Game Development - Imperator and PDS

[aono]

It's not a One Man project.

Seeing one man being Director, Game Designer, Programmer, and UX designer, Creative Director for development firm as a whole, and also being the most active community figure for said project, I hardly doubt it. I don't say it's bad. But I hardly doubt it.

What would the other content designers do then?

Making things Game Director and their team leader assigned them to by production plan verified and signed to execution by Game Director. Again, it's a job of Game Director - supervising everything and checking it doesn't fall apart because different people doing things everywhere.

Still, I believe you misunderstood me. The thing I wanted to show is there is a lot of things in basic game which are there even if Johan isn't intresting of doing it. So "Johan wasn't intrested to add two consuls" isn't an arguement. There are a lot of stuff that isn't intresting to make, but useful for a system to work. Like irish tribe. Or two consuls. And historicity of I:R is important enough to be highlighted on Steam Store page.
Actually, it's so obvious that a situation "Rome had two consuls, but we have only one" was highlighted by Johan himself in the very dev diary he said it first.

In a decision to make it more into a fun engaging game, where you care about your characters, you only have one consul in rome, and they serve for five years.

 

[Larque]

Not my review, nor am I interested in the game, but it's a honest review.

Why does he speak like he is emperor palpatine?

 

[Sher_Khan]

Hi, Can you please fixed the bug of the bordeless full screen on linux ? When I clic on my other screen my game is reducing and I need to make an alt tab to go back to the game. Thanks and good works
(sorry for my english)

 

[FacelessOne]

Why does he speak like he is emperor palpatine?

Well, I don't know what you mean...and can't recall that he sounded like him.
Maybe because of his accent? He's norwegian after all, so a non native to the english language.

 

[LeandroB]

Treat your games like Blizzard : "we will release it when it's done" and you won't have to make justifying post like this ever again.

Blizzard? Did you forget about Diablo 3 launch? That was horrible, besides, Blizzard is no more reference in the industry, greed took over them.

 

[MataNiall]

I was looking forward to this game. I remember the apprehension from the company previously to take a chance on this because of the original Rome but this game has great potential so I hope it receives the level of support CK2 does.

In saying this. As a customer and a supporter of Paradox for over 10 years. I avoid buying at release and follow the games development. I have been fed up with the bare bone release of games which are then brought up to standard through mass amounts of DLC. I understand and support DLC but CK2 and Europa would generally cost hundreds even with consideration of discounts. You don't need to bail on this game or become more like blizzard, you just need to find a better balance of what kind of official release you and the consumer provide and expect. I'm sure reviews would be different if this was released as still officially a work in progress.

I'll be eagerly following how this game develops and I wish this game receives the full support it deserves for its potential that it and its predecessor have yet to realize.

 

[Xeiki]

Well, I will try to explain what went wrong for me with this release.

I watched Imperator pretty closly, read every dev diary and watched the dev clash. So, I knew what would be in the game, and the dev clash showed what I should expect - but as it turns out, it showed ALL that I could expect, and nothing more. Let me try to explain.

Families are in the game. They are also utterly unimportant. I thought we were only getting glimpses of family interactions in the dev clash, because the commentators made a big deal out of the family feature, and how people would plot, and you could have enemies and friends, and it is important to keep families happy, or else ... And thats all true, at a surface level. But what that system is, is "Alert in the top right corner, click one button, forget it". Thats literally all there is to families. At least it feels like it when playing the game. I didn't have any concrete expectations what would happen with families, but since it was so prominently featured (with detailed character models, lineages, and so forth) I expected something interesting. Instead it is boring.

A big deal was made out of civilization level. There were contest between players, who could achieve the highest civilization level, and the commentators commented on it regularily. Yet, as I played the game, it turns out that civ level is absolutely trivial to achieve and does nothing beyond adding a buff. Or something. I don't even really know what it does off the top of my head, but it feels like it has no impact at all. It is literally just a number, and in my first playthrough I played neither tall nor especially focused on tech or civ level, yet my barbarian german nation has a higher civ level than Rome in some province in the middle of nowhere. So... huh. Disappointing.

Pops were mentioned, with the added "... just like victoria" which I knew not to be true, because the numbers were abstract instead of real population size, but I expected them to not be completely static without my intervention. It is just development from EUIV with another name, and instead of changing a whole province to a new religion or culture, you change it in increments. Only one pop can grow in a proivince (randomly?) and population management is just pointless once you are bigger than 15 cities or so. It's also a clickfest. Again, don't know what I expected, but at least something.

To try to some it all up: The dev clash made it look like you'd have some goal or sense of achievement in the game, but that was literally all roleplaying by the players and commentators. Watching the game was fun, playing it is just boring (I am only playing singleplayer). Diplomacy is bare-bones, peace-time gameplay is waiting to click an Omen and building roads (which I actually enjoyed thoroughly), and war is no fun either. I did not expect much, anyways, because paradox combat is always pretty hands off beyond "coax the AI to attack you in a disatvantageous position or just throw numbers at the problem" but the forts take soooo long to siege down that it is just a waiting game. It is also incredibly easy to blob, the only danger to me was Rome because they get so many buffs and bonuses, but once your country reaches a certain size, wars just become tedious - as was apparent in the dev clash already, where Rome was attacked on all sides constantly yet nothing was achieved. In short, the game has no single thing that's fun enough to keep you occupied. Everything is just "meh" which is not good. I get it, Paradox Games grow over time, but Stellaris for example, the only other title I played at launch, at least had enough interesting stuff to keep me playing. I've played for maybe 20 hours (of which at least 5 must have been waiting) and I think I've seen all this game has to offer, and I have no desire to play it again anytime soon. I only played so long to finish a playthrough, to see what would happen in the late game and the end of the game, but nothing happened. It felt like wasted time.

So, tldr: Dev Diaries and Dev Clash made the game look fun, but it isn't. It's mostly waiting (for power to press a button or for sieges to finish) or a chore (micromanaging things just for the sake of it because there is nothing else to do while waiting for mana).

 

[GundamMerc]

A big deal was made out of civilization level. There were contest between players, who could achieve the highest civilization level, and the commentators commented on it regularily. Yet, as I played the game, it turns out that civ level is absolutely trivial to achieve and does nothing beyond adding a buff. Or something. I don't even really know what it does off the top of my head, but it feels like it has no impact at all. It is literally just a number, and in my first playthrough I played neither tall nor especially focused on tech or civ level, yet my barbarian german nation has a higher civ level than Rome in some province in the middle of nowhere. So... huh. Disappointing.

You... you realize that you need civilization for certain government types, right?

 

[Karapis]

Families are in the game. They are also utterly unimportant. I thought we were only getting glimpses of family interactions in the dev clash, because the commentators made a big deal out of the family feature, and how people would plot, and you could have enemies and friends, and it is important to keep families happy, or else ... And thats all true, at a surface level. But what that system is, is "Alert in the top right corner, click one button, forget it". Thats literally all there is to families. At least it feels like it when playing the game.

Oh, so true. I didn't follow dev diaries pre-release, but read them now after buying the game. "Characters can have friends and rivals" sounds very exciting, but in practice it has very little impact on the game

On the other hand problems with UI design make it look worse, it actually not that bad and uninteresting. I would recommend to try to turn on all notifications related to families (you will later want to turn that off again, because it will spam way too many messages). There is actually a lot of stuff happening with the families. It adds to immersion a lot, when you constantly see marriages, children born, new characters arrive from different nations and new ambitions of the characters, (i didn't realize that new assigned generals often get goal to conquer particular province for example). Worth a try, also there is very funny bug. Apparently ambition of "imprison rival-character" gets refreshed every day or something, so if you have that type of notification turned on, you will get spammed with request to imprison someone every single day. Like on the one hand it is annoying bug, but it also adds impression that you have just badshit crazy family member who terrorize you every day, saying "KILL THAT GUY! HILL HIM! I HATE HIM! I CANNOT WAIT". What i'm saying that making all this info about characters easily accessible to the player, but at the same time not overwhelm the player with pop ups would make families a lot more interesting and immersive even in the current state. And then we can hope that future patches will add some depth to the families on top of that

 

[Jamey]

No excuses for the UI/UX, we're still learning there.

I hadn't seen this until now, but I'm glad to see it as the UI is my problem with Imperator. I'll quit complaining and wait and see.

In regards to the grand strategy games from PDS, I think it is worth keeping in mind that we have multiple Game Directors, and whilst our current games have largely spawned from the minds of Johan and Henrik, we have new people at the helms of the live games and also on some unannounced stuff. Each Game Director brings their own designs and ideas to the formula and over time they end up going in different directions, but still within the over all framework of a grand strategy game.

Looking at the data we have, very few people consistently play all of them, there is cross over certainly, but it is clear that these different approaches appeal to different groups of people. We'll see how Imperator lines up against that in due course, though we aren't making every GSG for every GSG player, that would be an impossible task (or fool's errand depending on how you want to view it).

I want to say that this is one thing I like about where Paradox is now. I have been able to play the game which is in a good place for me and not play the games that aren't in a good place for me.

We've already realised that whilst we've done a great job of getting word out about Imperator, that we still have a long way to go in ensuring that people understand exactly what it is, so we're going to work on that and make sure we don't repeat that mistake with the next game.

For me, the communication of the last few days (both the Design Corner and the Dev Diary) have been very good. They have made it clear that Paradox sees the same issues I see (as well as others I'm less worried about) and is working to solve them. That is the communication I have been wanting, so thank you.