Very surprising. The game looked like it had a lot of potential and could’ve been the most popular sims alternative, but it’s suddenly been cancelled.
I guess no game is better than a shitty one, but can someone please make a modern sims game that’s not EA and their endless DLC crap.
I mean, you say that, but a new player looking to get into Stellaris or CKII is looking at a $300 bill if they want all the content. In fact that’s what prevented me from getting into Stellaris, I own the base game, but when I discovered I’d need to shell out an additional several hundred dollars, even during a sale, for not only new species but just for base game mechanics, I stopped in my tracks.
Compare with Civilization, I own Civ V and Civ VI and all the released content for each, pretty sure I bought each of those for less than $20.
Endless DLC is literally the paradox business model. I happen to find it an acceptable compromise for continuous development of the games I like, at least the way paradox does it, but lets not pretend like this was going to be different from a business model perspective.
While true, I think Paradox does it better than Maxis. First, you almost always get some stuff for free. Second, it’s usually more substantial (or it’s art packs or whatever, which you don’t need but are fairly cheap). Would this game do it well? Who knows. Just having them competition would force them and Maxis to do better though.
All this said, I pirate most of the DLCs for Paradox games. I’ll buy the first few near release, but when I want to revisit a game after a few years, likely just for one playthrough or less, I don’t feel like spending $100+ to catch up, and I’d like to see where the new content went. I’ve given them plenty of money where I feel no moral issue with doing so.
My problem with endless DLC isn’t the cost, but the fragmented result of each ‘feature’ needing to stand separately and not interact with any other DLC feature. You end up with some really janky gameplay where nothing works intuitively and the stuff you can implement is all hurt by those limitations.
Not to mention the sheer code hell that all this results in with an exponential increase in possible install states to account for. Which the devs just give up on and the game becomes a little buggier with every new expansion.
Honestly think they should move to a sort of MMO model. Charge for the most recent expansions and older DLC eventually gets merged into the base game. Cuts down on complexity and most of your sales will happen in the first year anyway.
While PDX-published games may suffer from the decouplement of features between DLCs, at the very least PDS-developed games have a built-up expertise when it comes to managing this.
As for MMO model, it’s a hard sell because purchased things get made “free” for new comers. It’s one of the crux that EU4 faced when they rolled many DLC features into the base game.
I feel like the amount stuff paradox are putting behind dlc is better than what it was before either games like ck2, however, the quality of the stuff in the dlc has gotten a lot worse
CK2 dlc was mid as fuck. Every single one adds a few features at most that don’t meaningfully change anything, just enhance things slightly. Some changes are borderline QOL but all of them leaving you with fomo when you watch streamers. It’s always been bullshit and predatory.
I’m keeping an eye on this but I really hate the anime blush on every character
Lol, I’m not sure I’d describe it as anime, but I understand what you mean. Personally I quite like the aesthetic of it. It makes them feel just the right amount of fake to me that I won’t feel bad deleting the pool ladder. I can totally see how it would bug you though. Hopefully it’ll be easy to mod out, or at least turn down.
