they get the jews in there, Madagascar probably closed their ports the second Germany entered Poland

[QUOTE=TrafficMan;50813330]How would they get the jews in there, Madagascar probably closed their ports the second Germany entered Poland[/QUOTE] Probably the same way they planned to get Germans into eastern Europe. Madagascar was controlled by France anyways. The plan was abandoned early on, iirc it was a very early proposal. Just Google Madagascar plan if you want to read up on it.