Too much game to play? A personal fear, but anyone agree?

[Pete0714]

I don't know, am I the only one who is starting to feel that this game just might be too big, to deep, too complicated for them to enjoy? Like the mechanics, the scale, the systemic minutia, and the level of detail, is going to be too overwhelming for them? I am NOT saying it should not be what it is, please understand I fully love the concept being put in this game. But I am really getting concerned that this game is looking to be just...too much for me. Anyone else feel that concern? Not looking for changes from developers, just expressing a view and wondering if others are feeling similarly daunted by what is looking more and more like a godzilla level beast of a game.

 

[Mindel]

Have you ever gone outside? The outside world is a huge and complicated place. Even more complicated than Project Caesar, I'll bet. Way too deep for you to experience everything in a single lifetime, or for that matter a million lifetimes.

Does that mean you should just hide inside?

 

[Insigna]

No matter what there will be some who think the game is too deep or too shallow. I would rather them err on the side of to deep if anything. If the game is good it'll be worth learning all that depth.

 

[Koopatin]

I don't know, am I the only one who is starting to feel that this game just might be too big, to deep, too complicated for them to enjoy? Like the mechanics, the scale, the systemic minutia, and the level of detail, is going to be too overwhelming for them? I am NOT saying it should not be what it is, please understand I fully love the concept being put in this game. But I am really getting concerned that this game is looking to be just...too much for me. Anyone else feel that concern? Not looking for changes from developers, just expressing a view and wondering if others are feeling similarly daunted by what is looking more and more like a godzilla level beast of a game.

i know where you are coming from. And i like a lot of games on different levels. But some games need to fill the need, the need for speed!

I want EU 5 to be a game that just does not care about being easy to get into and/or master. i hope it will be (almost) the GSG equivalent of a soulslike. A paradox game for everyone is mostly deep as a puddle.

 

[MasterPaw]

Have you ever gone outside? The outside world is a huge and complicated place. Even more complicated than Project Caesar, I'll bet. Way too deep for you to experience everything in a single lifetime, or for that matter a million lifetimes.

Does that mean you should just hide inside?

As much as I like the analogy it doesn't really make sense to compare the ability to enjoy a complex (strategy) game with life

 

[Dongerino]

No, I feel the exact opposite. I'm excited to learn all the different systems. I have 3.5k hours on EU4, got the Three Mountains recently, and the game feels really shallow to me now. All the mechanics feel surface level, where you just expand and click things to make you expand easier. I want to feel lost again. I want to be clueless as to what the most optimal way to play is. I want to click things without knowing what the long-term effects are gonna be.

 

[Mindel]

As much as I like the analogy it doesn't really make sense to compare the ability to enjoy a complex (strategy) game with life

It highlights the same strange line of thinking, so it makes perfect sense.

 

[Metz]

The more options, the harder the game is to learn. Once learned, the replayability is higher.

The more basic the game is, the easier it is to learn, however it gets boring quickly.

The only easy games that don't get boring or repetitive are the ones that are competitive because the fun comes from beating the other person. Some easy games are also hand-eye coordination dependent so there is personal improvement there (like in many competitive FPS games).

 

[Ispil]

Have you ever read a history book? I don't mean this in offense, just a general question, but have you ever read one of those region-and-period-specific deep dives into the history of a given region? Something like The Aqquyunlu— Clan, Confederation, Empire or The Late Medieval Balkans: A Critical Survey from the Late Twelfth Century to the Ottoman Conquest? Once you start digging into books like those, you see just how precarious all of these states really were. Not just in the sense that outside forces could do them in, but that every little decision that they would make had significant consequences later on, not just in those decisions but the time not spent making other decisions instead. You read them and go "how did they do well?" You read them and go "where did it all fall apart?"

I long for the grand strategy game that has the fidelity of one of those books. PC is the closest I've seen to that so far, at least in the mechanics described. I'm not expecting perfect representation— I don't need every single member of the Serbian aristocracy represented as long as the broad power of the nobles is represented— but I want those little details to matter. Things like wars depopulating the countryside, making it easier to hand those territories over to your own nobility for which you've promised favors rather than keeping the power of the nobility already ruling those territories (since they've now left due to aforementioned depopulation due to war). Things like having to counterbalance the power of the nobles against the fact that they're the ones providing you with the bulk of your early armies. Things like leaving the existing laws and practices in place for territory conquered rather than trying to rule with the laws and customs of the state, knowing that the state simply lacks the means and knowledge to properly administer these conquered territories that follow different laws, customs, and language (plus to avoid unrest in those conquered territories).

I want the ability for my state to fall apart. I want this to be something that can happen without me deliberately having to "play badly", or because some artificial mechanic popped in and decided "well you got too big; now you collapse". I want it to happen as a consequence of decisions that seemed good at the time but ultimate ramifications could be seen with a bit of better foresight.

I want my decisions to feel organic as a response to the immediate issues that plague my state. I want "the meta" to feel intended and something baked into the overall mechanics of the game, not something that feels counterintuitive and nonsensical.

All in all, everything I've seen so far regarding PC indicates that it's doing much of that already. There's a few areas that we don't know about yet that I need to see the filled-in details before I can make my full assessment, but so far the game holds great promise with what has been presented.

---

Will I have my state collapse repeatedly due to mistakes that I made due to a failure to understand the full extent of the overarching mechanics of the game? Absolutely.

And I'll enjoy every second of it.

 

[Austregisel]

Don't worry, Eu4 will always be there with a more simple mechanics and smaller overrall.

 

[ProfessionalRat]

I’m looking forward to the complexity, I enjoy it, but I understand what you’re saying. It’s likely not going to be very new player/casual friendly, and I’ve had some of my friends tell me that they won’t be getting it because they don’t want to deal with production/trade and just like their simpler map painting eu4 games, not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Everyone just has their own tastes.

 

[William the Merry]

Its far more indepth to just be eu5, but this deep level of modelling will be interesting, rather than just railroad events

 

[Álvaro Núñez de Lara]

No, I don't. The game is not "too deep" or "too complicated". It's detailed, it's organic and it makes sense. It's actually a videogame now, instead of a boardgame in computer.


I want a game in which I can immerse myself in a world of old, where the world around me feels real and that it matters. Not a game where i just braindead click my way through menus until I conquer most of the world.

But again, this is not Vicoria. It's not as deep, its not as complex, everything seems strightforward, with automation tools etc. So no I am not worried. People will learn this game and will have no problem with it once you get used to it. And in 10 years we will be complaining it's too shallow and need something even more deep and realistic. It's the cycle of life.

And for the few who can't be bothered to think while playing and just want to carry out fantasies without any thought into it while watching a movie, EU4 will always be there

But this game is made by life long PDX fans for life long PDX fans. Targeted to an audience who will stick around for another 12 years and that love PDX for its complexity and its realism and replayability.

 

[Imperialismo]

As long as the mechanics and detail are shown and represented in concise and logical ways (as anything should be), this fear is unfounded imo. If you want a more abstracted, simpler experience then EU4 is prolly your goto

 

[FleetingRain]

Tbh I don't know if the same game can portray five centuries in a proper manner. People already complained that EU4 covered too much and that the Age of Absolutism/Revolutions should be another game, imagine PC which starts when the Black Death hasn't hit Europe yet.

 

[Meneye]

Back when the vic3 dev diaries were coming out, the game seemed really deep too. Once it was released, the promise of emergent gameplay and a complex world turned out to be more "line goes up" and "AI destroys entire economy doing something weird again."

Dev diaries give a distorted view of what the game's going to be like, because they cant tell us everything and we fill in the gaps with our mind. We can't tell just how deep the game's systems are actually going to be, so don't feel intimidated by a developing game that we only have a vague concept of.

 

[Teng_Ri]

Back when the vic3 dev diaries were coming out, the game seemed really deep too. Once it was released, the promise of emergent gameplay and a complex world turned out to be more "line goes up" and "AI destroys entire economy doing something weird again."

Dev diaries give a distorted view of what the game's going to be like

finally someone sane replied among all the daydreaming fantasizing fiesta. i do like what i see too but reality is often disappointing and im ready to be disapponted whether it be underrepresentation of ottomans, anatolia, islam and overall mena. or huge performance and ai issues. or bugs. or price

 

[Ispil]

finally someone sane replied among all the daydreaming fantasizing fiesta. i do like what i see too but reality is often disappointing and im ready to be disapponted whether it be underrepresentation of ottomans, anatolia, islam and overall mena. or huge performance and ai issues. or bugs. or price

If it's any consolation there's some post by Johan buried around here that the Ottomans are one of the favorite starting nations of the devs.

So there's hope!

 

[Teng_Ri]

hope

it is buried youre not wrong

i know they are consistentingly top 3 over the course of, what, 8-10 years of data provided but that didnt save them from having a dumb internal struggle mechanic and a dumb decadence resource. only thing immersive about ottomans in eu4 is their intro message. whoever wrote that should have been their game designer aswell

-oops

 

[Ispil]

Fair. Fortunately with the estate and economic mechanics in place, they're almost at the point where they can have a proper implementation without any of that tacked-on garbage. Just throw in raiding and we're good.

Though I've got no real good ideas for how to represent the Ottomans conquering the whole Mamluk Sultanate in a single war. I guess basically a military engagement so decisive (killing the ruler, among other things) for a state that at that point wasn't all that well-regarded to begin with, effectively leading to a military collapse and the various forts along the way just opening the gates? Like, unless I'm mistaken there wasn't all that much sieging going on, either.

Then just... do away with that stupid infamy-on-conquest mechanic, and we're good. That mid-millennium "decline" of the Ottomans is then properly represented as an economic (and state) transition from raiding, since that starts drying up and trade becomes a whole lot more lucrative (until that starts getting problems too). Pass some laws to change around some estate power, more emphasis on other aspects of the economy and away from raiding, and we already have a pretty nice dynamic trade system as well.