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Sure, you drive a hard bargain. Keep an eye on our socials and for featured posts on the forums so you don't miss it.
(Seriously though, we have our schedule for the year laid out already. We'll have substantial information to share about the content plan for 2024 Soon™)
(Seriously though, we have our schedule for the year laid out already. We'll have substantial information to share about the content plan for 2024 Soon™)
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Last year, if I recall correctly, T&T was announced at the beginning of March, with Chapter 2 itself being announced in April…here’s hoping that this time we find out about 2024’s content Sooner™!
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It’s actually going to be about Oklahoma. When the dev says soonTM, the dev means sooner. Meaning Oklahoma.
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Nothing is ever announced in January except the floor plan. This year was a bit of an anomaly that we got the extra fashion pack. Typically we hear of the first expansion in mid-late February if I remember correctly. Or maybe it was March last year...cant quite remember. Then the actual expansion launches in May.
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Dev diaries, 1st quarter 2023:
Source: wiki
Dev diaries, 1st quarter 2022:
Dev diaries. 1st quarter 2021:
Varies every year.
Source: wiki
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That reminds me how weird it was to have the Northern Lords dev diaries come out after the dlc was released.
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I assume part of it was just the dev team getting their footing. Honestly it's a very strange DLC. But yeah that was definitely super odd and confusing.
Yeah, we were figuring a lot of stuff out back then. IIRC part of it was to not let the hype train build up too much, and it worked well enough for that. Personally no regrets for the DD situation, weird as it was at the time.
Not a perfect DLC by any stretch of the imagination, and we took a lot of key learnings on both what to do and what not to do in a CK3 DLC, but I have fond memories of working on it.
Not a perfect DLC by any stretch of the imagination, and we took a lot of key learnings on both what to do and what not to do in a CK3 DLC, but I have fond memories of working on it.
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Well I for one loves the northern lord dlc.
I think I have played about 50% of the time as a viking of some sort.
I am curious what would you have done differently if the DLC was made today?
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Glad you enjoyed it!
Oh so, so many things. It was originally supposed to be smaller in scope but the FP1 team didn't really want to do the subject dirty like that, so we uhh. Lightly inflated the amount we were expected to produce vs. what we'd been asked to make, and in retrospect I'm very happy we did that, but we weren't staffed up for it much at all. Subsequent flavour packs we used the revised scope and they actually got larger teams assigned, which was so much better, but I do wish we'd done that for FP1 from the start. ^^' One dedicated designer + support for bugfix (which was still incredibly helpful) + whatever spare time the GD had to make stuff wasn't quite enough for my discipline alone, let alone the estimations made for Code or Art staffing. There was also a bunch of boring improvements/learnings to be taken from processes (how we do research, how we treat pre-production, QA and I hatched a conspiracy to re-do how we test events that we still force on the team to this day, etc.) that I suspect aren't quite what you're after.
I'll stick to my discipline since that's stuff I know the status of and whether we're comfortable talking about it. Stuff that probably didn't need as much time as I spent on it:
- Runestones — man we fought through jank hell to get custom runestone modifier descs and I don't think anyone even noticed. At time of release, they had loc for near every trait in the title too. ;_; My variant loc for a Norse child of the Great Khan raising a runestone to their awesomeness, forever unmourned. I have rarely felt so demotivated as when the first few negative reviews rolled in and said we'd just C&P'd the runestones feature from CK2. Sorta wish we had, it would've been much easier, but a thing we tried to stick to was, if we're gonna do something that TOG did, we should try to give it at least some extra shine. Wouldn't be right to ask people to pay for an identical version of the same features again so we should strive to be improved wherever we can. The result, sadly, varied, but the intent was there.
- Various events — Phantom Islands in particular were a ton of fun to read about and research but I think the event they were in just kinda passes by in a blip for most people. Ditto the event with the wanderer who comes to court, who can be one of various different people masquerading as (or who actually is) a homeless wanderer. I had to pester Art to get a version of the eye patch that could be applied over someone who had both eyes so that if you get a godi who's pretending to be Odin, they won't put one of their eyes out in the evening before harassing you in your chambers. There were assorted others with little historical or mechanical flourishes that didn't really seem to hit right and were in retrospect probably a poor use of time that I could've squeezed another few events out of, or perhaps a small mechanical system.
- Local Cults/Bhakti — I spent way too much time trying to find historical justifications for diverse Norse pagan beliefs and it's just an area we know tragically little about for sure. I didn't want to make stuff up and I didn't want to just take the Poetic Edda as gospel truth, so we ended up with a very limited version of the thing instead. In retrospect I would've cut our losses on this one much earlier and spent the time on religious event content, but I really wanted to try for another Norse pagan tenet.
- Shieldmaidens/poetry — these aren't the biggest systems but they took a while to make and tbh I don't think either are especially popular. We probably could've gone with something much more basic, in retrospect, and allocated the time elsewhere.
- Single Combat — I was very happy with how it turned out and it was a colossal amount of work to get even to the level it currently is, but I do still have a bunch of notes for extra combat moves that I sometimes stare at forlornly. Kicking someone in the shin was only supposed to be a fallback, not a common move, and it's indicative of the gaps where I wasn't able to cover all the personality traits because we were already 30k words of loc deep (which was a 5% increase in the total loc of the entire title IIRC) and the localisers were sending me polite-yet-threatening messages about string complexity.
- Jomsvikings — they were supposed to make more of a nuisance of themselves in the Baltic and tbh they kinda don't. Forever a disappointment IMHO, even if they're a bit more lively than most holy orders. I wanted them to have personality and colour and really feel like the last zealots of a likely-doomed faith.
- A dynamic version of the cold war system we gave to England & the Danelaw. It being hard-scripted has never sat right.
- The All-Thing innovation — what we wound up with has always felt aggressively underwhelming to me, partially because...
- Thing Elective content — I wanted to have events or an activity for stuff happening at the moot, for votes being swung different ways and dramatic election shenanigans. Cut for time.
- Berserker options — these were supposed to be sprinkled through the content after we'd made it, so berserker characters would get a chance to use their trait/be forced to experience it a bit more. Cut for time.
- Personal longship story cycle — basically a narrative story cycle where you have an ancestral longboat you commission and then take on raids with you over several generations. Mostly cut for time, though there's some remnants of it as longboat-themed events.
- Missionary content — basically something for slowly Christianising/Islamicising/reformed faithifying Scandinavia via event content and not just conquest/marriage. Cut for time.
- The random Viking nickname assigner: this was gonna be an effect that just has ~100 Viking-sounding nicknames in it that gets applied to you after you win a few raids or are elevated to king, y'know, important stuff. The idea was to preserve some of the crazy tone of nicknames we have for historical characters on game start and propagate it throughout the early game. Alas, cut for time.
I guess overall I would've spent less time on fine details and more on volume and impact. Less runestones, more Varangian Adventures. Hindsight is 20:20, though, and I didn't really have the experience at the time to really be able to guess a lot of this stuff.
It still informs a lot about how I work today, at least, and from time to time I'm able to scratch something off the long-term list.:eyes:
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Your passion and enthusiasm is not appreciated enough. Thank you for the hard work and dedication you’ve put so far into the game. @Wokeg
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Since you have brought up Danelaw, are there any plans to use that system elsewhere? I really think it's a waste using it in just a single place when there are many places that it can be applied to. Another question to this is is it possible to use between two empires or is it necessary that partitioned titles have a de jure title above them.Glad you enjoyed it!
Oh so, so many things. It was originally supposed to be smaller in scope but the FP1 team didn't really want to do the subject dirty like that, so we uhh. Lightly inflated the amount we were expected to produce vs. what we'd been asked to make, and in retrospect I'm very happy we did that, but we weren't staffed up for it much at all. Subsequent flavour packs we used the revised scope and they actually got larger teams assigned, which was so much better, but I do wish we'd done that for FP1 from the start. ^^' One dedicated designer + support for bugfix (which was still incredibly helpful) + whatever spare time the GD had to make stuff wasn't quite enough for my discipline alone, let alone the estimations made for Code or Art staffing. There was also a bunch of boring improvements/learnings to be taken from processes (how we do research, how we treat pre-production, QA and I hatched a conspiracy to re-do how we test events that we still force on the team to this day, etc.) that I suspect aren't quite what you're after.
I'll stick to my discipline since that's stuff I know the status of and whether we're comfortable talking about it. Stuff that probably didn't need as much time as I spent on it:
Stuff I'd have loved to improve further:
- Runestones — man we fought through jank hell to get custom runestone modifier descs and I don't think anyone even noticed. At time of release, they had loc for near every trait in the title too. ;_; My variant loc for a Norse child of the Great Khan raising a runestone to their awesomeness, forever unmourned. I have rarely felt so demotivated as when the first few negative reviews rolled in and said we'd just C&P'd the runestones feature from CK2. Sorta wish we had, it would've been much easier, but a thing we tried to stick to was, if we're gonna do something that TOG did, we should try to give it at least some extra shine. Wouldn't be right to ask people to pay for an identical version of the same features again so we should strive to be improved wherever we can. The result, sadly, varied, but the intent was there.
- Various events — Phantom Islands in particular were a ton of fun to read about and research but I think the event they were in just kinda passes by in a blip for most people. Ditto the event with the wanderer who comes to court, who can be one of various different people masquerading as (or who actually is) a homeless wanderer. I had to pester Art to get a version of the eye patch that could be applied over someone who had both eyes so that if you get a godi who's pretending to be Odin, they won't put one of their eyes out in the evening before harassing you in your chambers. There were assorted others with little historical or mechanical flourishes that didn't really seem to hit right and were in retrospect probably a poor use of time that I could've squeezed another few events out of, or perhaps a small mechanical system.
- Local Cults/Bhakti — I spent way too much time trying to find historical justifications for diverse Norse pagan beliefs and it's just an area we know tragically little about for sure. I didn't want to make stuff up and I didn't want to just take the Poetic Edda as gospel truth, so we ended up with a very limited version of the thing instead. In retrospect I would've cut our losses on this one much earlier and spent the time on religious event content, but I really wanted to try for another Norse pagan tenet.
- Shieldmaidens/poetry — these aren't the biggest systems but they took a while to make and tbh I don't think either are especially popular. We probably could've gone with something much more basic, in retrospect, and allocated the time elsewhere.
Stuff I never got to make:
- Single Combat — I was very happy with how it turned out and it was a colossal amount of work to get even to the level it currently is, but I do still have a bunch of notes for extra combat moves that I sometimes stare at forlornly. Kicking someone in the shin was only supposed to be a fallback, not a common move, and it's indicative of the gaps where I wasn't able to cover all the personality traits because we were already 30k words of loc deep (which was a 5% increase in the total loc of the entire title IIRC) and the localisers were sending me polite-yet-threatening messages about string complexity.
- Jomsvikings — they were supposed to make more of a nuisance of themselves in the Baltic and tbh they kinda don't. Forever a disappointment IMHO, even if they're a bit more lively than most holy orders. I wanted them to have personality and colour and really feel like the last zealots of a likely-doomed faith.
- A dynamic version of the cold war system we gave to England & the Danelaw. It being hard-scripted has never sat right.
- The All-Thing innovation — what we wound up with has always felt aggressively underwhelming to me, partially because...
... there's also stuff I've thought that I'd like more of since then (more stuff relating to your children & your character coming back from raids, a special activity with its own events for blots rather than cribbing off feasts, more event content for life inside Scandinavia rather than outside it — especially in the winter, which was a mechanic we didn't much use in content even though it came in the same patch).
- Thing Elective content — I wanted to have events or an activity for stuff happening at the moot, for votes being swung different ways and dramatic election shenanigans. Cut for time.
- Berserker options — these were supposed to be sprinkled through the content after we'd made it, so berserker characters would get a chance to use their trait/be forced to experience it a bit more. Cut for time.
- Personal longship story cycle — basically a narrative story cycle where you have an ancestral longboat you commission and then take on raids with you over several generations. Mostly cut for time, though there's some remnants of it as longboat-themed events.
- Missionary content — basically something for slowly Christianising/Islamicising/reformed faithifying Scandinavia via event content and not just conquest/marriage. Cut for time.
- The random Viking nickname assigner: this was gonna be an effect that just has ~100 Viking-sounding nicknames in it that gets applied to you after you win a few raids or are elevated to king, y'know, important stuff. The idea was to preserve some of the crazy tone of nicknames we have for historical characters on game start and propagate it throughout the early game. Alas, cut for time.
I guess overall I would've spent less time on fine details and more on volume and impact. Less runestones, more Varangian Adventures. Hindsight is 20:20, though, and I didn't really have the experience at the time to really be able to guess a lot of this stuff.
:eyes:
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Honestly, I wouldn't hate that. India needs more love, and if they can do it well, I'd be interested to see what southern Africa would be like.
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So, will it be sharing a presentation event with Half-Life 3?
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Anyone know if the devs have said via one of the other channels that a dev diary is or is not expected today?
LOL you'd usually never know, but I expect one at the end of the month. My neck is itching for more content tbh.