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The same feel of really running an empire instead of just going through "bunker in, tech up, steamroll map"-gamephases play, that made EU and CK special and let them stand out? Nope nowhere to be found.
CK3 ? Yea I did test it and found it the same kind of bland, basically a bastardized shell of a once great game, using the core-stuff of it to build a meme-generator around it on wich you can then hang apparently shiny stuff to sell as DLCs.
And like with Stellaris they will sell meaningless additions like they sold new races and origins over there (wich just ment you have to slightly vary the economy of the empire youre running and besides that the gameplay is the same as before, kinda like selling breakfast cereals now in one additional color but they taste the same and turn into the same sludge after 5 minutes but charging extra for it...).
The first "major expansion" wich they claimed would have WAY MORE CONTENT then their old DLCs in other games used to have to makt up for the 30 bucks price?
Yea its one part meaningless slightly different bonusses (culture-mechanic) and a laughable 3d "court" I wouldn't be interested in if I got it for free and would actually be annoyed if the game would put me into it forcibly interrupting my game (no idea if it does, I got the DLC cause I have the royal edition but I couldn't be bothered yet to load it up...)
So yea disapointed, somewhat but after Stellaris... yk its like the last episodes of Game of Thrones after you had already seen half the last season, the dissapointment is already done, you just kinda watch the dumpster burn down out of morbid curiosity.
Unless pdx radically course-corrects and I get to test some future game that is good again, CK3 will most likely, sad as that is, have been the last pdx game I actually bought.
10 years ago you pay $20 for a DLC, you expect $20 worth of content. Seems fine and reasonable to have such an expectation, yes?
Today you pay $30 for a DLC, but got, maybe $10 worth of content. Meanwhile if you express disappointment that this is the best that they could come up with after a year of development, everyone rages at you for being "entitled", simply for expecting what you paid for.
Paradox will continue to surround themselves with people who sing softly into their ears and refrain from offering any semblance of criticism, and the quality of their games and the standards—that they themselves have set with the previous title—will suffer.. I really thought that after the shake-up at Paradox, and reforming that went on this time last year (before they basically went scorched-earth on the members of the forums, banning and putting everyone on probation who spoke up about their lack of communication, then apologized and said they will do better), that they would have 'hit the ground running' on this next release. It feels more like they drank beer and sat around the drawing board until maybe October or November and managed to throw something out just to say they did something.
EDIT: I'm being too harsh. maybe could just be the developers truly want to design an awesome game and add awesome DLC, and someone in upper management keeps throttling them and capping their potential. Who knows.
and here we are.
And it was much longer than a year..
I was being generous, lol.
I think there was some 'dysfunctional-family' type stuff going on between August 2020 when the game released and the great paradox forum massacre of February 2021. Yes I know COVID COVID. But I think there was more to it than that, going on behind the scenes, that for customer-relations reasons, Paradox would not have wanted to be made public. And when they announced Dev Diary #48 where they went into introducing all the new team members and shuffling people around, I said to myself, "this is either a good sign, or a very bad sign". (Nothing criminal or anything like that, just perhaps people not able to work together very well or something that would have caused issues with work performance)
So its just eyecandy, meme-generation and pretend-content that is really nothing then shifting some number around (oh and ofc, when looking at Stellaris again, not-quite-copying of known franchises, so you can suck in those fandoms to a degree).
Oh I get that ppl can get a ton of fun out of it, but that is pretty much what I meant by a generator that allows you the nice stories in your head, it is, by now, functional to provide a platform for you to RP on and if you like to do that I get there can be a lot of fun (in case you don't know the Templin Institute Stellaris Invicta video series on youtube, I can recommend them and they nearly made me play Stellaris again, but the thing is I would be dissapointed because the game doesn't provide the great stories, its the players brain doing that).
For me the biggest letdown with Stellaris is that after years they still haven't managed to come up with a really working colony-AI that can actually run a big empire for you, wich is necessary with the micro-managment the game puts on your shoulders.
The empire designing yes in theory its great and I admit I did have fun to build and imagine many empires, but after a while you come to the conclusion that all that differentiates widely different empire builds is that you just put some numbers a bit different in your economic buildup, the general gameplay is always the same.
I sunk over 800 hours into stellaris, waaaaaaay too many back when midgame was empty and the game lagged as hell, in fact just to test stuff that took time I let the game run while doing something else, and pretty much every new iteration I started a new game, hoping to get a feeling that would be somewhat akin to EU or CK in space, running an empire not just build up -> tech up -> steamroll and stellaris consistently failed that.
To be fair there is a reason I brought up the Game of Thrones analogy, because being fair even GoTs abysmal last season doesn't deserve the ratings it got compared to some of the stuff out there, but it gets compared to what came before and that makes the fall hard.
If I had to rate stellaris and ck3 fairly on their own I would probably give them a 4-5/10, there are waaaay worse games out there, but for their price and given that I have way less free time then I had in the times of EU2 and 3, yea no if Stellaris, CK3 and (even though I didnt test it) Imperator Rome are todays pdx.... then yea not wasting money and (looking at stellaris) especially TIME on their products anymore.
Inflation is one thing, some developers demanding money and avoiding effort is another. I don't want to speak on how much thirst for money Paradox has because I simply don't have enough insight to comment on that. However, it does seem to me that Paradox has long entered on the low-effort route. For years I've been saying that there seems to be a trend for missing things that a person of average intelligence exercising a modicum of effort should be able to see and failing to properly resolve situations that perhaps arent' too difficult to resolve if you are willing to put in some effort, some time, allow your brain to ache for a while with fatigue. And then there is a tendency to rely on gapfill solutions for years, avoid fixes, avoid owning up to even massive blunders that shouldn't even have happened to begin with, and so on. There must be a skill problem (not necessarily technical skill but perhaps management skill in cases where it's relevant) or an effort problem. But looking back at the years from 2012 onward it looks like the degree of effort put in the CK series is steadily diminishing. I should rather not say that Paradox demands copious praise and a medal for simply lifting a finger to do something, but on some days it looks like that.
I get the same treatment (understating here) for talking about the same problem not so much from the perspective of the price paid, though that too, as from the perspective of (a) all the promises and hype and koolaid, and the demands for praise from the community and self-praise heaped by the marketing department vs (b) reality, in reference to what could be (c) reasonable expectations.
Unfortunately, there seems to be a small but vocal corps of defenders in the community who are ready to defend even the completely indefensible, just for the sake of contradicting whatever criticism you make, even if they need to resort to very dubious logical operations in their argument and embrace absurdity, pushing the limits of belief so far that you can't or almost can't find it in yourself to believe that they are really arguing in good faith rather than coming up with red herrings and straws on purpose to waste your time with.
In short, contrarian to the point of absurdity, contradicting just to contradict and deflecting just to deflect, maybe stalling just to stall. You could call it defensive fan mentality or debunking mentality something along these lines. Actual dev team members seem to be more ready to accept criticism or accept some ideas from your post to use in the next patch than those 'defenders'.
That is exactly the case, and it's been like that for years now in the community. Marketing employees will write posts to the tune of 'the gods at Paradox have listened to the prayers of their faithful', forum employees will instruct people on how to render proper respects to a dev and make him or her feel great, etc., people who offer criticism will be banned or infracted, which includes giving them warnings for 'spam' because a Paradox employee decided that the criticism is… repetitive, whereas praise is not. Or that it is not constructive because it focuses on a flaw and doesn't come up with something to praise Paradox for and make sure that there is more praise than criticism in the post. And then there's prodding you to tone down your criticism, relativize it, put it in deferential and supplicatory terms and rename anything you can from bug or issue report to 'suggestion for improvement', improvement being code word for actually fixing things and tying the lose ends.
And then you have people like Fredrik Wester smiling smugly and accusing the community of being toxic, whereas toxic sounds more like the kind of atmosphere Paradox's management has allowed to unfold inside the company, among the employees, and no wonder it's been affecting the community as well, with the way in which the forums are managed being quite clearly dysfunctional (using brutality to squeeze out as much and as high praise as they can, even if it largely comes from or is driven by their own marketing department, and to silence criticism, even if that means having to leave the like button and remove the dislike button in order to make e.g. 5000 likes show but 4000 dislikes not show, so that it looks like they are being praises and agreed with, not to mention the behind-the-scenes treatment of the critics of the various flaws and shortcomings in the game or in the company's conduct).
I think the quality is decreasing quite steadily perhaps because of the culture of amplifying the praise and drowning out or outright shutting off criticism. There is clearly a (meticulously cultivated?) cognitive gap that's causing a lot of problems.
EDIT: I'm being too harsh. maybe could just be the developers truly want to design an awesome game and add awesome DLC, and someone in upper management keeps throttling them and capping their potential. Who knows.
and here we are. [/quote]
I don't know what they did. Perhaps they suffered from writer's block or some sort of coder's or designer's or even manager's block. Perhaps everybody had to be juggling several in-development titles at the same time due to staffing shortages. I definitely wouldn't presume to think they simply sat there drinking beer. But questions beg to be asked.
And there is a need to emphasize that the same sort of problem has been with us for quite some time now, although — to do them justice — Paradox have often put quite a lot of content in their DLCs or even free patches.
Still, as there has been a cognitive gap relating to quality for several years now, now there also seems to be a cognitive gap relating to quantity. And a problem with expectation management, which includes how much the company are expecting of themselves, and I am led to think that they set the expectation bar too low for themselves, there is too little expectation and too much patting oneself on the pack, and too much putting too much stock in the Internet praise driven by the specific… curation of the company's social media by its marketing department, including community staff.
It's been several years now. It's time for Paradox to stop living in a bubble.
Additionally it is kind of worrying for the PDX studio as in the past few years, nearly all the content they have released have been between average to frankly bad. Imo nearly all DLCs they have released since 2018 actually ended up turning their base game worse due to features bloat, unbalance, poor design, bugs and general creative direction free fall.
I had hope a new CK game would help them turn the tide as it is imo their most brilliant franchise. Instead it may become the worse offender. At least among their best titles (although HoI4 is giving a serious challenge for that title due to how broken NSB is).
So far, nothing I have seen from Victoria 3 makes me optimistic the devs can find a way out of this negative spiral going on for years. Quite the opposite actually. It is just sad really.
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/my-patch-1-5-review.1509797/
That is possible.
I imagine, especially for the ones that were also involved in the development of CK-2, that there is a fair amount of pressure to resist simply copying the ideas of CK-2 and simply re-skinning them. You want to come up with something new, but at the same time, shouldn't feel like you have to re-invent the wheel.
I know you said staffing is possibly an issue, and on that topic, I think increasing that budget and hiring some good writers, would go a loooong way in improving the variety of the events. CK3 has an issue where it can't seem to decide whether it wants to be a roleplaying game or a strategy game, and as a result, it doesn't do either particularly well.
FristTime.jpg Happened when EUIV came out. I still remember the quality of the In Nomine update and its impact on EUIII. Compare that to the dumpster fire of Paradox product pricing today and its a real shame.