[Megathread] Leviathan Release Problems

[Jacabon]

Not quite comparable. It's quite easy to refund the game and roll back the game to a previous patch version.

Also it's quite easy to delay a product. But nope shove it to the masses.

 

[LeSingeAffame]

Not quite comparable. It's quite easy to refund the expansion and roll back the game to a previous patch version.

If the official advice is to refund the DLC and rollback to a previous patch version, maybe the DLC should not be in the Steam or Paradox store for a while until it's fixed

 

[Alblaka]

This is like seriously shocking. It should lead to resignations and firings right?? How can they be this lazy

Usually I would blame management for not budgeting correctly and forcing devs to split up their workload too much or into unreasonable features/expectations...
But there's a low-point in quality where you legitimately have to question whether however was working on that is actively trying to be removed from a project.

In either case, I'm curious whether there'll be any reaction from PDX beyond the usual "Woops, fix coming soon, please continue supporting us with your wallets".

 

[EarlKonrad]

Looks like I'll be doing more modded FTL between dominions turns for now.

Dominions rule! Still looking forward to Conquest of Elysium 5. One day. Someday

 

[LeSingeAffame]

This is like seriously shocking. It should lead to resignations and firings right?? How can they be this lazy

Eh, the issue here is probably management and distribution of resources, not something that would be fixed by firing devs

 

[BjornB]

If the official advice is to refund the DLC and rollback to a previous patch version, maybe the DLC should not be in the Steam or Paradox store for a while until it's fixed

It's not my advice. My personal opinion is that you can still play the expansion and enjoy yourself if you so wish. But if you truly believe that this release is something that constitute a violation of human rights, maybe a refund is in its place

 

[LWE]

A work-alone modder can easily miss things like that, but where was the QA? It seems they were either incompetent, or, more likely, their reports were ignored/didn't reach the developers for some reason.

 

[Chazb5046]

Eh, the issue here is probably management and distribution of resources, not something that would be fixed by firing devs

If I produced work like that I’d be sacked. If Paradox doesn’t make somebody accountable for this constant mess it’s never going to end.

 

[LeSingeAffame]

A work-alone modder can easily miss things like that, but where was the QA? It seems they were either incompetent, or, more likely, their reports were ignored/didn't reach the developers for some reason.

The QA and the rest of the dev team are probably not to be blamed, it's very likely that QA spotted most of these issues very early on, it was added on the dev team backlog, but they simply were not given the resources by their management to fix those
I can assure you that both the QA and the rest of the team are probably not happy with the state of the release

 

[petertju]

I can assure you that we do not take these matters lightly - and again I won't try to make excuses.

Assuming that the development team is just shrugging it off and laughing all the way to the bank is rather presumptuous however. The team consists of a number of people recruited from the community - people that joined Tinto for the love of the game and a desire to make it the best it can be. Sometimes things don't work out in the best way from the start however.

I once again promise that everyone involved is working really hard to have a patch out as soon as it is possible, but we do not believe in the abuse of workforce.

Bjorn, lot of respect for what you are doing here, but I hope you understand that it is hard to believe that you don't take this lightly. After GC and Emperor the response was the same: This is an exception and we are going to do better in the future. but here we are again.

Why should we believe that it isn't shrugged off?

 

[brifbates]

The QA and the rest of the dev team are probably not to be blamed, it's very likely that QA spotted most of these issues very early on, it was added on the dev team backlog, but they simply were not given the resources by their management to fix those
I can assure you that both the QA and the rest of the team are probably not happy with the state of the release

I don't buy it, this happens far too many times with PDS releases for it to always be the fault of the higher-ups as some would have you believe. At some point the dev teams and QA need to step up and fix their parts of the overall s___show that the recent releases have been.

 

[Jacabon]

It's not my advice. My personal opinion is that you can still play the expansion and enjoy yourself if you so wish. But if you truly believe that this release is something that constitute a violation of human rights, maybe a refund is in its place

Thats a straight up lie. You can't play this expansion and enjoy it. You should be ashamed of this release and the state of paradox development.

 

[klingonadmiral]

Governing Capacity can flow negative, making the Tribal polities in the Champa highlands some of the easiest tags to WC with.

I was only memeing!

I predict a stateless society WC no more than 2 weeks after the new content is released.

 

[Esben_DRK]

It's not my advice. My personal opinion is that you can still play the expansion and enjoy yourself if you so wish. But if you truly believe that this release is something that constitute a violation of human rights, maybe a refund is in its place

That's... not a great answer. Leviathan was (As predicted) a buggy, unbalanced, and incomplete mess. People asked whether it was a wrong version because while PDX has a poor history, it's never been this poor before. There's no need to also insult people on the forum because your product was this incomplete, though I hope people will take both the initial state of Leviathan and the official responses into account when making current refund and future purchasing decisions.

 

[BjornB]

That's... not a great answer. Leviathan was (As predicted) a buggy, unbalanced, and incomplete mess. People asked whether it was a wrong version because while PDX has a poor history, it's never been this poor before. There's no need to also insult people on the forum because your product was this incomplete, though I hope people will take both the initial state of Leviathan and the official responses into account when making current refund and future purchasing decisions.

No answer is a good answer when you find yourself in this situation. But I still wanted to let you know that your concerns are heard.

 

[Alaitoc]

I can assure you that we do not take these matters lightly - and again I won't try to make excuses.

Assuming that the development team is just shrugging it off and laughing all the way to the bank is rather presumptuous however. The team consists of a number of people recruited from the community - people that joined Tinto for the love of the game and a desire to make it the best it can be. Sometimes things don't work out in the best way from the start however.

I once again promise that everyone involved is working really hard to have a patch out as soon as it is possible, but we do not believe in the abuse of workforce.

As much as I'd like to believe this, many of the issues with 1.31 were known (even to the community!) weeks or months before release and nothing was done about them. Actions speak louder than words, and it doesn't seem like there was much action going on. I'm sure that will change now that this embarassing release has seen the light of day and people are scrambling to fix it, but surely you can understand why people are concerned that a patch that's been in development so long has so many glaring issues?

A lot of people will be happy when (if?) this patch is truly completed and fixed up, but many of us are also concerned how this situation even happened in the first place.

 

[kkeiper1103]

Please take as much time you need. I'll not die if I need to wait for a few days, weeks, or even a month.

But, PLEASE, give us a working game then.

This. I don't care how long it takes to release a DLC. What I care about is if it's polished and tested. I suspect Paradox could have taken another month or two to polish the release, players would rather have that, as opposed to a Q1 release date.

 

[Jacabon]

No answer is a good answer when you find yourself in this situation. But I still wanted to let you know that your concerns are heard.

We had these exact same concerns with emperor. And not only did they not get addressed, they got worse.

 

[Jarvin]

No answer is a good answer when you find yourself in this situation. But I still wanted to let you know that your concerns are heard.

Might be a weird question but
is there something that we - the community - can do to help?

 

[Vityviktor]

At the time, I used to consider EU4 an overall better game than CK2 (which is my most played game in Steam): solid, coherent, deep but accesible, etc. Expansions like Art of War or Common Sense were really good.

Then something got really wrong. I'm not even sure when, maybe with Mandate of Heaven, or Mare Nostrum. The game is now an hypertrofied mess of redundant mechanics, hidden tabs, and too many buttons.

I remember these things from early pre-release Dev Diaries:

The game should, as we mentioned earlier, not increase its complexity levels dramatically. We are happy with the level of complexity the Eu-series has, and want to keep it at this level.

One of the most important aspects of EU4 is to make an interface that is both easier to get into, and less hassle for an expert user. This a fine line to balance, and we are rather happy with the interfaces we have done so far for EU4.

One important thing though, is that while we had lots of cool and interesting ideas for EU, we simply couldn't just add them all in, as the game would become an unwieldly mass. EU has a complexity level we do not want to dramatically increase and while improving the interface can reduce it a fair bit, it is a very fine balance when it comes to designing a game.

Purging is when we remove features that simply are not good enough, or not as fun and exciting as we had hoped them to be when we thought of them, or that we feel stand in the way of a completely new system. Plenty of features have been reworked from scratch, but today I want to focus on the features that we're taking out – not redesigning.

Etc etc.

Now tell me if these ideas do actually reflect how the game "works" right now.

It's very sad indeed.