Stellaris Dev Diaries #317 - Ad astra per aspera

[Eladrin]

With the two games sharing the same framework, are there plans for features developed or expanded upon in one game to migrate to the other?

I absolutely want to steal some of the things they added.

 

[Alfray Stryke]

What new features are you most impressed by?

Me personally, their tutorial.

 

[PDX-Ruk]

Would you say that someone who knows nothing about Star Trek should buy this game? I was never attracted by SF franchises but I do have 2000 hours in Stellaris. I don't know if the Star Trek theme would affect my enjoyment, positively or negatively. Also, how different is this game from Stellaris? Different enough to be worth the 30 euro-energy credits?

I won't block you from buying it, but when an internal review starts with "I don't know anything about Star Trek" I am usually in for a negative review. A lot of the good feels from this game is how it resonates with existing knowledge, in the same way that say, Crusader Kings, or HoI does. You know the factions, you understand the conflicts and when events happen it hits harder.


The first time I understood that Infinite was special, was during a pre-alpha build, where we had some basic systems up and running (warp, some ship models, some events) and I was tracking along and saw the message that Bajor had invaded Qo'nos. This hit me in a way that no event popup in Stellaris had ever done, and I knew we had struck gold.

In a internal preview, I read the line that they were playing normally, doing events, clearing notifications, until a message saying "Admiral Picard has died at the age of 103" and it was at this point they paused the game and took a deep breath.

These moments are the real reason the game resonates, and I worry that if you don't have any familiarity, the game might feel hollow.

I know my marketing manager will hate me for saying this, but target audience is Trekkies. We put in a good bit of work to streamline the game, but Trek knowledge was something we expected everyone to have on game start.

 

[PDX-Ruk]

will custodians attention be diverted to this mod? if so will they get additional staffing?

This is not a Studio Green project - I am the only one officially assigned this project.

 

[PDX-Ruk]

I'm not sure why this is getting downvotes. It's a separate game that gets its own dev diaries. It shouldn't take over the Stellaris ones too. They could have just made a special post like they do for announcements or other notable things and not taken up the dev diary slot. It's pretty clear this was probably a decision made by bean counters who wanted to advertise the new game as widely as possible and figured Stellaris nerds would show up to dev diary. It worked but I'm not happy about it.

Three reasons:
1) I am the Producer for Stellaris, I throw my weight around, I do what I want.
2) We launch on a Thursday. Stellaris Dev Diary go out on Thursday, Infinite Dev logs go out on Friday. It made sense to align the efforts on this and have Stellaris support its sibling game.
3) We are worried Stellaris players will think this is Stellaris 2.0 or something, some type of sneaky cash grab. We need to step up and say that yes, it exists, it's not Stellaris, but it's still a part of the family. We love it for what it is, and we all love Trek.

 

[Eladrin]

I'm glad Eladrin got a rest at least

To be totally honest, last week was our staff conference so I likely would have had to skip either last week or this week regardless.

Next week I'll also be travelling, but I have a dev diary prepared. Will probably be a bit late though.

 

[Eladrin]

I mean, their QA hasn't really gotten better and its been a significant problem especially in Stellaris.

Our QA process, especially on Stellaris, is much better than it used to be. Things still slip through, and there are still improvements that can be made, but these days major changes go through an immediate QA pass on the merge before it goes into the main branch. The last two releases haven't required an unplanned hotfix.