We sit down with the devs of this DLC to find out what their motivation was to create this addition, how excited they got when it started climbing the sales charts and more.
Enjoy!
What does Dies Irae add to Hearts of Iron ?
Dies Irae: Götterdämmerung is all about immersion. The focus is Germany, and the DLC adds graphical changes, mechanics, units, events and so on to add to the experience of WW2 Germany. To mention a few things, instead of only showing a black and white photo the brigade screen now illustrates the brigade type, technological level and amount of experience by a soldier. This soldier changes appearance as the brigade gains technological advances, he gets more worn as his experience increases and he is awarded medals. Another thing the DLC adds is the German experience of operation Barbarossa. Technologies and decisions have been added to make the invasion of the Soviet Union much more challenging, and in general decisions are much more critical in DI:G. I.e. we’ve added special Afrika Korps units, which you will have to upgrade/equip your units to, if you are to have any hope of success fighting in Africa. You will get bonuses and penalties from choosing certain ministers, and from researching, or not researching, certain “operational battle plan” technologies, which give you much needed boosts needed in various campaigns. The submarines have also received an overhaul, adding three classes of u-boats with a variety of technology to simulate the actual advance and use of the German u-boats. That’s just a bit of what we’ve added.
Who are you, the developers of the DLC?
In short we’re both fans of Paradox grand strategy games who eventually started modding them with Hearts of Iron 3, and couldn’t stop doing it once we began. Devildread is from Southern France, Danevang from Denmark, and without the Paradox forum we probably never would have met and found out that we compliment each others’ skills very well. We’re both studying, but spend a lot of time working on the Paradox games, and laying sinister plans for future evil DLC projects. The good experience of developing DI:G has led us to stay in touch, to formulate ideas for future projects, Paradox willing.
What made you come up with the idea to do it?
As most HoI3 gamers who has visited the Paradox forum know, there’s a mega mod called “I.C.E. (Iron Cross Edition) made by Devildread (and many other contributors). This mod adds a lot of game play and depth to HoI3, but was to begin with quite scripted. It was less sandbox and open than the vanilla game, and was limited by its’ scope: To add a huge bulk of material to most nations in the game. After having done some graphical mods for HoI3 (Map Fertilizer and various interface improvements which were added to I.C.E) Danevang started out a mod called “Dies Irae”, with a bunch of ideas for ways to utilize the HoI3 interface differently than vanilla, like adding soldiers to the brigade images, to overhaul the look of the game in general, and to add various features like better submarine development system, units that would be specialized in certain environments and more. The main idea was to do the mod only for one country, Germany, as this would make the most changes, both graphical and game play wise, possible. After a while it became apparent that the whole mod would be too large a job, and that certain ideas were impractical. Around that point we had been speaking together about the main ideas in Dies Irae and how they could be merged and expanded with a number of improvements that Devildread had been wanting from I.C.E, but couldn’t do due to the huge scope of that mod. Together we discussed and worked out how various features could be done, and added a lot more concept. What we ended up with was a merger of graphical skills, changes and concept wise ideas from Danevang, combined with the mega mod experience and skill of Devildread. After talking to Paradox we were off on a hard but rewarding job.
How did you find the experience of developing it?
Devildread: Dies Irae is my third attempt as a DLC and is done after a year and a half of extensive modding (thousands of hours into I.C.E.), but believe it or not, this was the most enjoyable experience of development I had. First I was working with an amazing artist, and this really boost the motivation to see all those new models coming up dozens a week. And secondly the Germany only scope of the DLC allowed me to experiment stuff I didn't even thing about before, due to AI limitations I have on I.C.E. (everything I add I have to be sure how the AI will react to it, in Dies Irae I don't have to worry about that). Again, thanks to the player only scope I could create dozens of decisions and events for the other countries (France, UK, Soviet Union) requiring an AI to make exactly what I want to do, then making the campaign I want to make for the players. Paradox gave us maximum freedom and this was really great. We made what we planned to make and we were able to add anything we want, for instance I remember working on some deep research about Grossdeutschland elite unit and then I discover something about an assassination attempt against Hitler on november 39 by a guy named Johann Georg Elser. Hop I created an event right after that.
Danevang: I’ve always been drawing and building things since I was quite young, and started fiddling with graphics and such in the mid 90’s, but gradually stopped since then. I’ve played the Paradox grand strategy games since the first Europa Universalis, but not until HoI3 came out did I begin changing the odd image here and there. Before that I’d made a popular skin pack for Silent Hunter 3, which sort of got my graphical work on the move again, and I thought I’d do something proper for the Paradox games, as historical strategy games are my absolute favorites. Now I’ve always loved the grand strategy titles from Paradox, but my main issue with them has always been the presentation, especially when trying to “sell” them to my gamer friends. The look has for a long time been somewhat hard to get into, not quite as smooth as other games. That’s changed a lot lately though. With the open and VERY modder friendly concept of the Paradox titles, I thought I’d have a go at not only changing but adding things I know I’d like in HoI3, like soldier portraits and such, and really enjoyed being creative with graphics again. After fiddling with that for quite a while, Victoria 2 came out, and I thought I’d put myself to test, and change the whole look of the interface, plus add some different mechanics and such. That effort ended up as the official DLC “Old Vic”. With the experience from that, adding graphics and working with the interface files, and knowing that he’d made a DLC for HoI3 before, I spoke to Devildread about doing the Dies Irae: Götterdämmerung DLC. We already had pretty much the same vision for a very mood saturated DLC for one country only, after planning and define our goals, we set sail! It’s been a huge experience, working with Devildread, both with regards to working and organizing a job together, without ever having met one another, and with working on the Paradox game. It’s definitely something that deserves doing again.
The DLC has been really successful, what is your reaction to that?
Actually, we are not that surprised about the popularity of the DLC, not because we are overconfident about our job ("yeah, we're the best", you should have seen our mail exchanges "err Martin, I'm adding that what do you think? I'm not sure oh my god people will hate what I am doing ><") but because we were convinced that focusing the game on only one country was something the community wanted. We received a lot of positive comments from the community from the day we released the first Dev Diary and we are so happy about how the gamers welcomed our concept so nicely. We never thought we would have comments like "you guys have understood my need", this really is for us the best reward a game developper can hope for.
We are thankful to Paradox for giving us the chance to work on Dies Irae. Not only they hired us, but they also listen to our needs and have added some stuff in the engine just for us (for example the xp showing on the brigade view, a big Dies Irae feature). And not only us! Just take a look at the HOI3 forum about For The Motherland, most of the gamers suggestions have been answered and some of them are already included in the incoming expansion. Now try to name 5 companies in the world doing that. This is so great, we are proud to be a part of it and we do hope that the journey just begins!
Enjoy!
What does Dies Irae add to Hearts of Iron ?
Dies Irae: Götterdämmerung is all about immersion. The focus is Germany, and the DLC adds graphical changes, mechanics, units, events and so on to add to the experience of WW2 Germany. To mention a few things, instead of only showing a black and white photo the brigade screen now illustrates the brigade type, technological level and amount of experience by a soldier. This soldier changes appearance as the brigade gains technological advances, he gets more worn as his experience increases and he is awarded medals. Another thing the DLC adds is the German experience of operation Barbarossa. Technologies and decisions have been added to make the invasion of the Soviet Union much more challenging, and in general decisions are much more critical in DI:G. I.e. we’ve added special Afrika Korps units, which you will have to upgrade/equip your units to, if you are to have any hope of success fighting in Africa. You will get bonuses and penalties from choosing certain ministers, and from researching, or not researching, certain “operational battle plan” technologies, which give you much needed boosts needed in various campaigns. The submarines have also received an overhaul, adding three classes of u-boats with a variety of technology to simulate the actual advance and use of the German u-boats. That’s just a bit of what we’ve added.
Who are you, the developers of the DLC?
In short we’re both fans of Paradox grand strategy games who eventually started modding them with Hearts of Iron 3, and couldn’t stop doing it once we began. Devildread is from Southern France, Danevang from Denmark, and without the Paradox forum we probably never would have met and found out that we compliment each others’ skills very well. We’re both studying, but spend a lot of time working on the Paradox games, and laying sinister plans for future evil DLC projects. The good experience of developing DI:G has led us to stay in touch, to formulate ideas for future projects, Paradox willing.
What made you come up with the idea to do it?
As most HoI3 gamers who has visited the Paradox forum know, there’s a mega mod called “I.C.E. (Iron Cross Edition) made by Devildread (and many other contributors). This mod adds a lot of game play and depth to HoI3, but was to begin with quite scripted. It was less sandbox and open than the vanilla game, and was limited by its’ scope: To add a huge bulk of material to most nations in the game. After having done some graphical mods for HoI3 (Map Fertilizer and various interface improvements which were added to I.C.E) Danevang started out a mod called “Dies Irae”, with a bunch of ideas for ways to utilize the HoI3 interface differently than vanilla, like adding soldiers to the brigade images, to overhaul the look of the game in general, and to add various features like better submarine development system, units that would be specialized in certain environments and more. The main idea was to do the mod only for one country, Germany, as this would make the most changes, both graphical and game play wise, possible. After a while it became apparent that the whole mod would be too large a job, and that certain ideas were impractical. Around that point we had been speaking together about the main ideas in Dies Irae and how they could be merged and expanded with a number of improvements that Devildread had been wanting from I.C.E, but couldn’t do due to the huge scope of that mod. Together we discussed and worked out how various features could be done, and added a lot more concept. What we ended up with was a merger of graphical skills, changes and concept wise ideas from Danevang, combined with the mega mod experience and skill of Devildread. After talking to Paradox we were off on a hard but rewarding job.
How did you find the experience of developing it?
Devildread: Dies Irae is my third attempt as a DLC and is done after a year and a half of extensive modding (thousands of hours into I.C.E.), but believe it or not, this was the most enjoyable experience of development I had. First I was working with an amazing artist, and this really boost the motivation to see all those new models coming up dozens a week. And secondly the Germany only scope of the DLC allowed me to experiment stuff I didn't even thing about before, due to AI limitations I have on I.C.E. (everything I add I have to be sure how the AI will react to it, in Dies Irae I don't have to worry about that). Again, thanks to the player only scope I could create dozens of decisions and events for the other countries (France, UK, Soviet Union) requiring an AI to make exactly what I want to do, then making the campaign I want to make for the players. Paradox gave us maximum freedom and this was really great. We made what we planned to make and we were able to add anything we want, for instance I remember working on some deep research about Grossdeutschland elite unit and then I discover something about an assassination attempt against Hitler on november 39 by a guy named Johann Georg Elser. Hop I created an event right after that.
Danevang: I’ve always been drawing and building things since I was quite young, and started fiddling with graphics and such in the mid 90’s, but gradually stopped since then. I’ve played the Paradox grand strategy games since the first Europa Universalis, but not until HoI3 came out did I begin changing the odd image here and there. Before that I’d made a popular skin pack for Silent Hunter 3, which sort of got my graphical work on the move again, and I thought I’d do something proper for the Paradox games, as historical strategy games are my absolute favorites. Now I’ve always loved the grand strategy titles from Paradox, but my main issue with them has always been the presentation, especially when trying to “sell” them to my gamer friends. The look has for a long time been somewhat hard to get into, not quite as smooth as other games. That’s changed a lot lately though. With the open and VERY modder friendly concept of the Paradox titles, I thought I’d have a go at not only changing but adding things I know I’d like in HoI3, like soldier portraits and such, and really enjoyed being creative with graphics again. After fiddling with that for quite a while, Victoria 2 came out, and I thought I’d put myself to test, and change the whole look of the interface, plus add some different mechanics and such. That effort ended up as the official DLC “Old Vic”. With the experience from that, adding graphics and working with the interface files, and knowing that he’d made a DLC for HoI3 before, I spoke to Devildread about doing the Dies Irae: Götterdämmerung DLC. We already had pretty much the same vision for a very mood saturated DLC for one country only, after planning and define our goals, we set sail! It’s been a huge experience, working with Devildread, both with regards to working and organizing a job together, without ever having met one another, and with working on the Paradox game. It’s definitely something that deserves doing again.
The DLC has been really successful, what is your reaction to that?
Actually, we are not that surprised about the popularity of the DLC, not because we are overconfident about our job ("yeah, we're the best", you should have seen our mail exchanges "err Martin, I'm adding that what do you think? I'm not sure oh my god people will hate what I am doing ><") but because we were convinced that focusing the game on only one country was something the community wanted. We received a lot of positive comments from the community from the day we released the first Dev Diary and we are so happy about how the gamers welcomed our concept so nicely. We never thought we would have comments like "you guys have understood my need", this really is for us the best reward a game developper can hope for.
We are thankful to Paradox for giving us the chance to work on Dies Irae. Not only they hired us, but they also listen to our needs and have added some stuff in the engine just for us (for example the xp showing on the brigade view, a big Dies Irae feature). And not only us! Just take a look at the HOI3 forum about For The Motherland, most of the gamers suggestions have been answered and some of them are already included in the incoming expansion. Now try to name 5 companies in the world doing that. This is so great, we are proud to be a part of it and we do hope that the journey just begins!