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Stellaris Dev Diary #180 - DLC Visibility Experiment

Hello everyone!

We hope you are enjoying your time with 2.7 and the 4 year anniversary of Stellaris! It’s very fun to see how far the game has come, and just as interesting to imagine what the future can hold.

We want to make sure that Stellaris is well-prepared for more content in the future. Something we’ve learned, especially with CK2, is that a long tail of new content can make it very difficult for players to see what kind of DLCs are available for the game. As we recently announced, Stellaris has more than 3 million players, and we want to make sure that players – both new and old – have an easier time finding content that they might like.

In order to improve visibility, starting today and lasting for a couple of weeks, we’re going to be running a couple of experiments that will be looking at DLC visibility within the game. We will be running a controlled experiment that will split up the player base into different groups, where each group will get a slightly different experience (or no change, in the case of the control group). The experiment will only affect the main menu and empire creation/selection, and will not have any effect on the game as you are playing. The purpose of this is to gather some insights into what kind of visibility features are actually helpful.

Before you grab your laser-powered pitchforks and plasma-illuminators, and complain about development focus, rest assured that all of this work has been done by an external team (who has done a great job btw!) and has had no effect on the development of Stellaris as a game :)

I want to emphasize that even though we want to improve the visibility of content for the game, it will never come at the expense of the game experience itself, so you don’t need to worry about that. It is very important for us that our players are able to immerse themselves in the Stellaris universe and to have fun while they play.

And because a dev diary can’t be complete without pictures or teasers, here’s two icons related to some future content. What could it be..?
merciless_teaser.png
 
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Before clicking on this, I honestly thought this would be a dev diary talking about a new DLC/Patch that would change how visibility and information availability in the game work.
I had the exact same experience. Can't say I'm not disappointed...
 
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In terms of the whole "highlighting DLC content owned", why not do a variant of what EU4 does in the main menu?

Have say a honeycomb of icons on the far right side of the screen. Content you OWN would be the full icon, Content you DONT would be grayed out. Mouse over the icons, and it would give you a tooltip with the DLC name, and a short blurb about the main content of the DLC. Clicking on the icon opens the storepage for the DLC.

And in terms of the icons... - if they end up doing a religion based DLC, I'd LOVE if Machines got an Origin "Ghost in the Machine" (start as synths and require Fanatic Spiritualist as an ethic, lock them out entirely form bio-techs for genemmodding and uplifting, and give a handful of special religious buildings and have their origin event chain be about accessing the shroud through a different means). My RP idea for it is that the race was deeply spiritual, and believe an entity from the shroud 'created' them. They ventured into space seeking knowledge to 'meet' their 'creator', and the creation of robots and eventually merging their consciousness with those synths was them treading the same path of creating life... and extending their own since the race's primary drive is to meet their maker and gain their blessing.
 
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So I've got the experiment which shows a list of DLC icons along the edge of the screen in the main menu and empire creation, with a checkmark next to the ones I own. My reaction: I hate it and I hope it dies in a fire. I am neither an infant nor an imbecile, and so I already know what DLCs I have and haven't purchased and why. I don't appreciate pushy sales tactics in the game itself.
 
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Given your track record with external teams (the mobile game s-storm) I do not see any reason to rest assured upon being told that...

Oh yeah... whatever did happen to that?
 
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The 'game' had been rereleased a few months ago without the stolen art but still with the controversial microtransactions.

Haha, really? They actually released it? I never noticed anything on the forums about that. Interesting...
 
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Couple of points:

1. How can I opt out? Where have I consented to be a part of this experiment.

2. How long will this last? If it's indefinite that we'll be getting in-game ads from now on, I'll be staying with 2.6.3.

3. If you need to incentivise people to purchase more DLC's, fix the game, including old features that have been broken for several patches and have something that works with more stability. Then I'll buy more DLC.
 
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Guess this is like the EU4 and CK2 DLC visibility system then, more or less. Can't say I'm a big fan, but eh, I can ignore it I guess.

... Is this thread an experiment in Dev Diary visibility too? It's not pinned :p
 
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Since you seems to touch the custom empires code, could you please add them to the steam cloud?

I lost most of my carefully made empire last time I formatted my PC :'(
 
Max trolling. The game is bordering on unplayable with whatever bug causes the massive performance dip, but yeah having loads of fun with it.

I usually have massive slow downs at the 2320 mark and later on huge galaxies so I try to rush purging as my own victory condition. If the game slows down too much I have lost.

Now I get the same at about 2280 and my colossus isnt even finished yet. Its so fun to see 2 factions pop up and disappear each month as my pops change political affilitations every day. Its crazy and yet half of my pops are slaves and not even part of a faction yet I get this.

Performance in this patch is unplayable and I rather have no pops changing faction than me not being able to even play the game.
 
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