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YOU ended up becoming a demi?!??
I've mellowed, dude.
thumbsup_gary_busey.jpg
 
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Any photo of Gary Busey that does not have his teeth in it is an unworthy photo.

Also, seeing life in this forum made me very warm and fuzzy inside.
 
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10 years and still seems like yesterday for some of the games. Great to hear the back-story on these classics. Now just patiently waiting for the 20 yr anniversary for HOI and the 25 yr anniversary for EU.
 
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It kind of surprises me how much of the pitch didn't make it into the final product.

You could make a proper sequel if you implemented all of the pitch
Victoria 3: All we wanted to do in Victoria 2
Paradox has QA now? One learns new things every day. Who knows, in another decade we may get an AI.
you shouldn't dream higher than VIc 3
“the world market code is bugged, I’ll fix it, and then the sweet summer child looks into the code and quickly becomes a jaded cynical veteran :)"
speaking of that guy, i wonder what victoria 3 secret project he's working nowadays
The counter does reset at 0 if we mention it often enough.
if it's like the money counter in their games it's just 1M to reset it to 0
 
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had my best pdox memories in vic2 multiplayer sessions. a lot of laughs, a lot of anger, but camaraderie along the way...

Also, i was a "badboy" when i first played this game until i realized how great it was and decided to pay for it since I thought pdox deserved it haha
 
That was a great peek into the birth of Vicky II - what an awesome post, thank you!

As someone who started playing with Empire Under the Sun, I've got to say at how impressed I was with Vicky II.
I don't think I could ever go back to industrializing China by manually upgrading pops (and splitting and waiting for the requisite goods to become available).
You guys nailed the systems that most needed improvement in Vicky I and delivered the gem that is Vicky II.
Like many (most?) here, I'm hoping and looking forward to this particular piece of history repeating itself...
 
Vicky 2 still remains my favourite Paradox game. Still has pride of place on my PC long after I've moved on from other games and left them uninstalled and long untouched in my Steam library.

Actually, I think I bought Vicky 2 three times: physical disc, gamersgate and finally in a Steam sale. I've never bought any other title more than once.
 
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Actually, I think I bought Vicky 2 three times: physical disc, gamersgate and finally in a Steam sale. I've never bought any other title more than once.
Unfortunately, due to Windows 10 not supporting on-disc DRM, I've had to repurchase most of my old games. Victoria 2 is merely one of a long list that I had to buy again, but in digital form, despite owning the CD.
 
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This is really amazing, thanks for putting this together Johan. I've always wondered what happened behind the scenes, its nice to get a look at game development. Cant wait for V3 someday!
 
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Loved reading this until I realised one very sad thing...
If this was how little time and people it took to produce the game of Vic2 quality... How come the quality of things is not getting considerably better with all the people on the team and boatloads of DLC cash that they have now?
 
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Loved reading this until I realised one very sad thing...
If this was how little time and people it took to produce the game of Vic2 quality... How come the quality of things is not getting considerably better with all the people on the team and boatloads of DLC cash that they have now?

To be fair, vanilla VIC II was a bit lacking on content. I like it anyway, but both expansions, at least for me, were much needed.
 
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To be fair, vanilla VIC II was a bit lacking on content. I like it anyway, but both expansions, at least for me, were much needed.

Now, I know very little about game development, but it kind of seems to me that content design is like one person job for the duration of development? Surely PDX development teams have increased by much more than one extra person, but the amount of content is still roughly the same?
 
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Now, I know very little about game development, but it kind of seems to me that content design is like one person job for the duration of development? Surely PDX development teams have increased by much more than one extra person, but the amount of content is still roughly the same?

When I started in 2010 we often were one Content Designer per project with support from the programmers and sometimes they too would script the databases, the events, do research, and everything else a CD does. When we worked on CK2 we had one main CD and another who jumped a bit between projects, and Johan, King, and DoomDark also made some events. We had around 1000 events in CK2 when it was released and the word count was somewhere between 100-150k words. CK3 is at least 4 times that with a lot more CDs than CK2 had.

Nowadays, most projects have between 2-5 CDs and a Lead CD as well, but our game has gotten more complex in terms of triggers and effects so it takes longer to make events - the quality of them has increased as well. For example, I asked for options to be able to have triggers in CK2, something that didn't exist before then, and which means that if you have the trait greedy you might get an extra option in certain events. Now we also have customizable localization, which means that you can script both the event and the text too. So you can take a basic text: "I have a [Root.GetRandomWeaponName]!" and that variable might output "sword", "mace", "dagger", "carrot" and so on. If you haven't read the CD DDs for CK3 for example have a look! They are great sources of information.

I haven't scripted for our games since 2015 but I do know that we have more CDs than ever and scripting is more complex than ever too, events can do so much more than when I started. And CDs do a lot more than just events, just saying.
 
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When I started in 2010 we often were one Content Designer per project with support from the programmers and sometimes they too would script the databases, the events, do research, and everything else a CD does. When we worked on CK2 we had one main CD and another who jumped a bit between projects, and Johan, King, and DoomDark also made some events. We had around 1000 events in CK2 when it was released and the word count was somewhere between 100-150k words. CK3 is at least 4 times that with a lot more CDs than CK2 had.

Nowadays, most projects have between 2-5 CDs and a Lead CD as well, but our game has gotten more complex in terms of triggers and effects so it takes longer to make events - the quality of them has increased as well. For example, I asked for options to be able to have triggers in CK2, something that didn't exist before then, and which means that if you have the trait greedy you might get an extra option in certain events. Now we also have customizable localization, which means that you can script both the event and the text too. So you can take a basic text: "I have a [Root.GetRandomWeaponName]!" and that variable might output "sword", "mace", "dagger", "carrot" and so on. If you haven't read the CD DDs for CK3 for example have a look! They are great sources of information.

I haven't scripted for our games since 2015 but I do know that we have more CDs than ever and scripting is more complex than ever too, events can do so much more than when I started. And CDs do a lot more than just events, just saying.

This was very helpful and insightful, thank you!
 
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