• We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.
Greetings!

It’s a new year, and we thought it would be interesting to give all of you an update on the status of the team! There’s quite a few of us, and we hope you’ll enjoy this brief insight into who’s working on updates, fixes and exciting new content for your enjoyment!

My name is Carmille and I work as a Producer on CK3; I’ve been with the team for about one and a half years now. CK2 was one of my favorite games and the reason that I joined Paradox to begin with, so naturally I am feeling quite blessed to work on the project :)

Firstly, an announcement! It has been decided that Alexander Oltner (aka @rageair) will be stepping up as the new Game Director for the project! Alexander is the (now former) Design Lead for CK3, and has spent many years designing features for both CK2 and CK3. He started at the company in 2015 and, if you’ve tuned in to any of the pre-release streams or interviews, you surely know who he is already. Long-term fans might even recognize him as the lead designer behind Holy Fury for CK2, or perhaps you’ve seen him in one of the many past Dev Clashes. We have full confidence that Alex will be able to take up the reins and steer the project towards a bright future! The former Game Director, Henrik Fåhraeus (known on the forums as Doomdark), is ascending the ranks and will instead act as the Creative Director for many titles, CK3 included.

With that said, let's move on to the team itself!
You might think that with the release of the base game, the amount of people working on the project would be reduced. We’re actually doing the exact opposite, and are in the process of expanding the team instead! This will give us a lot more flexibility and freedom and should allow us to work on several different things at the same time.
Naturally, we need to train and onboard our new team members so it is not something we can start with straight away, but our hope is that you will see the effects within a not so distant future.

Now, how many are actually working on CK3 and what are they doing?

The team is made up of many different disciplines, working together to create amazing experiences! We’ll go into more details on each of them below.

Producer

We have four people working in Production (myself included). Our job is to help the team bring the design to life and into your hands. We do this by setting up (and iterating upon) processes and workflows, identifying deadlines and milestones, making plans to hit those dates while staying in good shape and ensuring that everybody knows what to do. We can often be seen grooming CK3s task and bug database and making sure everything is according to plan, up to date and representative of the current situation as well as spending a lot of time looking at numbers in spreadsheets.

Game Design

Our Game Designer is working very closely together with the Game Director. Their focus is split between what is currently being developed and nailing down the design for future expansions. They can very frequently be seen playing the game as it is being developed and make tweaks or highlight areas of concern so that the feature feels as great in the game as it looks on paper.

UX Design

Just like Game Design, our two UX Designers have their focus split between what is happening in the game right now and what is being designed for future expansions. UX Design and Game Design work closely together and make sure that new features are both fun and user friendly. They focus on interactions and user interface, although they can often be seen giving feedback on when something just doesn’t feel intuitive.

Content Design

Although the two previously mentioned design disciplines can sometimes be seen creating content for features as they are being developed, it's the Content Designers that create the vast majority of it. We have eight Content Designers working on CK3, and unlike the other two Design disciplines, they are almost entirely focused on working with what’s being developed in the game here and now. They pride themselves on creating historically plausible content, and will spend a lot of their time researching something before it is being put into the game. They are skilled scripters and writers and very passionate about ensuring that all features have a soul made out of supportive events, decisions, interactions, etc.

Code

There are seven Programmers and two Tech Leads working on CK3. The Tech Leads are responsible for the overall technical health and spend a lot of their time setting up (and iterating upon) processes and best practices for the project. They play a major part during all development stages and are constantly aware of the big picture and the challenges that could come with it.

Our Programmers are responsible for building the functionality and foundation of the features themselves. They work very closely together with the other disciplines on their features and can often be seen providing Code Support or in other ways using their skillset to make life easier for the non-coders. They will also keep an eye on performance and the overall stability of the game and jump upon an issue as soon as it appears.

Art Director

There is one Art Director working on CK3, and their responsibility is the overall artistic vision. They work closely together with the Game Director and Production, but also with all of the Artists in the team.

2D UI Art

We have three 2D Artists on the team and they can often be seen collaborating with Code and UX Design to bring the interfaces of new CK3 features to life after Code has provided their framework. They will also create icons and illustrations as well as investigate artistic improvements to the UIs that is not part of the UX design.

2D Concept Art

Our two Concept Artists help the game team by visualizing assets before they are to be created by a 3D Artist.

3D Character Art

Just as the name indicates, our three Character Artists work on anything related to our characters. This not only includes the characters itself, but also the clothing, headgears and hairstyles. In addition to that they are also responsible for creating the Units that are walking around the map. They can often be seen working closely together with Animation.

3D Environment Art

These Artists work mostly on the map itself. We have four of them and they can often be seen creating holdings, ships, siege weapons and other map assets. They are also painting the map as well as making sure that all the units, holdings and other buildings are located where it makes sense, both from a historical perspective and an artistic one.

Animation

There is one Animator working on the project and their main focus is on bringing our characters and units to life. They can be seen working on brand new poses and adding more variety to existing ones to make sure the characters show a wide range of different emotions and visually support different situations.

VFX

CK3 is not a very VFX heavy game, and because of this we do not have a VFX artist working with us full time, but only on demand.

QA

Our QA is the glue that keeps everything together. We have a core team of seven QA, but expand to a lot more once we are starting to wrap up and getting ready for a release. They can often be seen playing the game and testing the new features as they become ready, but it is important to note that this is not the only thing they do. They have a holistic view of quality and work closely together with all disciplines to make sure that the end product is as great as possible. Sometimes this is achieved through testing alone, but other times they can identify a need to redesign / introduce more content to a feature that feels a bit weak or perhaps a need to tweak a process or workflow within the Project itself.

Audio

The Audio team works on all PDS games, so we can’t really claim them for ourselves.
When they do work on CK3, they are often around two to three people and can be seen working on sound effects for our new features as well as composing music that fit the theme of the expansion.

Naturally, we don’t all work on the same features or fixes at the same time, that’d be very confusing! We’re divided into smaller groups, each focusing on their own set of features or content. Once a week we have a couple of hours set aside to make sure that everybody on the CK3 team has time to sit down and play the game and see for themselves how everything is being tied together.

The team is currently busy working on two things: one is big and the other is smaller. The smaller of these you'll be hearing more of in the coming weeks...
 
Two big patches (of around 1,000 changes each) and and a Ruler Designer don't seem like slow post-launch support to me.

The majority of these were bug fixes and the ruler designer is great, but ultimately it just gives you the ability to customize the game. Most of its functions were already in the game via debug option and were made available to every player via in game menus. It's better than nothing, but that doesn't change the fact that many players paid for a season pass which has not even started after 5 1/2 months, and we have no real info what we'll be getting besides that it'll be two flavour packs and one expansion. We've also heard in the past that bug fixes and content design are different teams, so they shouldn't be impacting each other that much, since they should be in separate pipelines. Ultimately, tangible content release is still much slower than anticipated by the player base. The numbers don't like, current CK3 player base has dropped by over 90%, and is now lower than even EU4, a seven year old game. None of this should be a surprise, especially not to the CK3 dev team. There's no game in the world where you can sell unreleased content for, not deliver ANY of it after five months, and expect the players to be happy.
 
  • 23Like
  • 13
  • 4
Reactions:
The majority of these were bug fixes and the ruler designer is great, but ultimately it just gives you the ability to customize the game. Most of its functions were already in the game via debug option and were made available to every player via in game menus. It's better than nothing, but that doesn't change the fact that many players paid for a season pass which has not even started after 5 1/2 months ...

So you'd rather they not fix bugs, and instead redirect that effort towards getting the paid content ready faster? That's a rather curious opinion; I think most would be rather grateful for the attention that was given to bugs after release.
 
  • 11
  • 8
  • 4Haha
Reactions:
So you'd rather they not fix bugs, and instead redirect that effort towards getting the paid content ready faster? That's a rather curious opinion; I think most would be rather grateful for the attention that was given to bugs after release.
Also, the ruler designer was paid content in CK2. We've effectively already received what was a CK2 DLC for free in addition to the free patches they've already pushes
 
  • 13
  • 3
  • 1Like
Reactions:
There's no game in the world where you can sell unreleased content for, not deliver ANY of it after five months, and expect the players to be happy.

Not only do we not have the content, I was expecting there would be a wait for that but, there is barely been any hint of what we have to look forward too. The answer is always "you'll hear more soon" and it's getting kinda annoying. I guess the word "fire" was supposed to be some big hint to keep us going. Ok well, if I wanted to analyze code words and connect red strings I'd join the forum for Taylor Swift fans or reddit sleuths! After 5 months I don't think some information beyond a one word hint is too much to ask for. Oh well, I've learned my lesson about pre purchasing these things I guess!
 
  • 16
  • 5Like
Reactions:
Oh well, I've learned my lesson about pre purchasing these things I guess!
if enough people learn, maybe we can get online-distribution-only established studios to abandon the practice :D
 
  • 8
  • 1Like
Reactions:
So you'd rather they not fix bugs, and instead redirect that effort towards getting the paid content ready faster? That's a rather curious opinion; I think most would be rather grateful for the attention that was given to bugs after release.
That's not a reasonable interpretation of his post and you know it. Especially since he specifically wrote:

"We've also heard in the past that bug fixes and content design are different teams, so they shouldn't be impacting each other that much, since they should be in separate pipelines."

I'm going to go ahead and assume that you just missed that, because if you read that and still wrote what you wrote above then that'd be posting in extraordinarily bad faith.
 
  • 22
  • 2Like
  • 1
Reactions:
While acknowledging the right of the devs to maintain the forum as they like, I feel like a significant portion of the deleted posts that I remember were free of personal remarks and even (in many cases) free of hyperbolic negativity. I suppose, when clearing an overgrown garden, a certain amount of desired plants will inevitably get thrown out along with the weeds, but some of the recent handling risks creating the impression that criticism is not tolerated even when well reasoned, politely expressed, and calculated to suggest improvements, which leaves one to wonder whether the Paradox forums can be relied on to be a place where one can accurately learn the state of Paradox games.

I only wish they were so proactive at clearing out the useless bug reports and getting back to us on the good ones. THAT would make people happy. The acknowledged bug sticky hasn't been touched since mid-October...

Has there been any explanation as to why the post-launch support has been so slow? It would be better if we at least knew what was going on.

Not that I have seen, but perhaps I missed it?

Two big patches (of around 1,000 changes each) and and a Ruler Designer don't seem like slow post-launch support to me.

See, that's just it though. *Consistency.* I rightfully applaud them for those two big patches, but those were all in the first month or two post-release. Then...mostly silence. There was a minor update in December and then nothing else. Maybe they have been quietly prepping an absolutely gigantic 2,000+ item bugfix behind the scenes these last few months, but if that were so, LOL all they need to do is SAY that! Just tell the people that a huge patch is coming within the month and that most of the big bugs will be dealt with. That would satisfy most of the disappointed people (except those explicitly worried about DLC alone). Instead, there is just speculation and increased silence, particularly in the bug report forums. PDX staff used to answer some of them in the fall, but since then they seem to have retreated from there? Why? They encourage us to make bug reports there, but then there is little-to-no interaction between them and us subsequently. They need to overhaul that team and be communicative on bugs, and also prune away useless, nonsensical reports that aren't truly bugs. These clog up the forum and obfuscate the real problems.
 
  • 12Like
  • 2
  • 1
Reactions:
Keep in mind the bug fixes (for the most part) and Ruler Designer were both in the works prior to the game's release, with the designer just taking way longer than expected and bug fixes getting done after the game was prepared for distribution, meaning they couldn't be bundled in day 1
 
  • 12
  • 1Like
Reactions:
Keep in mind the bug fixes (for the most part) and Ruler Designer were both in the works prior to the game's release, with the designer just taking way longer than expected and bug fixes getting done after the game was prepared for distribution, meaning they couldn't be bundled in day 1

Precisely, they have been too quiet since. I don't know in what world that is a good thing...except I can only think of one place where that might be coming from: corporate. This all stinks of the game developers and designers being hamstrung by some over-arching, corporate plan across all their products. "Too much CKIII news means that Game X won't have much attention," etc. Stuff like this is the only reason I can see for their silence. Personally, I think it's a bit misguided to start shooting holes in one ship so another can sail better, but what do I know; I'm not in their HQ with the customer research and marketing data...

han.gif
 
  • 9Like
Reactions:
Greetings!

It’s a new year, and we thought it would be interesting to give all of you an update on the status of the team! There’s quite a few of us, and we hope you’ll enjoy this brief insight into who’s working on updates, fixes and exciting new content for your enjoyment!

My name is Carmille and I work as a Producer on CK3; I’ve been with the team for about one and a half years now. CK2 was one of my favorite games and the reason that I joined Paradox to begin with, so naturally I am feeling quite blessed to work on the project :)

Firstly, an announcement! It has been decided that Alexander Oltner (aka @rageair) will be stepping up as the new Game Director for the project! Alexander is the (now former) Design Lead for CK3, and has spent many years designing features for both CK2 and CK3. He started at the company in 2015 and, if you’ve tuned in to any of the pre-release streams or interviews, you surely know who he is already. Long-term fans might even recognize him as the lead designer behind Holy Fury for CK2, or perhaps you’ve seen him in one of the many past Dev Clashes. We have full confidence that Alex will be able to take up the reins and steer the project towards a bright future! The former Game Director, Henrik Fåhraeus (known on the forums as Doomdark), is ascending the ranks and will instead act as the Creative Director for many titles, CK3 included.

With that said, let's move on to the team itself!
You might think that with the release of the base game, the amount of people working on the project would be reduced. We’re actually doing the exact opposite, and are in the process of expanding the team instead! This will give us a lot more flexibility and freedom and should allow us to work on several different things at the same time.
Naturally, we need to train and onboard our new team members so it is not something we can start with straight away, but our hope is that you will see the effects within a not so distant future.

Now, how many are actually working on CK3 and what are they doing?

The team is made up of many different disciplines, working together to create amazing experiences! We’ll go into more details on each of them below.

Producer

We have four people working in Production (myself included). Our job is to help the team bring the design to life and into your hands. We do this by setting up (and iterating upon) processes and workflows, identifying deadlines and milestones, making plans to hit those dates while staying in good shape and ensuring that everybody knows what to do. We can often be seen grooming CK3s task and bug database and making sure everything is according to plan, up to date and representative of the current situation as well as spending a lot of time looking at numbers in spreadsheets.

Game Design

Our Game Designer is working very closely together with the Game Director. Their focus is split between what is currently being developed and nailing down the design for future expansions. They can very frequently be seen playing the game as it is being developed and make tweaks or highlight areas of concern so that the feature feels as great in the game as it looks on paper.

UX Design

Just like Game Design, our two UX Designers have their focus split between what is happening in the game right now and what is being designed for future expansions. UX Design and Game Design work closely together and make sure that new features are both fun and user friendly. They focus on interactions and user interface, although they can often be seen giving feedback on when something just doesn’t feel intuitive.

Content Design

Although the two previously mentioned design disciplines can sometimes be seen creating content for features as they are being developed, it's the Content Designers that create the vast majority of it. We have eight Content Designers working on CK3, and unlike the other two Design disciplines, they are almost entirely focused on working with what’s being developed in the game here and now. They pride themselves on creating historically plausible content, and will spend a lot of their time researching something before it is being put into the game. They are skilled scripters and writers and very passionate about ensuring that all features have a soul made out of supportive events, decisions, interactions, etc.

Code

There are seven Programmers and two Tech Leads working on CK3. The Tech Leads are responsible for the overall technical health and spend a lot of their time setting up (and iterating upon) processes and best practices for the project. They play a major part during all development stages and are constantly aware of the big picture and the challenges that could come with it.

Our Programmers are responsible for building the functionality and foundation of the features themselves. They work very closely together with the other disciplines on their features and can often be seen providing Code Support or in other ways using their skillset to make life easier for the non-coders. They will also keep an eye on performance and the overall stability of the game and jump upon an issue as soon as it appears.

Art Director

There is one Art Director working on CK3, and their responsibility is the overall artistic vision. They work closely together with the Game Director and Production, but also with all of the Artists in the team.

2D UI Art

We have three 2D Artists on the team and they can often be seen collaborating with Code and UX Design to bring the interfaces of new CK3 features to life after Code has provided their framework. They will also create icons and illustrations as well as investigate artistic improvements to the UIs that is not part of the UX design.

2D Concept Art

Our two Concept Artists help the game team by visualizing assets before they are to be created by a 3D Artist.

3D Character Art

Just as the name indicates, our three Character Artists work on anything related to our characters. This not only includes the characters itself, but also the clothing, headgears and hairstyles. In addition to that they are also responsible for creating the Units that are walking around the map. They can often be seen working closely together with Animation.

3D Environment Art

These Artists work mostly on the map itself. We have four of them and they can often be seen creating holdings, ships, siege weapons and other map assets. They are also painting the map as well as making sure that all the units, holdings and other buildings are located where it makes sense, both from a historical perspective and an artistic one.

Animation

There is one Animator working on the project and their main focus is on bringing our characters and units to life. They can be seen working on brand new poses and adding more variety to existing ones to make sure the characters show a wide range of different emotions and visually support different situations.

VFX

CK3 is not a very VFX heavy game, and because of this we do not have a VFX artist working with us full time, but only on demand.

QA

Our QA is the glue that keeps everything together. We have a core team of seven QA, but expand to a lot more once we are starting to wrap up and getting ready for a release. They can often be seen playing the game and testing the new features as they become ready, but it is important to note that this is not the only thing they do. They have a holistic view of quality and work closely together with all disciplines to make sure that the end product is as great as possible. Sometimes this is achieved through testing alone, but other times they can identify a need to redesign / introduce more content to a feature that feels a bit weak or perhaps a need to tweak a process or workflow within the Project itself.

Audio

The Audio team works on all PDS games, so we can’t really claim them for ourselves.
When they do work on CK3, they are often around two to three people and can be seen working on sound effects for our new features as well as composing music that fit the theme of the expansion.

Naturally, we don’t all work on the same features or fixes at the same time, that’d be very confusing! We’re divided into smaller groups, each focusing on their own set of features or content. Once a week we have a couple of hours set aside to make sure that everybody on the CK3 team has time to sit down and play the game and see for themselves how everything is being tied together.

The team is currently busy working on two things: one is big and the other is smaller. The smaller of these you'll be hearing more of in the coming weeks...
so, mid-jan you said along the lines of "we dont want to get everyones hopes up and keep you refreshing so we'll keep it simple, the next big dev diary will be mid-feb with more information on whats to come"

now, its mid feb, and this?... "meet the team" is the big reveal?
dont get me wrong, i love that pdx is expanding and its great news but this isnt a dev diary post.. this a seperate post all together because as far as a dev diary goes.. you haven't said anything.

you're not an indie pateron game dev of 3. please dont string people along.

i realise a lot of people are going to backlast at this comment, i get it im a fanboy too, i am patient, this is not about that, its about accountability, they clearly did want to announce something mid-feb, something must've went wrong or not as planned but instead of being honest and upfront they treat us like sheep anf give us this crumb of "information" which tells us absolutly nothing, artists and coding teams come and go on a monthy/yearly basis... is this what we're to expect from pdx from now on?... will we recieve constant updates everytime you hire and fire new sanitation and cafeteria staff also?
 
  • 28
  • 2Like
Reactions:
That's not a reasonable interpretation of his post and you know it. Especially since he specifically wrote:

"We've also heard in the past that bug fixes and content design are different teams, so they shouldn't be impacting each other that much, since they should be in separate pipelines."

I'm going to go ahead and assume that you just missed that, because if you read that and still wrote what you wrote above then that'd be posting in extraordinarily bad faith.
That depends on the sort of bug fix/tweak/rebalancing done. If it's in the code of the game, that's in the territory of programmers and unlikely to gravely impact content designers. Similarly, if it's in the script written by content designers, as many of changes in 1.0.2 through to 1.2.2 have been, those fixes are in the territory of content designers
 
  • 4
  • 1
Reactions:
Big patch in September. Big patch in November. Then the Christmas break (which is very long in Sweden) and back in mid-January. Presumably they've spent post-Christmas getting the DLC into a state where they can show it to us. I know others disagree, but I just don't see that as "slow post-launch support".

Ultimately I'm not worried. They were clear pre-launch that DLC was going to be bigger, but less frequent. I don't think six months is a long time to wait for the first post-launch DLC. Indeed, I remember a time when launching DLC that quickly after a launch would have been met with eye rolls and "Typical Paradox. They just can't wait to start cashing in".
 
Last edited:
  • 12Like
  • 12
  • 4
  • 1Haha
Reactions:
I am very excited for the next diary! Do we have a date scheduled for the next DD?
The OP says "The team is currently busy working on two things: one is big and the other is smaller. The smaller of these you'll be hearing more of in the coming weeks..."




What is the frequency of the diaries?
Hehehe, that is either really funny or really innocent. :)
 
  • 2Haha
  • 2
Reactions:
That's not a reasonable interpretation of his post and you know it. Especially since he specifically wrote:

"We've also heard in the past that bug fixes and content design are different teams, so they shouldn't be impacting each other that much, since they should be in separate pipelines."

I'm going to go ahead and assume that you just missed that, because if you read that and still wrote what you wrote above then that'd be posting in extraordinarily bad faith.

I did actually miss that, my bad, thank you for highlighting it. Still, it seems to me nearly unbelievable that they would be completely independent; I would think that content designers often need programmers to help integrate their desired additions, and with bugfixes usually requiring a programmer's attention as well, the programmers are being pulled in two distinct directions. We know that there are only 7 programmers, and that's after any hires. Speaking as a software developer that works in teams this size myself, I'm skeptical that they would specifically split such a small group of programmers into "feature-coders" and "bugfixers," and even if they did, the teams would be fluid rather than discrete, emphasizing one or the other in appropriate circumstances, e.g. after a big release.
 
  • 3Haha
  • 2Like
Reactions:
I did actually miss that, my bad, thank you for highlighting it. Still, it seems to me nearly unbelievable that they would be completely independent; I would think that content designers often need programmers to help integrate their desired additions, and with bugfixes usually requiring a programmer's attention as well, the programmers are being pulled in two distinct directions. We know that there are only 7 programmers, and that's after any hires. Speaking as a software developer that works in teams this size myself, I'm skeptical that they would specifically split such a small group of programmers into "feature-coders" and "bugfixers," and even if they did, the teams would be fluid rather than discrete, emphasizing one or the other in appropriate circumstances, e.g. after a big release.
It depends what you define as a 'bug', or maybe the sub-classification of a bug.

A developer will be fixing or adding things to the engine, new coded features etc

A content designer will be creating new content through the scripting language, or fixing events/scripts etc that are bugged. Both disciplines work on new content and fixing existing, but different types.

They may work with each other when it crosses boundaries (an event that is broken due to an engine change for example) but that would be less common than it sitting purely in one or the other.

Disclaimer: Just my opinion, I've not seen behind the scenes for CK3 at all.
 
  • 3
  • 2Like
  • 2
Reactions:
I am very excited for the next diary! Do we have a date scheduled for the next DD? What is the frequency of the diaries?

They have confirmed a DD coming tuesday on their twitch stream. I would expect a dev diary at least every week from now on until DLC arrives.
 
  • 12
  • 4
Reactions:
They have confirmed a DD coming tuesday on their twitch stream. I would expect a dev diary at least every week from now on until DLC arrives.

It says everything about how toxic it's got around here that a helpful post like this - with factual information about when dev diaries are coming (the very thing people say they're crying out for) - is getting a load of "respectfully disagree"s.

We reached the point a while back where posting anything positive about the game was enough to get you a load of "Respectfully disagrees" (often from the same group of people time after time). Now it seems posting something neutral is enough to get that response. Really sad to see.
 
  • 24
  • 9
Reactions:
It says everything about how toxic it's got around here that a helpful post like this - with factual information about when dev diaries are coming (the very thing people say they're crying out for) - is getting a load of "respectfully disagree"s.

We reached the point a while back where posting anything positive about the game was enough to get you a load of "Respectfully disagrees" (often from the same group of people time after time). Now it seems posting something neutral is enough to get that response. Really sad to see.
What are you on about? Only two people disagreed with the post you replied to, and from what I've seen it's never two-digit numbers, and there are way more than that who engages with content on this forum (even though it doesn't always feel like it). I mean, I get more dislikes from my fandom on average. The forum will endure this little mishap too. Come release of the new DLC, people will be over it.
 
Last edited:
  • 14Like
  • 1
Reactions: