Well paradox could always stop selling DLC completely, sure games like CK2 would have stopped being updated with content in the free patches years ago, but hey at least you can say you have a complete game without having to spend more money!
I Don't Want To Be That Guy But...
- Thread starter KingHoot
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that's the maid reason i haven't bought CK\EU. even though i think both are good games. because i've already has Stellaris that's forcing me to periodically buy more and more dlc.
you may argue that they are not needed and i don't have to. but i think otherwise
my head is already bugging me for playing incomplete game because i'm missing iirc 2 creature portraits. and i have to tell myself that can probably still enjoy the game without them but i'm not forcing anyone else to buy dlc. at all
that's the maid reason i haven't bought CK\EU. even though i think both are good games. because i've already has Stellaris that's forcing me to periodically buy more and more dlc.
you may argue that they are not needed and i don't have to. but i think otherwise
but i'm not forcing anyone else to buy dlc. at all
I mean, I'd use the term "encourage" rather than "force" but yeah, I see your point. Still doesn't make vanilla stellaris an incomplete game on its own though.
The original post repeatedly addressed 'broken gameplay issues' and only mentions bugs once, in the phrase about wanting 'feature complete, bug free' game play. You have interpreted 'broken' to mean bugged but the OP has subsequently said he was not talking about simply bugs. Broken can easily mean 'unbalanced' and the term 'Feature complete and bug free' is not the same thing as just 'bug free.'
Someone probably never even started to complain about DLC if PDX hasn't talk about all new stuff. In fact, we have a modding (very powerful by the way) and free patches with content. To me it looks like you do not use your toilet (no reference to game, just personal humour) bcz there is a version with auto-flush, warmup and so on and you don't sure yours is complete.
It's funny how two different people can approach a game and come up with two wildly different results. I look at Vanilla Stellaris and I compare it to similar science fiction themed 4X titles, the new Masters of Orion, Endless Space, or Civilizations: Beyond Earth, and it seems to be finished, thorough, and offer a dramatically different experience. It's superior in some ways, the Diplomacy is leaps and bounds above Beyond Earth or Masters of Orion, it's take on governments is leaps and bounds above Masters of Orion and Endless Space. It's replay ability and balance is leaps and abounds above Beyond Earth and Endless Space.
But in other ways it falls behind, as a quick example, Beyond Earth, Endless Space, and Masters of Orion all had more flavor. Hard thing to quantify I know, but I felt more immersed in their worlds. In an attempt to become a more versatile and flexible system, it feels like Stellaris lost quite a bit of personality.
Still, all told, of those four science fiction themed 4x titles that I've tried, one of them I still have installed on my machine, and one of them I kept enjoying all the way up till the developers started dropping hints about what it could be. I can see arguments being made that either of the titles is superior, if someone shows up and claims they enjoyed the new Masters of Orion more, I can understand that. What I can't understand is how you reach this conclusion that the game is somehow unfinished, just because it can be more.
Ohhhhhhhhh..... yeah, okay, I get it now.
Agreed, I also did not fully understand what the original post was about at first. It wasn't until you came along and spoke so adroitly about bugs, in response to a single point about bugs, and explained the possibility of a whole new crop of bugs that come with such a fundamental change to core gameplay, and then the original poster came in to say that you had taken the words out of her mouth, that I was even convinced the OP was talking about bugs.
Hell, I was halfway through typing up a post explaining that the topic of bugs is mentioned only once in passing in the original post, and the original poster doesn't really speak at length about it until they make their first reply to the first response which leads off with bugs.
But still, you did make a very helpful post about bugs and how fundamental changes in gameplay being added to the game will likely create a whole new crop of them, and the original poster did say your words were exactly how they felt and what they were trying to convey. So, in that context, the majority of the original post is about bugs, her broken gameplay seems to be about bugs. So no point backing away from it now.
I am a bit confused about where they subsequently said they weren't just talking about bugs. I went through all four of the original posters posts on this thread and didn't find anything, outside of the original post, that went outside the discussion of bugs. Now admittedly, I myself may be at fault, so few examples are given that when the original poster claims bugs make entire systems not function, I'm not sure whether they're talking about legitimate code behaving as it shouldn't, or whether they're talking about certain systems behaving as designed, but them fundamentally disagreeing with the design. And I will bow to your superior understanding of the original poster, you are the one who adroitly restated how they felt better than they did.
Still though, these kinds of complaints can become very vague, which is actually not as helpful as it could be. A game designer would likely prefer a specific complaint about something the original poster felt was broken and why they felt that way over a mutlipage discussion of the nature of game design and quality control. For that matter, they'd probably prefer a specific complaint about something the original poster felt was broken and why they felt that way over multiple pages of fan cheering too. But we don't just post on these forums for their benefit, do we?
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I think the overlap of Grand Strategy fans and FPS fans is rather small.
An excellent source for new strategy, builder, tycoon games is Belannaer - nice streamer, who is always good for a welcome recommendation of a new indie title: http://store.steampowered.com/curator/6859276-Builders-managers-commanders/
I dunno man, most of my friends and I like both FPS games and Strategy games.I think the overlap of Grand Strategy fans and FPS fans is rather small.
An excellent source for new strategy, builder, tycoon games is Belannaer - nice streamer, who is always good for a welcome recommendation of a new indie title: http://store.steampowered.com/curator/6859276-Builders-managers-commanders/
I think a lot of people have trouble differentiating between bugs and things which are working as intended but are not quite right. Missiles, for example, right now are working as intended. The fact that they vanish when their launching ship is destroyed, is not a bug. It is intended design. Many players consider it bad design, but it is not a bug. Yet many will refer to it as 'broken' -- in the sense that the design is not whole, not correct or complete, but this also comes across as meaning 'bugged'. People frequently use the two terms to mean the same thing (broken = bugged in some contexts, broken = working but badly designed in others). To exacerbate this, some features people consider 'broken' are unclear in terms of whether they are broken because they are bugged or broken because they are badly designed. And even more confusing, sometimes it is a little of both.
The OP's original point, which as actually a solid and reasonable one, has been thoroughly lost in all of this discussion of whether it is bugs or bad design, or some of both (the more likely case) he/she was talking about. The larger point here -- regardless of which one you are talking about, and again, it is more likely some of each -- has to do with the size and scope of the update. This update, Utopia, is massive. It has to be, to justify charging people $20 for it. They are making huge changes to nearly every game system. Such a massive overhaul is guaranteed to produce an unknown but almost certainly not inconsiderable quantity of both issues -- bugs, and broken/poor game design choices that are working as intended. How change (a) will stack up with unchanged feature (b) is hard enough to predict when one is only considering two features in a pairwise manner. But when one considers the fact that there are features c through triple-z that may also be affected just by (a), let alone all of the affects on each other, predicting what is going to happen by changing the political rules or by adding dyson spheres or what have you, is impossible and there not might, but will be major issues forcing several more updates to clean up the mess that will be made when Utopia is launched.
And again this is not just about bugs. It's about interacting systems. Take just one system, Sectors. Lots of people have complained about how these work. This update produces 'tall' empires as a viable game play technique. What impact does this have on sectors? Will the player effectively controlling directly a larger % of his or her empire cause major changes to game balance? And in what way? How will sectors need to change to compensate for this with tall players while not at the same time breaking how they work for wide players? And on top of this, some people would say they're currently broken in the first place (again not bugged -- but designed badly).
And this is the crux of what I got out of the OP. Rather than, say, *fixing* sectors (not the bugs, but the balance and design issues) so that they are less objectionable to so many players, so that they work well and are satisfying to use, all by itself, they are lumping whatever changes they might be planning with sectors in with a whole host of other things, and it is impossible to do that and not introduce a whole new slew of problems. And while they are doing this huge mega-update/DLC, there have been no actual patches coming down recently to address these smaller issues like missiles, sectors, war goals, each of which could have been dealt with in a smaller patch. They're doing a huge big update 'bomb' with massive game changes along with minor ones and bug fixes all in one go, and this is likely to lead to even more game-play problems (in the OP's term, 'broken' gameplay) both bugs, and feature/design issues that are working as intended but do not work well with all the other new stuff they have added.
Personally I've bought all Total War Warhammer's DLCs and zero Stellaris' DLCs.
For TWW, DLCs are mandatory, if you don't buy them you miss a lot (entire factions and game mechanics). This is not true for Stellaris (and other Paradox games). Most of its DLCs are mainly based on scripted events and a few graphic items.
To be honest, I often wonder if the final version of their games is worth 150€ (or more).
As I've said before, I'm going to spend money on Stellaris' DLCs when I'll find them on sale on Steam, not before, and if they'll never get on sale I'm not going to buy them.
Buyer's prerogative.
Unless you buy everything in bulk for full price you arent really paying 150€ for the final version of the game. Well you are, but the value is much bigger than it seems. Atleast personally every time I buy a dlc for a paradox title I get a ton of hours in entertainment, might be more than for a new game for the same price on avreage, maybe even the cheaper ones, because you know its a game you already like.
From the 150€ final product 1 purchase perspective I get your point though.
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Stellaris is something new to Paradox, I think that it's equal to CK2 and EU4, the game will improve with the time, like wine.
If you like EU4 like me you probably know it since before CoP, if you know you can tell how much the game changed and improved since then.
I like their games since the first EU and I agree. Your statement is the node of the discussion though. I get enjoyment from their base games and this enjoyment is enough for me to keep playing the way they are. This is why I often question the quality of their DLCs. I mean, they're nice addition, but I feel the price is too high for what they add to the game.
And thats perfectly fine! I think discussing if its ACTUALLY worth it or not is like discussing what the best flavour of icecream is.
Keep in mind that the free updates are funded by the dlcs. Yes you are very welcome(sarcasm).
EDIT: I love total war warhammer dlc aswell.
An unfortunate fact of playing Paradox games is that every DLC ships with bugs. Sometimes it's a complete mess and breaks many things and others just don't really work or are completely unbalanced. I find there is usually a net fixed rate for bugs etc such that when the game gets older it plays better but until Pdx decide to do more quality control I don't see this ever improving.
I'm not sure that was the OP's point at all. But it is a better point to discuss and more worthwhile than what I got from the original post, so lets say it was for the sake of not discussing something that's already been hashed over a few times. Seriously, we both agree bugs happen.
I'm going to star
t by doing something most people won't. I'm going to admit that you're right to both notice the departure from standard game design philosophy and the pitfalls of it. I only know of one game outside of a Paradox product that has as frequently completely revamped core systems, Blizzards flagship MMO World of Warcraft, but that's spaced out over more than 10 years and in response to a drastically changing MMO market. Anything in the 4X or Grand Strategy genre? Not at all. Civilizations 5 was on the market for almost 11 years, and it produced less than half the expansion than EU4 has produced in half the time. If Firaxis had produced Stellaris, we'd be seeing a small patch to coincide with the release of the expansion, no changes to core gameplay beyond a few limited balance tweaks, and the new expansion coming with only new content, new systems and new mechanics. Paradox has instructions on the front page of their forum that tell you how to return to a previous game state, in a Firaxis game they don't need to include instructions because the way to do it is a clean install with no expansion content.
However, here is why I think it's a necessary evil.
From the original poster. Praise heaped upon games that have seen a 12 and 9 major gameplay altering expansions over about 5 years.
I was going to quote more, but what's the point. The system Paradox has works. If they hook a player with a game like Stellaris a launch, they'll find that player is happy to spend 20 dollars an expansion every 6 to 9 months. Or 10 dollars on a story pack. 8 dollars on a cosmetic expansion. If the customer base for their next expansion seems too small, if the barrier of entry for, say, EU4 gets to be too steep that they no longer feel they can sell enough copies of Mandate of Heaven, they put on a sale. When I got into EU4, it was during a massive sale. I spent around 40 bucks to get 120 dollars worth of software and expansions. Then I was hooked, invested, paid full price for Cossacks, Common Sense and Mare Nostrum. Started playing Stellaris shortly after and... holy shit, they removed Westernization? Sorry, that's another topic for another time. Anyway, I lost touch because I liked this game better, at least for the moment. I kicked around a few other games in the meantime too, Civ:BE, Civ 6, the new Masters of Orion, a couple of weird indy titles as relaxation fuel. If/when I burn out on Stellaris, there's a better than even chance I return to EU4... especially now that I want to know how the hell primitive nations even play? I'd better go put Rights of Man down as an alert on Steam...
In the meantime, as they're hitting their die hard fans for 10, 15, 20 bucks a pop, and their less dedicated for various fractions of those sums, they'll keep refining that one game until they have an overall better product. A much better product. A product that I can return to 6 months from now and not let burn me the way attempting to return to the Civilization franchise bit me when I got Civ:6 and compared it to the completed version of Civ:5. Or the way Civ:4 die-hards are famously still pissed at Civ:5 for not being as good as the final version of Civ:4. So yeah, they should be vigilant in regards to the gameplay working, and often they're more focused on getting the next expansion working and not making missiles viable. Which doesn't at all help when such a rapid development schedule opens them up to pretty significant gameplay imbalances. But they shouldn't lose sight of a system that works. I was going to say more, but I've got to check the wiki for EU4. Seriously, no more Westernization?
Anyway, you're a smart guy, you get the idea.
I think the OP does have a right to be concerned. Stellaris hasn't had a good history with the launching of new content. Any around last summer can attest that the 1.2 patch was a disaster made laughable by Sweden's mandatory month long vacation, leaving the community to do it for them. The devs have said that they will no longer do betas for expansions, but betas for core system functionality are a staple in AAA game design. Pretty much everyone does it now, because core changes wreck havoc on components you can't expect.
The communication with the community is one of Stellaris' stong points. Having a smooth launch for new content is not. I will not be buying Utopia on release. I don't have much faith that they will deliver on all the promises made without game-breaking bugs, lackluster design, and other shenanigans. I will let you guys be the beta testers.
The communication with the community is one of Stellaris' stong points. Having a smooth launch for new content is not. I will not be buying Utopia on release. I don't have much faith that they will deliver on all the promises made without game-breaking bugs, lackluster design, and other shenanigans. I will let you guys be the beta testers.
it's all subjective. and i also said "probably" =)
personally i enjoyed Civ 6. and gladly i've bought deluxe edition, or would've been very angry about dlc too.
don't see the difference with paradox's games. you may say that dlc are not mandatory but i'll disagree. without dlc i will not have a full game.
don't understand analogy. for me it's just 3 games(DD, DST, Stellaris) with similar pricing and good replay-ability. only exception is that first 2 are complete games
DD was/is a great game. "Where death and madness have real meaning." Can't really compare it to Stellaris in genre but for anyone who hasn't tried it. Highly recommend Darkest Dungeon.
P.S. They just added an "easier" mode too"