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Dev Diary #113 - Community Choice Event Pack

Greetings!

We’re all back, gathered from the holidays, and ready to set sail for 2023! Actually, most of us have been back for a few weeks by this point, working away on this year's big release, but we're not going to be talking about that just yet. That's not to say we're not going to in the future, but until we are ready to, we want to give you something to dig your teeth into as a community. This is the first of a small series of Dev Diaries about some more minor things, teasers, and today, about a brand-new community initiative!
But first, here’s a small teaser of something coming in the expansion:
teaser1.png

[Image - Teaser]

Later this year, after we’ve released the next big expansion and before we start working on the next large project, we’ll have a period where we have the time and opportunity to work on an event pack. For the last event pack we chose ‘friends and foes’ as the core theme, as it was something practically everyone in the team felt strongly about, and something that needed more content in the game. Since then, we’ve had so many ideas for future event packs, both from within the team and outside, and this time it’s harder to choose…

Therefore we’d like to invite all of you to help us decide which theme to pick! We have three themes that we’ve curated, which means a few things; each theme has designers on the team that are passionate about them, and we know roughly what free feature we’d like to add to the update that will accompany the event pack: generally we'll be aiming for something with a similar size and impact as Friends & Foes' Memories system, which heavily ties into the events we're making but is relevant across the game as a whole.

We don’t have final names for the event packs yet, but as we enjoy alliteration here’s what we’re calling them and a very brief description of each:

Wards & Wardens - Anything childhood-related, with themes such as: playing as a child, being a guardian, handling children in court, and so on. A deep dive into what being a child in the Middle Ages was actually like, and what guardianship meant in practical terms.

Love & Lust - An exploration of more intimate relationships, with themes such as: expanded seduction, romance, married life, and so on. This would be a great time to allow lovers and spouses to take on a larger role in the game.

Villains & Vagabonds - Events and content around Dread and Tyranny, exploring what it means to be dreaded, leveraging your fearsome reputation, making dread more visible, and the consequences and opportunities of being a tyrant. It’d also be interesting to explore the other side of the coin from Dread - fairness, and honor.

Even though this event pack is something we’ll work on later this year, it’s good to get your input now - this way we can start working on it without delay as soon as the next big expansion is out! As we have a lot of talented event-crafters on the design team, we feel quite confident that we can adapt to whatever theme you, as a community, choose.

If this turns out to be a popular activity, it is possible that we will do it again in the future! The themes that do not get chosen this time will likely make a comeback, alongside some new challengers.

The poll to vote is located in a separate forum thread here. Voting will begin today and you will have until January 27, 8am CET to discuss the different themes and cast your vote. We’re looking forward to seeing which theme you like the most!


EventPackThemeVote.png
 
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Wokeg said:
I solemnly swear that if Love & Lust wins the poll, I will add non-wolf pelt ways to prove your love to other characters.

By contrast, for every percentile that Love & Lust loses the poll, I will add one additional piece of wolf-only content to the romance scheme.

These are my terms. Vote as you will.
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So... the more Love and Lust loses the more wolf content you will add? Guess I should change my vote away from Love and Lust then so we can get more of that spicy wolf content...
 
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Wards and Wardens for me because I feel love & Lust will only add more of those crazy cheating events with more bastard sons and daughters as result since in the base game they went overboard with these events which resulted in most of us that don't like this having to use mods that stops these. Villains and Vagebonds don't really do it for me either so yeah wards and wardens as we can definitely use more events for kids.
 
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Audio-Man said:
I'm not so sure that community really is into event packs.
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I didn't think it was that bad as the Steam Reviews have shown it. For me it was always an completely optional DLC as the Patch around it was solid. It also came out in the worst time around the price increase debacle.
 
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Audio-Man said:
I'm not so sure that community really is into event packs.View attachment 939264
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I'm not sure that "the community" and "people who leave reviews on Steam" are necessarily the same thing. I remember when the Witcher 3 game got a load of negative Steam reviews years after launch simply because people didn't like season 2 of the Netflix Witcher show.
 
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Tschobo said:
I didn't think it was that bad as the Steam Reviews have shown it. For me it was always an completely optional DLC as the Patch around it was solid. It also came out in the worst time around the price increase debacle.
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Played myself and the content is actually good quality. Feuds are fun (although they do need a bit of balancing).
Also this pack kind of got review-bombed a little bit by people who were angry because they thought it should have been a free update, or people who saw the pictures of the cat catapult event and went nuts because they thought the entire pack was going to be like that.
 
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johnty5 said:
I'm not sure that "the community" and "people who leave reviews on Steam" are necessarily the same thing. I remember when the Witcher 3 game got a load of negative Steam reviews years after launch simply because people didn't like season 2 of the Netflix Witcher show.
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Seconded. I generally find them to be not very helpful since they seem to mostly function as a barometer of whatever the gaming community is irrationally angry about at any given time.
 
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Voted for LL. It is wild to me how little content features our spouse in a game that is focused on a following a family through the ages.

Doesn't look good for a win, but I have one small but essential QOL request that I hope can be implemented regardless: LET US ATTEMPT TO BEFRIEND OUR LOVERS AND (ESPECIALLY!) SOULMATES. PLEASE! I truly don't understand why becoming soulmates with someone blocks an intentional attempt to befriend them, especially because you can go in the reverse order no problem (friend to soulmate). Thanks!
 
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to be honest now, children and the rearing thereof could always use more content. ideally a complex regency system to allow simulation of one of the few ways women could grasp power and authority but, you know, since thats really big, some more events to make your grandchildren not characters you forget about sometimes would be cool

it would be a mistake to set the focus on events for WHILE youre playing a child, to be clear. some is fine, but if this one wins im kinda more hoping to see a noticeable uptick in interactions with my wards and close relatives, at present theres genuinely no reason to even remember they exist
 
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Being frank, I see no point in LL pack when everyone in the realm is having an affair.
That means events are going to be firing in the background all the time, and is going to get super annoying seeing everyone with X effect, due to ''LL event''

WW sounds good... until you realise there's still no regencies and most people end up with a dozen kids in their court, so you'll end up seeing all the events after a few play sessions.

V V can either be great or completely useless depending of your playstyle. I rarely use dread, unless my character has traits that synergyse with it. Execute some rando in your dungeons every now and then to have 30 dread and that's it.
However, if a character having dread can affect others, that can be interesting. How to deal with a neighbor that has taken impaling people as a hobby? What to do with a vassal that is executing people left and right?
 
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PDS_Noodle said:
Friends & Foes wasn't just a whole load of events, remember. Yes there were events and yes they took time, but it also included an entire code system (memories, programmer time), a script system (House Feuds, designer time), multiple new event backgrounds (2D artist time), multiple new animations (3D art time), music (audio time) and a whole host of other bits and pieces. We call them Event Packs and that puts a natural emphasis on the time spent making events (which is admittedly considerable) but these are not small endeavours we chuck together in a week and a half on a whim, they're concerted multi-discipline efforts.

As such, I can guarantee you there's an opportunity cost to doing any one of those. So choose wisely!
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Soooo... With all this talk about the code system and the script system... Is it possible that, for example, with the event pack Wards and Wardens we will get a regency system?

Also, I really hope you guys learn from Friends and Foes and give up on the various Cat-a-pults and similar immersion braking events. Alternatively, it would be a good idea to group these events into some "cringe group" and add a new game rule where we could choose not to show events from that group. I understand that you need to focus on the new generation of teenage gamers as well, but most of us would still rather play a medieval grand strategy simulator and not an interactive meme generator.

So much for my contribution to constructive criticism. Otherwise, great job and I can't wait for the next expansion.
 
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Monalba said:
Being frank, I see no point in LL pack when everyone in the realm is having an affair.
That means events are going to be firing in the background all the time, and is going to get super annoying seeing everyone with X effect, due to ''LL event''

WW sounds good... until you realise there's still no regencies and most people end up with a dozen kids in their court, so you'll end up seeing all the events after a few play sessions.

V V can either be great or completely useless depending of your playstyle. I rarely use dread, unless my character has traits that synergyse with it. Execute some rando in your dungeons every now and then to have 30 dread and that's it.
However, if a character having dread can affect others, that can be interesting. How to deal with a neighbor that has taken impaling people as a hobby? What to do with a vassal that is executing people left and right?
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Yeah, this is my concern as well. Thinking about it more, it's troubling to me to add on events to mechanics that are already deeply flawed and broken unless those underlying mechanics are getting a revamp.

Seduction is often so easy it's kind of a joke, and other than plotting against others or having some bastards there's no real narrative purpose or deep events beyond the love. I know it's out of the scope of this timeframe, but could you imagine being able to do something like the Trojan War? A foreign ruler seduces and whisks away the King's wife, which leads to massive warfare and invasion. Those are the kind of stories I want to develop and RP, but I think it's less flavor holding things back than actual underlying mechanics.

Childhood events are fine but it still happens that it tends to be min/maxed to hell (either pick yourself as the guardian to micro or pick someone with the highest stats in the area you want your kid to specialize in, there's no real reward other than a small opinion boost if you give them to a family member or powerful vassal. Like, if you send your second son to be raised by a powerful vassal and he ends up far more competent than your heir, that powerful vassal's relationship with your second son should MATTER and make it far more likely there's a rebellion in his name)

Villainy still uses the dread system, which while certainly improved is still lacking a lot of depth in how it operates and it seems very... inconsistent and unexplained, I'll say.

On the one hand, maybe some additional events will help with these issues, but I'm worried that the more content we pile on top of broken systems the harder it's going to be able to fix those underlying systems going forward.
 
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L&L sounds most interesting for me.

That said, if the event pack is the same quality as the last one, I'm not sure I'd buy it. There is a regular problem in the game's events where they don't properly check their targets or the basic circumstances (e.g. not checking if your current spouse was the spouse when you had an affair, if the target is a child), or even just outright bugs, e.g. with events describing supposed interaction between two people having same person in both "positions". If we are talking about the full game with many features, where events are only a small part of the whole, the issues in them is one thing. But when Paradox decides to take money for content that is 100% events, their usual level of quality is just not enough.
I can see that in many cases there is talented writing and good ideas behind it,but basically if you are not putting sufficient QA resources into checking these kind of things, it often doesn't matter how good the design was in theory - in the issues are common enough, they smear the whole impression. And this is even more important for DLCs where you take comparable money for a smaller amount of content, which should be easier to test.
 
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I voted for Wards and Wardens because I feel it's the one thing you're guaranteed to interact with every playthrough. You might not always be interested in romance or love, and you might(or always) be a good guy(though you might interact with villains on the regular), but considering the nature of the game you'll at least always have children(or have to deal with being one).

Also a part of me is hoping for a tie in to a regency mechanic, but I promise the devs I won't be upset if its not involved at all :p
 
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I'm voting for M&S (Messages & Settings) because it is the most requested feature in the game, and I think it would greatly enhance most people's experience, while negatively impacting nobody's! :)

What, you say? It is not one of the options!? You are a silly man to say that; it is by far the most upvoted suggestion in the suggestions sub-forum! To think they would pay no attention to that is silliness indeed!

;)
 
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Karlington said:
I'm voting for M&S (Messages & Settings) because it is the most requested feature in the game, and I think it would greatly enhance most people's experience, while negatively impacting nobody's! :)

What, you say? It is not one of the options!? You are a silly man to say that; it is by far the most upvoted suggestion in the suggestions sub-forum! To think they would pay no attention to that is silliness indeed!

;)
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I have to respectfully disagree with this. I HATED the old message system and I'm glad its gone. I always thought it was poorly explained and fiddly, plus you had to manually reset it after every update.
 
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