Our first release of 2024 was Update 1.6 back in March, and I consider it our low point of the year. While the update itself contained a lot of nice improvements, it was released in a pretty rough shape and also (contrary to our expectations at the time) had worse overall performance for a majority of users. This felt, in all honesty, more than a little embarrassing to me since I had stated improved performance to be one of our goals with the update.
The reason this happened is simply that, even though we had made a plethora of performance improvements, other changes (principally AI improvements and changes to migration) degraded performance more than these improvements could make up for. What this made us realize is that our internal tools for monitoring performance were simply inadequate to the task, and our Tech Lead spent a considerable amount of time expanding and improving on something we call ‘The Performance Dashboard’, which now monitors not just overall performance but also provides a plethora of useful breakdowns.
As an example of new functionality added to the dashboard, the new tools contain a heatmap of the most performance-intensive parts of the game (such as updating pop growth and adjusting trade volumes) with a 2-week history that lets us immediately spot if a change to a particular part of the game causes it to become slower so that we can take immediate action. All of this, alongside some extra allocation of programming resources, allowed us to release both updates 1.7 and 1.8 (as always, on average - individual hardware variation unfortunately means performance improvements are never going to be universal) with significant performance improvements despite all the new features those updates introduced.
In addition to general performance monitoring, the Performance Dashboard also tracks more specific data such as the slowest events, which lets us quickly spot when suboptimally written triggers start to impact overall performance. It’s worth noting that something being yellow or red here isn’t inherently bad - it’s okay for a complex event to use up more computing power so long as it all adds up to a reasonable level.
However, I’m getting a little bit ahead of myself now. Returning to update 1.6, it of course wasn’t all bad. On the good side, the update ended up being dubbed ‘The UX Update’ as it contained a lot of UX improvements, ranging from simple quality of life changes to more significant changes such as formation map marker consolidation and the addition of a proper migration map mode. The most significant and well received new UX feature was probably the Pop Census Panel, which allows you to truly dig down into the nitty-gritty details of your population. The Trains Bonus Pack free DLC we released alongside 1.6 of course also merits a mention, as honestly, who doesn’t like free trains?
If 1.6 was our low point of 2024, then Update 1.7 and Sphere of Influence, released in June, was definitely the high point! Both the expansion and the update itself performed extremely well, and were very positively received by the community. In particular I want to mention the Building Ownership Rework, a massive months-long effort to create more complex relationships between Buildings, Pops and Countries. There was some internal debate about whether we should really spend so much of our available development time overhauling the economic core of the game for a diplomacy-oriented expansion, but doing so is what allowed us to implement Foreign Investment as a natural extension of the building construction and autonomous investment systems instead of making it a tacked-on mechanic, and I consider it well worth the time spent.
Power Blocs is another interesting 1.7/Sphere of Influence addition to mention in relation to its community reception. During their initial conception, Power Blocs were intended to be a broader feature that could capture a variety of transnational agreements, but in actual implementation it suffered from this approach of trying to do a little bit of everything and ended up quite underwhelming. Following feedback from QA and beta testers, we refocused the feature into one focusing almost entirely on imperialist projects. This decision is something that we received some criticism and pushback about in the Power Bloc dev diaries, as some in the community felt the feature was now too narrowly focused (though I know at least a few people who came around to it after the update was released). Ultimately I believe we made the right call, as I’d rather we add a feature which does a few things but does them well rather than one which stretches itself thin and just ends up underwhelming.
Something that was more on the mixed side of things was the Great Game Objective. While the objective itself seemed pretty well received, and we saw a very noticeable increase in the number of playthroughs of the countries involved with it, there was (and still is) a perception that playing without the objective locks you out of the content added for those countries. I can only attribute this to poor communication on our part, and that we need to more clearly indicate exactly how objectives change the experience, and the fact that they do not lock away country-specific flavor JEs when not enabled.
The last thing I want to mention for 1.7 is the AI, as it’s an area of the game that was significantly improved in the update, especially on the diplomatic side. The catalyst system and the way it explicitly informs you when and why an AI changes their diplomatic stance towards you is something I am personally very happy with, and is a model for how I want to continue to improve the Victoria 3 AI going forward. I want the AI of Victoria 3 to be both an interesting opponent and an interesting ally, self-interested but largely rational, and for players to be able to understand why it makes the decisions it makes even if it’s not the decisions the player themselves would make. This is an approach which necessitates the kind of transparency offered by the catalyst system as opposed to the opaque black box of hidden dice rolls which preceded it. We of course still have a lot of work to do here, and improving the AI isn’t something that is ever really going to be ‘finished’, so the main takeaway here is really that we don’t just want to make the AI smarter or better at challenging the player, we also want to make it make more sense.
Finally then, we have reached Update 1.8 and Pivot of Empire, the final release for 2024. As I recently posted a dev diary on my thoughts for that specific update, I won’t go too much into detail, but I do want to mention that we have taken a further look at the balance of the India content (particularly the Unstable Raj JE, where we have looked at telemetry for completion rates across the playerbase and found them significantly lower than intended) and concluded that some further balancing is needed from us in 1.9. Specifically, we want to adjust its difficulty level while also improving rewards for completing it successfully, but also look into making failing the JE less of a game-ruining state.
I also want to reiterate that one of the major learnings we have made from 1.8/Pivot of Empire is that we need to focus more on the why of Journal Entries when designing them in the future. That is, why do you want to pursue and complete a Journal Entry - what player fantasy is it fulfilling, what playstyle is it supporting, what rewards does it offer - and to communicate those whys to the player. The reaction of the player to completing a complex and challenging Journal Entry should never be ‘huh, that’s it?’ when presented with the conclusion and rewards.
On a more positive note, something we expected to be positively received but which turned out to be extremely well liked was state/hub renaming. We were already planning to continuously add more renaming functionality to the game, and the massive amount of positive feedback we’ve gotten has only strengthened that ambition.
Lastly in regards to 1.8/Pivot of Empire I want to mention which came as something of a surprise to us was the strong negative reaction to the lack of an Expansion Pass for Pivot of Empire. Again this is something we’ve already talked about, but I do want to mention that there will absolutely be more expansion passes going forward. The reason we didn’t do so already is that we’ve found that Expansion Passes work best for us (in terms of being able to plan and deliver high quality releases) when they start off with a major expansion, rather than ending with one, so that is what we’ll be doing going forward.
To conclude this dev diary, I want to share an internal phrase that’s been going around: ‘2024 is the year that Victoria 3 hit its stride’. It’s no secret that the game had its issues at launch and that we made some mistakes in the initial post-release period, but from update 1.5 onwards, and particularly after 1.7/Sphere of Influence, we’ve seen excellent playerbase growth and greatly improved community sentiment. In summary, 2024 was a very good year for Victoria 3, and I’m very excited to continue building on these successes to add depth, flavor, and excessively in-depth socioeconomic simulation mechanics to this very special game series that is quite unlike anything else I have ever worked on.
That’s all for today! With update 1.9 some time away, we’re now going to take a bit of an extended break to focus solely on the development end of things. Expect us to return sometime early spring with details on the Trade Rework, Frontline Improvements and so much more. See you then!
