Update from the Developers

[ruhrbaron]

Greetings all,

At the risk of stating the obvious, the release of Graveyard of Empires has not gone the way we wanted. Today, I want to post a mini-retrospective that explains some of what happened leading up to the release, and how we plan on acting on the results of that and on subsequent feedback and reception moving forwards.

One of the most important parts of the pre-release process we perform in Studio Gold is the Go/No-Go meeting. This is where each discipline; QA, Tech, Design, Marketing, Business et al, present their perspective on the state of the game and expectations on the likely reception thereof. We do this so we’re all on the same page, and so we can jointly arrive at a consensus on whether to launch or not. In GoE’s case, while we identified some areas of uncertainty mostly relating to dev diary feedback, we agreed that there was nothing out of the ordinary here, and that a release at this stage was acceptable. I don’t want to diminish my role here or throw anyone under the bus: as Game Director I can overrule in either direction, and I did not - I did not see what I should have seen.

Collectively, and personally, we were quite clearly wrong. As an organization we were unaware of the issues present in this release, and this represents a serious need for some inward thinking on how we arrived at this decision, and how we reorganize ourselves to prevent it occurring again. I have few answers for you right now as we’re focusing on the short-term goals for putting Graveyard of Empires right, but we have no intention of sweeping this under the rug.

From a long term perspective, this is now the second release of a Country pack which has performed worse than expected. Review score is actually a surprisingly difficult metric to evaluate. It is better to think of it as a snapshot that, on balance, gives us an idea of how much of the community considers everything surrounding a release to be a net positive or negative. This can include price, quality, scope, overall opinion of a company, and many other things. What we tend to do is aggregate the key sentiments of negative and positive reviews and work out, on balance, where the main points for and against are. The two main negatives on Trial of Allegiance were, in first place the regional price adjustments in two specific markets, followed by scope. It’s a bit early to say for Graveyard of Empires, but first impressions are content direction & quality (as we’ve acknowledged), followed by scope.

Both regional pricing and content quality are things that I would hope are relevant only to the individual releases here. They’re localized. Scope, on the other hand, represents a clearer area where we need to offer more on a fundamental level. Scope in this context, is the nature of what we’re offering: focus trees, mechanics, 3d models; the whole package. Content-only releases are popular with some HoI fans, but on balance are not enough to resonate with the majority of the community. Once again, I don’t have an answer yet here, but we’re aware of it, and will be evaluating how to make these releases more exciting to more people.

And finally, in the short term, I want to address our plans for Graveyard of Empires. Beginning this week, we have a series of patches and updates planned for GoE as well as for the base game in order to both fix and improve content that you found lacking. I sincerely appreciate all those who have reached out with constructive suggestions. We have all hands on this endeavour right now.

Timeline:

• 12th March - Patch (Operation HEAD)
• 20th March - Patch (Operation KNEE)
• Late March - War Effort (Operation SHOULDER)
• April - Updates & Changes to GoE content

/Arheo

View attachment 1263791​

Ive waited for a statement before commenting or writing to IR but as a shareholder and customer I'm genuinely irritated as to how GoE could ever see the light of day in a state like this because i do believe this fiasco hurts the game and pdx in a pretty significant way. PDX enjoys a lot of trust by their customers to ship great games. Shipping something as fundamentally broken as this dlc betrays buyers of it and the expansion pass at large. Suffice to say, i am not going to buy the next expansion pass and i wish i could get my money back for GoE.

the tibet kerfluffle and dev doxxing over this dlc is utterly regrettable and unacceptable, however.

I think it would be best if u talked to your stellaris colleagues about how they manage a long running game with lots of intertwined content, while not perfect (hello astral planes) the stellaris devs have been managing the expansion pass and development in a way where i trust them to not deliver something for which i paid in advance that will make me not regret buying the whole thing entirely. Thanks to the custodians i have faith that the dev team is going to revise old, broken content or address pressing QoL matters in a timely manner. The open betas break games frequently but they're the most helpful thing for the game and have always gone a long way towards bringing QA and the development forward.

Whereas with Hoi4 in 2025, there are too many areas of the game in dire need of dev attention. I just would like to mention the click spam for the sake of clicking things. QoL has been dearly missing from the game for the past two years. from the top of my head:

- managing big navies and airwings is super click intensive and tedious
- always designing the same ships, airplanes and tanks and companies across games gets old fast
- i think blueprints/ templates that we could take from game to game would address this sufficiently
- division love retreating through enemy territory or retreating straight into combat.
- the AI doesnt contest the air above sea zones much at all but loves stockpiling an absurd amount of infantry equipment
- the use of aircraft roles and airwing updates could need some polishing. any aircraft designed with mission xyz can only ever be updated to aircrafts with mission xyz, so im basically never going to design naval bombers that can drop mines for example.

 

[ruhrbaron]

Would the next update affect save game? I'm currently having a great ironman game run, don't wanna re-start again.

u can always roll back to an older version via steam.

 

[Kamis51]

Ethiopia already has way too many nerfs. It doesn't need Italy getting EVEN MORE buffs. I have more fun playing Aussa than Ethiopia, as Aussa has no nerfs and a good National Spirit.

In fact, this brings me to another problem with the last few DLC: lots of countries have National Spirits that heavily nerf the country and make it unfun, without an easy way to remove the paling gemrnay o

 

[Kamis51]

I'm about a historical Germany game, ruined by Italy messing up the entire war preparation from 1936, involving in endless war, sometimes even starting World War 2 early because some unimportant small nation, Ethiopia, joined the Allies.

 

[51states]

Some of the older content is really dated and the interactions are broken with the new DLC.

Some things never worked at all. I've played this game since release and have never seen the British attack Mers al Kabir or properly conduct operation Torch unless you do it yourself. US naval equipment have the wrong equipment tags since those were a thing. Japan isn't as aggressive as it should be with its naval invasions, I have never seen it regularly attempt to take Guadalcanal so the Pacific war never actually happens (You only need to take 3 islands to be within striking distance of Japan)

In this country pack The AI is also incapable of conquering Iran within the timeframe the game gives itself before Iran joins the Axis. So basically the game runs sort of as it should on Historical if you use only 3 nations (Germany, USSR or the UK)

My expectation if I buy a country pack is
1. A historical focus tree (and non historical flavor focuses)
2. That the historical focus tree better railroads the country into its WW2 historical actions.
3. That these actions interact properly with the relevant countries who haven't had reworks in a while.

I think this DLC misses the mark on all 3.

 

[Ossiv]

I'm about a historical Germany game, ruined by Italy messing up the entire war preparation from 1936, involving in endless war, sometimes even starting World War 2 early because some unimportant small nation, Ethiopia, joined the Allies.

For me the endless Italo-Ethiopian war is a problem, if I play Germany. Accepting Italy's request to join Axis can mean suddenly Germany is at war against the Allies, at wrong time and wrong reason.

Developers, please make Italo-Ethiopian war that AI plays to end in some point of time. Or remove Ethiopia from the Allies. IRL Italy was not at war with the Allies prior to 1940.

 

[Dimitri _Udaloy]

It is funny, the moment the dlc was released it had 75% good reviews. When I checked the next day it was 20%.

About the diary itself, I am not a "game director" but a simple consoomer and I realized very soon the dlc was going to be slop. I would give extensive feedback, but it basically goes down to being tired of all the content revolving around focuses trees that are always the same, lack of historicity and unsufferable memes in everything. You are developing the base game, you are not modders, you have access to the source code, do something with it.

Mostly it is due to the xhinese players kept on offering "not recommend". They had been prepared and plotted to make huge amount of notrecommend for many days in xhina social media.

The number of them is quite huge. It is nearly impossible to crack down the comments score of the dlc within such a short time without the xhinese players' floodin, And which is due to the "we all known" issue.

 

[51states]

This implies to me that the focus tree model has poor cost-effectiveness, in that the ratio of development effort required to player interest in the output (and, thus, willingness to pay for a new DLC) is worse than for other content or mechanics.
(There's some obvious reasons why this might be the case: a good mechanic is generalizable to the whole game, while any given focus tree are specific to a particular country, often one that most players would likely only play once or a few times and many not at all)

In the short term, I'd just put this down as another argument for HoI5 redoing the concept currently fulfilled by focuses, but looking further ahead I'll speculate a bit on whether the whole concept of country pack DLCs should be abandoned, with new focus trees only bundled with larger expansions. Certainly each country pack seems less popular than the last one.

These are great points but which new mechanics are viable and won't break the game? Food production? More complex equipment deployment? Sea lines of communication?(Moving men and material around the world is really simplified because fuel and food costs are pretty abstracted).

I have always seen the historical focus trees at least as the railroad to make sure WW2 happens when it should. The rest are just flavor if a particular person wants to have fun with a particular country.

 

[lilcritt]

After the South America DLC, paradox also apologized and announced four War Effort operations. I am wondering, Operation Hamster is already nine months late. I guess it's not coming anymore, is it?


Planned were: Each month 1 Operation.
Operation Grouse – Released in April
Operation Badger – May (Took place in June)
Operation Davidson – June (Maybe took place on August 29th, but was never officially named)
Operation Hamster – July (Did not happen)


Will there still be an Operation Hamster? I mean..
It's a Hamster. It must be one of the best Operations.

View attachment 1263983

 

[Slippyfopp]

For me the endless Italo-Ethiopian war is a problem, if I play Germany. Accepting Italy's request to join Axis can mean suddenly Germany is at war against the Allies, at wrong time and wrong reason.

Developers, please make Italo-Ethiopian war that AI plays to end in some point of time. Or remove Ethiopia from the Allies. IRL Italy was not at war with the Allies prior to 1940.

The best way to do that IMO is not to buff Italy, but to give Ethiopia a National Spirit which A) raises their surrender limit to at least 50%, and B) can be easily removed by a player, but will never be removed by the AI on historical, similar to France's Disjointed Government. If that were done, I imagine the Italo-Ethiopian war would go much smoother for Italy, even if half of Ethiopia's other nerfs were removed.

 

[genyuab]

I'm amazed that Paradox considered there was nothing out of the ordinary here even after the fury brought by the India Focus Tree

 

[Skylax]

Quick suggestion:
The Home Assistance development team has a great campaign every two years. They start a "What the heck?"-month in order to:

"we take the time topause, listen, and dive deep into the little things that maybe you go“What the heck?!” about Home Assistant"

You could do the same with HoI. Start a "What the heck HoI" campaign on this forum and reddit or whatever channels you supply asking players what their number one annoyance about HoI is feature- or mechanic-wise. Then actually take time to fix the worst annoyances and the countless unaddressed bugs. Not a year or together with another DLC release, do it in a month or two. Yes, you can't charge $20 for this, but put your money where your mouth is when claiming that you want to listen to the community more. Try to re-establish the relationship with the community because lets face it: the last two years have not been great for PDX. You put profit first, which is ok to a degree. I am sure some people earned a lot of money, but this is not a sustainable path.

 

[stid33]

Just tried to finish my first non historical game and the lag becomes unbearable much earlier (around 1941) due to so many civil wars and smaller wars going on. I know there has already been some remarks about a lack of testing so I'll not venture there, but in terms of scope I would hope non historical is also tested. Clearly these wars need to end earlier (I think supply hubs are the issue, certainly in Afghanistan from the new DLC) but also the Soviet civil war can still drag on (and freezes my game for about 10 seconds when it kicks off).

I have a really good PC but it seems that it gets slower playing HOI with every release. I suspect releasing new countries from the start like Jordan, Syria etc don't help.

 

[Merrivale]

As someone who has been around since EU2, I think I'm in a pretty good position to judge how this game has been handled when it comes to pace of updates and customer interaction. And I honestly have to say it might be the worst PDS game when it comes to pace of development and community interaction. Even considering the pre-DLC games, which had less of both than you see now. They at least had the excuse of much smaller teams. This game is coming up on 9 years-old. In those nine years, we have had nine major (non-country pack) DLCs. Stellaris was released at roughly the same time. It has had 8 "major" expansions and two "mechanical" expansions so the number is roughly the same. But Stellaris has had, by my count, 108 patches, including 31 major patches. HOI4 has had 87 patches, including just 15 major patches. Since release HOI4 has had 270 dev diaries, of those 122 came in the first three years after release, leaving just 148 diaries over the past 6 years. The diaries have also been increasingly late in the development cycle and crammed into just a few weeks. Stellaris has had 339 dev diaries over, again, essentially the same amount of time. And I have to say, while Stellaris is an easy comparison, the crown jewel of Paradox leaves all of you in the dust. 371 dev diaries in its first 9 years, 109 patches in that timeframe and 34 major patches (so similar to the Stellaris workload there, but no custodian team at EU4 at this time). And look at what Johan is doing with EU5. Everyone at Paradox could stand to learn a thing or two from the best in the business. He's abrupt, terse, and sometimes grumpy in his interactions with us. But he listens in a way that almost no one else at Paradox does. I think it's telling that, seemingly alone of the studio heads, he never even considered removing message settings from his games, he thought they were a core part of the experience. Everyone else ripped them out only to later have to put them back in, with one notable exception we are discussing here today.

What all of this tells me is that HOI4 has taken the development model of all changes in major patches tied to major DLCs, no changes otherwise. 15 major patches vs. 9 major DLCs. 15 major patches in 9 years is less than two a year on average. The communication model around these patches is let's rev up the marketing right before they go out to get people excited. But we aren't actually looking for real feedback and improvement. And your customer base has been telling you, for a long time now, that they do not like this model.

It appears to me that the deepest explanation for all of this is the focus trees. The structure of change in this game has rapidly become centered around these trees and I would guess that every DLC is first and foremost centered around "which trees are we going to change for this one?" The second, and in my opinion far more damaging decision in this regard, is that you've decided you cannot just do all the majors. At this point the balance of the game exists in these trees, so like or not to have it truly be balanced all the majors need "upgraded" trees. But here we are nine years in and Japan doesn't have one. Germany just got its upgraded tree. And I take Arheo at his word when he says that these trees take this much time, in other words doing just one major tree a year is all the team can do. So once the decision was made in 2019 to take these trees to the extreme we see now, if you add up GB, France, US, USSR, Germany, Italy, and Japan, you get seven years. And here we are in 2025, about to finally finish them. Meanwhile you've burned tons and tons of precious dev time on minor trees that, as you admit, most of your customers don't care about. It was a bad choice but it's water under the bridge now.

So if you are really taking a deep look and looking to make positive change, start by reconsidering your base assumptions about this game. Look at what people have been asking for, for years now. Work on that stuff first. Rebalance your development cycle so you aren't trying to hit home runs twice a year but produce more singles and doubles along the way. Stop creating intricate mini-systems that apply to only one country and work on more universal mechanics. Work on making the game more user friendly (there are TONS of thoughts about this in the forum you can pick up, from saved templates across games to easier access to basic information in a ledger style to making the production system less opaque, to a ton more). In other words, spend some serious time working on the nine years of UI and tech debt that you've been too ready to push off for another day while chasing minor country mission trees. For interacting with us, for a start just do more of it. Don't be too wedded to all of your ideas and be open to changing some of them based on our feedback. I don't know how useful those surveys Stellaris and now Vicky are doing, but maybe you should do those. But only if you really mean it. If you don't have any intention of truly taking our feedback into account, don't get people's hopes up.

From the beginning I've felt the HOI4 team, which I do realize has turned over at this point, had the most my way or the highway approach of any PDS game. You were meant to play the game in a very specific way and the developers were not too interested in people who wanted something different. Now, I will say I think this mostly worked, it appears the game is a smash hit. But if you are serious about continuing its lifespan in a way that is received more positively, I think it's time to put that approach aside.

 

[MrMcQue]

Dang. I guess this is a sign for me to replay FarCry 3 again. Especially now after they added achievements on Steam.

 

[withche.07]

You could add this Azerbaijani general to game.

Samad bey Rafibeyli - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Treviranus]

There, there, I know these country packs haven't done well lately, but you just keep going at it, put one foot ahead at the time and you'll accomplish whatever you have set your sights on. Wasn't it always clear that Trial of Allegiance and Graveyard of Empires would be a bit more niche? Don't beat yourself up, a swing and a miss, it happens. Sure, some people have been a bit negative, but when you crush that next DLC they'll be right back in the fold. Just take your time and make the best DLC that you can!

Did I personally buy either of the country packs? Thus far I haven't. Wanted to wait for how they are received by the community for once and I also wasn't sure if I'm going to play in either region of the globe all that much.

Greetings all,

At the risk of stating the obvious, the release of Graveyard of Empires has not gone the way we wanted. Today, I want to post a mini-retrospective that explains some of what happened leading up to the release, and how we plan on acting on the results of that and on subsequent feedback and reception moving forwards.

One of the most important parts of the pre-release process we perform in Studio Gold is the Go/No-Go meeting. This is where each discipline; QA, Tech, Design, Marketing, Business et al, present their perspective on the state of the game and expectations on the likely reception thereof. We do this so we’re all on the same page, and so we can jointly arrive at a consensus on whether to launch or not. In GoE’s case, while we identified some areas of uncertainty mostly relating to dev diary feedback, we agreed that there was nothing out of the ordinary here, and that a release at this stage was acceptable. I don’t want to diminish my role here or throw anyone under the bus: as Game Director I can overrule in either direction, and I did not - I did not see what I should have seen.

Collectively, and personally, we were quite clearly wrong. As an organization we were unaware of the issues present in this release, and this represents a serious need for some inward thinking on how we arrived at this decision, and how we reorganize ourselves to prevent it occurring again. I have few answers for you right now as we’re focusing on the short-term goals for putting Graveyard of Empires right, but we have no intention of sweeping this under the rug.

From a long term perspective, this is now the second release of a Country pack which has performed worse than expected. Review score is actually a surprisingly difficult metric to evaluate. It is better to think of it as a snapshot that, on balance, gives us an idea of how much of the community considers everything surrounding a release to be a net positive or negative. This can include price, quality, scope, overall opinion of a company, and many other things. What we tend to do is aggregate the key sentiments of negative and positive reviews and work out, on balance, where the main points for and against are. The two main negatives on Trial of Allegiance were, in first place the regional price adjustments in two specific markets, followed by scope. It’s a bit early to say for Graveyard of Empires, but first impressions are content direction & quality (as we’ve acknowledged), followed by scope.

Both regional pricing and content quality are things that I would hope are relevant only to the individual releases here. They’re localized. Scope, on the other hand, represents a clearer area where we need to offer more on a fundamental level. Scope in this context, is the nature of what we’re offering: focus trees, mechanics, 3d models; the whole package. Content-only releases are popular with some HoI fans, but on balance are not enough to resonate with the majority of the community. Once again, I don’t have an answer yet here, but we’re aware of it, and will be evaluating how to make these releases more exciting to more people.

And finally, in the short term, I want to address our plans for Graveyard of Empires. Beginning this week, we have a series of patches and updates planned for GoE as well as for the base game in order to both fix and improve content that you found lacking. I sincerely appreciate all those who have reached out with constructive suggestions. We have all hands on this endeavour right now.

Timeline:

• 12th March - Patch (Operation HEAD)
• 20th March - Patch (Operation KNEE)
• Late March - War Effort (Operation SHOULDER)
• April - Updates & Changes to GoE content

/Arheo

View attachment 1263791​

 

[pheonicia]

Is there going to be any changes to how you package together DLC in the future?

I am pretty upset that I can’t get a refund for GoE because I bought the expansion pack last year before the DLC.

I was upset to find out that since I had bought Gotterdammerung, is still have to buy the expansion pass at full price later on. That was not made clear to me when Gotterdammerung came out and steam wouldn't let me return it.

Yes

Have you ever considered doing scenario packs instead of country packs?

Like, instead of doing every focus path for 3-5 nations, instead doing 1 path for every nation involved in a specific scenario so they can all be linked together and you don't have to worry about tying in new trees after the fact.

For example a "rise of the empire" pack that just focuses on GB's Edward the 8th monarchist branch, and every dominion and major would get one focus tree path added that would specifically tie into that.

 

[Duke_Dave]

Hopefully any meaningful changes to GoE are communicated in advance, so the community can contribute and help fix problems. The Port problem was mentioned several times before release. Also wrong portraits, I have to check Iraq again but I think Midfai has the wrong portrait. Also his trait doesn't reallly make sense.

 

[lilcritt]

Dang. I guess this is a sign for me to replay FarCry 3 again. Especially now after they added achievements on Steam.

The real joke here being that you can buy about 3 farcry 3 copies for the same price as this DLC right now.