EU4 - Development Diary - 20th of December 2016

[Anona]

Greetings all EU4 players!

The EU4 team is currently wrapping up the year by fixing some bugs on a few new great features that are yet to come. Everyone on the team is very excited for the upcoming expansion and we can’t wait to announce it. Two people have already started their Christmas vacations, whereas the most of us will leave on Thursday / Friday this week.

2016 has contained a lot of changes to the team and we’ll still keep experimenting, learning new things and find new ways to work. One of our legendary AI-programmers has unfortunately left the team to try his own wings - but we’ve also got two new additions to the team who have already proved themselves highly worthy. During the development of Rights of Man we also had the opportunity to get some help with creating events from two content designers in the CK2 team. More than ever before we’ve had structured feedback sessions (retrospections) regularly as well as new exercises in estimations every now and then. But even though lots of changes happen all the time we fortunately still have Johan as a cornerstone who has worked with EU4 longer than any of the rest of us and knows in which direction we’re going with the future expansions.

This year we’re also taking pride in having released Rights of Man, which received a Steam review of 86% - sharing second place in terms of EU4 Steam Review on par with El Dorado and 2% below Art of War. This is a great result and we aim even higher for the next expansion.

Additionally we’ve managed to get two (!) of our dedicated fans to become translators for us in French and German respectively - which is just in line with our vision of being close to our fans. Our quality of translations increases with passion and skills. Maybe sometime in the future we will get all our texts translated by fans.

By the way, it was great talking with some of you at the Fangathering at our office some time ago - hope that some of you will join PDX Con next year!

Last but not least I hope you have enjoyed our competitive Multiplayer-sessions as much as we have, the plans and strategies behind the sessions have not been limited to what’s seen on camera but there is continuous talk in the team on how to form alliances even when the camera is turned off. Congrats to Wiz who won!

Thank you for all the feedback you’ve given to us this year, it’s very useful to us and we have people in the team reading your posts every day. Keep talking with us and we’ll keep listening to you.

***Here is a small teaser for next year***

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year all EU4-fans!

 

[DDRJake]

From the knee-jerk-complaints crowd: have we been cheated out of our next Ages instalment? Just askin'...

We had a wee update to share the other day. We'll be back with more ages stuff after the holidays (expect the next Dev diary in 3 weeks, unless someone gets all work-frenzied over Christmas

Just some curiosity. Do your annalists see some sort of connection between the steam review percentages and how well a DLC does?

While we have our fair share of analytics such numbers would be nothing we can share. From the dev team though, better reception works wonders on morale. When the Rights of Man reviews came in, we were all very pleased. We are, believe it or not, all humans working on this game and hearing that something we worked on for months was enjoyed is a great feeling.

 

[Johan]

Really? AGAIN a contentless dev diary?

Meh, merry christmas and a happy new year!

contentless?

 

[Anona]

You stated, that the remaining team is currently fixing bugs. Will we get a hotfix, that patches the savegame-corruption bug before vacation, or do we have to deal with it until next year?

We have no plan of releasing anything during the remaining time of 2016. We fix bugs regularly during development of new expansions.

 

[Anona]

So, you said two of your fans became translators for French and German. Would you be interested in a Spanish translator?

YES! Send me a PM here and we'll take it from there.

 

[Johan]

filler DDs.

We don't do filler dd's. We talk about what we do in our dev diaries, and most of the time we talk about new features.

They are called Development Diary, not "feature explanations".

 

[Trin Tragula]

You talk of translators; how about a proofreader for existing English text? I'm always noticing little mistakes (spelling and grammar, but also odd or misleading phrasing and tone) here and there in various Paradox games. In EU4, the flavour text for ideas tends to be particularly in need of work, though there are issues all over the place, which I've spent plenty of time fixing in mods for personal use.

If you can bug report such text issues you run into we would appreciate it

 

[Trin Tragula]

I used to do that, but there are too many too keep up with. When I get a good moment I might spend an hour or two compiling all the ones I've found.

Tag me when you do

 

[Trin Tragula]

Do you pay them?

Of course

 

[Trin Tragula]

Don't take this the wrong way but you Scandinavians sure like taking vacations. I mean a month off in the summer and another in the winter is like. . . 3 times as much time off as us Americans take... you know, assuming we take the days we are suppose to off >,>

I think I should move to Sweden.

Most at pds take 2 weeks in the winter and the 4 in summer.
Law gives 5 paid weeks per year (4 of which has to be given together during the summer months unless the employee doesn't want to).
Paradox has 6 weeks paid vacation (and we do have positions open often these days ).
It's not 2 months though but it's more than many places and still seems to work ok for us (and some other European countries). A Swedish work week is 40 hours (unless you're in some special area such as health care which has exceptions through collective agreements) so apparently it's longer than the Danish one.

This is all a bit off topic for this thread though