It's evident the devs have a lot of passion behind their efforts to develop this game for a larger audience by making it more accessible, with well put together mechanics, certainly more polished than the HoI3 release and ultimately more bankable; I don't doubt they'll succeed. As a consequence, some of the things we have grown accustomed to will inevitably evolve.
However, it just seems like there's an ever-growing list of items that fairly large numbers of long time players have come to expect, which are being relegated to the inbox of the (currently hypothetical) HoI IV Modding community. Now I know from the coffee vs. tea explanation offered up by one of the devs that the Devs are (rather refreshingly) not trying to pitch their product as being the best fit for all interested in the genre. That said, the HoI series isn't like coffee. If it was, I could get Hearts of Iron anywhere. Hell, it's not like most other grand strategy or world war 2 franchises that are on the market and some of us have been coming to Paradox for years to get it, so to see all of the jarring changes in attempts to make the game more enticing to new players (be they aficionados of other Paradox titles or not), and very little concern for the expectations of fairly large portions of the existing game's fanbase over pretty basic thematic issues, is a bit disconcerting. Obviously, many may disagree with that assessment, but that's why they're called opinions, folks.
Fortunately, at the end of the day, it's just a game and whether your poison is HoI1 (never played it), HoI2, DH, AoD, HoI3 or whatever else, we always have those games to go back to, and to be fair, as critical as I am of certain aspects, this game has some great new additions (huge things people have been requesting for ages), so it's a wait and see situation. Hopefully there will be a robust modding community to take advantage of an incredibly well coded and put-together game that is also mod-friendly.
