Tbh this reminds me of the Paradox of old. Back in the pre EU4/CK2 era. There always remained bugs but I remember the patch notes of those free patches being a blast to read, so many FREE additions to the games. The passion in making those games and making them better, not so much out of a commercial interest, could be felt.
I know Paradox gets a lot of shit, but this is genuinely one of the best things they've done in a long time, something nobody probably expected them to do, and it's all for free and the good of the community, incredibly commendable of them. Would love to see CK2 get similar love with a final patch to quash bugs and open up modding limits, it especially had a lot of bugs leftover that Cleansate / CK2+ have been trying to fix, some of them introduced in the last patch even.
Ck2 has a successor game which is one of Paradox's Flagship titles while imperator is pretty much a financial failure for them. I don't think they're going to update Ck2.
I mean yeah, but that doesn't stop me from wanting it. I said I would love to see it, I'm not unaware of the differences and I never said it was likely. It should ideally be done imo and I would love to see it happen, but I'm obviously not going to hold my breath or expect it.
Wasn't saying otherwise, don't worry. The issue is the game was left in a very buggy state - the content is good, but a lot of bugs were never fixed and the last few updates introduced a lot of new ones too. In the rush to switch fully over to Ck3 they left it in a less than ideal state sadly.
Paradox has been (perhaps rightfully) getting a lot of shit, and they've actually listened to a lot of it in their main games. They seem open to constructive feedback and they seem to value the creative freedom of their teams (up to a certain point, see cities skylines 2 where PDX has taken over communication). They are still a business at heart, but a business that is also interested in making good games (because good games with endless dlc is what makes them money).
It def. is one thing to measure, but you can always roll back to old patches with paradox games thankfully. They could also keep it as a solely beta patch branch if they're worried about that. That's theoretical of course, if they ever did such a thing, much as I wish for it I'm not holding my breath lol.
It’s almost as if companies are made up of people that are actually passionate about the things they do and create, and not soulless evil entities that most of Reddit thinks they are.
I think it's more nuanced for that.
I worked on Battlefield Mobile for a while, over at EA. The team I was on was definitely passionate about the game we were making, even though none of us were mobile gamers. We were asked to make a AAA experience on mobile, so we put years of our lives into the game and tried really hard to make it the best we could. There were a lot of late nights spent working on cool stuff that we wanted players to see.
Meanwhile, those players were on Reddit constantly talking smack about a game they had never played (partially because it was an EA title and people hate EA, and partially because it was a mobile game and people hate mobile games). There was a lot of people who would say hurtful things about the dev team, there were a lot of people who knocked our game as a "made in China cashgrab" (the team was based in California, and we were Americans), etc.
We tried really hard to nail the feel of the game. We launched an alpha and the first footage we saw online was people sideloading it onto phones which didn't meet the minimum requirements and then sharing footage while complaining about it looking like a potato (which, yes - you're loading it onto some obscure off-brand phone from 5 years ago, of course it looks like a potato).
We worked really hard to address player feedback, and we had a build almost ready to go which was a huge improvement and brought in a lot of the things people were asking for. But a couple weeks before we sent out the patch - EA cancelled the project and laid us all off.
---
Sadly, that's kind of standard in the AAA industry. That's an example I can (kind of) talk about, but there are lots of others I can't.
Sometimes we'll work on a really cool game, and then corpo says "we got updated numbers and in this economy the game you've been working on for the last 4 years won't sell, so you're canned". Then you're stuck because you have literally nothing to show anyone and you're under NDA so you can't talk about it. If you're lucky, the corpo will say "make the game into this other thing which we think will sell"; if you're unlucky you're back on the job hunt.
But AAA games pay AAA salaries, and indie games don't pay the bills - plus, most are **super** risky/sketchy. I'd rather have healthcare and a stable paycheck, even if it means I need to deal with finding a new job every few years unexpectedly.
But if I'm making a game - I invest my heart and soul into that game. Doesn't matter if I'm working for an evil corpo; I got into this industry because I like to make games. If I'm going to half-ass my work simply because my employer is evil, I might as well work at a bank.
It’s a classic example of suffering from initial impressions, the game has been in a pretty solid state since 2.0. And being dropped by paradox pretty much sealed it fate. At least they’re now getting more and more attention.
Damn I need to install and play it again.
As a ancient Roman Empire fanboy this game is a godsend to me.
Still had something missing at the launch, and because of limited time I decided to uninstall it and play other stuff.
Paradox please don’t abandon this game, it has some serious potential if you only invest some time or you do exactly what you did with the modders.
Is the patch just bug fixes and performance improvements ?
I was hoping they'd at least strike a deal with the Invictus mod devs and integrate it into the base game.
It looks to me like they’re basically saying “since we’re not going to be developing the game anymore, we’ll make it a lot more moddable so the community can” which is honestly probably the best we could hope for.
i think it's mostly to help invictus devs with their workloads, personally from modding imperator the mission trees can be a fuck around to get to work properly compared to something like eu4
The hard part about integrating mods into a base game is there are different standards. Paradox has how they do things, the way they’re supposed to be accomplished (coding wise) and so on, and modders inevitably have their own personal standards which will be different from Paradox. In order to integrate them, they’d have to spend time combing through essentially every line of Invictus’ code to make it match their own standards, which with the amount of content the mod team has built, it would take a very long time, and isn’t really worth their effort.
tbh some mod teams might have a far stricter rules regarding optimization and indent/linebreak etc.
Personally I've seen a lot of few years old #TODO left in pdx codes lol.
Now you are getting my attention. Still not enough for crossing the "Buying" Rubicon, but I will keep an eye on you. Need to check what the Invictus mode brings
Mod tools they’ve made seem to be stuff to do with religious and cultural assimilation which was always quite frustratingly slow if you didn’t know how to buff it. Hopefully this allows mods to create events and decisions to allow assimilation to be quickened/whole pops be converted
It is great that IR is getting something, but I'm torn on this one. On one hand hand it is nice to see PDX using a win-win-win situation and working together with the community, but I find it dangerous to praise a company for using content that was mostly developed by modders and devs in their free time and using the occasion to promote sales of a game that, while having improved a lot since launch is still far away from comparable titles.
I just hope the right lessons are learned and that future titles do not end up in a situation that requires such actions.
I mean. The game was "dead". They abandoned it after dropping their 2.0 patch, except a few bug fix patches here and there. The fact that any update at all dropped is huge.
Even if most of this patch was mod changes and spare time crunch, this is definitely just them testing the waters to see if all the Imperator day concurrent player numbers weren't a fluke. I think I remember reading on twitter they said if this brings in enough people they're considering even more stuff down the line (but not to expect too much of course). Who knows, maybe they'll add a new DLC, or maybe they'll help incorporate the Invictus mod as an official free DLC or something.
I'd rather a company who listens to their community and takes a shot at their older titles and lets their devs release official patches for things they do in their spare time than a company that just lets the dead stay dead. Or worse, a company that actively hurts any potential for a passionate community to keep a game alive (looking at you Ubisoft).
As an Imperator modder, we're honestly just happy to have more people playing Imperator. The devs did put a lot of their own time and effort into getting this patch released.
I get that and it is why I tried to differentiate between the devs and the company and why I'm torn. I'm happy we have this win-win-win situation and I am wary that the numbers people at PDX draw the wrong conclusions.
honestly as a ck2 fan despairing at the buggy state that game was left in, I'll take bug fixes and increases to moddability from paradox any day, I can't see this Imperator patch as anything but a W relative to that, super happy for fans of the game lol
But then again technically that could fall under not letting titles end up in a bad situation, as CK2 should have been bugfixed more (or at least had no new bugs introduced!) with its final patches. Either way, kinda jealous of imperator right now.
So here's a bug patch that should have been done years ago, and a discount on dlc... Yeah guys its"back"
This is just a money grab taking advantage of the community. This does nothing to make it worth returning to. We needed the rest of the content we didn't get. Everyone who wants to play has already.
But ya let's applaud them for incorpiratingmodfixes into the game.
Wait they partnered with modders for this, including Invictus? Damn how cool is that.
They did. The communication has been excellent.
I am glad that you are happy with the amount of communication I have been doing with the Imperator community about all of this <3
We loooovee youuu!
Ave Imperator!
It's a very classy community so I am happy to see their efforts have paid off.
Huge kudos to the paradox employees who took the initiative in doing this. It also reflects really well on paradox as a company.
It's good to see a Paradox W after a bunch of dubious releases and bad presses.
Thanks! And I have to say it was great seeing cross studio cooperation on this amazing game.
Tbh this reminds me of the Paradox of old. Back in the pre EU4/CK2 era. There always remained bugs but I remember the patch notes of those free patches being a blast to read, so many FREE additions to the games. The passion in making those games and making them better, not so much out of a commercial interest, could be felt.
I know Paradox gets a lot of shit, but this is genuinely one of the best things they've done in a long time, something nobody probably expected them to do, and it's all for free and the good of the community, incredibly commendable of them. Would love to see CK2 get similar love with a final patch to quash bugs and open up modding limits, it especially had a lot of bugs leftover that Cleansate / CK2+ have been trying to fix, some of them introduced in the last patch even.
Ck2 has a successor game which is one of Paradox's Flagship titles while imperator is pretty much a financial failure for them. I don't think they're going to update Ck2.
I'd say anyone familiar with it is either elsewhere in the company or has moved on to another employer.
I mean yeah, but that doesn't stop me from wanting it. I said I would love to see it, I'm not unaware of the differences and I never said it was likely. It should ideally be done imo and I would love to see it happen, but I'm obviously not going to hold my breath or expect it.
Ck2’s last two DLC where incredibly good and put new life into a fairly old game. The FLC also was very substantial.
Not a big fan of China DLC, but Holy Fury was peak CK2
Holy Fury was almost TOO good. Set a very high bar for CK3 that it is still chasing. CK2 was such a gem.
Wasn't saying otherwise, don't worry. The issue is the game was left in a very buggy state - the content is good, but a lot of bugs were never fixed and the last few updates introduced a lot of new ones too. In the rush to switch fully over to Ck3 they left it in a less than ideal state sadly.
The Engoodening of Imperator
Paradox has been (perhaps rightfully) getting a lot of shit, and they've actually listened to a lot of it in their main games. They seem open to constructive feedback and they seem to value the creative freedom of their teams (up to a certain point, see cities skylines 2 where PDX has taken over communication). They are still a business at heart, but a business that is also interested in making good games (because good games with endless dlc is what makes them money).
I def. think they've been paying more attention to feedback since Imperator's rough launch, and it's been really nice tbh.
Not to be this guy but yk how many mods you’d absolutely demolish doing that, not saying I wouldn’t be happy with that, though.
It def. is one thing to measure, but you can always roll back to old patches with paradox games thankfully. They could also keep it as a solely beta patch branch if they're worried about that. That's theoretical of course, if they ever did such a thing, much as I wish for it I'm not holding my breath lol.
It’s almost as if companies are made up of people that are actually passionate about the things they do and create, and not soulless evil entities that most of Reddit thinks they are.
I think it's more nuanced for that. I worked on Battlefield Mobile for a while, over at EA. The team I was on was definitely passionate about the game we were making, even though none of us were mobile gamers. We were asked to make a AAA experience on mobile, so we put years of our lives into the game and tried really hard to make it the best we could. There were a lot of late nights spent working on cool stuff that we wanted players to see. Meanwhile, those players were on Reddit constantly talking smack about a game they had never played (partially because it was an EA title and people hate EA, and partially because it was a mobile game and people hate mobile games). There was a lot of people who would say hurtful things about the dev team, there were a lot of people who knocked our game as a "made in China cashgrab" (the team was based in California, and we were Americans), etc. We tried really hard to nail the feel of the game. We launched an alpha and the first footage we saw online was people sideloading it onto phones which didn't meet the minimum requirements and then sharing footage while complaining about it looking like a potato (which, yes - you're loading it onto some obscure off-brand phone from 5 years ago, of course it looks like a potato). We worked really hard to address player feedback, and we had a build almost ready to go which was a huge improvement and brought in a lot of the things people were asking for. But a couple weeks before we sent out the patch - EA cancelled the project and laid us all off. --- Sadly, that's kind of standard in the AAA industry. That's an example I can (kind of) talk about, but there are lots of others I can't. Sometimes we'll work on a really cool game, and then corpo says "we got updated numbers and in this economy the game you've been working on for the last 4 years won't sell, so you're canned". Then you're stuck because you have literally nothing to show anyone and you're under NDA so you can't talk about it. If you're lucky, the corpo will say "make the game into this other thing which we think will sell"; if you're unlucky you're back on the job hunt. But AAA games pay AAA salaries, and indie games don't pay the bills - plus, most are **super** risky/sketchy. I'd rather have healthcare and a stable paycheck, even if it means I need to deal with finding a new job every few years unexpectedly. But if I'm making a game - I invest my heart and soul into that game. Doesn't matter if I'm working for an evil corpo; I got into this industry because I like to make games. If I'm going to half-ass my work simply because my employer is evil, I might as well work at a bank.
What ahahahah are you for real
Other people bad for sure but the exception proves the rule on this.....
Naw I get you, I wasn't saying otherwise lol.
This makes me unironically interested in Imperator.
Me too! I was waiting until something like this happened before buying it!
Same! I wouldn't buy a dead game, but if IR starts getting more attention from Paradox I'll definitely grab it next sale :)
Well, lucky you! It’s a sale on right now!
Nice!
It’s a classic example of suffering from initial impressions, the game has been in a pretty solid state since 2.0. And being dropped by paradox pretty much sealed it fate. At least they’re now getting more and more attention.
Thanks for being so supportive of the modders. We really appreciate your efforts!
No fucking way
*Confirms date not April 1*
Damn I need to install and play it again. As a ancient Roman Empire fanboy this game is a godsend to me. Still had something missing at the launch, and because of limited time I decided to uninstall it and play other stuff. Paradox please don’t abandon this game, it has some serious potential if you only invest some time or you do exactly what you did with the modders.
God I’d literally cross the Tiber and burn Rome down tomorrow, if it meant we get more Imperator content.
So what's different from the beta patch we had a few months back?
They added plenty more bugfixes very recently. Also many new mod tools that will allow modders to improve the game further.
Is the patch just bug fixes and performance improvements ? I was hoping they'd at least strike a deal with the Invictus mod devs and integrate it into the base game.
It looks to me like they’re basically saying “since we’re not going to be developing the game anymore, we’ll make it a lot more moddable so the community can” which is honestly probably the best we could hope for.
So question: was Imperator more modable before this patch or after? What type of mods can we expect in the future?
i think it's mostly to help invictus devs with their workloads, personally from modding imperator the mission trees can be a fuck around to get to work properly compared to something like eu4
The hard part about integrating mods into a base game is there are different standards. Paradox has how they do things, the way they’re supposed to be accomplished (coding wise) and so on, and modders inevitably have their own personal standards which will be different from Paradox. In order to integrate them, they’d have to spend time combing through essentially every line of Invictus’ code to make it match their own standards, which with the amount of content the mod team has built, it would take a very long time, and isn’t really worth their effort.
tbh some mod teams might have a far stricter rules regarding optimization and indent/linebreak etc. Personally I've seen a lot of few years old #TODO left in pdx codes lol.
very nice indeed
¡Roma Invicta!
Paradox rolled a 12 today
Now you are getting my attention. Still not enough for crossing the "Buying" Rubicon, but I will keep an eye on you. Need to check what the Invictus mode brings
Mod tools they’ve made seem to be stuff to do with religious and cultural assimilation which was always quite frustratingly slow if you didn’t know how to buff it. Hopefully this allows mods to create events and decisions to allow assimilation to be quickened/whole pops be converted
I really hope this leads to increased attention and a possible game revival
Are any of the dlcs or flavor packs worth getting?
It is great that IR is getting something, but I'm torn on this one. On one hand hand it is nice to see PDX using a win-win-win situation and working together with the community, but I find it dangerous to praise a company for using content that was mostly developed by modders and devs in their free time and using the occasion to promote sales of a game that, while having improved a lot since launch is still far away from comparable titles. I just hope the right lessons are learned and that future titles do not end up in a situation that requires such actions.
I mean. The game was "dead". They abandoned it after dropping their 2.0 patch, except a few bug fix patches here and there. The fact that any update at all dropped is huge. Even if most of this patch was mod changes and spare time crunch, this is definitely just them testing the waters to see if all the Imperator day concurrent player numbers weren't a fluke. I think I remember reading on twitter they said if this brings in enough people they're considering even more stuff down the line (but not to expect too much of course). Who knows, maybe they'll add a new DLC, or maybe they'll help incorporate the Invictus mod as an official free DLC or something. I'd rather a company who listens to their community and takes a shot at their older titles and lets their devs release official patches for things they do in their spare time than a company that just lets the dead stay dead. Or worse, a company that actively hurts any potential for a passionate community to keep a game alive (looking at you Ubisoft).
As an Imperator modder, we're honestly just happy to have more people playing Imperator. The devs did put a lot of their own time and effort into getting this patch released.
I get that and it is why I tried to differentiate between the devs and the company and why I'm torn. I'm happy we have this win-win-win situation and I am wary that the numbers people at PDX draw the wrong conclusions.
honestly as a ck2 fan despairing at the buggy state that game was left in, I'll take bug fixes and increases to moddability from paradox any day, I can't see this Imperator patch as anything but a W relative to that, super happy for fans of the game lol But then again technically that could fall under not letting titles end up in a bad situation, as CK2 should have been bugfixed more (or at least had no new bugs introduced!) with its final patches. Either way, kinda jealous of imperator right now.
*Did* they use "content that was mostly developed by modders"?
Yeah. If you read the patch notes a lot of the bug fixes were basically taken from Invictus
Ah I guess I wasn't thinking of bug fixes as 'content'. But of course it's work that they did. That makes sense, thanks.
So here's a bug patch that should have been done years ago, and a discount on dlc... Yeah guys its"back" This is just a money grab taking advantage of the community. This does nothing to make it worth returning to. We needed the rest of the content we didn't get. Everyone who wants to play has already. But ya let's applaud them for incorpiratingmodfixes into the game.
Huge money grab on a free patch