It really, really depends. There are a number of key binary tensions in EU’s development (I pay much less attention to other games); one could almost think of them as “policy sliders”. I think the quality of EUV depends on how they’re resolved in its development, and then how they continue to be resolved as the game evolves.
There are tensions as I see it, at least, between:
- “EUIV is for map painting” versus “EUIV is for generating plausible alternative histories”.
- The game world as a sandbox created by player agency versus the game world as a complex of organic processes the player can interact with.
- “Content” as generalised mechanics capable of dynamically producing interesting outcomes versus content as scripted buttons and bonuses.
In my view EUIV has historically leaned harder into being a game about map painting, and design choices from day one like instant stability, 13-month core creation, fabricating CBs at will and so on have pushed it towards being a “sandbox game” whereas EU3 leaned harder into a game world made up of organic processes that tried (even if it didn’t do very well) to produce plausible outcomes: cores took fifty years to appear irrespective of player actions because territory becoming an embedded core part of a country is a process, not something that happens at someone’s whim. Stability increasing is a process. Construction getting started and armies being ordered around, by contrast, is an expression of agency. That delineation used to be clear and it seems to me that blurring it made EUIV a worse game. EUIV’s mechanics mean that the world itself isn’t a character in the game, as it were, whereas in EU3 stuff took time because it was happening in a world.
Over its lifespan EUIV has also shifted focus from “content” meaning robust mechanics (Res Publica, for example) and toward “content” being button-clicks: tributtons and then the DLC godsend and game-design catastrophe of mission trees.
For both of those reasons I continue to regard EUIV as less-good than EU3. It was less good at release, it had a great deal of potential which seemed to be being realised with e.g Wealth of Nations, Res Publica and Art of War; it fell apart a bit sometime around Common Sense and then it went absolutely to pot sometime after Cossacks and has only gone from bad to worse.
It’s hard to know what Paradox have learned from EUIV, because (due to the age of the game) they say one thing and do another: Johan tells us he wouldn’t repeat mission trees while the team is churning out DLC that’s basically just mission trees. That makes sense, but it also makes the possibilities of EUV very opaque.
I think if the “policy sliders” of EUV are reset from EUIV and head in a radically different direction, it could be great. That is to say: if EUV is designed with emergent storytelling in mind (as it once was for EUIV), with the goal of producing a plausible world at the end front and centre (as it was once suggested was the case for EUIV), and trusting that mechanics which produce a coherent narrative of the world will produce a compelling game-arc, I think it’ll be good.
People worry about the lack of “content” in a new game, but lacking umpteen mission trees and tributtons for every country wouldn’t be a loss, really. EUV needs mechanics like the HRE and the Dutch Republic slider, but iterated on and more robust. Losing pre-scripted “content” is neither here nor there. No one moans about the thousands of events lost from EU2, because they were a bad idea.
If that “content” is the focus of EUV development, though, it’s hard to imagine the product being good. And if it isn’t the focus, it’s hard to imagine a successful long-term DLC policy…
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