How can so many major game aspects be broken?

[Onkel_Bums]

They haven't got a nice early access tag, but we basically know that's what they are.

Doesn't make it any better, or right, for that matter.

Anyway, I would feel better if there was any official communication, at least acknowledgement that stuff isn't up to par and a clarification of current priorities. I think that would go a long way to soothe some of the tempers a bit and also reinstate some trust.

 

[fuinril]

We just know the drill by now. You may not believe it if you're new, but PDX QA actually improved enormously since EUII days. Back then there were more bugs than features at day one. But even nowadays, PDX games need a lot of time in the oven after release. They haven't got a nice early access tag, but we basically know that's what they are. Good thing is that they usually deliver, if the game sells well enough. But honestly there is no point in buying a PDX game before, like, six months unless you're a very hardcore grand strategy fan.

Well usually I would agree with you, but in this case I do not. This update is the worse I've seen, effectively making the game unplayable between broken core features and performance issues. This on a game nearly 3 years old. That is not acceptable in any way.

That beeing said, I fully understand the need for holidays and will not put the blame on dev, but I will think really hard before spending money on PDS games from now on. Not sure about the long term earnings of this particular rushed release....

 

[MrMess85]

We just know the drill by now. You may not believe it if you're new, but PDX QA actually improved enormously since EUII days. Back then there were more bugs than features at day one. But even nowadays, PDX games need a lot of time in the oven after release. They haven't got a nice early access tag, but we basically know that's what they are. Good thing is that they usually deliver, if the game sells well enough. But honestly there is no point in buying a PDX game before, like, six months unless you're a very hardcore grand strategy fan.

This has been one of the worst releases in quite some time. It's the amount of bugs plus lack of communication which is troubling.

 

[TheAtreides84]

Well, they pushed it out in time for Christmas without polishing it, that much is obvious by now.

 

[Army Pea]

Hmmm.
Didn’t Bethesda burn up a lot of good will in 2018?!

 

[BlackholePD]

You guys might know the drill, but I sure didn't. I only bought Stellaris about a month before the 2.2 release; the only other Paradox game I've played aside from Stellaris is Cities: Skylines, but I didn't know the developer or even make the connection between the two games until after I booted up Stellaris and recognized the logo.

I don't think it's fair to expect consumers to "know" that a new release should be considered an early access, because, well, it isn't. I expected to be paying for a published product.

That said, I don't regret paying for MegaCorp. I prefer to have full access to the content of the games I play, even if aspects are unpolished (or even unfinished), and Stellaris built up a lot of good will with me during my month playing 2.1. I also fully expect that the majority of these issues will be fixed with time; I just wish that they'd waited until 2.2 was actually finished instead of pushing it out for the holidays. I would have bought the expansion either way, but this wait while I cross my fingers for some of the more blatant issues affecting my games to be fixed is annoying, to say the least.

Hoping there's an update this week.

 

[Alblaka]

Shifting the blame saying, "the customers should know better!" is absurd to me, but you're free to believe whatever you want. If they still have your trust, then that's fine; they don't have mine anymore.

Ye, shifting the blame like that would be a retarded thing to do. So it's a good thing neither of us two is doing that kind of stupidity.

To reiterate what I said with emphasis on that pint (since that seems to be your only concern):

I do not judge PDX for making Open Beta releases with optional stable branches, which allows, not forces, everyone interested to get his hands on the newer version earlier and is more in line with the iterative developement practices of Agile Developement,

but I do judge PDX for not 'informing their customers' better and making the beta release the default automatic pick, instead of an explicit opt-in branch.


My grief with the community is that everyone's yelling at them to never again release any kind of buggy update, which is more inline with crowd-sourced stupidity, than yelling at them to do it in a better way.

 

[Spacemadnesss]

That's a bit of a straw man on your part too. This is not a buggy release, this release is unplayable. Several core features are broken. The AI sitting idle. End game Crisis not working. There doesn't seem to be a stable functional branch where these things are not true. I hope I'm wrong, i'm relatively new after all but I don't think I'm wrong.

The game is only functional insofar you can play by yourself until the lag makes you quit or boredom does.

 

[TheAtreides84]

You guys might know the drill, but I sure didn't. I only bought Stellaris about a month before the 2.2 release; the only other Paradox game I've played aside from Stellaris is Cities: Skylines, but I didn't know the developer or even make the connection between the two games until after I booted up Stellaris and recognized the logo.

I don't think it's fair to expect consumers to "know" that a new release should be considered an early access, because, well, it isn't. I expected to be paying for a published product.

That said, I don't regret paying for MegaCorp. I prefer to have full access to the content of the games I play, even if aspects are unpolished (or even unfinished), and Stellaris built up a lot of good will with me during my month playing 2.1. I also fully expect that the majority of these issues will be fixed with time; I just wish that they'd waited until 2.2 was actually finished instead of pushing it out for the holidays. I would have bought the expansion either way, but this wait while I cross my fingers for some of the more blatant issues affecting my games to be fixed is annoying, to say the least.

Hoping there's an update this week.

You're absolutely right, mate. But that's sadly how things are.

 

[AlanC9]

That's a bit of a straw man on your part too. This is not a buggy release, this release is unplayable. Several core features are broken. The AI sitting idle. End game Crisis not working. There doesn't seem to be a stable functional branch where these things are not true. I hope I'm wrong, i'm relatively new after all but I don't think I'm wrong.

The game is only functional insofar you can play by yourself until the lag makes you quit or boredom does.

"Unplayable"'s a bit much. I'm playing it right now, and having a pretty good time. Had to give up on playing large galaxies because of the lag, but smaller ones play fine.

 

[Korruna]

I do not judge PDX for making Open Beta releases with optional stable branches, which allows, not forces, everyone interested to get his hands on the newer version earlier and is more in line with the iterative developement practices of Agile Developement, but I do judge PDX for not 'informing their customers' better and making the beta release the default automatic pick, instead of an explicit opt-in branch.

My grief with the community is that everyone's yelling at them to never again release any kind of buggy update, which is more inline with crowd-sourced stupidity, than yelling at them to do it in a better way.

Well I'm glad we can agree on something. If this is actually some hidden beta, then they should stop doing that because I think it's just a terrible experience especially for new people.

I wanted to mention something though: Almost every game studio uses Agile, from the polished Witcher 3 of CD Project Red to the mess of Fallout 76 from Bethesda. Shipping some buggy product is not the result of Agile, it's actually a perversion of that methodology. Testing and refinement is supposed to happen continuously; I find it hard to believe that the major issues were not caught by their QA or developers. I have to believe they are competent and simply chose to backlog them in order to prioritize other features to get the product playable. They have every intention of fixing it later, but this more like Waterfall than Agile, where you frontload development and backload tons of bugfixing.

Performance issues are unacceptable in both Waterfall and Agile though because they are so easy to test for because you can run scripts on many machines to get loads of data right away. They're both high priority and easy to detect and the fact that 2.2 shipped with very noticeable perf. problems is a big red flag for me. Imagine how the stutter would handle if they did proper regression testing with a CPU of the recommended system requirements of Stellaris.

And finally: Paradox maintains that "open betas aren't helpful", but I promise you that if they simply "missed" these pervasive performance issues of this release, an open beta would have caught it and given feedback on it. Immediately.

 

[Dreadlord]

My guess is marketing pushing for a pre-holiday release and/or higher-ups pushing Wiz to wrap up so he can join the secret project so groundwork were laid but nearly all edges were left rough...

 

[Flyinghotpocket]

last years yearly release broke the game with ridiculous forced white peace crap. took them literal 3 months to change the code to make wars fun again.

this year, they just broke the entire game. this is why people save money and wait for dlc. i want to play stellaris so bad, but the ai is BROKEN. i could get around wars being ended in 5 seconds but the ai not being able to ever challenge you is a joke.

 

[CStarker]

The further I get into my current 2.2 game the more obvious holes start opening up in the game left right and center. I'm just about muddling through despite it all for now, but it's seriously immersion breaking.

It's not like these are all minor, edge-case issues either, it seems like vast pockets of regular-play content just do not function.

So far I have experienced:

• Contingency ship and starbase models rendering with a placeholder model instead of any actual model.
• The Contingency don't seem to be able to purge pops/take over worlds, so their fleets will just hang around above my planets indefinitely.
• The resource trade UI menu bug! This is almost *constant* and turns attempting to trade resources into a new chaotic minigame. Half the time, the expanding menus of resource buttons will oscillate between expanded and collapsed, meaning that to select a resource you have to try and click the flickering mass of bars and get lucky. Restarting fixes this but it comes back within a few trades. I almost forgot about this one due to how ubiquitous it is now.
• The Desanu Consonance L-Gate outcome still tells me that I'll be granted "unique strategic resources", but these no longer exist. I am given an empire modifier that does absolutely nothing.
• I have crashed to desktop several times since I started playing 2.2; this didn't really happen before.
• Awoken empires fielding multiple Colossi. Is this meant to happen? I don't even know if it's a bug, but it seems like one.
• Market monthly trades and outgoing diplomatic trades will calculate *before* the month's income is calculated, meaning that even if I am getting +1000 of a resource a month I will be forced out of a trade deal if I overspent and didn't leave enough of a "pool" of resources for it to draw from, incurring massive diplomatic penalties in some cases.
• Performance issues aren't as bad for me as some other people, but it is still pretty jarring in the late game.
• Various dialogue options still refer to the grid planet layout...
• In my previous game (still 2.2) I repaired a ringworld section, and the repaired section spawned in the wrong way round and awkwardly clipped with the existing sections.
• A whole host of weird bugs where I will take over systems but the game won't regard them as explored. At one point I repaired an entire megastructure to working order, before one of my science ships entered the system and declared that it had "discovered" the broken megastructure I'd already repaired.
• Ships will routinely route through systems belonging to hostile empires that I'm at war with, causing all my reinforcements to throw themselves lemming-like at starbases and die. I can't manually reroute them without messing up my fleet loadouts.
  • The AI in general makes terrible decisions, which means that I have to micromanage everything. Sectors are tiny, highly expensive, don't seem seem to generate their own resources, and so I have to micromanage hundreds of different worlds solo.
• The AI in a neighbouring empire went crazy and ended up building habitats around almost every body within their empire, half of which it didn't even bother to colonize.
• At one point the game refused to acknowledge that I had a scientist assigned to lead research, which seemingly lead to the game getting confused and cancelling an ongoing research assignment on load.
• Generally, the balance of the game is really weird now. The alloy construction chain I like, but it makes all major constructions twice as expensive, and nothing else has been adjusted to compensate. The game can take an absurdly long time now as I wait for my empire to accrue enough alloys to grow fleets large enough to take down crisis fleets. I still haven't managed to get enough fleet power to take on a Contingency machine world, and it's well past the year 2500 at this point. (Granted, this game is going slower than normal because I was stalled by a War in Heaven early on, but regardless).

(I know I could bug-report all of these, but a lot of people are already doing so, and I don't really want to type up a dozen individual reports...)

I could talk a lot more about the game's balance, mechanical issues and so on, but at this point that's just me griping about things, and my main point are some of the extremely severe bugs up there. I've only played two games on 2.2, and so I haven't even scratched the surface of the possible routes/event paths, so lord knows what other gamebreaking issues are lurking out there.

I love the new 2.2 features, but (and I know that I am preaching to the choir here, but I wanted to say it myself), the sheer quantity of broken major features really makes me think that this one needed a fair bit longer in the oven. I really appreciate what Paradox do, and don't want to sound entitled (although I have sunk a fair bit of money into this game at this point...), but I really hope there's a plan to address these things instead of pushing ahead past them. I think the game needs a fairly comprehensive period of bug-fixing updates, because at the moment it's really hard to play a game through without having immersion broken, or some feature not working correctly in a way that sabotages part of the game. I really want to get deep into the game, but something always knocks me back, and that's... not great.

I have encountered a host of new bugs as well. The poor performance after the galaxy is heavily developed causes large galaxies to be unplayable. The worst offender is definitely the botched planets and sectors menu. That menu is critical to the game and is currently unusable due to the permant formation of 1-2 planet sectors all over the place.

The current state of the game is not acceptable. One of two possibilities must be true; they tested 2.2 and though that this was okay or they didn't test it before releasing it. I don't know which one is worse.

 

[Spacemadnesss]

"Unplayable"'s a bit much. I'm playing it right now, and having a pretty good time. Had to give up on playing large galaxies because of the lag, but smaller ones play fine.

What do you call "fine"? I personally don't see how lobotomized AI empires are fine when they can't oppose you in any meaningful way, or assist you against midgame threats. I don't see how its fine when you ramp up to the late game and wait for the hammer to drop only for the Unbidden or Scourge to get stuck forever because nobody at PDX decided to check if the endgame crisis still work.

What are you playing for? I had some fun in the first week checking out the new features, I think we all did. All the stuff listed in this thread and forum preclude the game from being playable past the mid game in any satisfying fashion though, that is if you're looking for any sort of challenge or payoff to the hours you spend building your empire.

 

[Rillian1980]

My guess is marketing pushing for a pre-holiday release and/or higher-ups pushing Wiz to wrap up so he can join the secret project so groundwork were laid but nearly all edges were left rough...

This is a safe bet. Remember the devs saying the release was a long way away in November only for it to be released pre Christmas. Anyway we are where we are in sure the devs will fix the game but they just need to be given time to do this

 

[methegrate]

The market. Dear god, the market.

The AI is my number one broken feature in this update.

Relatedly, the market and market prices are my number two.

This was supposed to be a dynamic trading floor where you could buy, sell and speculate based on the state of the galaxy at large. You could corner the food market, then watch your enemies starve by driving up the prices. You could get rich by building a dozen forge worlds then waiting for a major war between two federations. I could go on.

But the real thing is nothing like that. Instead there's just a base price per commodity and everything resets to that price almost immediately. If you buy or sell the prices change a little bit for a little while, but all you have to do is wait around for about 15 seconds and it all goes back to normal.

 

[Alblaka]

And finally: Paradox maintains that "open betas aren't helpful"

Yeah, that one is honestly the cherry.

 

[AlanC9]

What do you call "fine"? I personally don't see how lobotomized AI empires are fine when they can't oppose you in any meaningful way, or assist you against midgame threats. I don't see how its fine when you ramp up to the late game and wait for the hammer to drop only for the Unbidden or Scourge to get stuck forever because nobody at PDX decided to check if the endgame crisis still work..

Well, now the AI becomes non-competitive by 2350 or so instead of 2450, sure. But the AI always fell behind.

 

[Onkel_Bums]

Shipping some buggy product is not the result of Agile, it's actually a perversion of that methodology.

Wrong. The Agile Manifesto says: ship the smallest viable package. Refine from there. And if PDX uses the Agile Method, this is exactly what they did.
What ever we think happened is purely speculation.

What now is grinding my gears is that I remember seeing Wiz showcasing the "better performance with the new pop system" in one of the 2.2 dev previews on twitch. And he did it very hush hush and moved on quickly from it - like someone who doesn't anyone to look to closely at what is actually going on.