TL;DR:
-
They apologized (again)
-
They will refund everyone who bought the beach DLC and make it a free addition to the game, admitting it was tasteless that they made paid DLC when the game is in a broken state
-
They will focus on base changes and better modding tools before starting to make more DLC (previously announced DLC has been delayed to 2025)
-
Console release delayed
Honestly, this is a good update. It’s everything we wanted to hear. Looking forward to buying the game when it gets fixed.
This was too late. Paradox’s in house development studio did the same thing with Victoria 3. Do something way too greedy (lock historical characters behind a preorder for a dlc that was already bad). Waited to see the backlash, and when it was too much, they make the bonuses free.
At least they’re doing something, but the dlc should have been pushed back at launch.
It’s not just greedy, at this point it’s blatant. The release itself was already bonkers, but they could have saved things by working hard on the base game and releasing additional free content. But this? How many “sowwy we fucked up, we promise to do better, buy our new 132 DLCs” will they pull before people stop giving them the benefit of the doubt?
I’m not hopeful at all. If Bethesda or Blizzard are anything to go by, they can keep messing up big time for years, maybe decades to come and consumers will keep coming back, begging to be disappointed once more. You’ll have more luck looking for alternatives out there in the ocean of indie games.
Yep. It will never change As long as gamers continue to buy from shitty companies, the companies have no incentive to change in any direction but worse. Bethesda is a brilliant example of it, how every game is more simplistic and devoid, and more reliant on randomly generated content than the previous.
Ubisoft is another example, with the outright hostility, hatred and downright contempt they have towards their own customers.
and they are both still multi-billion dollar companies, cause idiots keep throwing them tons of money.
These updates from C:SL team mean nothing, cause they keep doing stupid shit despite of their sweet words. Like they did with trying to sell DLC for a broken game. Their actions and focus speak far louder than any of their honeyed words.
I am actually planning on not buying anything more from paradox if they fuck up the launch of eu5, only dlc from current games (if they’re worth it/required)
I’ve hated Paradox ever since I bought CK2 and then realized how many minor features were locked behind $5 DLCs. I later pirated the game to play all the DLC and there is absolutely no fucking way that shit was worth what they are charging. Decided then never to buy a Paradox game again.
Compare that to the Factorio devs Wube. They released their game as a beta and then just kept updating it and adding features until it was done. Then they spent years fixing basically every bug in the game. As far as I know they never decreased the price or put the game on sale, and at one point they increased the price of their game because of inflation. Which honestly is fine, they made a great game and they are continuing to support the game, why decrease the price?
I know I’m coming off as a Wube shill but in my eyes they are ideal devs. Paradox in theory make really interesting games but in practice they poison them with shitty monetization strategies. If they just made games and added free updates for a while afterwards if they wanted to I probably would have spent a shit load on their games.
I’m ranting but as a side note, Paradox definitely abuses fomo. They make games that basically require you to watch videos of how to play and those videos inevitably mention DLCs which you then start wondering what you’re missing out on. That’s definitely what made me want to buy their DLC.
Fuck paradox
It is a shame they’re such a greedy company because, similarly to what you said in your 3rd paragraph, they make good games, some can be as good as games like factorio at times, but it’s always ruined by their dlc.
You mentioned free updates at the end, I believe they are doing that for victoria 3, but their first big expansion for the game, spheres of influence, comes out in June so we’ll see if they stick to that.
I love paradox games and have the money to by their dlc most the time and will keep buying the ones I want (because the beach dlc was too far even for the largest paradox shills) as long as the game’s stability and the free players are prioritised, unlike the way they have been treated in cities: skylines 2.
And yes, fuck paradox, shame their games are ruined by their greed.
CK2 was a complete game at launch IIRC. They just kept releasing new DLC for it for many years, much of which was outside the scope of the original game (playing as Arabic rulers, vikings, Indians, etc). I think that’s fine. Them selling music, portraits, and new models separately was kinda shitty though.
Remember when games used to be a finished product on a cartridge/CD? You just bought it at the store for a base price of a video game and that was it. Any bugs found in the game became widely accepted, and maybe even exploited by competitive gamers. But there was no patching, no updates, no DLC. You paid for a game up front and that was it.
I miss those days.
idk if this is a stupid opinion but I feel like us, the consumers are to blame. If everyone just waited a week and read reviews before buying games then publishers wouldn’t be able to get away with this shit.
Honestly, I always felt the $60 price tag for games (now $70+ for AAA titles!) was way too much, so I usually wait about a year or more, then buy it on sale.
So I get to sit back and watch the shitshow when people pre-order games and then get screwed when the game is garbage.
Dragon’s Dogma II was super hyped up recently, and even I got the free character customization demo to pre-build a character. Then it announced day-one microtransactions the day before release and pissed off the gaming community.
I do wait, and the publishers don’t get away with selling me unfinished games. It’s great.
I wait at least a month for any game, 8 months for a Bethesda game.
I waited a year for cyberpunk, until everyone was saying it was all fixed, and I hated all the bugs and some bad design decisions. Nothing major, but it felt like death of a thousand cuts.
I shudder to imagine how that game looked at release that this feels like a polished product to people.
No, the consumers are never to blame for stuff like this!
This is something that is just that we get told by the people that are lying about and hyping up a product, putting up manipulative incentives for buying it before letting us inspect it. Then releasing trash, but still appealing on our empathic nature and promising that it might get fixed later. And when things turn to shit, then it is our trust and empathy, willingness to support them, that is to blame for it. No!
If the industry exploits our good and trusting nature, then we need to fight them with regulation and laws. Our civilization and the human nature is built on trust, and that should not be undermined by short profit oriented, exploitative companies or business practices.
To be precise, the new generation is to blame, who constantly preorders a game, and spends a lot on mobile games. Companies realize that bad products sell, so why would they improve?
The new generation? I remember this stuff happening 15 years ago. People were camping outside before big game releases and had an incentive to ensure they got a copy of the game. The new generation that only buys digital is not to blame for the practice taking hold.
“The new generation”
So there are no 40 year olds who blindly pre order the 15th CoD game because that’s all they play? This is a general issue in the gaming community as a whole.
It wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows. I remember losing hundreds of hours of progress on games due to memory card corruption. Or game cartridges/CDs no longer working, requiring you to buy a new copy. Or consoles getting straight-up bricked.
Hell, a ton of people have memories of blowing into N64/SNES cartridges to get them to work since they had notoriously unreliable connectors. But even though it was something that didn’t work great, everybody has fond memories of doing it since there wasn’t this amalgamation of voices from every direction telling you to be upset about it and clamoring for retribution. If something was broken, you got frustrated about it, complained to your friends, and then moved on with your life since there wasn’t anything else you could do.
Games were also significantly less complex then. It takes teams of 100s of people to make a AAA game now. But don’t kid yourself, there were definitely game-breaking bugs back then. And in the pc world, patches arrived much, much earlier than in the console world.
FF7 and supreme commander were complex. And devs then didn’t have the tools we have today, not to mention game engines (there were, but not like today). And ps3 was a pain to program for. And, and…
Arguably, patches started even earlier. It wasn’t uncommon to release another whole title that was basically a bug/balance patch. See Japanese Pokemon Blue, and all the various Street Fighter 2 versions.
Actually there were update still cause the games were only little less broken. It’s updates were so much harder for everyone. Hosting them, finding them, knowing there were updates, having to apply updates in specific orders.
Steam has been a good send for that.
Maybe I’m just old
Not old enough, heh. The cartridges/CDs this commenter are talking about had to have rock-solid code because patching wasn’t possible. You’d have to make an entire new print run, and very few games of that era ever had those.
And guess what? They still had multiple versions! Ask any Link to the Past speedrunner. 1.0 is broken as hell!
You don’t miss those days.
You don’t have to! Pretty much all of those games are available, and you can play them for free if you’re willing to pirate.
But let’s be honest, modern games are better which is why you won’t do this instead.
I’ve tried time and time again to enjoy “modern” games, but nothing released after Oblivion or The Witcher 3 was worth my time.
Plenty of old games however have an extremely high replay value, thanks to their immersive missions and bugfree gameplay. Recently played Thief: The Dark Project again (from 1999), and it’s a bloody masterpiece.
You’re one of the few. Pretty much everyone else complaining about how modern games are bad and the time you speak of was some magical time for gaming, are at the same time only be playing games from the last decade or so.
Having been a game since the early 80s, I would argue gaming is better now than it has ever been. It has its own set of problems, but nothing better than throwing a game I’m interested in into my wishlist, waiting for it to go on deep sale (which happens long after most of those annoying first bugs have been ironed out), checking the reviews at that point, and then downloading if it still looks good.
Generally speaking, games are so much better looking and have the ability to be far more intricate and interesting. Like I played hundreds of hours of civ I. But if I’m going to play civ now, it will be 5 or 6.
They’ve basically perfected keeping the community mostly happy by toeing the line between putting out solid base games and putting out greedy DLC.
What we’re now seeing is what happens when you don’t immediately change course after you skimp on making a good base game.
It’s all sheer greed, too. Paradox has fully embraced the model of releasing sequels with less content than their DLC-enhanced previous games after 2K showed the market had tolerance for it with Civilization. Considering how that already puts them ahead of the curve, it’s amazing that Paradox let this game come out in this state.
That doesn’t make it sheer greed; it’s what’s feasible to develop. A systems driven game like a city builder or a 4X game mean that you can’t just drag and drop old content in the new systems and expect it to work and look cohesive. Every fighting game launches with fewer characters than the previous version, and it’s not because it’s some conspiracy to delay dropping the SFV characters in SF6; it’s because swapping out the V system for the Drive system is a massive change, and the old characters take a lot of work to port over. Even the art style in Civ 6 is very different from Civ V. When you try to just copy and paste content between two different styles of art direction, you end up with nightmare fuel Chun-Li in Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite.
The base game having less content than its predecessor isn’t the greedy part. It’s the fact that taking advantage of that market inelasticity wasn’t enough for Paradox and judging it acceptable to release a product in this state on top of that.
The Beach DLC was distasteful, you still can’t even make convincing beaches with the terrain.
I’m very glad Paradox reversed course here. It sounds like they are starting to take seriously what it means to make a finished, solid game. Cities:Skylines fans are tired of half-baked shit.
I’m not convinced Paradox knows what they are doing as publisher. Millenia was similarly pushed out the door before it was ready (though in a better state than Cities: Skylines 2). And both games pushed out the door in the last week of the quarter in a transparent effort to boost their earnings. The shortsightedness of the publisher is now impacting their reputation in ways that will be hard to recover. I no longer consider buying Paradox published titles until they are at least a year old or have at least a few months of reviews showing they are solid (like AoW4).
We’re riding this wave over in the Total War community too. Broken game, weak and overpriced DLC.
We kicked off (and then all their other games managed to flop at once, so they came crawling back) and now we’ve got a notable amount more effort into the DLC coming at the end of the month, as well as price cuts, refunds and redoing of the bad DLC.
Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, but I’m seeing positive movements in general on legacy resting-on-laurels games.
