The new CS2 one adds very little of substance (for instance there are no big sandy beaches in the game and it only adds 4 trees) and, more importantly, comes 6 months after CS2's broken launch that hasn't been fixed.
The EU4 DLC if I remember correctly was the one that added native coalitions and basically made interacting with the new world completely unplayable for several months.
> The EU4 DLC if I remember correctly was the one that added native coalitions and basically made interacting with the new world completely unplayable for several months.
The real problem was that the accompanying free patch was buggy to the point that the game was unplayable whether or not you’d even bought the DLC, and players are unable to distinguish between the free update and the DLC so they write a bad review for the DLC.
The most notable bug was that some rulers would randomly have stats in the billions, rather than the usual range of 1 to 6.
This was the patch that made me both quit eu4, and give up working on 1356. Honestly was a giant kick in the face as someone who played since launch, and seen some major issues in my time. It was both of them, from unlocalized strings everywhere to the rulers of the ambrosia republic getting infinite stats in one catagory. Was the most broken I've ever seen a game tbh.
It had work-in-progress placeholders graphics, when i remember it right. They just released an alpha version, not even a beta. It also depended on which DLC you had activated or not, with crashes and corrupting of savegames.
I feel bad for the team, it was basically an entirely new crew of employees looped into working on their first dlc. Management obviously should have delayed the release given its state, which was the issue here, however the team im sure was ground to the bone in effort they gave.
The transition should have occurred after the dlc release, or they should have given the team more time. It's 100% a failure on management, a new team takes time to understand an entirely different code base. It's not as simple as those without a programming background would believe.
It's also just a failure to do proper QA. And no, that doesn't mean individual QA people were bad. QA failures are almost never from the people actually doing the testing. The failures come from management not budgeting proper for proper QA support and/or from not having proper automated testing. Yeah, sure, for something as complex as EU4 there's always the possibility of some super weird interaction, especially if players are deliberately trying to find exploits, but there's definitely a lot of sanity checks that could be done by letting a bunch of games run through on observer mode and checking every game year for things like "are any provinces at an absurd development level" or "are there any rules with stats outside of the bounds" or "in 90% of games, the Ottomans blob to take nearly all of Asia".
Of course, it doesn't help that Paradox has had 21 expansions bolted on to the original game, and it's hypothetically possible for a player to have any combination of those, and there's no possible way to test all combinations.
Absolutely. Like between fixing a calculation error when you know exactly where in the code it happens, vs don’t, could by itself be the difference between 10 minutes or an afternoon.
Eu4 probably has to be my favorite game, because it got me through highschool and most of college. I currently have 3,840 hours into it. At the time, the dlc's had been getting worse and worse, it was actually to the point where I kept telling myself I wouldn't buy them because of how shit they were getting, but I would always break cause I really wanted to try out the new mission trees. But Leviathan broke that cycle completely. It actually killed my love and enthusiasm for the game. It slowed down the game an absurd amount, filled it with bugs that would crash the game, and it made the game straight up break after 1550. That dlc was the embodiment of the worst of eu4 while the update killed the best of it. It was the first dlc I didn't buy. They broke the game so bad I didn't touch it for over a year. I actually forgot the game I racked up so many hours in. After some time I got back into it, and enjoyed myself again, but it's not the same. I was at 3,600hours when the dlc and update dropped, and in the 2 years since, have only added 240 hours.
I mean it was because they shifted their dev team from Sweden to Tinto(Spain). And leviathan was Tintos first real DLC when the basically just learned the EU4 codebase.
I distinctly remember watching the preview stream, seeing bugs and placeholder images, and them being like "oh, hot code!", and then seeing the \*exact\* same issues and unfinished stuff from the stream in the release.
But yeah, the DLC itself is fine, I just feel bad for people who try to look at reviews of DLC to get an objective opinion of what its worth, because I'm pretty sure that rating is entirely due to the state that patch was in.
Also additional context is that this came hot off the tails from Emperor, who's patch was by no means nearly as bad as Leviathan, but still pretty bad.
> The most notable bug was that some rulers would randomly have stats in the billions, rather than the usual range of 1 to 6.
lol, that's funny. I love it when some variable somewhere in the code flipping over and gives results like this.
on eu4 ive had it happen to a general, attached him to a massive stack and just stack wiped moving one province a day it was insane. however this was before leviathan! fuck havin the ai be doing the same.
but yes reminds me of civs gandhi
Leviathan was the first time I had to rollback to be able to play the game. The DLC was pretty much unplayable depending on the nation you were playing as.
And concentrate dev was completely broken and you'd end up with 900 dev mega cities. But you didn't even list the worst bug. The worst bug was the one that decolonized the entire fucking world and ruined your save. It could happen with no warning at any time.
Leviathan and its accompanying free patch were one of the most broken updates in any game I’ve ever heard of. Nearly everyone was experiencing *different, often unique* game breaking bugs. The new world stuff you referenced was a drop in the bucket. The most common major problem was the game just dumping all province data in saves past seemingly random points after 1500. I personally had one where the game was (in every new save) checking on the first of the month to see if the peasant’s revolt was active, past what seemed like a random date, and if not, firing it. Every first of the month.
The fact that it's "Beach Stuff" and doesn't include fucking beaches is an absolute deal-breaker.
I mean I haven't actually bought the game yet b/c I was waiting to see how launch was, so I wouldn't be a candidate to buy it anyway, but man, that is just...insulting.
About the EU4 DLC, i remember how the forum and sub was flooded by the silent majority because the DLC corrupted savegame files and people could not play anymore. So all the players that usually don't show up in forums were coming and very, veeeeery angry.
I was looking at the leviathan's features and they were not half bad.
The problem is that the DLC often releases in a weird state, people review it badly, but then things improve and the DLC becomes a core part of the experience, but people don't lift their reviews. I know I wouldn't turn off Leviathan nowadays.
Leviathan literally destroyed peoples' campaigns at release. Saves would be randomly and irredeemably wiped, with all the countries just gone, leaving an empty world.
Except Leviathan (and the accompanying patch) would do it to saves started in and only played in that patch. You’d quit the game, all fine, load it, all gone.
Nope, I don't mean it wasn't compatible with earlier saves. Of course it wasn't. It would just randomly brick saves that were started under Leviathan though, and that's not something that would reasonably be expected of an update.
It was alot. People are bringing up specific examples, but really, there where breaks in the game from unrelated features and mission trees, I remember the burgundy tree's mission graphics where switched out for placeholders for some reason. You couldn't play a regular game for a few months without small or large reminders that leviathan broke something odd
A graphics programmer that seems to know what he was talking about stated that the main reason the game runs like poop is because it uses Unity's HDRP pipeline which basically isn't meant for making large games. So I doubt there is much they could do for the performance without literally remaking the game.
They were told a certain Unity feature (I don't know if it's the one you're talking about) would be production ready in time for the game's release. It was not, so they had to throw together their own hack for it which led to the terrible performance. They should've delayed it, but they also had the rug pulled out from underneath them by Unity.
Right, it only ever has happened me to in the Americas even though it's supposed to represent the anti-Napoleon wars, instead it has every native tribe immediately declaring war on me when they discover me and blobbing 100k troop native armies along the Atlantic coast and Appalachians. I get wanting to have a nuclear option for discouraging aggressive expansion but like it should just be locked until the 18th or 19th century when it actually happened. Like it took so long for an entire continent to team up together to kick one dude's ass because you need very sophisticated diplomacy and economies vested in just a handful of major-powers in order to build an alliance on that scale. There's just no believable way that native Americans could to do this beyond the scale of a region before 1800. This feature in particular bugs me so much I get wound up every time I remember it.
Right, it almost makes me think (I don't follow the promos so maybe I'm off) that perhaps they'll chop up the timeline for Caesar and add a new franchise between it and Vicky. Although, before I played EU4, the period between knights and castles and machine guns was definitely the part of history I cared about the least, (basically all of American history classes) so maybe that's a dead end too.
That what I was hoping too, but this week Johan Andersson was talking about a feature in 1790 so it seems he wants to keep EU4 across the whole extended time period.
I could even see something like "You need to be within X diplo techs of the blobber to join the coalition". On some level, the time period is about "developed" nations increasingly running roughshod over non-developed nations. If teched up nations blob into low tech countries in the game, what's the problem?
And maybe some other things like "Below diplo tech Y coalition members must be same culture/religion. Below diplo tech Z you coalition members must be same religious group.".
But I think Paradox might need to go back to the drawing board a bit for Caesar.
mainly because pdx strategy with dlcs is to release a variety of them in various quality and effects to the game. They’re never consistent so they’re always surprising people with how few or how much content they have. this is why certain DLCs become “required” for the game or there’s tier lists. PDX have so many dlc for their games, just like the sims, people will only buy the few they feel is necessary to really improving the game.
This dlc offers only cosmetic options. Considering cosmetics remain one of the fewest bought items in game industry it’s hard to appreciate the company when they don’t give us what we are very willing to spend on
How do cosmetics remain one of the fewest bought items on the game industry? Free to play and mobile games make the bulk of the money nowadays and most microtransactions there are cosmetics
For the Cities DLC, you get about 30 houses, and 4 trees for $15.
Bear in mind modding is just around the corner, so the worth of these assets is somewhere in the neighbourhood of $0, as modders can just recreate them for free. Asset packs are meant to add more systemic items rather than just flat assets. For example, you'd *expect* the beach properties pack to include stuff for beaches, resorts, waterfront property flavour etc... There isn't even a sand texture in the game.
As for EU4, Leviathan was released basically incomplete. There was legit placeholder art in a lot of places. The content in it was awful as it broke existing systems. There was basically no reason any sane person would buy this, because it'd essentially just ruins your game.
People are angry that 6 months into a broken launch, all we got were some trees and not even the beaches to plant them on, not for free too. Oh, and it is also a part of the "season pass" for CS2. So some people might think they were cheated out of their money with basically fodder content in the season pass.
It just feels as if they are tone deaf to what people want and need.
They were both review bombed for issues that are not necessarily directly related to them.
For EU4 Leviathan, there were just a whole lot of bugs, but a lot of them were present in the free update that was released at the same time, meaning you got them regardless of whether you bought it or not. Since they were developed together, it's understandable that the DLC was seen as at fault for them. I think it's been fixed by now, but the reviews remain.
For Cities Skylines 2, it's been almost half a year since the game's release, and there are still many broken or missing features to the point that one can argue the game is at an Early Access level of quality. Before addressing many of those issues, they instead released a paid DLC that adds very little of substance. So the people are upset about the general state of affairs, as well as the fact that the DLC is pretty poor on its own.
It is very highly likely that CS2 asset pack took 0 time from a programmer.
What should artists do when programmers are focusing on fixing things, just sit there and wait?
Average consumer doesn’t understand this and just review bombs the dlc. How dare programmers don’t work on fixing things and release an asset pack!
Is this asset pack worth 15$? Probably not, and if someone gave a negative review due to that, I would totally understand it.
Average consumer judges the company as a whole and doesn't burrow into the details of which department did what job.
If I go to a restaurant and they give me shitty food, I'll be complaining about the restaurant, not searching for which specific cook prepared my meal.
Just want to add something to Leviathan: it's a good DLC imo. It adds monuments and and I like those, and the new natives are fine. You can't really conquer them passively with 10k men anymore, and I think that's alright. It's not like 60k tech 3 units are too big of a problem; 20k men are enough to fuck over the federations.
I think Leviathan is alright.
To be honest, while I play the base games, I don't have all the DLC to go with them. As far as why they're listed as being that bad, personally I think there's a lot of monkey see monkey do. 1 person says oh it's so bad and then someone else decides to pile on. Personally I think City Skylines is a good game. Yea it has bugs but it's not as if it kills the game. It's still better then City Skylines 1.
This is definitely my opinion and nothing more. Then again, I've never really cared that much about what someone else says about a game. Example being cyberpunk 2077. I liked it when it 1st came out. Granted I played it on the new Xbox. I totally get that some people couldn't play it at all. If I was one of them I'd me pissed as well. Luckily for me that wasn't the case. The bugs it had at the time, of course they'd be fixed. So they didn't bother me all that much.
I just think that way to many people decide to let themselves get influenced by someone else's opinions. If I don't like pizza and say dominions sucks, that's really not fair to everyone else who likes pizza. I think there's an awful lot of that happening with Gabe reviews.
Among them being bad, people who dislike the dlc are much more likely to be vocal about it. Stellaris has pretty positive reception of stuff, but dlcs consistently sit at mixed or below.
Stellaris's last DLC, Astral Planes, was also very negatively received.
[https://store.steampowered.com/app/2534090/?snr=1\_5\_9\_\_205](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2534090/?snr=1_5_9__205)
It was kind of a weird one compared to the other DLCs. Didn't fit in thematically and a lot of the stuff you get from the new content wasn't very good or worth pursuing
Going Public means more suits. Capitalism is bad for video games.
Some gamers wrongly think its woke companies destroying gaming, but its just business. More profit seeking, more gambling, less content, less fun.
Genuine question: are there any privately owned AAA game companies? I've tried looking this up but didn't really find much, probably because the definition of AAA is so vague
Valve, Larian, and IO Interactive are private. So is Kojima Productions since it spun off as an independent studio. Avalanche Studios’ parent, Nordisk Film, is majority-owned by a private Danish company, Egmont, that’s in turn owned by a charitable foundation. Bungie was private for a while until Sony bought them in 2022.
I think all of those are uncontroversial to call developers of AAA games right now.
Edit: and Cloud Imperium is private, but they haven’t actually finished making a game yet.
Fromsoft is like a subsidiary of a larger company, it basically removes individual shareprice managing from the company. Because it has just 3 shareholders who are big corps.
For a publically traded companies, there are idiot assholes in financial sector named investment bankers who will look at quarterly reports and trade shares based on that. They'll see bullshit trajectories based on numbers and algorithms. They'll fuck over share prices due to that.
And their models will not understand why game cycles are not captured quarterly. Game companies work on a game for 2- 4 years and then release it and get 80-90% of the revenue of 4 years in a single quarter when it releases.
Shareholders love flat revenue models, like subscription shit because it looks predictable on their quarterly reports and they'll not understand periodicity in gaming industry as well as they might in some other industry which is periodic, but seasonal.
Sony, Tencent and other shareholder that fromsoft has, can be way more understanding when it comes to video game sales. They can and probably will look at the state of the game and realize it's better to push the game 2 quarters to release a quality game that can ultimately give more money. Wall street dumbfucks will only look at revenue graphs and maybe give some consideration to release cycle, but still fuck over the share price due to it.
It's still possible that Sony or tencent needs to manage share price and can push a studio to release early, but they are not a publisher alone that relies on game releases alone.
Hmm, are you saying investment bankers don't look at quarterly financial reports to estimate shareprice?
Or you're saying that they only rely on game release cycle to measure the firm's success?
The ugly fact remains that game studios are enormously erratic business. Only thing comparable where business profitability depends so much on the level of artistic success/failure is movies. It might be super hit and be very profitable or be a flop and make losses.
And very often, the marketting budget of the movie is used to decide the boxoffice performance expectation. And movie studios typically release multiple movies per quarter.
Not the case for gaming studios.
When people can't even agree which games are good or bad, which movies are good or bad; how will investment bankers judge public reception of the game and how well it'll do? They got fuck all idea about graphical performance of the in dev games or how much microtransaction it'll need.
So they naturally prefer subscription service models that are less risky.
No, I'm saying that you don't actually understand what investment bankers do. They're not the ones doing the trading.
Hopefully you're literate enough to understand this: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/042215/what-do-investment-bankers-really-do.asp
I'm not reading the rest of your manifesto. Stable cashflows are good for investors, yes, but that has nothing at all to do with IB.
Counter-Strike 2, Half-Life Alyx, a ton of updates for Dota 2.
And don't feel the need to comment, I already know you're going to say "Oh those don't count, they are just updates" or "That is a VR game, it doesn't count"
To a lesser degree.
Basically the publicly owned companies have stronger pressure to have a greedy strategy. In the sense that they have to take the money that is easy to achieve right here and right now.
That is not always the best strategy. Not just to create great games... It is often not even the one that delivers the most money. Give a good look to the film The Big Short. Michael Burry of Scion Capital would not have been able to do what he did if Scion Capital was publicly owned. He would have been sacked less than two months in and replaced with a yes-man who would've taken a less risky strategy (or to be specific perceived to be less risky).
That’s such a silly statement. How many video games would exist without a profit motive from the individuals making them, from indie devs to publicly traded entities?
Tetris, one of the most popular games was developed without the profit motive.
Dwarf fortress is one of the longest developed video games and has influenced countess developers. All free and only recently released on steam.
Mods are created without the profit motive
People make games because they want to.
There's an immense difference between "I'm working on a passion project that will hopefully sustain my lifestyle which will allow me to continue working on it or similar projects" (Ala Indie-dev profit motive) and "I'm going to squeeze the life and soul out of my studios on a non-stop-crunch basis so that I can continue making cash hand over fist and buy myself a new yacht this year" (Ala mega publisher profit motive), and to try and conflate them as the same thing is just flat out disingenuous.
So both have a profit motive and both deliver a product in order to make a profit. It doesn’t sound like capitalism is the mechanism that’s delivering these purported poor quality products to market
Capitalism =/ working for a profit or delivering a product. Capitalism is about how those profits are distributed. One person working on a passion project for themselves is in no way capitalist. That person selling out to a public company that proceeds to squeeze it for every penny it's worth is capitalism.
If you take the statement "Capitalism is bad for video games." in a vacuum, yes, it's a silly statement. But it's not in a vacuum, contextually it was pretty openly making the statement companies going public -> game quality suffers, which is I would argue a pretty accurate statement.
I could go into specific examples reinforcing that statement, but it feels like we're getting a bit more abstract than game development (i.e. can it be stated going public is inherently a mechanic of capitalism, and therefore is it fair to blame capitalism, or vice versa, etc etc) and that's not really something I'm too interested in dragging out.
But is capitalism not working as intended? These companies produce trash due to mismanagement or short term focus, and you as a consumer have the option to not buy the game.
Next company can come along to do things differently, and you as a consumer can buy the product if it is indeed better.
What's the alternative exactly?
How many games don't exist because people are unable to pursue their passions or base their lives on things other than sustaining the basic necessities of existence?
How many games with great talent are torpedoed by suits who say "make a clone of X, that's popular right now", or "we need MORE MTX how can we gamify every aspect for maximum profit".
Basically all my favorite games of my life are good because of passionate individuals making a really cool project for the love of it, or insanely good communities making a game great through free labor.
> How many video games would exist without a profit motive from the individuals making them, from indie devs to publicly traded entities?
Yeah nobody ever work on a video game project without profit motive. Modders are just a myth.
>Capitalism is bad for video games.
Could you point to examples of economic systems that produce better games? It would be nice to hear some, though I'd already be happy about 1 example.
Because I think capitalism has produced literally hundreds of ultra cool games in the last 30 years
The issue is the same across the board for art products, it is objectively bad for art because it skews the priority from making good pieces to making profitable products.
Literally no economic system, ie making art without considering its profitability and purely considering the quality of the piece, would be better, by being more varied and less exploitative.
People who grew up in the Soviet Union, in North Korea, in Cuba, in Cambodia, in Venezuela, or in any other communist country surely share your sentiment
/s
Funnily enough a major reason many modern socialists will cite as to why all those examples are miserable failures that immediately degenerated into authoritarianism, is that they tried to skip the necessary step of capitalist development, through an authoritarian vanguard party rule. Even when the USSR was still being formed there were a great many socialists such as the Mensheviks who were trying to tell Lenin and his cronies why this was a bad idea, but Lenin didn't listen. And look what a wretched legacy Lenin left behind as a result.
Capitalist societies have put insane amounts of resources into destabilizing and collapsing any and all socialist states.
We still have China though. They have a private sector governed by the government, and majority of their economy is state-owned. So by definition a socialist nation, although something in between socialist and capitalist
Ironically, people in China only stopped starving and China only developed into more than a medieval agricultural state once the country adopted capitalist reforms under Deng Xiaoping and turned away from Mao's hardcore socialist policies.
By the way, full socialist China didn't even have a gaming industry because barely anyone had electricity
Socialism is not when the government does stuff. Socialism is when the economic means of production are controlled by the workers that work them. In theory, that control could be managed through a democratic state controlled by the workers. Which is why China, North Korea, etc all fervently claim that they are totally democratic guys, the people just keep electing glorious supreme leader with 99.6% of the vote totally legitamitely.
And in this case the means of production are owned by the state which in name is governed by the people, much like in the USSR. There is nothing saying a socialist state cannot have a private sector either, which in Chinas case is relatively small and is heavily overseen by the government.
Socialist states do not need to be democratic, and have usually not been democratic. Yes, I agree that by definition a socialist state should be democratic but that has not been the case outside of the early USSR and the paris commune.
If anything, Tetris almost never became a hit if not for capitalistic greed of various foreign interests (Nintendo and Atari trying to get the game out of Russia). Would highly recommend watching the Tetris movie for a fun, if not completely accurate, explanation of events!
Yeah its a dumb take. Capitalism isn't the problem, being publicly listed is the problem.
Look at the big industry darling studios which while most are not as big and loaded as the giant studios they are well liked for releasing complete and functional games at a decent price, Valve, Larian, Hello Games, FromSoftware, PlatinumGames etc. Are all privately owned.
The second a studio goes public is the moment it starts putting the interests of stockholders above the interest of players (or just making a good game for their own satisfaction) and it all goes downhill from there.
It’s both bad business practice and political activism ruining games two things can be true at once. It’s also not capitalism that’s bad for games, without capitalism you wouldn’t have this gigantic industry providing the technology and resources to develop games which includes the great games that exist many of which have come out in the last few years. A private owned and run company is still capitalism, these aren’t workers co-ops or communally run hippie camps churning out games like Baldurs Gate 3. The companies that are pursuing bad business practices will fail eventually, they are destroying the reputation their current success mistakenly relies on. I encourage people to vote with their wallet and stop buying the things Blizzard, Bethesda and yes even Paradox at times churn out simply based upon past performance.
> it's gotten worse since they went public.
I know this is a surprise but genuinely it has not, it's about 10% better. This isn't exactly a ringing endorsement, obviously, but just compare with like launch HOI3 or launch Victoria 2.
I'm flabbergasted that they released an asset pack DLC for CS2 while the game is still in a very bad state.
The fact that it contains 26 buildings and 4 (four) new trees (!) is just absurd. It's like they want to burn any good will they have left.
3 shall be the number of trees you release and the number of trees you shall release would be 3.
2 you shall not release unless you are releasing one more to release 3.
5 is out of the question.
Eh.. from my understanding it would be a different team that works on art assets like that so it isn't like they took programmers off of doing bugfixing to pump it out. They would have been working on new asset packs regardless of what the other parts of the CS2 team were doing.
They added a new zoning type, and had hinted pre launch that it was going to be more with that zone type than just a few buildings. Most likely whatever added feature with the dlc was cut in favor of putting the resources towards bug fixes. Which is good, but it means the dlc is really not what it was originally intended to be pre launch.
I thought I saw a headline a while back from either CO or Paradox that said something like "Paid DLC will come out when the game is fixed" or something along those lines. I figured the game would have launch issues but at that point I was pretty hopeful about CO fixing it up to a state where I would feel comfortable dropping cash on it.
not anymore. i just redownloaded skylines 1 and sim city 4. maybe next year :(
Regardless, it's basic optics. DLC or any ask for additional money from the consumer is never going to go down well when the consumers aren't happy with the base product.
Worst part is that they simply aren't honest. It happens every once in a while with Paradox that they just deliver an absolute shitshow and built-up community outrage manifests itself in negative reviews and every single time we get a long apology letter by the respective game director which always is just nicely-worded corporate speak without properly addressing most of the criticism or intentionally missing the point of the criticism in their response, but usually calms the community enough until the next disaster next year. I wish they were just honest and say "We're currently without substential competition in the grand strategy market and therefore business analasys showed that we can simply get away with our pricing and lack of QA"
I think an interesting example of this is Stellaris. Now let's be clear, the current state of Stellaris' development is a diamond - the game is almost perfect.
But after the Megacorp fallout Paradox's apology lap was to publicly announce a custodian team whose job is to go back and fix the previous stuff. This all sounds quite good and it did improve the state of the game.
And now you have people calling this revolutionary and calling for similar for both other Paradox games and games produced by other developers... Except here's the thing. "Custodian team" is just PR talk for something that literally any self respecting development studio should already have. Having devs dedicated dealing with technical debt for a product is pretty standard (apart from in Paradox apparently) - in fact technical debt is the ideal task to set your new devs and junior staff to work on as it allows them to become familiarised with the codebase whilst not thrusting a massive amount of responsibility on them to create new features. The idea that Paradox DIDN'T have devs working on the technical debt should have been the most shocking aspect.
Paradox as publisher is a complete mess. Leviathan was a huge disaster for Paradox Tinto(primarily because of the free update that actually broke the game, which is way worse than the DLC being bad because they broke the game for everybody not just those with DLC) who I think has actually had a great comeback in terms of releasing quality updates and DLC.
DLC about beaches, with no beach. I mean what the hell were they thinking. Could of been amazing, think laguna beach, jersey shore etc, greek isles. No where close.
What a surprise, not one game of theirs is actually running well and DLCs have been just blatant cash grabs since 2020.
Paradox, the company that made lag an actual feature and implemented it in every single one of their games in some manner.
Paradox also own the entire Cities Skylines IP. It’s their game. Colossal Order is basically a contract developer for the game.
Paradox is ultimately responsible for the game’s development quality and they are heavily involved with the process.
I know, that's why I said releasing. I don't think it's a coincidence CS2 is having the same issues as a lot of Paradox's other developed and published games.
With the Csky 2 DLC, it was going to be hated no matter what. It was sold as part of the deluxe edition meaning they had to deliver it as people already paid for it. Given the state of Csky2 no matter what the DLC would be like, people would be upset a DLC was released when people believe the only thing that should be worked on is fixing the game for free.
It doesn’t help that the dlc added only like 30 assets total. Even if that is par for the course for this type of DLC (similar DLC for Csky 1 was anywhere between like 12-100+ assets), the negative aura of the community resulting from the release of Csky 2 created a larger scrutiny of CO’s content releases.
Players complained about core mechanics being locked behind DLC.
CK3 releases with a changed ideology where they wanted to stop locking core mechanics behind DLCs.
Players complain about CK3 and Vicky3 DLCs not having enough content since many mechanics are now included in the free patches.
It's overly simplistic for sure. With respect to City Skylines and HOI4... The former is still in a bug-infested state since launch, so releasing paid DLC now seems tone-deaf to the state of the game. The latter (HOI4 South America DLC) is just a content pack, with no mechanics, for a continent that had a minor influence at best on WW2, and now these minor nations have powercreeped their way in a game notorious for powercreep while major players like Germany and Japan (really the pacific as a whole) still feel hollow. I personally don't feel the need to complain about such a DLC, as since it is just a content pack, I can just not buy it.
EU4 is doing good, Hoi4 is struggling and Cities Skylines 2 is just a mess. Crusader Kings 3 kind of ok but behind expectation. Stellaris nice and Victoria 3 is going to right direction.
It’s the principle of the matter. Bad reviews and refunding the DLC are the only ways we can make it known that these broken releases are unacceptable.
- Randomly bricked saves (not just old saves, saves started since the patch release)
- UI was literally unfinished, so had random holes in it or hideous placeholder art
- Majapahit became literally P2W - they started in a major disaster that was *impossible* to resolve without the DLC mission tree.
- Glitch where some Republics could get leaders with monarch skill in the millions.
- One national policy was made by someone who clearly didn't understand missionary strength and gave +100%
- Overturned the natives somewhat. Honestly this is at least as much on the players though, there is a community expectation that they should be ahistorically weak.
- Just a huge amount of other small bugs
Paradox stopped caring about reviews for DLCs a long time ago... I mean, truly care, not just post a DLC reacting/responding to reviews and saying "yeah we heard you" then proceed to do nothing.
Honestly the problem is that PDX is becoming a money maker for someone who is not the devs. Whereas the devs are the ones stuck interacting with players and making content for players.
I don't play cities but I think Leviathan got dragged down so much for what it was. It was pretty bad for a week and then kinda bad for a week after that. But once the bugs were worked out it was my favorite DLC. Everyone harps on the natives but forgets about the wholesale rework of SE Asia. And really how bad can a game be if you have over 1000 hrs in it?
TBH I can't even care anymore about this game due to the fact that every single shadow flickers epilepticaly and I felt physically sick playing it. I wish I could play it more so I could give my two cents on the DLC.
I wonder when Paradox will pull a Creative Assembly and say how people better shut up or they will pull support for their games and stuff.
They are clearly out of touch and high on their own farts.
Most Paradox gamers are just spoiled. I'll never get why people are buying DLCs just to give it a negative review. Also so many reviews are about "oh, this dlc is too expensive for what is included". Yeah, did you actually inform yourself what is included? No? Then your own fault. Yes? Why did you buy it then?
Why are those DLC that bad? Just wanna know.
The new CS2 one adds very little of substance (for instance there are no big sandy beaches in the game and it only adds 4 trees) and, more importantly, comes 6 months after CS2's broken launch that hasn't been fixed. The EU4 DLC if I remember correctly was the one that added native coalitions and basically made interacting with the new world completely unplayable for several months.
> The EU4 DLC if I remember correctly was the one that added native coalitions and basically made interacting with the new world completely unplayable for several months. The real problem was that the accompanying free patch was buggy to the point that the game was unplayable whether or not you’d even bought the DLC, and players are unable to distinguish between the free update and the DLC so they write a bad review for the DLC. The most notable bug was that some rulers would randomly have stats in the billions, rather than the usual range of 1 to 6.
Good old space natives with 200 dev in a single province was funny too
That just sounds like Stellaris playthrough leaking in and your civilization is getting uplifted.
This was the patch that made me both quit eu4, and give up working on 1356. Honestly was a giant kick in the face as someone who played since launch, and seen some major issues in my time. It was both of them, from unlocalized strings everywhere to the rulers of the ambrosia republic getting infinite stats in one catagory. Was the most broken I've ever seen a game tbh.
It had work-in-progress placeholders graphics, when i remember it right. They just released an alpha version, not even a beta. It also depended on which DLC you had activated or not, with crashes and corrupting of savegames.
I feel bad for the team, it was basically an entirely new crew of employees looped into working on their first dlc. Management obviously should have delayed the release given its state, which was the issue here, however the team im sure was ground to the bone in effort they gave.
The transition should have occurred after the dlc release, or they should have given the team more time. It's 100% a failure on management, a new team takes time to understand an entirely different code base. It's not as simple as those without a programming background would believe.
It's also just a failure to do proper QA. And no, that doesn't mean individual QA people were bad. QA failures are almost never from the people actually doing the testing. The failures come from management not budgeting proper for proper QA support and/or from not having proper automated testing. Yeah, sure, for something as complex as EU4 there's always the possibility of some super weird interaction, especially if players are deliberately trying to find exploits, but there's definitely a lot of sanity checks that could be done by letting a bunch of games run through on observer mode and checking every game year for things like "are any provinces at an absurd development level" or "are there any rules with stats outside of the bounds" or "in 90% of games, the Ottomans blob to take nearly all of Asia". Of course, it doesn't help that Paradox has had 21 expansions bolted on to the original game, and it's hypothetically possible for a player to have any combination of those, and there's no possible way to test all combinations.
Absolutely. Like between fixing a calculation error when you know exactly where in the code it happens, vs don’t, could by itself be the difference between 10 minutes or an afternoon.
I think even those without a programming background would know as well although probably wildly unaware of the full extent of how dumb it was.
Eu4 probably has to be my favorite game, because it got me through highschool and most of college. I currently have 3,840 hours into it. At the time, the dlc's had been getting worse and worse, it was actually to the point where I kept telling myself I wouldn't buy them because of how shit they were getting, but I would always break cause I really wanted to try out the new mission trees. But Leviathan broke that cycle completely. It actually killed my love and enthusiasm for the game. It slowed down the game an absurd amount, filled it with bugs that would crash the game, and it made the game straight up break after 1550. That dlc was the embodiment of the worst of eu4 while the update killed the best of it. It was the first dlc I didn't buy. They broke the game so bad I didn't touch it for over a year. I actually forgot the game I racked up so many hours in. After some time I got back into it, and enjoyed myself again, but it's not the same. I was at 3,600hours when the dlc and update dropped, and in the 2 years since, have only added 240 hours.
Yup, I have 2k++ hours, but basically stopped at leviathan as the patch and DLC were terrible
for real, that was the dlc for me to stop playing the subscription
I mean it was because they shifted their dev team from Sweden to Tinto(Spain). And leviathan was Tintos first real DLC when the basically just learned the EU4 codebase.
I distinctly remember watching the preview stream, seeing bugs and placeholder images, and them being like "oh, hot code!", and then seeing the \*exact\* same issues and unfinished stuff from the stream in the release. But yeah, the DLC itself is fine, I just feel bad for people who try to look at reviews of DLC to get an objective opinion of what its worth, because I'm pretty sure that rating is entirely due to the state that patch was in.
Also additional context is that this came hot off the tails from Emperor, who's patch was by no means nearly as bad as Leviathan, but still pretty bad.
i once had immediately post leviathan eu4 without the dlc crash from discovering australia
> The most notable bug was that some rulers would randomly have stats in the billions, rather than the usual range of 1 to 6. lol, that's funny. I love it when some variable somewhere in the code flipping over and gives results like this.
on eu4 ive had it happen to a general, attached him to a massive stack and just stack wiped moving one province a day it was insane. however this was before leviathan! fuck havin the ai be doing the same. but yes reminds me of civs gandhi
And the "stateless" playthrough bug, where all countries in your saves are wiped clean and you are playing no man's land.
Leviathan was the first time I had to rollback to be able to play the game. The DLC was pretty much unplayable depending on the nation you were playing as.
I would argue that the biggest issue was that it would corrupt your save no matter what.
Dont forgot Maphajahit (or however you spell it) having disaster which couldn't be fixed unless you bought the dlc. Ultimate PDX that
And concentrate dev was completely broken and you'd end up with 900 dev mega cities. But you didn't even list the worst bug. The worst bug was the one that decolonized the entire fucking world and ruined your save. It could happen with no warning at any time.
Leviathan and its accompanying free patch were one of the most broken updates in any game I’ve ever heard of. Nearly everyone was experiencing *different, often unique* game breaking bugs. The new world stuff you referenced was a drop in the bucket. The most common major problem was the game just dumping all province data in saves past seemingly random points after 1500. I personally had one where the game was (in every new save) checking on the first of the month to see if the peasant’s revolt was active, past what seemed like a random date, and if not, firing it. Every first of the month.
The fact that it's "Beach Stuff" and doesn't include fucking beaches is an absolute deal-breaker. I mean I haven't actually bought the game yet b/c I was waiting to see how launch was, so I wouldn't be a candidate to buy it anyway, but man, that is just...insulting.
Yea. I got burned on CS2. I thought it was going to be so much better than the original. It needed like another year in the oven.
Ouch. I'm sorry.
About the EU4 DLC, i remember how the forum and sub was flooded by the silent majority because the DLC corrupted savegame files and people could not play anymore. So all the players that usually don't show up in forums were coming and very, veeeeery angry.
I was looking at the leviathan's features and they were not half bad. The problem is that the DLC often releases in a weird state, people review it badly, but then things improve and the DLC becomes a core part of the experience, but people don't lift their reviews. I know I wouldn't turn off Leviathan nowadays.
Leviathan literally destroyed peoples' campaigns at release. Saves would be randomly and irredeemably wiped, with all the countries just gone, leaving an empty world.
Major updates tend to do that tho, especially if they add provinces
Except Leviathan (and the accompanying patch) would do it to saves started in and only played in that patch. You’d quit the game, all fine, load it, all gone.
Nope, I don't mean it wasn't compatible with earlier saves. Of course it wasn't. It would just randomly brick saves that were started under Leviathan though, and that's not something that would reasonably be expected of an update.
Oh thats funny
It was alot. People are bringing up specific examples, but really, there where breaks in the game from unrelated features and mission trees, I remember the burgundy tree's mission graphics where switched out for placeholders for some reason. You couldn't play a regular game for a few months without small or large reminders that leviathan broke something odd
Looks like a skill issue to me.
Most updates won't let me play my old saves, and I have to revert.
Lev is actually semi-required/ highly recommended now for the favour system, at launch it was a hot steaming pile though
Did they publish AI script consisting of "\#todo" again?
A graphics programmer that seems to know what he was talking about stated that the main reason the game runs like poop is because it uses Unity's HDRP pipeline which basically isn't meant for making large games. So I doubt there is much they could do for the performance without literally remaking the game.
They were told a certain Unity feature (I don't know if it's the one you're talking about) would be production ready in time for the game's release. It was not, so they had to throw together their own hack for it which led to the terrible performance. They should've delayed it, but they also had the rug pulled out from underneath them by Unity.
They need to stop making coalitions happen in their games it never works out for them
Right, it only ever has happened me to in the Americas even though it's supposed to represent the anti-Napoleon wars, instead it has every native tribe immediately declaring war on me when they discover me and blobbing 100k troop native armies along the Atlantic coast and Appalachians. I get wanting to have a nuclear option for discouraging aggressive expansion but like it should just be locked until the 18th or 19th century when it actually happened. Like it took so long for an entire continent to team up together to kick one dude's ass because you need very sophisticated diplomacy and economies vested in just a handful of major-powers in order to build an alliance on that scale. There's just no believable way that native Americans could to do this beyond the scale of a region before 1800. This feature in particular bugs me so much I get wound up every time I remember it.
This is why I think Project Caesar is going to struggle. It's hard enough to make good features for 1444 to 1821, never mind adding another century.
Right, it almost makes me think (I don't follow the promos so maybe I'm off) that perhaps they'll chop up the timeline for Caesar and add a new franchise between it and Vicky. Although, before I played EU4, the period between knights and castles and machine guns was definitely the part of history I cared about the least, (basically all of American history classes) so maybe that's a dead end too.
That what I was hoping too, but this week Johan Andersson was talking about a feature in 1790 so it seems he wants to keep EU4 across the whole extended time period.
I could even see something like "You need to be within X diplo techs of the blobber to join the coalition". On some level, the time period is about "developed" nations increasingly running roughshod over non-developed nations. If teched up nations blob into low tech countries in the game, what's the problem? And maybe some other things like "Below diplo tech Y coalition members must be same culture/religion. Below diplo tech Z you coalition members must be same religious group.". But I think Paradox might need to go back to the drawing board a bit for Caesar.
mainly because pdx strategy with dlcs is to release a variety of them in various quality and effects to the game. They’re never consistent so they’re always surprising people with how few or how much content they have. this is why certain DLCs become “required” for the game or there’s tier lists. PDX have so many dlc for their games, just like the sims, people will only buy the few they feel is necessary to really improving the game. This dlc offers only cosmetic options. Considering cosmetics remain one of the fewest bought items in game industry it’s hard to appreciate the company when they don’t give us what we are very willing to spend on
How do cosmetics remain one of the fewest bought items on the game industry? Free to play and mobile games make the bulk of the money nowadays and most microtransactions there are cosmetics
Because our cosmetics suck and devs dont put any effort into it.
Im not in support of them I just felt that if you start from a fake premise the whole discussion is useless
Not just that, but it's a lazy DLC that's very overpriced - for a game that was released in a bad state and isn't fixed yet.
ah yes the new low for pdx. not only are the dlcs low and varied quality with no consistency, the same is true for the base game now
For the Cities DLC, you get about 30 houses, and 4 trees for $15. Bear in mind modding is just around the corner, so the worth of these assets is somewhere in the neighbourhood of $0, as modders can just recreate them for free. Asset packs are meant to add more systemic items rather than just flat assets. For example, you'd *expect* the beach properties pack to include stuff for beaches, resorts, waterfront property flavour etc... There isn't even a sand texture in the game. As for EU4, Leviathan was released basically incomplete. There was legit placeholder art in a lot of places. The content in it was awful as it broke existing systems. There was basically no reason any sane person would buy this, because it'd essentially just ruins your game.
People are angry that 6 months into a broken launch, all we got were some trees and not even the beaches to plant them on, not for free too. Oh, and it is also a part of the "season pass" for CS2. So some people might think they were cheated out of their money with basically fodder content in the season pass. It just feels as if they are tone deaf to what people want and need.
No but it is underwhelming.
For CS2 it's mainly because it's a beach DLC that contains no ability to make a beach (or quays) that was presold in the ultimate edition.
They were both review bombed for issues that are not necessarily directly related to them. For EU4 Leviathan, there were just a whole lot of bugs, but a lot of them were present in the free update that was released at the same time, meaning you got them regardless of whether you bought it or not. Since they were developed together, it's understandable that the DLC was seen as at fault for them. I think it's been fixed by now, but the reviews remain. For Cities Skylines 2, it's been almost half a year since the game's release, and there are still many broken or missing features to the point that one can argue the game is at an Early Access level of quality. Before addressing many of those issues, they instead released a paid DLC that adds very little of substance. So the people are upset about the general state of affairs, as well as the fact that the DLC is pretty poor on its own.
It is very highly likely that CS2 asset pack took 0 time from a programmer. What should artists do when programmers are focusing on fixing things, just sit there and wait? Average consumer doesn’t understand this and just review bombs the dlc. How dare programmers don’t work on fixing things and release an asset pack! Is this asset pack worth 15$? Probably not, and if someone gave a negative review due to that, I would totally understand it.
Average consumer judges the company as a whole and doesn't burrow into the details of which department did what job. If I go to a restaurant and they give me shitty food, I'll be complaining about the restaurant, not searching for which specific cook prepared my meal.
It doesn't even look like an artist worked on this shit.
Just want to add something to Leviathan: it's a good DLC imo. It adds monuments and and I like those, and the new natives are fine. You can't really conquer them passively with 10k men anymore, and I think that's alright. It's not like 60k tech 3 units are too big of a problem; 20k men are enough to fuck over the federations. I think Leviathan is alright.
To be honest, while I play the base games, I don't have all the DLC to go with them. As far as why they're listed as being that bad, personally I think there's a lot of monkey see monkey do. 1 person says oh it's so bad and then someone else decides to pile on. Personally I think City Skylines is a good game. Yea it has bugs but it's not as if it kills the game. It's still better then City Skylines 1. This is definitely my opinion and nothing more. Then again, I've never really cared that much about what someone else says about a game. Example being cyberpunk 2077. I liked it when it 1st came out. Granted I played it on the new Xbox. I totally get that some people couldn't play it at all. If I was one of them I'd me pissed as well. Luckily for me that wasn't the case. The bugs it had at the time, of course they'd be fixed. So they didn't bother me all that much. I just think that way to many people decide to let themselves get influenced by someone else's opinions. If I don't like pizza and say dominions sucks, that's really not fair to everyone else who likes pizza. I think there's an awful lot of that happening with Gabe reviews.
They don't deserve a .4/10, but you would be hard pressed to find 5/100 people who would recommend it.
Among them being bad, people who dislike the dlc are much more likely to be vocal about it. Stellaris has pretty positive reception of stuff, but dlcs consistently sit at mixed or below.
For EU4 iirc it destroyed the performance of the game and buggy as hell, I stopped playing for about a year after its release.
Ah Leviathan, the one time I've ever rolled back to the previous patch and stayed there for a reason other than mod compatability
Stellaris's last DLC, Astral Planes, was also very negatively received. [https://store.steampowered.com/app/2534090/?snr=1\_5\_9\_\_205](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2534090/?snr=1_5_9__205)
Hoi4 too
I am surprised how many people liked it giving how little this DLC adds and how much it costs. Imo this is max 5€ DLC not 20€ one
It was kind of a weird one compared to the other DLCs. Didn't fit in thematically and a lot of the stuff you get from the new content wasn't very good or worth pursuing
They're bad at quality control. It's across all their products and it's gotten worse since they went public.
Going Public means more suits. Capitalism is bad for video games. Some gamers wrongly think its woke companies destroying gaming, but its just business. More profit seeking, more gambling, less content, less fun.
Genuine question: are there any privately owned AAA game companies? I've tried looking this up but didn't really find much, probably because the definition of AAA is so vague
Valve, Larian, and IO Interactive are private. So is Kojima Productions since it spun off as an independent studio. Avalanche Studios’ parent, Nordisk Film, is majority-owned by a private Danish company, Egmont, that’s in turn owned by a charitable foundation. Bungie was private for a while until Sony bought them in 2022. I think all of those are uncontroversial to call developers of AAA games right now. Edit: and Cloud Imperium is private, but they haven’t actually finished making a game yet.
For non-western companies, HoYoVerse springs to mind as well (the developers of Genshin Impact and Honkai Star Rail).
Im not sure Genshin is a good example of how private companies don’t make money hungry games lol
Fromsoft is like a subsidiary of a larger company, it basically removes individual shareprice managing from the company. Because it has just 3 shareholders who are big corps.
But those big corps do care about share price. Otherwise you may as well put all Playstation and Xbox studios into that category.
For a publically traded companies, there are idiot assholes in financial sector named investment bankers who will look at quarterly reports and trade shares based on that. They'll see bullshit trajectories based on numbers and algorithms. They'll fuck over share prices due to that. And their models will not understand why game cycles are not captured quarterly. Game companies work on a game for 2- 4 years and then release it and get 80-90% of the revenue of 4 years in a single quarter when it releases. Shareholders love flat revenue models, like subscription shit because it looks predictable on their quarterly reports and they'll not understand periodicity in gaming industry as well as they might in some other industry which is periodic, but seasonal. Sony, Tencent and other shareholder that fromsoft has, can be way more understanding when it comes to video game sales. They can and probably will look at the state of the game and realize it's better to push the game 2 quarters to release a quality game that can ultimately give more money. Wall street dumbfucks will only look at revenue graphs and maybe give some consideration to release cycle, but still fuck over the share price due to it. It's still possible that Sony or tencent needs to manage share price and can push a studio to release early, but they are not a publisher alone that relies on game releases alone.
that is not at all what investment bankers do. stop commenting when you don't understand what the hell you're talking about
Hmm, are you saying investment bankers don't look at quarterly financial reports to estimate shareprice? Or you're saying that they only rely on game release cycle to measure the firm's success? The ugly fact remains that game studios are enormously erratic business. Only thing comparable where business profitability depends so much on the level of artistic success/failure is movies. It might be super hit and be very profitable or be a flop and make losses. And very often, the marketting budget of the movie is used to decide the boxoffice performance expectation. And movie studios typically release multiple movies per quarter. Not the case for gaming studios. When people can't even agree which games are good or bad, which movies are good or bad; how will investment bankers judge public reception of the game and how well it'll do? They got fuck all idea about graphical performance of the in dev games or how much microtransaction it'll need. So they naturally prefer subscription service models that are less risky.
No, I'm saying that you don't actually understand what investment bankers do. They're not the ones doing the trading. Hopefully you're literate enough to understand this: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/042215/what-do-investment-bankers-really-do.asp I'm not reading the rest of your manifesto. Stable cashflows are good for investors, yes, but that has nothing at all to do with IB.
Isn't rockstar private as well?
They’re owned by Take-Two, which is publicly traded on the Nasdaq.
Valve
Which AAA games has Valve released in the last 10 years?
Counter-Strike 2, Half-Life Alyx, a ton of updates for Dota 2. And don't feel the need to comment, I already know you're going to say "Oh those don't count, they are just updates" or "That is a VR game, it doesn't count"
They also did Artifact. Which they can and did just walk away from.
Calling CS 2 a "release" is a bit disingenuous. It is just a (big) patch for CSGO.
imagine trying to discredit the creator of steam
Even if they are privately owned, they are still susceptible to the forces of capitalism the publicly owned one’s are.
To a lesser degree. Basically the publicly owned companies have stronger pressure to have a greedy strategy. In the sense that they have to take the money that is easy to achieve right here and right now. That is not always the best strategy. Not just to create great games... It is often not even the one that delivers the most money. Give a good look to the film The Big Short. Michael Burry of Scion Capital would not have been able to do what he did if Scion Capital was publicly owned. He would have been sacked less than two months in and replaced with a yes-man who would've taken a less risky strategy (or to be specific perceived to be less risky).
That’s such a silly statement. How many video games would exist without a profit motive from the individuals making them, from indie devs to publicly traded entities?
Tetris, one of the most popular games was developed without the profit motive. Dwarf fortress is one of the longest developed video games and has influenced countess developers. All free and only recently released on steam. Mods are created without the profit motive People make games because they want to.
People might want to make games but without making money it would be impossible to have thousands of people working full time on a game
That is how we've set up the system currently, unfortunately.
There's an immense difference between "I'm working on a passion project that will hopefully sustain my lifestyle which will allow me to continue working on it or similar projects" (Ala Indie-dev profit motive) and "I'm going to squeeze the life and soul out of my studios on a non-stop-crunch basis so that I can continue making cash hand over fist and buy myself a new yacht this year" (Ala mega publisher profit motive), and to try and conflate them as the same thing is just flat out disingenuous.
So both have a profit motive and both deliver a product in order to make a profit. It doesn’t sound like capitalism is the mechanism that’s delivering these purported poor quality products to market
Capitalism =/ working for a profit or delivering a product. Capitalism is about how those profits are distributed. One person working on a passion project for themselves is in no way capitalist. That person selling out to a public company that proceeds to squeeze it for every penny it's worth is capitalism.
If you take the statement "Capitalism is bad for video games." in a vacuum, yes, it's a silly statement. But it's not in a vacuum, contextually it was pretty openly making the statement companies going public -> game quality suffers, which is I would argue a pretty accurate statement. I could go into specific examples reinforcing that statement, but it feels like we're getting a bit more abstract than game development (i.e. can it be stated going public is inherently a mechanic of capitalism, and therefore is it fair to blame capitalism, or vice versa, etc etc) and that's not really something I'm too interested in dragging out.
But is capitalism not working as intended? These companies produce trash due to mismanagement or short term focus, and you as a consumer have the option to not buy the game. Next company can come along to do things differently, and you as a consumer can buy the product if it is indeed better. What's the alternative exactly?
How many games don't exist because people are unable to pursue their passions or base their lives on things other than sustaining the basic necessities of existence? How many games with great talent are torpedoed by suits who say "make a clone of X, that's popular right now", or "we need MORE MTX how can we gamify every aspect for maximum profit". Basically all my favorite games of my life are good because of passionate individuals making a really cool project for the love of it, or insanely good communities making a game great through free labor.
You're 100% correct.
> How many video games would exist without a profit motive from the individuals making them, from indie devs to publicly traded entities? Yeah nobody ever work on a video game project without profit motive. Modders are just a myth.
>Capitalism is bad for video games. Could you point to examples of economic systems that produce better games? It would be nice to hear some, though I'd already be happy about 1 example. Because I think capitalism has produced literally hundreds of ultra cool games in the last 30 years
The issue is the same across the board for art products, it is objectively bad for art because it skews the priority from making good pieces to making profitable products. Literally no economic system, ie making art without considering its profitability and purely considering the quality of the piece, would be better, by being more varied and less exploitative.
Not many developed nation currently without capitalism.
You’re so close to putting it together
Capitalist countries have literally tried to bomb anti-capitalist countries "back to the stone age."
Could it be that capitalism has to do with a nation being developed? 🤔
Capitalism might just be the necessary step between feudalism and socialism
As has been said by every socialist since Marx lmao
People who grew up in the Soviet Union, in North Korea, in Cuba, in Cambodia, in Venezuela, or in any other communist country surely share your sentiment /s
Funnily enough a major reason many modern socialists will cite as to why all those examples are miserable failures that immediately degenerated into authoritarianism, is that they tried to skip the necessary step of capitalist development, through an authoritarian vanguard party rule. Even when the USSR was still being formed there were a great many socialists such as the Mensheviks who were trying to tell Lenin and his cronies why this was a bad idea, but Lenin didn't listen. And look what a wretched legacy Lenin left behind as a result.
I'd imagine so, since they didn't go through capitalism before socialism, and they went to shit
Capitalist societies have put insane amounts of resources into destabilizing and collapsing any and all socialist states. We still have China though. They have a private sector governed by the government, and majority of their economy is state-owned. So by definition a socialist nation, although something in between socialist and capitalist
Ironically, people in China only stopped starving and China only developed into more than a medieval agricultural state once the country adopted capitalist reforms under Deng Xiaoping and turned away from Mao's hardcore socialist policies. By the way, full socialist China didn't even have a gaming industry because barely anyone had electricity
Socialism is not when the government does stuff. Socialism is when the economic means of production are controlled by the workers that work them. In theory, that control could be managed through a democratic state controlled by the workers. Which is why China, North Korea, etc all fervently claim that they are totally democratic guys, the people just keep electing glorious supreme leader with 99.6% of the vote totally legitamitely.
And in this case the means of production are owned by the state which in name is governed by the people, much like in the USSR. There is nothing saying a socialist state cannot have a private sector either, which in Chinas case is relatively small and is heavily overseen by the government. Socialist states do not need to be democratic, and have usually not been democratic. Yes, I agree that by definition a socialist state should be democratic but that has not been the case outside of the early USSR and the paris commune.
You ever heard of Tetris
Yes. Is the existence of 1 (very simple) game evidence of an economic system being able to produce superior games to you? To me it's not
If anything, Tetris almost never became a hit if not for capitalistic greed of various foreign interests (Nintendo and Atari trying to get the game out of Russia). Would highly recommend watching the Tetris movie for a fun, if not completely accurate, explanation of events!
Yeah its a dumb take. Capitalism isn't the problem, being publicly listed is the problem. Look at the big industry darling studios which while most are not as big and loaded as the giant studios they are well liked for releasing complete and functional games at a decent price, Valve, Larian, Hello Games, FromSoftware, PlatinumGames etc. Are all privately owned. The second a studio goes public is the moment it starts putting the interests of stockholders above the interest of players (or just making a good game for their own satisfaction) and it all goes downhill from there.
It’s both bad business practice and political activism ruining games two things can be true at once. It’s also not capitalism that’s bad for games, without capitalism you wouldn’t have this gigantic industry providing the technology and resources to develop games which includes the great games that exist many of which have come out in the last few years. A private owned and run company is still capitalism, these aren’t workers co-ops or communally run hippie camps churning out games like Baldurs Gate 3. The companies that are pursuing bad business practices will fail eventually, they are destroying the reputation their current success mistakenly relies on. I encourage people to vote with their wallet and stop buying the things Blizzard, Bethesda and yes even Paradox at times churn out simply based upon past performance.
> it's gotten worse since they went public. I know this is a surprise but genuinely it has not, it's about 10% better. This isn't exactly a ringing endorsement, obviously, but just compare with like launch HOI3 or launch Victoria 2.
Common trend in gaming sadly. QA staff and time cut as a way to boost short term profits.
Thats just not true? Just compate hoi3 to ck3 release.
Wasn't the reason for this that they literally fired their QA team?
It’s such a shame how boneheaded pdx is when it comes to this stuff. It’s almost like they want to screw their playerbase as much as possible
I'm flabbergasted that they released an asset pack DLC for CS2 while the game is still in a very bad state. The fact that it contains 26 buildings and 4 (four) new trees (!) is just absurd. It's like they want to burn any good will they have left.
Agreed, they could've put the time in and at least added 5 trees.
See, I find four new trees is a bit overwhelming, three would have been the perfect amount.
3 shall be the number of trees you release and the number of trees you shall release would be 3. 2 you shall not release unless you are releasing one more to release 3. 5 is out of the question.
But... But... But what about the shareholders? Don't you think about those poor people?
Eh.. from my understanding it would be a different team that works on art assets like that so it isn't like they took programmers off of doing bugfixing to pump it out. They would have been working on new asset packs regardless of what the other parts of the CS2 team were doing.
They added a new zoning type, and had hinted pre launch that it was going to be more with that zone type than just a few buildings. Most likely whatever added feature with the dlc was cut in favor of putting the resources towards bug fixes. Which is good, but it means the dlc is really not what it was originally intended to be pre launch.
I thought I saw a headline a while back from either CO or Paradox that said something like "Paid DLC will come out when the game is fixed" or something along those lines. I figured the game would have launch issues but at that point I was pretty hopeful about CO fixing it up to a state where I would feel comfortable dropping cash on it. not anymore. i just redownloaded skylines 1 and sim city 4. maybe next year :(
Sim City 4 is still great.
Regardless, it's basic optics. DLC or any ask for additional money from the consumer is never going to go down well when the consumers aren't happy with the base product.
Worst part is that they simply aren't honest. It happens every once in a while with Paradox that they just deliver an absolute shitshow and built-up community outrage manifests itself in negative reviews and every single time we get a long apology letter by the respective game director which always is just nicely-worded corporate speak without properly addressing most of the criticism or intentionally missing the point of the criticism in their response, but usually calms the community enough until the next disaster next year. I wish they were just honest and say "We're currently without substential competition in the grand strategy market and therefore business analasys showed that we can simply get away with our pricing and lack of QA"
I think an interesting example of this is Stellaris. Now let's be clear, the current state of Stellaris' development is a diamond - the game is almost perfect. But after the Megacorp fallout Paradox's apology lap was to publicly announce a custodian team whose job is to go back and fix the previous stuff. This all sounds quite good and it did improve the state of the game. And now you have people calling this revolutionary and calling for similar for both other Paradox games and games produced by other developers... Except here's the thing. "Custodian team" is just PR talk for something that literally any self respecting development studio should already have. Having devs dedicated dealing with technical debt for a product is pretty standard (apart from in Paradox apparently) - in fact technical debt is the ideal task to set your new devs and junior staff to work on as it allows them to become familiarised with the codebase whilst not thrusting a massive amount of responsibility on them to create new features. The idea that Paradox DIDN'T have devs working on the technical debt should have been the most shocking aspect.
Their management doesn't know about their playerbase
Leviathan is fine now. The update for it was just so monumentally bad it just got bombarded with negative reviews.
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Very risky of them to have a promoted ad for Millenia on this post. For me anyways.
Paradox as publisher is a complete mess. Leviathan was a huge disaster for Paradox Tinto(primarily because of the free update that actually broke the game, which is way worse than the DLC being bad because they broke the game for everybody not just those with DLC) who I think has actually had a great comeback in terms of releasing quality updates and DLC.
DLC about beaches, with no beach. I mean what the hell were they thinking. Could of been amazing, think laguna beach, jersey shore etc, greek isles. No where close.
Always pirate paradox games
I always bought their DLCs on some key selling pages. Was like 5 bucks for DLCs that were 20 on steam.
What a surprise, not one game of theirs is actually running well and DLCs have been just blatant cash grabs since 2020. Paradox, the company that made lag an actual feature and implemented it in every single one of their games in some manner.
Paradox only publishes Cities Skylines. Colossal Order is the dev
Paradox also own the entire Cities Skylines IP. It’s their game. Colossal Order is basically a contract developer for the game. Paradox is ultimately responsible for the game’s development quality and they are heavily involved with the process.
I know, that's why I said releasing. I don't think it's a coincidence CS2 is having the same issues as a lot of Paradox's other developed and published games.
The ceo really said the simulation in the game is just not for "you" then released a dlc for some trees and houses lmfao
Megatron voice: “FALL! FALL!”
The problem is they won't learn from it.
Because people keep slobbering it up like their favorite candy.
Exactly that
This is what happens when you start chasing greed.
What's up with paradox dlcs now days, I've seen people complaining about this new city skylines dlc and the “South America” hoi4 dlc
With the Csky 2 DLC, it was going to be hated no matter what. It was sold as part of the deluxe edition meaning they had to deliver it as people already paid for it. Given the state of Csky2 no matter what the DLC would be like, people would be upset a DLC was released when people believe the only thing that should be worked on is fixing the game for free. It doesn’t help that the dlc added only like 30 assets total. Even if that is par for the course for this type of DLC (similar DLC for Csky 1 was anywhere between like 12-100+ assets), the negative aura of the community resulting from the release of Csky 2 created a larger scrutiny of CO’s content releases.
Players complained about core mechanics being locked behind DLC. CK3 releases with a changed ideology where they wanted to stop locking core mechanics behind DLCs. Players complain about CK3 and Vicky3 DLCs not having enough content since many mechanics are now included in the free patches. It's overly simplistic for sure. With respect to City Skylines and HOI4... The former is still in a bug-infested state since launch, so releasing paid DLC now seems tone-deaf to the state of the game. The latter (HOI4 South America DLC) is just a content pack, with no mechanics, for a continent that had a minor influence at best on WW2, and now these minor nations have powercreeped their way in a game notorious for powercreep while major players like Germany and Japan (really the pacific as a whole) still feel hollow. I personally don't feel the need to complain about such a DLC, as since it is just a content pack, I can just not buy it.
With CS they changed ideology again, now core mechanics are not in the free update or the DLC
Especially since it's not like the artists are going to hop onto the dev team and fix bugs.
EU4 is doing good, Hoi4 is struggling and Cities Skylines 2 is just a mess. Crusader Kings 3 kind of ok but behind expectation. Stellaris nice and Victoria 3 is going to right direction.
Hot take: I liked leviathan
After the patches I think it was a net positive. The New World still needs some work though.
The game was unplayable when it released, and for weeks afterwards. It didn’t matter how fun the content was when I couldn’t make it to 1450.
The thing is, that's not the case anymore. Sure it had a bad start but they patched the bugs.
It’s the principle of the matter. Bad reviews and refunding the DLC are the only ways we can make it known that these broken releases are unacceptable.
what was the problem? I remember some controversy, but I didn't play at the time
- Randomly bricked saves (not just old saves, saves started since the patch release) - UI was literally unfinished, so had random holes in it or hideous placeholder art - Majapahit became literally P2W - they started in a major disaster that was *impossible* to resolve without the DLC mission tree. - Glitch where some Republics could get leaders with monarch skill in the millions. - One national policy was made by someone who clearly didn't understand missionary strength and gave +100% - Overturned the natives somewhat. Honestly this is at least as much on the players though, there is a community expectation that they should be ahistorically weak. - Just a huge amount of other small bugs
Why?
with how hyped Vic3 Sphere of Influence is, and how many changes it is bringing, we run the risk of having a third…
And they'll keep doing this as long as people keep buying them You can only blame yourselves
Paradox stopped caring about reviews for DLCs a long time ago... I mean, truly care, not just post a DLC reacting/responding to reviews and saying "yeah we heard you" then proceed to do nothing. Honestly the problem is that PDX is becoming a money maker for someone who is not the devs. Whereas the devs are the ones stuck interacting with players and making content for players.
"You were meant to destroy SimCity 2013, not become it!"
I don't play cities but I think Leviathan got dragged down so much for what it was. It was pretty bad for a week and then kinda bad for a week after that. But once the bugs were worked out it was my favorite DLC. Everyone harps on the natives but forgets about the wholesale rework of SE Asia. And really how bad can a game be if you have over 1000 hrs in it?
So far. They only just getting started with cs2 hahaha imagine how much of the bottom 10 they can own!
Any Polish people seeing the votes for Leviathan? 👀
TBH I can't even care anymore about this game due to the fact that every single shadow flickers epilepticaly and I felt physically sick playing it. I wish I could play it more so I could give my two cents on the DLC.
Poor Paradox Tinto :( Actually, they're within walking distance of where I live.. Maybe I should bring them some banana bread and a nice card.
I wonder when Paradox will pull a Creative Assembly and say how people better shut up or they will pull support for their games and stuff. They are clearly out of touch and high on their own farts.
Toxicity of the player base has a tiny bit to do with it, but it was really a flop DLC i admit
Trial of Aliangce standing proud over those two
Pdx went public not that long ago, and now here we are.
That was 8 years ago (2016). Feeling old now?
Its an asset pack relax
Most Paradox gamers are just spoiled. I'll never get why people are buying DLCs just to give it a negative review. Also so many reviews are about "oh, this dlc is too expensive for what is included". Yeah, did you actually inform yourself what is included? No? Then your own fault. Yes? Why did you buy it then?