this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2023
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PDX is one of the few companies I'll (barely) forgive for this behavior.
Their degree of experience and institutional knowledge on making systems that function well for strategy games is frankly unmatched, they're like 10ish years ahead of the rest of the genre, usually.
Employing those people for that length of time to build up the experience necessary to deliver consistency like this probably means you need a very reliable, predictable income stream, something you can count on like clockwork. That'll give you the freedom to let some random dude iterate the same thing for 10 years, making it gradually better and better.
Given how much room for improvement the grand strategy genre still has, and how difficult it seems to be to perfect compared to something like a shooter, I understand why this might be necessary to give any kind of high chance of continuing success.
So, I barely forgive them for this bs, more than I forgive others that do it. WoW pioneered this pattern, I think, and it did work for them.
Paradox releases a complete game, then continues to develop content for said game.
If you don't want it, don't buy it - but don't say it's incomplete just because they built something new for it 5 years later.
Well it is partially true in the newer games there are cases where the "main" game barely functions without the first two or three dlcs so they made the game intentionally bad.
Never once felt that way about a Paradox game.
Just because a DLC does a good job of expanding gameplay doesn't mean the base game is incomplete, it means they did a good job on the DLC. The fun part is the Venn of people who make this argument and people who bitch about content packs are damn near a circle.
Games are fucking expensive to make and they've gotten to slightly bump the price once in like 15-20 years. Paradox makes good games for niche audiences, then builds easier to produce solid DLC and content for those niche games to sustain a profit to keep the studio afloat. Sure there are companies bad about nickel and diming shit, but PDX ain't it.
You're making some good points here. But this doesn't explain why naval combat in every Paradox game seems to be a counterintuitive mess.
Minimal resources devoted to improving it because they don't consider it a core component, I imagine. The systems as they exist now are highly abstracted, but they do make some sense to a naval aficionado. They are a bit lazy though.
There's a lot of systems they could have, but don't. Internal politics are poorly modeled for instance, compared to how complex they actually are. These things would fall under that room for improvement category, which is very large still. This entire genre has only hit like 5% or less of its potential so far. Where several other genres are closer to 95%.
If you want genuinely accurate naval simulation though, you need specialists for that, it's not as easy as it sounds. Most games that try do pretty poorly unless they're focused on it. PTO by Koei was pretty good, back in the day, though that's probably my rose colored glasses talking.
Been making the same game for ten years.
“Complete” editions of the games sell for hundreds of dollars when not on a practically mandatory steam sale.
Developed an entire game based on naval combat in space, with a good ship designer and interesting events.
Still can’t make the naval units in HOI4 anything other than “click here to stop enemy from getting resources from water” and showing navy battles as an actual battleship board in a pop up.
People will pay hundreds of dollars for this.
Paradox developed themselves right into a niche, and then they charge a premium to the few people who enjoy staring at a map with gifs on it. They have barely innovated on the idea for 20 years. 20 years ago, we had the greatest grand strategy game ever released: Rome: Total War. Paradox has not even come close to touching the greatness of that game.