The hyped is fading fast... going to time things out on tuesday for an eventual refund

[Anton tchekov]

So like most I was hyped about Victoria 3.

Better graphics, new gameplay mechanics and quite decent ai. Not better than Vic 2 just different (as Hearts of iron III and Hearts of Iron IV are totaly different games).

Paradox as a game company is far from perfect but honestly, from the standarts of the industry, they do quite a good job. Paradox has regularly updated and improved their games as they did with EU4 and Hearts of Iron 4 ( both quite different games now from where they started).

So more than 10 years after Vic 2 I was hyped for Victoria 3. So I wanted to treat myself and bought the game and forgot about it.Until I saw the videos...

The good, the bad and the ugly:

The good:

* The graphics and UI are nice
* The score sound entertaining
* The art is very nicely done
* A lot of thoughts has been put into the game concept (economy, diplomacy and internal politics)... but

The bad:

* Well the warfare aspect of the game seems... off

I understand why they wanted a new mechanic, it's easier to code and gives more room for improvement. Honestly I'm opened to it. Micromanaging armies can be tedious.

But I fear it's not perfected (there is no logistics at play, it feels like a very sad number games you can basically invade anyone, there is no resistance movement, no big attrition penalties, any war cause the ai to mass moblise...)

Well a lot of room for perfection...

* The "market"

I like the whole idea of market and market accessiblity but ...

A short video by the Spiffing Brit showed the most baffling flaws that need to be corrected.

Trade routes cost no upkeep, distance and time don't exist ( harvesting season anyone..) not having foodstuff doesn't create any penalties, immigration is right now broken, countries cannot choose to embargo or not at country, Capitalists don't exists ( the difference between private and public capital is absent...)

Well quite a few months of updates ahead

* The management

There seems to be no stockpiles ( as in Vicky 2 a simple thing to do really....) and other flaws

* The technology tree is quite poor and boring

The ugly:

Well I fear border gore and AI limitations.

The proud bavarian in his video was able as Austria ( not yet Austria Hungary) to create the Holy Roman Empire by a very simple diplomatic play against Prussia.

He simply made Prussia unable to acces to its western half where it's war industries are located by asking a minor to join Austria's custom Unions....

Right now the game is a mess.....

I trust Paradox on a lot of things but I fear they didn't work this project enough before release.It should have been tested a bit more. You never can correct everything but a least make sure of some basic games mechanics after more than 20 years of experience as a game company.

I know Paradox can and will improve the game but only with financial incentive... think of the Imperator disaster.

Lot of hype, lots of good ideas, but terrible execution. No new sales so no dev teams on it to fix it.

I fear the same will happen to Victoria 3. Lot of hype, little engagement by the players a few updates there and there and then.... abandon ship.

I'll have a go at the game on tuesday, If I deem the game unsalveagable I 'll ask for a refund.

You can fix a lot of things but I don't belive it's heading well with that one.

Love to read your thoughts on this do share.

Anton

[FredDie]

Damedius původně napsal:

The good thing is Paradox is finally starting to get some competition. So if this flops Paradox might be finally unseated from it's throne.

That would actually be good thing...they can make great games, but now they just make games to maximize profit for shareholders, games are decend, not great.

[Dieselpunk1937]

DinoMight původně napsal:

my genuine worry from their showcasing streams is the the vast majority of buggs that they displayed

i somehow doubt they fill fix it all (i doubt they will fix even half of them) in these last two weeks before the launch
no matter how much they promise and say that it will be different and fixed for the launch, with the number if buggs we have witnessed its genuinely hard to believe it

and i have a feeling they know it but wont admit it just like I:R...

thats one genuine big concern i have, it has nothing to do with dev communication or content (imho it has 3 times the content than ck3 and I:R combined which is a problem for PDX but entirely different discussion from vic3) , the problem isnt graphics nor warfare


there is just so many buggs so close to the release, and the "better builds" you showcased on last two streams had even more buggs than older builds (you even admitted yourself on stream that older builds are more stable... but still equally bugged)

with spiffing britts video, rose another but smaller concern
it seems to me that VIC3 is taking the CK3 route of being too much "userfriendly" actually meaning being braindead easy....

it shouldnt be as easy as we have seen, or at least offer us difficulty scaling back again
i think its unacceptable that ck3 has no difficulty scaling without mods

and buggs... so many buggs... its such a great concern because ck3 has still a lot of buggs that are there from launch and you guys havent fixed them in 2 years of its release (one of your devs even admitted it on forums) and you guys didnt show any incentive on fixing them either, you just introduced new buggs with new DLCs

i dont wanna waste another 80euros on a broken product again, which mind you will be so lackluster and boring that i will drop it in less than two weeks (and only play again for a week every time you release a new dlc which i prebought no knowing how bad of a quality they will be, and how much they will break more the product which started broken)


seriously if game will be half as broken as it is on showcasing stream, spare us the suffering and just delay the release until its fixed and ready for the market

have standards fallen so low?


this is a desperate and very concerned comment from very long time PDX player
and you are 90% there to lose me, this is kinda the last straw

and if i get banned for this comment, i think you are sending me and everyone else here a clear message....
the ball is on your side of the court PDX....

the difficulty and complexity of the game should come in a form of game mechanics and not navigating clusterf*ck UI just to perform one action (aka pretty much all pre-HOI4 PDX games, asides from maybe EU4)

[Teller Navynuts]

DinoMight původně napsal:

Elden Ring is far less complex than Victoria 3. EU2 and 3 were both rather less complex as well. The scale was the same, but the depth wasn't, and there was a lot less emergent stuff going on.

seriously last comment
bro... are you for real?
game like elden ring is million times harder to code and far more complex of a game with large arsenal of builds to balance and choose from

hitboxes in soulslike games are one of the hardest things to code (fluency mostly) in gaming

compared to spreadsheets and modular coding of paradox games....

[/quote]

You know nothing about game design or programming. It shows. PDX games are endlessly replayable and are designed around emergent story telling. That means that there are infinte possibilities for your code to mess up. Rare combinations of events, countries, modifiers. This is why testing PDX games is so hard.

Elden Ring is essentially the same game From has been making since Demon Souls, I've played them all, the only thing that has been added is width. More areas, more monsters. You let 10 guys do a 100% playthrough and you will have caught most of the bugs.

You also display in your posts some kind of hard dislike of Paradox. You want Victoria 3 to fail almost.

I hate to bring it to you but Paradox is killing competition like Total war, Civilizations. Its player numbers are increasing and increasing, while games like Warhammer 3's are dwindling. Warhammer 3's release was a complete flop and they make the same game again and again.

Terra Invicta has less than 6k players. In your average weekend there is more than 100k players for PDX games.

[Damedius]

Teller Navynuts původně napsal:

This is why testing PDX games is so hard.

Paradox testing is so hard because they gutted their testing team to maximise profits. They decided that the player base would be fine beta testing their games and DLC's.

Teller Navynuts původně napsal:

Terra Invicta has less than 6k players. In your average weekend there is more than 100k players for PDX games.

You're comparing a brand new studio with it's first game in early access to an established studio with over 10 games that has been around for over 20 years.

[Fatbill]

Part and parcel of what PDX has been doing these last years: dumbing down their games.

Removing logistics requirements, and upkeep for trade routes, and many similar things is EXACTLY in line in PDX's efforts to bring "strategy games" to the console crowd. The fewer things that "require thought and planning", the better... (at least according to PDX).

Declaring war? Pfft. Why should anyone need to think about that? Just do it. It's simple, right? Individual units? Why should those matter...

Yeah, no.


I was planning on buying this game much later anyway, and on sale, but unless they fix up some of this stuff and at least try to improve some of the systems, "buy later" might become "buy never". (Imperator: Rome became a buy never.)

[Flickmann]

The old Paradox cycle in full-view in this thread:

1. Game gets announced - hysteria
2. First tidbits of information released - euphoria
3. Detailed dev diaries get released - doubt sets in
4. Close to release, embargoes get lifted - regret and concern
5. Game releases, is a turd - F Paradox, dumbed down, wokism etc.

Paradox haven't had a good game at release for a decade. With their army of dancing clowns on Youtube and reddit they manage to sucker in enough people to keep their grift going, sadly.

[Chri3352]

Flickmann původně napsal:

The old Paradox cycle in full-view in this thread:

1. Game gets announced - hysteria
2. First tidbits of information released - euphoria
3. Detailed dev diaries get released - doubt sets in
4. Close to release, embargoes get lifted - regret and concern
5. Game releases, is a turd - F Paradox, dumbed down, wokism etc.

Paradox haven't had a good game at release for a decade. With their army of dancing clowns on Youtube and reddit they manage to sucker in enough people to keep their grift going, sadly.

+1

[winddbourne]

I had my worries when I watched the Austria and Brazil releases but then I watched the Canada and America ones and got a better idea of what the game actually entails.

OPB reformed the HRE by bringing back serfdom and abusing diplomacy but Germany was able to unite in real history. The problem is the game didn't go on long enough to show us what the problems would have been.

He did showcase an economic problem at the start of the game . . . Prussia was too dependent on it's foreign trade and couldn't recover when it's supply lines got cut. That's logistics and I'm glad it's a worry in this game . . . I want more depth to that, and I want the AI to handle logistical problems better. Get on it paradox!

OPB also seemed to be preparing his nation to hold the HRE together via a huge army. . . While also depending even more on his market than Prussia had. Would that be his downfall? We didn't get to find out.

Brazil also exploded in size but that's realistic too. Peru-Boliva and Grand Columbia both existed in the real world and they were powerful for a time . . . then they collapsed to internal politics and civil war breaking up into smaller states.

Again . . . the video was too short. I didn't get to see the critical bit of information. How hard is it going to be for him to hold that mess together? How much will the effort hurt his progress on the leaderboard?

It still was disturbing until I saw Quill18 and Stakuyi engaging with systems both of those other players completely ignored. The game really could be a mess, or it could be amazing.

I expect there will be problems. Paradox' internal play testers never get it exactly right. But I also expect the problems are going to be less than they seemed when I only had one or two videos to judge things by.

What I really want to see is a ten or fifteen part lets play, published something like a month ago, and with open feedback from the dev team as to how they were addressing each exploit found.

But . . . that's not the world we live in. I complained about the lack of video content weeks ago. Now it's too late and I'm just waiting to get my hands on the game and go from there.

[PikDik]

I think Vic 3 will be pretty decent at start and improve over the years. A bit like CK2 which was bland but decent at the start and became a powerhosue after a bunch of DLC. Same for CK3, will be alot better in a couple of years after DLC releases, same goes for this title

[Mr. Wiggles]

Tanuvein původně napsal:

Spiffs was definitely an interesting play through. It was a bit too easy for him to just join with Russia and leach off all their resources with no repercussions. Of course, Russia did declare war on him, but they defeated themselves and plunged the nation into poverty all while he had 0 troops on his island. Not to mention having a massive population for such a location, even if you disregard its proper population at the start of the game would be 0 people. The lack of a physical existence for everything almost makes the map aspect negligible in that distance and time don't seem to matter. While we've seen some vids of people gaining massive power easily through conquest, the AI can't perform a basic military operation. The lack of diplomatic push back against the shennanigans was to be expected but still unfortunate. The lack of serious logistics, terrain and weather negates much of the element of space as well, creating an almost Platonic economy that only exists conceptually.

Amen

[easytarget]

Starting threads telling strangers what you'll buy or not buy is pretty odd.

Imagine getting any other social media platform and telling people what you were going to buy or not buy at the grocery.

[Mr. Wiggles]

easytarget původně napsal:

Starting threads telling strangers what you'll buy or not buy is pretty odd.

Imagine getting any other social media platform and telling people what you were going to buy or not buy at the grocery.

I think the zoomers call them "influencers"

[AlienWired]

easytarget původně napsal:

Starting threads telling strangers what you'll buy or not buy is pretty odd.

Imagine getting any other social media platform and telling people what you were going to buy or not buy at the grocery.

Once you buy sex toys and tell people about it.... You can buy anything and feel comfortable telling everyone......

[Mr. Wiggles]

AlienWired původně napsal:

easytarget původně napsal:

Starting threads telling strangers what you'll buy or not buy is pretty odd.

Imagine getting any other social media platform and telling people what you were going to buy or not buy at the grocery.

Once you buy sex toys and tell people about it.... You can buy anything and feel comfortable telling everyone......

What did you buy?

[GorgonCZ]

I do not really care. All their games start somewhere and get polished to perfection with time, this will be the same. I will play it now and then again after every big update.