Europa Universalis IV - Development Diary 20th of June 2023 - 1.35.4 release & History Lessons DLC

[Pavía]

1444-1836? (slightly) expanded timeline confirmed!

Overlook while writing it, rather.

 

[Pavía]

Really? We're even going to get a podcast explaining to us how Ming was completely destroyed by flooding and earthquakes in 1445?

It was destroyed and fixed by game devs, apparently, but some more research needs to be done on this topic.

 

[Pavía]

Will there be transcripts posted for these eventually? I would not mind subtitles in-game, but I am not sure how practical that would be without getting in the way of gameplay. I am deaf so, unfortunately, I will be missing out on this.

If anyone can recommend an app for voice-to-text transcription, that would also be great.

We thought about making transcripts for the Lessons, although we didn't go with them for the release, as it had a few technical issues related to its positioning in the UI, etc. But as improving the accessibility of our games is one of our UX objectives, I'll pass this feedback to the Team, so we investigate if we can add this to the Lessons at some point.

This is a very interesting idea and I really like it in principle. I don't know how it will feel to listen to a podcast while playing the game though. I imagine it may be a bit difficult to listen to someone speaking while reading events. A "pause music" hotkey might be useful.

Adding to our list of suggestions to improve the experience.

This DLC is only in English or I can listen it in Spanish?

At this moment yes, we might think in the future about translating to the other languages that we support in the game, although it's a bit early to decide about it, as it's the first time that we release this type of DLC, and we have to test how it's received.

In-game "History Lessons" is an interesting idea, but I think it'll need some significant changes to the in-game music player to be truly useful.

For example:

• Keyboard shortcut to pause/unpause (suggested by @Utik)
• Some way to automatically restart the podcast at the same place you left off last time you quit the game.
  • Or maybe it should be ~30s prior to the point you reached when you last quit? But this could quickly get annoying if you're loading up the game multiple times to test something.
• Ability to "seek" within each track.
  • If I get wrapped up in something in-game and realise I haven't been listening for the past couple of minutes, I want to be able to rewind. I can do this with external sources, but not with the in-game music player (you have to start over from the beginning).
  • If I quit the game partway through a podcast and the auto-restart feature mentioned above bugs out for some reason, I want to be able to manually choose my own starting point. (Errors of this kind are relatively frequent on dedicated platforms, so I imagine they'll be extremely frequent in a platform that's not primarily about podcasts, eg. EU4.)

I'm adding these suggestions to our list of possible improvements.

Intriguing. Not sure how this works though. So we have new songs integrated that are texts instead of music and play when we're playing in China/Japan only?

They play as other songs in the game, with the music player, and you can listen with whichever country you're playing with; although it probably makes the most sense to listen while playing with a Chinese or Japanese country, that's up to you.

 

[Pavía]

Quick update: the DD is not coming this week, but the next one, as we just released the 1.35.5 hotfix, and we're monitoring for further critical bugs. Thanks in advance for your understanding!

 

[Pavía]

Another quick update: another week without DD, as we have something in the oven for the coming days.

 

[Pavía]

Are you referring just to 1.35.6, or is there something else in the oven?

1.35.6.

 

[Pavía]

So is there going to be any DD next week?

Yes.