Comes down to opinions I guess, I don't see in nearly every aspect how CK3 is better than 2. And that mechanical "innovation" has been dogshit.
I don't know where you got 'in nearly every aspect' from when all I said was that they innovated with CK3, but I think it should be fairly uncontroversial to say that Men-at-Arms, Innovations and Feudal Contracts are all objectively superior to their CK2 counterparts in both mechanical conception and implementation, and none of them are locked behind DLC. I can get how someone might not be a fan of religious tenets or hooks and stress or the lifestyle trees but most of the criticisms I've seen of them has been more on the basis of their implementation than the mechanics proper, and that the groundwork for those mechanics are still superior than they were in CK2. Graphics are also clearly better but I don't think that's a fair point given you have to have a major screw-up to be a sequel to a game and have worse graphics than it, while stability is another noticeable improvement over CK2.
While I can sympathize with many grognard's complaints about CK3, in particular its presentation and the fact it blatantly panders to the section of the fanbase that only wants a murderhobo sim, and think that a lot of the praise it got was simply because it was an actually decent launch surrounded by a bunch of dumpster fires, being unwilling to say any aspect is an improvement is not going to help the games improve in the ways they need to either.
Disagree on the Wiz being project lead automatically translates to success. And I guess that makes for even bigger irony since for those of us who remember, back when he was a modder and Goon, he had plenty to criticize in PDX development and design. Compared to what we got now, I'd take ten thousand years of design "back then". I'm still trying, without success, to refund HOI4. And while I'd been willing to let things slide for a good long while before that, that was the final straw. The last thing we need is that Paradox, the one we have now, murderhoboing Victoria. Let's be real now, the track record was all there. EU4 had lost it's way WELL before Leviathan. HOI4 absolute trash, and a community that's even bigger trash. CK3 an absolute nothingburger. Stellaris gone from promising and different to just a same old mana hoarder.
Hey, miracles can still happen though, y'know? Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines 2, which was also looking set to being an absolute dumpster fire,(let alone the pure, unadulterated shyte that is VtM 5E that Paradox let out the door) ended up getting the closest thing we got to being cancelled. Praying for lightning to strike twice tbh.
I didn't say Wiz being project lead automatically translates to success, I said that I can have some hope for the game if it's true. And yes, I still remember the days when Wiz was a CK2 modder, and I more vividly remember his tenure as EU4 lead as being the best time to play EU4.
How are you still trying to refund HOI4? For that matter why are you still trying to if you haven't been able to all these years?
Yes, EU4 got off the rails well before Leviathan; it happened chiefly because DDR 'Three Buttons' Jake took over and wanted to redesign the game entirely around his playstyle, which was only compounded by certain other developers he was associated with having severe cases of Dunning-Krueger. There's a reason why most of the older EU4 fanbase maintains that Rights of Man was the last good dlc. Yes, HOI4 is still a mess and certain sections of its modding community have managed to create an even larger legal mess. I'm not keeping track of Stellaris but from what I can tell the problem is that it keeps redesigning core mechanics in a way that they don't interact well with each other instaed of just 'mana' - which is a term that I don't think can be justifiably applied to any resource in Stellaris aside from Influence. I don't know how you can justifiably call CK3 a nothingburger in any capacity other than it wasn't a dumpster fire when people were expecting it to be. And while there is very good reason to be concerned, saying that PDX is going to make Vicky 3 a murderhobo sim is so absurd it's almost a parody of genuine apprehension.
If you don't want to play a Vicky 3 that won't meet whatever astronomic expectations you have for it, then don't get it. But the Vicky 2 playerbase has, for the better part of a decade, been asking for a game where the global currency supply isn't held together with magic glue - not wanting yourself to be disappointed is an incredibly petty reason to want the rest of the fanbase to be disappointed.
