One Year Anniversary

[J4MESOX4D]

I remember saying a year ago that I'll give it a year before jumping in yet looking at it now, it seems worse than ever. Even recent reviews have shifted to a 'Mostly Negative' rating. Can anyone sum up what has happened in the first year and what the short-term future looks like? I'm really out of the loop but I am surprised to see things haven't seemingly improved.

[Noname]

To sum it up: lack of any coherent vision of the game. They change core mechanics by 180 degrees each and every patch, and they love to keep messing with the same mechanics for more than one patch.

If something worked fine in one version, next version it is nerfed or doesn't work anymore. On top of that, standard Paradox sheneningans: they fix one thing by breaking two others and so on.

For example this patch they decided to delete hourly ticks from the game, but they didn't fix combat that worked with those ticks, so now you can reinforce army forever, and battles take months to finish. They also decided to "fix" food system by completely overhauling it to the degree that it mess with other stuff in game (trade mostly). Plus on top of that DLC costing 1/3 of game price adds content to 2,5 countries (Castille and Morocco + half of that for Grenada). To give them some credit, they also added some extra content to other countries in Maghreb and Iberia for free.

In one word - Paradox.

[KroganCharr]

I believe Paradox is currently trapped in between trying to hold on to their sandbox vision they made for EU5, and trying to correct because it's clearly not working. Nobody has any idea where the game is going long term.

[GuastardoDellaRadica]

Devs still don't know how to balance their game and most importantly don't know what they want their game to look like.
Patches that change things no one asked for get released with no QA and bugs.
EU5 has progressively become worse and more tedious with every new patch without getting any funnier.
Key mechanics like cores and colonization are poorly designed and are in desperate need of reworks that are months, if not years, away.
But that's just the tip of the iceberg.

[ABoxFullOfKittens]

Watched a 1.4 reviewer last night. Praised the daily ticks up and down bc now he can finally do let's plays, where he could not before due to hourly ticks bc takes too long.
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When I think about what I want from a GSG... how it presents via social media.. isn't even on the list. I think this game just died for me.

[Thumper509]

I myself went into buying this game knowing it needed at least a year of tuning before I even considered a serious play. Unfortunately, we may be waiting another year before they even get the obvious stuff worked out.

I've lost faith in Paradox, and I fear this may be the last title I buy from the them. I've been playing PDX games since HOI2 and EU2. Sad to see that they haven't learned at all from past mistakes, and have gotten really bad as far as the DLC system is concerned.

Its been a good run but the time of Paradox being the Grand Strategy kings is at an end.

[KroganCharr]

Originally posted by Thumper509:

Its been a good run but the time of Paradox being the Grand Strategy kings is at an end.

The thing is, as far as I'm aware, nobody makes games quite like Paradox still. The grand strategy genre is relatively niche in itself, and what other games exist in it aren't really doing what Paradox does. I don't mean to disparage Total War or Civilization, but I think we can all agree that those games are not really substitutes to Europa Universalis (or each other, for that matter), not because they are worse but because they are not trying to do this thing.

[J4MESOX4D]

Originally posted by Thumper509:

Its been a good run but the time of Paradox being the Grand Strategy kings is at an end.

I think they will still retain a strong position in the space but they are certainly a shadow of their former selves and confidence in them is at an all-time low. CK3 and HOI4 is still keeping them in some regard despite some iffy expansions but blunders in Vic3 and this has been pretty damaging. Afterworld is also a huge risk which could backfire.

The most annoying thing is with all their experience and previous games, they always seem to needlessly screw up aspects of sequels when things it should be easy to built upon their past work. They then spend two plus years trying to get to square one. EU5 should've been a huge success right out the gate with the already vast and expansive EU4 as a foundation to work from but this game feels like a shell of what that was.

[Octopuses]

Daily ticks are good but it's ridiculous how they didn't rebalance combat to match it.

[truehunter]

They have mishandled the game so badly that I am not buying future paradox games and have no interest to play any of their games currently.

When EU5? When new dev team? When layoffs?

[ABoxFullOfKittens]

I guess I'm an abused wife with respect to PDX. They abuse, I come back. Even now despite all this I didn't leave the PDX orbit, but instead hopped to their adjacent titles. Like CA, no viable competitor. I hate to say it but if they go under, I don't think anyone will fill that void.