PDX developers seriously need to sow the fields with their keyboards and mouses for their own good, and not for the middle marketing managers and other sorts of bourgeoisie. Also Christmas must be banned for great justice.
Christmas killed Le Guin.
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Honestly I don't think what they label the game as will make a difference, it's what they're doing that makes the difference. If they're charging people for a product that fee comes with an assumption that the product is working and free of at least the larger bugs. If the product does include large bugs that should never have made it through the QA process, that product should not have been up for sale. Nobody expects a perfect bug free product, but the game breaking stuff we see today that effects vast swathes of the userbase, like the end-game crisis not working, the AI being bugged or the horrendous midgame lag should never have made it to a retail release. If Paradox need our assistance in QA testing the game, they should release the product to interested parties as a free open or closed beta before taking anyone's money, or they should launch it via steam early access.
My game should not run like the video below when I greatly exceed the recommended system specs and have waited two weeks for two patches that have claimed to improve performance. But not only is that the situation I'm in, I'm now expected to wait at least three more weeks for further fixes because they're going on holiday.
My game should not run like the video below when I greatly exceed the recommended system specs and have waited two weeks for two patches that have claimed to improve performance. But not only is that the situation I'm in, I'm now expected to wait at least three more weeks for further fixes because they're going on holiday.
How many players are we actually talking about here, though? I mean, we're how many Stellaris DLCs in? (Seriously, I've lost count.) What percentage of people who are actually going to buy Megacorp don't know what the deal is?
I will lend my voice to the I'm not at all angry crowd.
The game is actually in a decent state right now. Clearly needs more fixes, but the urgent stuff seems to be pretty well dealt with. I'd much rather have what we have now than still be playing 2.1 over Christmas. No question. We ultimately get a functioning 2.2 sooner if they release it a bit early than if they held it back. For a game that is an ongoing project the idea of only releasing things when they are 'done' seems backwards - the game isn't done until they stop developing for it.
For people who hate dealing with any kind of bugs you can always stay on the previous patch.
The game is actually in a decent state right now. Clearly needs more fixes, but the urgent stuff seems to be pretty well dealt with. I'd much rather have what we have now than still be playing 2.1 over Christmas. No question. We ultimately get a functioning 2.2 sooner if they release it a bit early than if they held it back. For a game that is an ongoing project the idea of only releasing things when they are 'done' seems backwards - the game isn't done until they stop developing for it.
For people who hate dealing with any kind of bugs you can always stay on the previous patch.
That's not how it works. If you sell someone a product it should be working. It doesn't matter if you consider the game an ongoing project or not. The 2.2 issues aren't "well dealt with" the AI is still broken, the end game crisis still doesn't purge and the performance is still awful and everything will remain this way until mid january. And sure I can stay on the previous patch but I paid for megacorp and can't play it without 2.2
Arguments like this are the exact reason companies feel safe in selling us unfinished games, people are more interested in impatiently jumping in to an unfinished experience than waiting for the developers to finish. Executives know this and push developers to launch early and fix content later for quicker financial gain screwing over those people who were always happy to wait to get their moneys worth.
Some of you think things are seemingly going fine, because our developers just disabled their unfinished codes to prevent bugs. It makes your play-through less game-breaking, but it's literally not complete.
If any of you have opened the L-Gate in 2.2 and found the Dessanu Empire (the Grey Goo empire), you would find their "gifts" are just nothing, because the codes of the gift modifier remains as what it was in 2.1: the four grey goo strategic resources, instead of nanites. And it's still disabled, as for 2.2.3. The same issue occurs on their Grey-goo-faked Gaia worlds, in which the original 2.1 codes give them enough buildings when spawning. And these codes are also unchanged and disabled, so if you survey one of these Gaia worlds, you would find there are literally no districts, no buildings, no jobs/housing/amenities, and no output of any resources.
Of course some of my friends mentioned that (through his observation of nearly every development cycle,) Stellaris devs always fix issues and bugs according to the urgency and severity, as more game-breaking bugs will have higher priority, while minor balance and textual tweak comes later. He also mentioned that contents from the base game and free features in the update also come first, while DLC-exclusive contents are temporarily queued up and get fixed later. I understand such decision, which is totally reasonable, but I'm surprised that their reaction is much slower than before.
If you've looked into patch notes of 2.0.1/2.0.2/2.1.1/2.1.2 (2.0.2 and 2.1.2 were released at least 1 month after the update, but they were also opt-in beta patches), you would find that every week, there would be several dozens of bugs, UI and balance issues getting fixed. Their speed of giving post-launch support and fixing bugs seems to be halved this time.
If any of you have opened the L-Gate in 2.2 and found the Dessanu Empire (the Grey Goo empire), you would find their "gifts" are just nothing, because the codes of the gift modifier remains as what it was in 2.1: the four grey goo strategic resources, instead of nanites. And it's still disabled, as for 2.2.3. The same issue occurs on their Grey-goo-faked Gaia worlds, in which the original 2.1 codes give them enough buildings when spawning. And these codes are also unchanged and disabled, so if you survey one of these Gaia worlds, you would find there are literally no districts, no buildings, no jobs/housing/amenities, and no output of any resources.
Of course some of my friends mentioned that (through his observation of nearly every development cycle,) Stellaris devs always fix issues and bugs according to the urgency and severity, as more game-breaking bugs will have higher priority, while minor balance and textual tweak comes later. He also mentioned that contents from the base game and free features in the update also come first, while DLC-exclusive contents are temporarily queued up and get fixed later. I understand such decision, which is totally reasonable, but I'm surprised that their reaction is much slower than before.
If you've looked into patch notes of 2.0.1/2.0.2/2.1.1/2.1.2 (2.0.2 and 2.1.2 were released at least 1 month after the update, but they were also opt-in beta patches), you would find that every week, there would be several dozens of bugs, UI and balance issues getting fixed. Their speed of giving post-launch support and fixing bugs seems to be halved this time.
I’m not upset, i’m use to it and know its part of the paradox launch cycle. They did a good job and did good work before the start of their holidays and i trust them to do good work after the holidays.
But seriously this whole release it before christmas thing is senseless and probably doesn’t make enough of an impacton sales to be worth it. Who’s buying dlc on steam for christmas as gifts? How many people buy the dlc because of the christmas season that wouldn’thave bought it anyways?
If we just moved past this senseless tradition of releasing things before christmas we could put holidays in the middle of development cycles where they belong.
The same trouble happens in summer sometimes too!
You have a calendar and several months to plan. Put patch and work interrupting breaks in the dead zone of your calendar between updates and you’ll instantly get rid of the endless complaints of pausing patches for the holidays.
A 6month dev cycle can look like this: Start dlc april or may -> take summer break and have nobody notice -> release in fall -> patch up dlc -> start new dlc in october or november -> take christmas break when nobody cares -> release in feb or march -> patch -> start again.
Working around two big holidays a year can’t be this hard can it?
Having said that i’m sure some head honcho can come in here and spout a million good reasons i’ve never thought of as a layman as to why you want to time dlc release right before breaks. I’ll be glad to hear them.
But seriously this whole release it before christmas thing is senseless and probably doesn’t make enough of an impacton sales to be worth it. Who’s buying dlc on steam for christmas as gifts? How many people buy the dlc because of the christmas season that wouldn’thave bought it anyways?
If we just moved past this senseless tradition of releasing things before christmas we could put holidays in the middle of development cycles where they belong.
The same trouble happens in summer sometimes too!
You have a calendar and several months to plan. Put patch and work interrupting breaks in the dead zone of your calendar between updates and you’ll instantly get rid of the endless complaints of pausing patches for the holidays.
A 6month dev cycle can look like this: Start dlc april or may -> take summer break and have nobody notice -> release in fall -> patch up dlc -> start new dlc in october or november -> take christmas break when nobody cares -> release in feb or march -> patch -> start again.
Working around two big holidays a year can’t be this hard can it?
Having said that i’m sure some head honcho can come in here and spout a million good reasons i’ve never thought of as a layman as to why you want to time dlc release right before breaks. I’ll be glad to hear them.
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I expected this as soon as they announced the release date. I figured this would have been a late January/Mid feb release. I've had fun with 2.2 and will continue to do so.
Looking forward to more updates in a month or so of course.
Also I've still got a bit of a backlog to get through. I gotta get back to my POE2 playthrough and give Pathfinder Kingmaker another crack now it's a lot more playable.
Quite a few people get steam gift cards for christmas, I usually get a couple each year.
But that isn’t really related, especially when it comes to dlc i think.
You wouldn’t have chosen not to buy megacorp if it was released in april right? Getting the steam gift cards don’t make you decide to buy something specific.
If you only buy games once a year with your christmas gift cards it doesn’t matter if you buy the dlc this christmas instead of next christmas assuming it was released after christmas right?
Maybe there is a handful of people that spend their christmas money willynilly and being in the spotlight for them to pick it will make them buy the dlc by chance. But even then if you released the dlc in october and then did a sale that brought the dlc, including the not yet discounted ones to the front of the steam page and get that money anyways.
Basically what i’m saying is you don’t have to make physical gimmicks to improve marketing instead of an artifical marketing gimmick like a sale.
Especially when the margins for extra dlc sales are going to be so low considering 1 they have to own the base game to even be able to buy the dlc so they’re already in the demographic of people that will spend money on stellaris and 2 most people that buy pdox dlc are doing so intentionally rather than on a whim.
Having typed that out i do realise that the point might be to boost base game sales during the holiday season with ‘new exciting content’ which does target people that are pruchasing on a whim.
But in the end all of this is moot because paradox literally has the sales data and can easily check if a new dlc boosts game sales in the holiday season and compare it to new dlc boosting game sales outside of the holiday season.
Actually all the data we need about whether or not these patch breaks are worth it should be visible in the sales data.
If anyone knows the account of the employee that handles sales data is i’d love to @ them and hear if they think there are enough sales to justify a christmas release over any other arbitrary release. A yes or no would satifiably resolve this question for me.
Pretty sure that's DNote as Product Manager.. I noticed Megacorp was in the top 10 for the Steam charts two weeks running, so make of that what you will.
I think he's referring to this.
Although it's probably worth baring in mind this isn't a fix, it's a work around that essentially puts trade collection and protection on easy mode, bad for gameplay but I if your performance is tanking, I guess there are no other options. I'm going to give it a try in a moment.
EDIT - Tried it, it didn't work.
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I don't think this has anything to do with Christmas. Every new Stellaris patch was a complete catastrophy and took at least weeks to fix, though I have a strange feeling that the performance issues won't go away for a long time.
I know two guys who always hated Paradox games, even such simple ones as EU2. They also played Stellaris before and found it meh. Both bought it few days ago and are loving it. So, i got anecdotal two vs anectodal some.
On a side note, is Kingmaker still load screen simulator? The game is very good, but seeing 30 load screen in hour is some wicked shit.
I think he meant pop growth fix, and its here:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1592077532&searchtext=
Yeah but some anecdotal arguments are fundamentally wrong, for example arguing in favour of being sold a broken product.
Product in not broken in this case, so arguing against buying it based on this is fundamentally wrong too. Especially suggesting factually untrue argument about new people supposedly being repelled by the update more than in case of previous updates, while steam sales scream otherwise.
Of course the product is broken, enemy AI doesn't work correctly and the end-game crisis is broken. That's 99% of your opposition in the game broken. Imagine playing any other game with a similar issue and not calling it broken. Halo and the covenant don't shoot anything, Skyrim and nobody even draws a sword, Final Fantasy and the enemy just skips all their turns.
All the betas are Steam are opt-in, though.
If you are suggesting that Paradox should mandatorily release beta versions, I will point out that will annoy those people who have no interest in betas, regardless of opt-in or opt-out who would complain about having to switch off a beta version.
(Me personally? I'll cheerfully play on a beta patch for a game post release, but I won't touch a pre-release beta (let alone alpha) wil a barge pole - opt-in or opt-out.)
I hear you - I elected to leave off both of those for another round of fixes and playthrough Divintiy Original Sin 2 first. (As I , at the moment, can't face going back to CK2 when it repeatedly throwing a RNG wobbly on my current save.)
Not exactly. I think some people (not you, but you're the ones you're butting heads with) are confused because of the "early access" phenomenon, where Steam will sell you a whole-ass game in beta development and that's the only version, there's no opting in step apart from the purchase. I think some folks are like unaware that there's another kind of beta.
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