Given the state of new PDX games these days, do you actually think EUV will be any fun?

[Antonius66]

With all the endless EUV talk around here and with the state of the games PDX has released in the last few years (CK 3, VIC 3, Imperator) plus the "quality" of expansions and DLC, I find myself wondering if there should really be anticipation that EU V will mark an awesome step forward. When I stopped and actually thought about the fact that with CK 3, I played once, conquered the whole world my first time and never was interested again, VIC 3 (despite buying and regretting early) I have largely avoided until at least the 1.5 patch as it seems it is several steps backward currently, and Imperator...well the less said the better. It took actually really thinking about the state of PDX releases and the general design and gameplay for their games these days to realize how little I would expect EU V to represent what I want and expect for a game like that, based on how much everything has changed here in the last 5-10 years.

I feel like PDX games have just lost their magic and it seems to carry across all the major titles for years now, so I think, do I really want an EU V? I have moved from thinking I would pre order most every PDX game and buy all expansions to having set a hard line where I will not pre order anything anymore and I have not bought the last EU IV expansion (or 2 I think) and don't bother with expansions for other stuff either like CK3, Stellaris, etc. Am I in the minority here? Curious to hear other people and rational thoughts about how they expect things to unfold, especially based on the current state of EU IV and the direction it has taken over the years.

 

[esbenmf]

I get you, even Nostalgia is worse these days.

 

[Slaytanic]

Johan has been always poking around when this is brought up, essentially to say he can't speak for those other games, and basically saying "trust me I know what I'm doing" when it comes to EU. Whether that's enough for you, it's your choice to decide.

Personally I was very conflicted about EU5, from when these rumors begun. Paradox even made a poll at some point, and I responded that they should be very careful with continuing EU, as to avoid delivering some dead husk that takes forever to be a good replacement for EU4.

Nowadays though, I am at peace, because the development of EU4 is significantly hindered. I am not nearly as critical of mission trees as some people here are, but I would be lying if I said expansions with only mission trees are as exciting to me as the old ones were. I want map changes, for example.

If EU5 is what is needed for me to get the content I want back, so be it. Even if it's not as great at launch, it will be enough eventually, and there will always be mods.

Even though I don't play Stellaris as much as I used to, the development for that game is going very well. If Johan thinks he can lead his team like the Stellaris team is doing, then he has my support.

 

[Mindel]

Each game has its own development team responsible for the guiding vision and implementation. If you were unhappy with other recent PDX games, it means you didn't like what those teams were doing with their games.

EU5 will have a different team from the others, very likely with Johan in charge. Whether you like it or not will depend on whether you like the plans Johan and his team have for it. Personally, I'm optimistic.

 

[Cpt.Cross]

I'd just like a PDX game where the end game doesnt run like ass.

Even Victoria 3 a much shorter game cant do it.

 

[prismaticmarcus]

Let's not make this thread about one (or more than one) person.

 

[Gyrvendal]

I enjoy the direction of Hoi4 and Stellaris a lot, so it's really not all bad. One thing I regret is that other PDX games haven't yet adopted the awesome "custodian initiative" that Stellaris has.
For EU5, time will tell. I won't pre-order it, that's all I can say for sure.

 

[Antonius66]

Some good and interesting points brought up here regarding specific teams and directors and the relevant direction for different games. Not sure it completely changes my mind but it does at least bring up some food for thought. I would say however, that the direction of EU IV itself in the last few years has been one of power creep and over simplification in my opinion, which still does not augur well. Still, definitely some things to consider here.

 

[Borgratz]

I won't expect anything and be pleasantly surprised, if I like it (probably after a year of fixes).

 

[Brynjar]

Each game has its own development team responsible for the guiding vision and implementation. If you were unhappy with other recent PDX games, it means you didn't like what those teams were doing with their games.

I would expect those teams to still have to pitch their ideas to get the required funding, and having to stay within their budgets. If Paradox grants them 5 years of development funding it's not like the team is going to decide that they will spend 7 before initial release. There are many similarities in the directions taken by Imperator, CK3, Vic 3, especially the latter two. Some of that can even be seen in the direction taken by EU4 in recent years (I don't follow the development of stellaris and HoI). I doubt those similarities are all a coincident, and not at all influenced by an overall company strategy.

Whether you like it or not will depend on whether you like the plans Johan and his team have for it.

No. Whether you like it or not will depend on what is actually implemented in the final product, not what they plan to implement. Liking their plans does not mean you like the game.

Personally I have absolutely no faith in EU5 being a fun game at release, but I hope I'll be pleasantly surprised. Part of my lack of faith is due to the state Imperator, CK3 and Vic 3 were released in, but another significant reason is the direction EU4 has taken over the past 6 or so years. There is too much fluff and too much focus on features which feels like they are primarily there to sell DLCs, and other features have been neglected too much. That's why the last DLC I bought at full price (i.e. at release) was Cradle of Civilization. The last Paradox game I bought was Imperator. I played CK3 a few hours through game pass, and Vic 3 has too many obvious design flaws to even get a chance without the option to try it with game pass first.

I don't see how what anyone says could change my expectations for EU5. Paradox will have to show that are able and willing to deliver a quality game first. That means my decision to buy the game won't be made until after release.

 

[Blust]

I'm sure EUV will be great a few years after its release, and a bunch of DLC, yes.

 

[Kurfürstin Adelheid]

As long as Swabia is formable in EU5, I am satisfied. If not, back to EU4 for me.

 

[st360]

1) I am concerned that any sequel to a game with 15+DLCs will feel bared boned. Though that cant be helped. I do also believe CK3 and EU 4 when they say their title shipped with way more content that CK 2 had at launch, that some of it can be "copy pasted" (maps, researched starting situations, concepts like idea groups or localized AE) giving some shortcuts. I also notice that the developers are openly treating EU4s end cycle as a chance to "have fun" and "experiment with new concepts trough missions" and might implement the more popular stuff as proper mechanics in EU 5.

2) I don't trust the graphics department too much. No, I don't care its *pretty* and has lots of high resolution pixels, I DON'T care that its 3D, in fact I openly DON'T want huge UIs made for Xbox and Sims players. And I don't want perfectly beautiful 2d advisor portraits from EU 4 turned into uncanny 3D plastic robots picking their nose and fidgeting around because that's "cool" and "it has more pixels so its prettier". I still play Hearts of Iron 2 (yes, two) because the HOI4 map is muddy, I cant tell where nation borders are and instead of normal soldier models I have some weird NATO symbols moving around my map.

3) People are pushing for the two pet issues of EU; pops and removing monarch points. But EU works just fine as is and those are way riskier to mess around than people think. Look at what happened to Imperator:Rome. Its some weird mish-mash of pops and CK characters that ended up clunky and never getting off the ground. People don't seem concerned enough that a new fundamental "cool sounding" mechanic in EU 5 could doom the game on arrival.

4) I'm concerned about power inflation. There used to be a time in EU when conquering half of Africa with France was almost an end game achievement, today you have 10 PUs as Austria or conquer the planet as an Australian tribe. And it only gets worse with DLCs. I hope that any EU 5 developers will have a firm hand on healthy game dynamics and wont give in to the "Nations should be able to annex countries the size of Mamluks, its historical!" crowd.

5) I do hope that EU 5 wont be too arcane to totally new players, but Paradox games seem to have ok tutorials and already seem to be on the right track for this.

6) I hope that EU 5 will be more limiting. Yes, I want more fun police. You shouldn't be able to start as a subsaharan tribe, loan up, make 10 transports, conquer Italy and change Naples to Mali culture Fetishists by 1500. I don't mind new religions (in fact, I think there *should* be 2-3 pagan provinces in Europe in 1444), but if you choose to be a Baltic Pagan nation in 15 century Europe, it should play as brutal survival mode, not "improve relations with France, ally, gobble up Bohemia, convert". France flipping to Jewish and conquering Spain and Britain should be the limit for 1821, not "accept rebels, disband HRE, take religious ideas and all of Europe is Jewish by 1600".

7) Same goes for TAG flipping shenanigans. I get that changing your nation TAG from Sweden-Ming-Ottomans-Venice in 20 years is fun for some people, but at that point we might as well introduce elves and orcs into EU 4, since that's also fun. TAG changing should check total development a culture holds, meaning it will take serious diplo points, time and be almost impossible for big nations (like it was historically). Not just "5 clicks to destate provinces, now I'm Scotish instead of Mongol". At the very least, changing TAGS should remove all unique bonuses your nation has.

8) Same goes for nations marching 60k soldier stacks trough 2 continents, unlimited military access, attrition, supply and finally making navies useful by limiting doomstack marching across 80 provinces to reach war targets.

8) I would hope that developers understand the core of EU 5 should be diplomacy (and judging by some comments, they do). "Monarch points" (or whatever key resource replaces them) should be acquired trough warscore, not blobbing and owning land. 98% of European wars in that period where over flipping 1-2 provinces back and forth, over prestige and over cutting the rival down by 2 provinces. They *werent* "conquer 20 provinces, where is my core all button" wars. If I had a magic wand, I would cut down monarch point sources by 80% and introduce a scaling "show strength" peace option where you get monarch points in exchange for winning wars and NOT taking any territory from them.

 

[Lykus Cerebros]

I have trust that the team will produce a pretty interesting and fun game. The recent DLCs were pretty good in my opinion and they fixed a lot of older issues. MP stability after a DLC release being one of the examples I can come up on the spot.

Haven't played Vic3 and imperator and only a little of CK. People tend to be overly dramatic on the Internet and people I think they are fine. So don't have a reason to doubt them.

 

[Jarvin]

Whether that's enough for you, it's your choice to decide

I think GSGs are insanely, mind bogglingly hard to design and develop and it would take a genius and a miracle for a designer & a team of developers to "get it right" on the first try nowadays.

I don't really trust Johan on just magically coming up with a good game.

but
I have trust in him, more than anyone else at Paradox, that he'll genuinely try his bset, and he'll genuinely change his direction & opinion if faced with a strong opposing opinion on something from the community.
If you read Johan's profile on this forum, you'll see that he's actually been fairly active here, with more than dozens of post in Vicky3 subform, for instance
Which I just - maybe bit optimistically - read as someone genuinely trying to understand the players better in order to just make a better game himself.


I think the most frustrating part of following the development of EU4 over the past ~~7 years for me was when devs would come up with something.. then sometimes they were met with a nearly uniformly strong negative reaction from the community.. and then they'd just go ahead with what they were doing anyways. (remember 1.26 missionary changes, and how long they took them to revert it?)
There's even been a certain dev in the past who genuinely openly had the attitude of "I know better than you, and you'll change your mind anyways so I won't listen to you"

I trust Johan to be better than that, and so - as someone thoroughly burnt out of and disillusioned with what EU4 has become - I have (some) faith that so long as EU5 manages a decent first landing - it'll eventually turn into one of the greats.

 

[Maxxie42]

I would say however, that the direction of EU IV itself in the last few years has been one of power creep and over simplification in my opinion, which still does not augur well. Still, definitely some things to consider here.

Regarding oversimplification, I'm not sure what you have in mind specifically. But as for power creep, I don't think it's completely fair to assume that it will continue in EU V.

Emperor and Lions of the North were the first DLCs to feature clearly OP mission trees, and they were very successful releases, so it made sense at the time for the devs to lean in that direction ; but after Domination, the community started to express more and more dissatisfaction with this power creep, and as a result, the first King of Kings dev diaries mention that they kept this in mind for the new mission trees. (And what they've shown does seem noticeably more reasonable.) So I don't think the power creep is a general trend, so much as a sign of the Tinto team learning as they go.

 

[Romanix90]

So here are my 5 cents about EU5.

I sort of disagree that game be half baked released and it'll eventualy get to that level of quality. Other titles like Vic3 or Imperator Rome suffered because of this. Nations seamed bland and empty, even the big ones felt generic. In my opinion it's a mistake to deliver a generic game without any uniqueness or should i say unique countries. For example when player plays Brandenburg/Prussia it should imidiately notice difference and unique play style. The same goes for France etc. People don't want things later via DLCs, they want things now and something new and fresh, not old or borrowed from other and oldr titles. Now i'm not against DLCs if they are delivering on top of the unique content that is oal ready in base game. I don't want EU5 to end up like Imperator or Vic3 because it lacks content. I want it like everyone else to be successful. As for Johan and other Tinto members i have full confidence in them that they'll deliver.

 

[treb]

With all the endless EUV talk around here and with the state of the games PDX has released in the last few years (CK 3, VIC 3, Imperator) plus the "quality" of expansions and DLC, I find myself wondering if there should really be anticipation that EU V will mark an awesome step forward. When I stopped and actually thought about the fact that with CK 3, I played once, conquered the whole world my first time and never was interested again, VIC 3 (despite buying and regretting early) I have largely avoided until at least the 1.5 patch as it seems it is several steps backward currently, and Imperator...well the less said the better. It took actually really thinking about the state of PDX releases and the general design and gameplay for their games these days to realize how little I would expect EU V to represent what I want and expect for a game like that, based on how much everything has changed here in the last 5-10 years.

I feel like PDX games have just lost their magic and it seems to carry across all the major titles for years now, so I think, do I really want an EU V? I have moved from thinking I would pre order most every PDX game and buy all expansions to having set a hard line where I will not pre order anything anymore and I have not bought the last EU IV expansion (or 2 I think) and don't bother with expansions for other stuff either like CK3, Stellaris, etc. Am I in the minority here? Curious to hear other people and rational thoughts about how they expect things to unfold, especially based on the current state of EU IV and the direction it has taken over the years.

I feel like the issue is paradox games are now suffering from "content creep". I think the best example is ck3, you cant do the "blank canvas" when the game before obstenatly has more features and flavor, and this is where the issue is. There is so much added and bolted on over the decade long lifespans of these games that when it comes to developing a sequal where do you even start?

 

[jonjowett]

I feel like the issue is paradox games are now suffering from "content creep". I think the best example is ck3, you cant do the "blank canvas" when the game before obstenatly has more features and flavor, and this is where the issue is. There is so much added and bolted on over the decade long lifespans of these games that when it comes to developing a sequal where do you even start?

More to the point, if you're going the "blank canvas" route, the new game needs to be obviously better in some important way compared with its predecessor. And, for many strategy gamers, just being prettier isn't enough.

 

[Brynjar]

There is so much added and bolted on over the decade long lifespans of these games that when it comes to developing a sequal where do you even start?

That depends on what you define as the start. I would hope (and think) that any really good ideas which has come up over the past decade or more which for whatever reason weren't feasible for EU4 hasn't been completely forgotten.

Aside from that, and aside from pitching ideas over coffe/lunch/beers, I would think that a logical first somewhat formal step after some budget allocations (even if only in the form of reduced earning requirements for EU4) would be to clean up the code of EU4 and see what can reasonably be adapted to be reused with the jomini engine and what would require larger reworks. We know (or at least have been told) that the EU4 code got a rather big cleanup in 2019-2021, and I wouldn't be surprised if that coincided with when the plans for EU5 started becoming more firm.

As someone who has never been a game developer, nor made any mods for Paradox games, I would think another step which seems natural to focus on fairly early on in the implementation would be the map. With the huge amount of details (although not always accurate) and work which has gone into the EU4 map I wouldn't be surprised if the decision to stop doing map changes for EU4 "for performance reasons" etc. back in 2021 coincided with Paradox wanting to use those resources on the map for EU5 instead.

The above could all be me using confirmation bias to try to find evidence that Paradox has actively been working on EU5 for years. On the bright side, it helps me think every new DLC I'm not interested in could buy more time for EU5 development

At the end of the day, the most important step which also has to be made fairly early is to make sure you are willing give the game a big enough budget and enough time to make sure that you can make a better game than the predecessor. If you can't, you probably shouldn't make it.