Spoken like someone who has never experienced pre-CKII launches. They were truly awful.
Trust me when I say that Imperator's launch still represents a marked improvement compared to that era.
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Will this be another I:R situation?
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Spoken like someone who has never experienced pre-CKII launches. They were truly awful.
Trust me when I say that Imperator's launch still represents a marked improvement compared to that era.
Despite being somewhat simplistic compared to other Paradox games at release (while simultaneously being rather too complex for many strategy gamers coming from the likes of Civ), Stellaris, for all its flaws, did have a few advantages going for it to set it apart. The procedurally generated galaxies - where that race of mushroom people or penguin people or floating bag of fart people could be an entirely different empire in culture and personality every time - as well as the empire customization made it quite special and different. I:R, by contrast, just kinda felt like several random aspects of CK2, EUIV, and Vicky 2 mashed together - I didn't mind I:R (though I understand if people were disappointed), but it was kinda just "okay" to me at release.
Crusader Kings, by contrast, does have a number of things to set it apart, mainly the heavy character and roleplay focus.
Plus, Stellaris' DLCs have generally been very good. The story pack + expansion system works very well for it, and I think it will work well for CK3 too. There was an excellent thread on reddit a while back discussing why Stellaris' DLC model and EUIV's DLC model, despite appearing similar on paper, had much different receptions, with Stellaris' being the superior model, and it boiled down to new features and game mechanics being included in the base game/free patches for the most part, and I think judging how I:R seems to be going that route, that CK3 will also be the same.
Even the pre-Stellaris launches were godawful, it was a miracle that Stellaris actually ran okay at release.
And who can forget the fiasco that was the buggy mess of Rajas of India? I was around then and I remember the great and mighty flamewars waged against the devs by angry players on the forums.
Crusader Kings, by contrast, does have a number of things to set it apart, mainly the heavy character and roleplay focus.
Plus, Stellaris' DLCs have generally been very good. The story pack + expansion system works very well for it, and I think it will work well for CK3 too. There was an excellent thread on reddit a while back discussing why Stellaris' DLC model and EUIV's DLC model, despite appearing similar on paper, had much different receptions, with Stellaris' being the superior model, and it boiled down to new features and game mechanics being included in the base game/free patches for the most part, and I think judging how I:R seems to be going that route, that CK3 will also be the same.
Even the pre-Stellaris launches were godawful, it was a miracle that Stellaris actually ran okay at release.
And who can forget the fiasco that was the buggy mess of Rajas of India? I was around then and I remember the great and mighty flamewars waged against the devs by angry players on the forums.
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EUIV was pretty good at release. It had its issues, but for the most part it was good. The only launch post-CKII I would consider godawful would be March of the Eagles (seriously, such wasted potential).
Keep in mind, I'm not talking about DLC. That's its own massive can of worms. Besides, this thread is about game releases, not DLC releases.
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True, good points. Never played March of the Eagles, so I don't know much about what happened then, but if I recall correctly, it was to HoI4 what Sengoku was to CK2 anyways, a test run of some of the systems and features.
I think it doesn't hurt to mention the DLC situation, as some criticism of CK3 are about the fears that the DLCs will be inadequate or be gameplay changing content cut from the vanilla game, but that's fair enough.
But yes on the issue of buggy releases, I think nothing beats the pre-CK2 world in terms of buggy messes that rival Bethesda's sandbox giants. If I recall, CK1 itself was such a horridly buggy mess because the devs basically had to pick up the game after it was left in pieces by an indie studio.
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Keep in mind that a major reason for why people see Imperator: Rome's as flawed is how it compare the current paradox games with all their dlcs and such, especially its lack of stuff that exist in other paradox games. If Imperator: Rome was relased like 2012 it would likely be seen as a much better game than it is seen now.
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Honestly its more that the base of I:R was anti-strategy, Rimmy made a great video on why that is the case. And it basically encapsulates the main things wrong with the game.
It was more of a waiting game, than a strategy game. There was no real strategy in I:R, as in no plan of action that lets you achieve long term goals/aims. You could do an insane amount of stuff that was practically magic without ever unpausing the game.
I've heard they have done many, many changes to fix this. But honestly it seems like the damage has already been done. Personally I've spent 173 hours in the game. Waiting until it became fun. It never really did. It got better I'm sure but I'm not touching it for years to come and going by steam charts many people made the same choice.
I guess I:R perfectly encapsulates "A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad." not in the literal sense, but more in perception.
It's not bad when compared to other full paradox games. It was just a bad game period. I've only ever played CK2 before it, so at least my perception is only coloured by that at best.
It was more of a waiting game, than a strategy game. There was no real strategy in I:R, as in no plan of action that lets you achieve long term goals/aims. You could do an insane amount of stuff that was practically magic without ever unpausing the game.
I've heard they have done many, many changes to fix this. But honestly it seems like the damage has already been done. Personally I've spent 173 hours in the game. Waiting until it became fun. It never really did. It got better I'm sure but I'm not touching it for years to come and going by steam charts many people made the same choice.
I guess I:R perfectly encapsulates "A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad." not in the literal sense, but more in perception.
It's not bad when compared to other full paradox games. It was just a bad game period. I've only ever played CK2 before it, so at least my perception is only coloured by that at best.
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March of the Eagles was actually an Europa Universalis title. I don't think it had anything to do with HoI4. It was a game that when released had some very good ideas, but some serious balancing issues and bugs and I think it only received a 1.01 patch at most.
Huh. Never knew that. Never played CKI.
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The thing is even with all the patches the game have recieved, including the removal of monarch Power have made little impact to make it into an interesting and fun strategy game, also it lack alot of quality of life features and other stuff that existed before it was released in other paradox games. Right now stuff like diplomacy and subjects are really underdeveloped and the economy is not really better than it was at release.
CK3 atleast don't seems to have any significant flaws and have strengths compared to the other paradox games, like an ingame encyclopedia, development upon the characters, a new interesting technology system and so on. It is a huge difference between Imperator: Rome, even the current version and what CK3 looks like it will be.
Imperator: Rome is a game about conquest and empire building but fail at making conquest and empire building fun and interesting. It would be like if CK3 fail at making characters fun and interesting, something that seems the completely opposite with new mechanics like stress.
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Oh huh I stand corrected then. I was just going off my vague memory about what others said, so maybe I misunderstood. I do know it just kinda appeared and then vanished just as quickly, at least in the grand scheme of things, kind of like Sengoku. Actually, I just checked Sengoku, and even Sengoku got more patches than MotE.
Never played it either, but I heard the stories from the ancient PI veterans that make even those of us who are veterans look young. CK1 was back in the day when the staff had to manually package and send out copies of the games or put patches in gaming magazines or something - least so I've heard.
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I remember having to get mods for movable windows (it is super confusing why they werent?) and compact event UI because those windows had a lot of dead empty space.
I:R is just baffling in how many mistakes it makes. Not in some side thing here and there that can easily be fixed. But at the very core of its design. Didn't help that they said they were happy with the state of I:R at launch.
Paradoxically enough the most fun I've gotten out of I:R was save editing in a custom family and character and playing it as if it was CK2. That's the only reason I have 173 hours in the game. But even after all that time I never really got where the supposed fun is.
The design decisions for I:R are bizarre. But if anything the failure of I:R gives me hope because it's a very obvious thing they can point to internally and go "We did wrong here. We need to not do this." Like people said it's not like this is the first time PDX has made an awful game. Every failure is a learning opportunity.
I've heard Victoria 2 was absolutely awful at launch and was elevated to godhood through the team doing an amazing job. But that might be an outlier.
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Agree, Imperator: Rome brought down reality upon them, it is like a student that get straight A but don't really try and then move up and get an F in their first test because they never had to work hard Before but learn and improve. CK3 is a game paradox will put basically Everything into so it don't become a fiasco and we have already seen that with the feudal contract rework.
Basically I feel like Imperator: Rome was the wakeup call, together with some poorly reviewed DLC and we have started to see quite some changes in how they develop their games and DLCs now.
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Theres also the fact that PDX isn't just a single blob hivemind entity. They have different teams, different directors and producers etc. And I'm pretty sure the director of CK3 isn't anyone who worked on I:R. If that is to anyones comfort.
I guess my point is that different people are making CK3 than the ones who made I:R. Same company, sure. But comparing the games directly isn't fair especially considering how CK3 development started before I:R? And how CK3 has CK2 to fall back upon. Which has been a surprise hit for PDX.
While I:R had... EU: Rome? Apparently from the sentiment on the forums it didn't even learn from the mistakes in that game either. Which is odd so I'm not sure if I should believe that.
tl;dr
Different people/team working on it.
Game has a solid vision.
Game has a solid prequel to fall back upon.
Team should, in theory, know what people want. (Backed up by game vision dev post)
Past failure of I:R is good in terms of a reason to be more cautious and take feedback more seriously
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For me personally, it is that I don't really grasp the core concept of IR: Who am I? There is a ruler and I can do stuff with him, make friends for him, but I'm not playing as him. There are dozens of other characters and while I can also interact with them and make them do a few things here and there, I'm not playing them either. Probably, the player is supposed to play the state, or its administrators, but then why are there these characters with their friends, their holdings, traits and schemes? Why can I control them all to some extend? And why are civil wars so bad, if I don't play the ruler but the state apparatus? I felt detached from the characters and the state at the same time. IR (todays version) has many great mechanics like loyalty, statesmenship and food (I very much appreciate their effort), but for me it still lacks an identification figure for the player. They tried to create a hybrid composed of EU4 and CK2, but while playing the state and playing a ruler are two things that work very well on their own, combining them feels weird. I tried it during one of the free trial weekends but it just didn't convince me yet.
What has all of that to do with CK3? Well, I simply think that while of course a lot of things can go wrong with the release of any game, CK3 at its core has a game play system that is proven to work. Also there is a large enough amount of CK2 players and many of them will - sooner or later - switch to CK3 (despite the 'lack' of features when compared to CK2, just have a look at Civ 5 to 6: there were many complaints, but the players moved to 6 anyways). That's why I am very certain that CK3 won't have this massive drop in player numbers that IR experienced.
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You are bureaucracy is the conclusion I had come up with when playing I:R.
It makes sense to me somehow. You aren't the spirit of a nation, but you aren't a character either. Only sometimes. It's vague, it's confusing, it's bureaucracy.
In all fairness I don't think I:R knows who you are and that's kind of an issue.
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Well CK, the first game was started its development by a (Russian?) Game studio before comming into paradox hands so the path of CK is a bit surprising indead.
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Indeed. The issue with I:R is to do with game design. The devs wanted to create a map-painter, only to realise no one wanted a map painter when the game is released.
Ck3 is build on stronger foundation in terms of game design. This is not to say there isn't any issue with the game design for CK3. I think there is game design issues regarding how they are going to implement non-feudal bureaucratic governments like the Byzantines in the game. But the feudal-game design is still going to let many players enjoy playing feudal Europe.
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I think people might have been fine with a map painter if it was sold as a map painter and made with the clear goal of being a map painter. But instead it came out with a map painter ethos for how systems work and how the country is managed but with little rump systems trying to model characters and population that kind of get in the way of map painting but aren't complete enough to be super interesting themselves. And it was marketed as a mix of EU, Vicky, and CK, which I think many players saw that as saying there'd be complex character interaction and complex population modelling (or, to some extent, they saw that as promising complex systems in whichever of those mechanics they most wanted), but I don' think that's what the devs meant by it.
Even though it's map-painty at its core it didn't really have a clear statement of what it wanted to be, so it struggled to incorporate disparate systems into a solid unit and players came up with their own ideas of what the focus was. You can see on the forums that players still have totally different conceptions of what the game should be - some want the game to push in a more CK direction with a big character focus, others want the devs to focus on the POPs and population management, others think the most important thing is more variation among regions and nations.
CK2 doesn't have the same problems. People play it in different ways and care more about different elements of the game, but there's a clear core focus of playing a character and managing your family and dynasty and vassals alongside your country.
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All games before CKII had terrible launches. EUIII was a shallow mess of a game. HoI3 was HoI3 (i.e. even the Devs admitted they fucked up; which is why I find people who rag on HoI4 so damned funny).
Victoria 2, while immense fun, is still a dumpster fire of a game (multiplayer is literal Hell on Earth). And those were the successful titles.
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It may be a more personal taste, but the CK3 map, compared to I:R for exemple, looks unpolished and barebones.
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The devs did say they saw it as a map-painter and laughed at people who said they wanted more than a mere-map painter.
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