As the saying goes: We’re not mad, just disappointed.
Last week the Victoria 3 dev team was alerted that streams of an in-development build of the game shared with a small group of testers was being broadcast within a small online community. As these things go, this footage quickly ended up in public. As hype grew around the leaked video so did demands for more, and before long links to download a cracked version of the leaked build started getting shared around.
We understand you’re excited about the game - we are too, and we’re anxious to share it with you properly! But there’s a reason why we haven’t yet launched Victoria 3 in open beta, Early Access, or similar. Yes, the game is technically in a playable state, but its current lack of balance and level of polish obscures many aspects of the mechanics and how they interrelate. Some interfaces are tedious or just not fun to engage with yet. It lacks a lot of crucial AI work, contains game-breaking bugs, and has only the most rudimentary tutorial and player guidance. Especially in an interconnected game like Victoria, just a single deficiency like that can have a negative domino effect on the whole experience of playing the game.
We can explain at length in dev diaries how our mechanics work and what our intentions with them are, but once you get a feel for how the game mechanics work in action, all those words lose their meaning. So when something isn’t fully realized in the game yet, you’re going to come away with an inaccurate impression of what we intend it to be. That’s not good for either of us, and it greatly damages our ability to have an open dialogue with you. If what you want is less interaction between developers and community and a more closely guarded development for future Paradox projects, then leaks like this are the single best way to try and make that happen.
We have (of course) read many of the posts community members have made since playing the leak, both positive and negative ones. Fact is, no matter how in-depth or insightful, none of them identify anything that’s new or surprising to us. Many of the concerns raised were already scheduled to be addressed in the development plan up to release. Even the most positive posts about how fun and engaging the game is even in an unbalanced, unpolished state are tainted with the knowledge that this first impression is still a let-down compared to what it ought to have been. For this reason, none of the feedback we’ve gotten as a result of the leak is really actionable or of any real use to us. It has mainly served as a hit to the team’s morale and a distraction from finishing the game, and in fact made it harder for us to act on your feedback, tainted as it is now by all the factors mentioned above.
Once the game has reached a state where we could really benefit from and respond to your feedback, we’ll be eager to be able to properly show it to you. Paradox has always maintained a quite open development process, and in the Victoria dev team we intend to double down on that responsiveness to community input because we think that’s what’s best for the game. But for that communication and trust to work, you have to also trust that if we’re not showing you something yet it’s because it really isn’t ready to be shown.
Before the leak, we were already looking forward to streaming the game in the near future, and to focus more on showing off in the game in motion, and we’re of course still planning to do this! We understand your curiosity and how excited you are for the game and what has happened isn’t going to change our focus on delivering a great game at release. However, while doing so, we can’t help feeling disappointed and demoralized by how all of this went down.
The Vicky 3 dev team
Last week the Victoria 3 dev team was alerted that streams of an in-development build of the game shared with a small group of testers was being broadcast within a small online community. As these things go, this footage quickly ended up in public. As hype grew around the leaked video so did demands for more, and before long links to download a cracked version of the leaked build started getting shared around.
We understand you’re excited about the game - we are too, and we’re anxious to share it with you properly! But there’s a reason why we haven’t yet launched Victoria 3 in open beta, Early Access, or similar. Yes, the game is technically in a playable state, but its current lack of balance and level of polish obscures many aspects of the mechanics and how they interrelate. Some interfaces are tedious or just not fun to engage with yet. It lacks a lot of crucial AI work, contains game-breaking bugs, and has only the most rudimentary tutorial and player guidance. Especially in an interconnected game like Victoria, just a single deficiency like that can have a negative domino effect on the whole experience of playing the game.
We can explain at length in dev diaries how our mechanics work and what our intentions with them are, but once you get a feel for how the game mechanics work in action, all those words lose their meaning. So when something isn’t fully realized in the game yet, you’re going to come away with an inaccurate impression of what we intend it to be. That’s not good for either of us, and it greatly damages our ability to have an open dialogue with you. If what you want is less interaction between developers and community and a more closely guarded development for future Paradox projects, then leaks like this are the single best way to try and make that happen.
We have (of course) read many of the posts community members have made since playing the leak, both positive and negative ones. Fact is, no matter how in-depth or insightful, none of them identify anything that’s new or surprising to us. Many of the concerns raised were already scheduled to be addressed in the development plan up to release. Even the most positive posts about how fun and engaging the game is even in an unbalanced, unpolished state are tainted with the knowledge that this first impression is still a let-down compared to what it ought to have been. For this reason, none of the feedback we’ve gotten as a result of the leak is really actionable or of any real use to us. It has mainly served as a hit to the team’s morale and a distraction from finishing the game, and in fact made it harder for us to act on your feedback, tainted as it is now by all the factors mentioned above.
Once the game has reached a state where we could really benefit from and respond to your feedback, we’ll be eager to be able to properly show it to you. Paradox has always maintained a quite open development process, and in the Victoria dev team we intend to double down on that responsiveness to community input because we think that’s what’s best for the game. But for that communication and trust to work, you have to also trust that if we’re not showing you something yet it’s because it really isn’t ready to be shown.
Before the leak, we were already looking forward to streaming the game in the near future, and to focus more on showing off in the game in motion, and we’re of course still planning to do this! We understand your curiosity and how excited you are for the game and what has happened isn’t going to change our focus on delivering a great game at release. However, while doing so, we can’t help feeling disappointed and demoralized by how all of this went down.
The Vicky 3 dev team
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