Was this joke even tested at all?

[Brynjar]

Dude, take calming pills, you are deluded. Victoria 3 playerbase dropped harder than ANY Paradox title after release with Stellaris coning close by. And comparison of concurrent playerbase is the worst of all PDX titles.

Am I? The only reason Vic has a bigger drop is due to an apparent higher initial interest. There are more people playing Victoria 3 than there were people playing Stellaris in July-August 2016, there are as many people playing Vic 3 now as there were playing HoI4 in August-September 2016. There are more people playing Vic 3 than there were people playing EU4 in November 2013, and it took CK2 years to reach the same player numbers. It took Imperator a few days to reach the same numbers. The only Paradox game seeing an higher interest (based on number of simultaneous player numbers) 2-3 months after release is CK3.

If everyone disliked the game as much as some people appear to claim, we would have seen significantly lower numbers, as we did with Imperator.

For several messages instead of adressing actual topic you screech about thievery of A LEAK.

I have addressed the issue of this thread, which is about testing, or the lack thereof on the first page of this thread, and repeated what I think is the core of the issue in several posts today. Yesterday you repeated a silly rumour you had from reddit on the topic. Do you have an opinion on the topic yourself?

Also, I'm not the one bringing up the leak which in most countries where Paradox gets the majority of their income from would be illegal to obtain. If you dislike people comparing obtaining something in an illegal way to thievery, you probably shouldn't mention doing it...

 

[Brynjar]

Actually in the case of 3rd situation they are selling trust. Trust of the consumer to their company. That's some kind of financing model I'm not against fundamentally as you are.

That companies can sell trust is a pretty wild statement (at least the kind of trust you are talking about), and probably not what you mean. That kind of trust is earned, not bought and sold. Paradox haven't done a whole lot to earn people's trust in the past 4-5 years, which is why I find it so strange that people chose to preorder.

But when that trust runs out they are no more that financially sound and established studio.

So far there is nothing indicating that it will ever run out. Just as there isn't a whole lot of things indicating that companies such as EA, Activision Blizzard or Bethesda are going to lose the trust, or at least not the loyalty, of their customers. There are still millions of people out there willing to throw money at developers regardless of quality of the games who would much rather say "shut up and take my money" rather than risk not being part of the next successful release. A month after the release of Vic 3 Paradox had found at least half a million of those.

 

[Major Malfunction]

I have addressed the issue of this thread, which is about testing, or the lack thereof on the first page of this thread, and repeated what I think is the core of the issue in several posts today. Yesterday you repeated a silly rumour you had from reddit on thr topic. Do you have an opinion on the topic yourself?

Maybe because it was not a rumor but actual observation about the code. There is a continuation:

I am talking about modeable code(like events, gui, colors, and that kind of things), not the hard code.

Every one maked their our version of how the code should work without checking what the others do. For example in the files in common>ethnicities Caucasian ethnicity has a large head-code at the start to refer the base model, while in the central Asian code it makes it with a single line

Also, I'm not the one bringing up the leak which in most countries where Paradox gets the majority of their income from would be illegal to obtain. If you dislike people comparing obtaining something in an illegal way to thievery, you probably shouldn't mention doing it...

Yes I am more than familiar with the concept. Back in the days of EA trying to setup Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars and Red Alert 3 as online competitive RTS games they actually BANNED beople who reported exploits on forums.
Luckily, we already have a great idea how to deal with the leaks!

 

[Major Malfunction]

The problem is obvious

 

[Brynjar]

Maybe because it was not a rumor but actual observation about the code. There is a continuation:

How does covid cause that? Do people think the developers are keeping the files on a single physical computer and just change who sits in front of that computer? Communicating standards for code is not not something which is significantly harder when not meeting face to face, in fact I would argue that relying on face to face oral communication instead of written standards for such things should cause significantly more issues.

Back in the days of EA trying to setup Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars and Red Alert 3 as online competitive RTS games they actually BANNED beople who reported exploits on forums.

Are you seriously comparing spreading unwanted video game exploits to breaking the law?

The problem is obvious

Is it? What is the problem?

Victoria 3 Sold 500 000 Games - and is Nominated in The Game Awards - Paradox Interactive

Paradox Interactive is a world leading PC games publisher known for games such as Cities: Skylines, Europa Universalis and Crusader Kings.

www.paradoxinteractive.com

 

[Inquerion]

Thanks Johan for clarification regarding 3D character models; CK3 models were created first, not V3 models.

Personally i'm sad to see that 2D option didn't win back in 2018.

High quality portraits can easily immerse players in the period and are a lot less demanding on hardware.

 

[Bezborg]

Thanks Johan for clarification regarding 3D character models; CK3 models were created first, not V3 models.

Personally i'm sad to see that 2D option didn't win back in 2018.

High quality portraits can easily immerse players in the period and are a lot less demanding on hardware.

Not to mention that V3 3D portraits look like they were developed in 2004 :/

 

[Nephandus]

I would like to request that the beaviour in this thread remains civilized and the required modicum of respect remains. Some people in here seem to struggle with both a bit at the moment. Please do not make me take targeted action or, if things really get out of hand, lock the thread. Thank you for your consideration.

 

[ironman3112]

Are you seriously comparing spreading unwanted video game exploits to breaking the law?

If the exploits looked anything like the following - they may in fact have been breaking the law.

 

[piaomiaotianzun]

Actually in the case of 3rd situation they are selling trust. Trust of the consumer to their company. That's some kind of financing model I'm not against fundamentally as you are. But when that trust runs out they are no more that financially sound and established studio. While it's a good punishment for a company who breaks trust of their customers, in this case it's also sad that we lose another bunch of good games in a rather niche genre.

yes，I quite agree with you

 

[consi]

Like some artist demanding people to cut their eyes out because they saw their artwork early, before release.

Just for the record, I am laughing at this for some time. Picturing a crazy artist from renaissance era with curly bob hair, wrapped in fabric with lots of paint on it. It's inside of my head man!

 

[Panagean]

Now at this point I have to intercede: The “shutdowns“ on the leaked beta was silply because playing them to comment on these meant that the users procured this through illegal channels, aka piracy.
It should also be noted that this thread is still open and only post violating the forum rules are being acted upon.

Do you really believe that feedback on an outdated leaked development build has any impact on a nearly complete development run?

Many of them were evident long before the leak, and should have been addressed by a larger portion of the community much earlier, including how stupid the war system was envisioned to work. By the time of the leak it was too late to change since paradox had no intention of delaying the release by a year.

I believe referring to the leak only increases the chance for the devs to ignore your feedback, and for good reason. If you care so little about their jobs and their work, why should they care what you think of the game?

Regardless of the "legitimacy" (or indeed usefulness) or not of the source of the feedback from the leak, I think it would be hard to argue that the feedback offered (that war was incredibly sloppy and hard to control, that trade-specifically and econ-generally micro was tedious) was incorrect, now that the release product has generated much the same response.

Its not true.

The character system we have was developed for Crusader Kings III first. Sometime during 2018, iirc, the v3 team decided to use the system as well, instead of the handpainted 2d portraits they were considering.

Oh no, handpainted portraits were being considered and decided **against**? Sad

If you haven't seen them, you can find some placeholders in C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Victoria 3\game\gfx\portraits\placeholder and they're gorgeous (if perhaps a little indistinct side-by-side):

2D images like this may have also avoided the 3d character models hogging the UI and, by de-emphasising their centrality to gameplay, requiring so many events to feel like Paradox tried to audition Karl Marx for Persona 5.

So here's a thing:

Pre-ordering a physically distributed edition can serve the rational interest of a consumer.

Pre-ordering a internetly distributed game from a tiny indie studio that might go broke and have to abandon the project if they don't get some cash flow Right Now can serve the rational interest of a consumer.

Pre-ordering an internetly distributed game from an established, financially sound studio almost never serves the rational interest of a consumer; I would even go so far as to say that it is unethical for such a studio to even offer pre-orders.

That companies can sell trust is a pretty wild statement (at least the kind of trust you are talking about), and probably not what you mean. That kind of trust is earned, not bought and sold. Paradox haven't done a whole lot to earn people's trust in the past 4-5 years, which is why I find it so strange that people chose to preorder.


So far there is nothing indicating that it will ever run out. Just as there isn't a whole lot of things indicating that companies such as EA, Activision Blizzard or Bethesda are going to lose the trust, or at least not the loyalty, of their customers. There are still millions of people out there willing to throw money at developers regardless of quality of the games who would much rather say "shut up and take my money" rather than risk not being part of the next successful release. A month after the release of Vic 3 Paradox had found at least half a million of those.

I preordered. I appreciate it was probably irrational. I regret it. I don't usually preorder games but I preordered Victoria 3 because:

• I love Victoria 2 and getting a real Victoria 3 was such a meme that I wanted to use my wallet to shout "Yes! Thank you! Please take account of my enthusiasm in whatever financial forecasting you do so that this game can have developer support and be a real masterpiece for years to come!"
• I wanted to cheer myself up with the thought of something fun in the future
• It wasn't sure how covid would affect Paradox and wanted to support them - I didn't feel bad about chucking them some cash for something I was likely to buy anyway
• CK3 was pretty decent on launch (while far from perfect CK3 has gripped me where CK2 did not - mainly just a from a more approachable UX experience), and getting the special package or whatever seemed like a pretty cost-efficient way of getting content I figured I was going to have to buy at some point anyway, given PDX DLC policy and how much I enjoyed Victoria 2.

Victoria 3 being, in my opinion, pretty bad, has definitely affected my consumer behaviour with respect to the Paradox studio. I probably won't buy any DLC for Victoria 3 (I just don't enjoy the vision of the game, so I can't really see DLC fixing that, where CK3 I could see that although there was content missing in some areas, I dug the vision for the game), and almost certainly won't pre-order any new games; I'll probably hold off on EU5 for a few months/years after launch as well, though I am aware that because of different teams being allocated to different franchises, this could be a Victoria-3-team specific set of issues, and I'm willing for good user response to change my view on that. I'm just one consumer, but it has impacted my behaviour.

 

[zilla737]

I'll never understand how anyone can consider the CK3 UI good. Having to dig through 3-4 submenus/tooltips to find information/buttons that was available with 1-2 clicks in CK2 was a giant step backwards and nothing but annoying and tedious. It also has too little contrast between a lot of text and background which ruins readability. To top it all off it is also full of horrible abstracted icons which might as well be dots of different colours for how easy it is to connect them to what they represent.

Also, that horrible default 0.5 second lock time for tooltips the UI is designed to require the player go into to find information is an abomination which comes from CK3. That "feature" nearly made me abandon CK3 within the first 15 minutes of playing (hooks and bad AI and UI made me abandon it after a few hours instead).

Many of the things that are wrong with the Vic 3 UI can be traced back to CK3, but for some unfathomable reason people keep praising the CK3 UI.

I don't really want to talk about CK3, but it makes my point, so...
The CK3 UI does not require having to dig through 3-4 submenus for anything a casual player would need to run a successful ironman achievement campaign. If you're digging 3-4 menus in, you're getting more info than you need. Not the case with Vic3. This UI requires you to dig 3-4 menus in for information that often isn't there. If I do dig 3-4 menus deep in CK3, there is progressively more useful information enhancing my gameplay.
The locktime is configurable, has options to the mouse-over lock, and if you nearly abandoned the game within the first 15 minutes of playing, I daresay you didn't bother to do the 3-4 clicks (from an active game) it would take to look at the settings to see if it was customizable.
I don't understand your issues with hooks, as they go both ways.
Bad AI applied to allies in warfare, I don't recall any other complaints. Maybe I'm wrong. They've largely fixed their bad AI, and as I recall, that was done (outside of crusades issues, which AFAIK are still ongoing) within a few hotfixes. I'm almost certain it wasn't gated behind DLC. I might be wrong there too. It's been a couple years.
The overall GUI made me drop CK2 like a hot potato. That and the ridiculous fantasy elements of CK2 had largely soured me on it.
Aesthetically, they're using the same GUI in Vic3, but they missed, as you apparently did/do, why CK3's GUI was considered a success. You may not like it, but the CK3 devs have used it in ways that make the game good.

There is your problem. Don't preorder...

I probably pre-ordered CK3. I did pre-order Vic3 for the exclusives offered with the pre-order, and as I said before, the product I got was shockingly bad, hasn't improved, and has gotten worse in some ways.

Actually in the case of 3rd situation they are selling trust. Trust of the consumer to their company. That's some kind of financing model I'm not against fundamentally as you are. But when that trust runs out they are no more that financially sound and established studio. While it's a good punishment for a company who breaks trust of their customers, in this case it's also sad that we lose another bunch of good games in a rather niche genre.

This is very correct. Having not been burned by an unfinished pre-release with CK3, Paradox, despite having an apparent history of bad releases in its other titles had earned my trust. Yeah, CK3 is/was not perfect, but it was never game-breaking bad, and they've done well with their DLC, in my personal opinion. You can like or dislike CK3, but it works. You could always from day one, start and play a fun(subjective) working(the game works) ironman achievement run successfully. That, to me, is a measure of quality. I never wondered if CK3 was ever even tested.
Vic3, after I learned how not to crash and burn my economy, shows its flaws with core game mechanics not working to the point of essentially being non-existent. The trust CK3 earned from me got destroyed with this game, and I doubt I'll pre-order another PDX game, or possibly even buy another PDX game. Even with the core elements that will entirely change the game, should they be fixed at some point, I have no trust that the team running the development will get those elements working. If they were making headway, instead of making hotfixes and minor version changes that have progressively broken imperfect features that were working, they might still have my trust. If it requires a DLC to get the AI exploiting resources in a sensible way, for example, I will never buy it. Well... maybe if this team shows that they've adopted a different strategy to fixing the game, and nobody but haters would be asking if it was tested. A DLC to fix the core mechanics would be the ultimate nail for the Vic3 hammer they used to break my trust as a customer, however. Gating core gameplay features behind DLC is what they've promised not to do.

 

[Bezborg]

Regardless of the "legitimacy" (or indeed usefulness) or not of the source of the feedback from the leak, I think it would be hard to argue that the feedback offered (that war was incredibly sloppy and hard to control, that trade-specifically and econ-generally micro was tedious) was incorrect, now that the release product has generated much the same response.


If you haven't seen them, you can find some placeholders in C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Victoria 3\game\gfx\portraits\placeholder and they're gorgeous (if perhaps a little indistinct side-by-side):
View attachment 936540View attachment 936541View attachment 936542View attachment 936543View attachment 936544View attachment 936545
View attachment 936546View attachment 936547View attachment 936548
View attachment 936549View attachment 936550
2D images like this may have also avoided the 3d character models hogging the UI and, by de-emphasising their centrality to gameplay, requiring so many events to feel like Paradox tried to audition Karl Marx for Persona 5.


I preordered. I appreciate it was probably irrational. I regret it. I don't usually preorder games but I preordered Victoria 3 because:

• I love Victoria 2 and getting a real Victoria 3 was such a meme that I wanted to use my wallet to shout "Yes! Thank you! Please take account of my enthusiasm in whatever financial forecasting you do so that this game can have developer support and be a real masterpiece for years to come!"
• I wanted to cheer myself up with the thought of something fun in the future
• It wasn't sure how covid would affect Paradox and wanted to support them - I didn't feel bad about chucking them some cash for something I was likely to buy anyway
• CK3 was pretty decent on launch (while far from perfect CK3 has gripped me where CK2 did not - mainly just a from a more approachable UX experience), and getting the special package or whatever seemed like a pretty cost-efficient way of getting content I figured I was going to have to buy at some point anyway, given PDX DLC policy and how much I enjoyed Victoria 2.

Victoria 3 being, in my opinion, pretty bad, has definitely affected my consumer behaviour with respect to the Paradox studio. I probably won't buy any DLC for Victoria 3 (I just don't enjoy the vision of the game, so I can't really see DLC fixing that, where CK3 I could see that although there was content missing in some areas, I dug the vision for the game), and almost certainly won't pre-order any new games; I'll probably hold off on EU5 for a few months/years after launch as well, though I am aware that because of different teams being allocated to different franchises, this could be a Victoria-3-team specific set of issues, and I'm willing for good user response to change my view on that. I'm just one consumer, but it has impacted my behaviour.

Oh man, those portraits are glorious. Why did they scrap this?! if you ask me, this is the most conclusive evidence yet that the game release was artificially rushed, for whatever reason. What a shame.

I hope the 2D portraits make it to some future version of the game, fingers crossed.

 

[grommile]

Why did they scrap this?!

Because of the number of portraits required, probably.

That set of portraits covers one role (those all look like generals to me) of one culture.

 

[Bezborg]

Because of the number of portraits required, probably.

That set of portraits covers one role (those all look like generals to me) of one culture.

These kinds of portraits could be modular, especially with gigantic beards and moustaches

 

[grommile]

These kinds of portraits could be modular, especially with gigantic beards and moustaches

Different whiskers on the same set of cheekbones is not a particularly reliable way of getting portraits to register as being different people.

 

[Bezborg]

Different whiskers on the same set of cheekbones is not a particularly reliable way of getting portraits to register as being different people.

Worked just fine in ck2. And it’s not like they have to make a specific image for every random character in the game… they definitely aren’t doing it for the 3D models, so why would 2D be an exception?

I don’t really care, I’m arguing that *anything* would look better than the current 3D models in V3.

Anything.

 

[dr_AllCOM3]

Vic3, after I learned how not to crash and burn my economy, shows its flaws with core game mechanics not working to the point of essentially being non-existent.

Precisely. The game is so so boring. Every country is boring in the identical way, so there isn't even any replayability.

You're also right that no one should buy DLCs just to have these bland feature be fun. They should be fun from the start. The game wasn't free.

 

[Soranya]

Oh man, those portraits are glorious. Why did they scrap this?! if you ask me, this is the most conclusive evidence yet that the game release was artificially rushed, for whatever reason. What a shame.

I hope the 2D portraits make it to some future version of the game, fingers crossed.

I dont like the 2D Potraits tbh. At least not the one posted above. They look generic and boring.