Season 09 seems awesome but I am concerned about the launch date if they use the 4.00 build.

[Skeletr0nKing]

While the additions coming with 09 are nothing short of amazing and what everyone wants, I am concerned with the population changes.
Will they be done in time? Will we be playing this amazing systems with unfinished pop changes?
Or will the expansions use the pre-beta systems just to be on the safe side?
The launch is in may which is not far away at all!

Sorry to be pesimistic, and maybe I am underestimating just how fast can the devs to their work, but the alpha we are currently testing seems like it might need a lot of work.
Shouldn't it be delayed to june at least ?
Maybe I'm just worrying about nothing but I dunno.

Edit: (sounded more negative than I wanted to)
Just to clarify, I know Paradox will in time fix any problems that exist at launch as they always do, I'm just concerned about first day buyers leaving negative comments because of these issues.

 

[ruhrbaron]

i tend to agree but we know the dev team has been working on a bio and psionic expansion for literally over a year and the work on the expansion should be mostly independent from the work on 4.0. i have no idea if the team is on schedule or not but it is not their first rodeo and the stellaris team is arguably PDX's best one at handling big overhauls and updates. i expect 4.0 to release on time since i trust the team's experience. i guess we'll have to wait and see how the beta plays out.

 

[Calvax]

It's not going to launch perfect, no big rework ever has. It will continue to get updates and work after. Whether that's best or not it's what's going to happen, so I wouldn't worry too much.

 

[ruhrbaron]

It's not going to launch perfect, no big rework ever has. It will continue to get updates and work after. Whether that's best or not it's what's going to happen, so I wouldn't worry too much.

i think if there is one thing that the recent hoi4 drama and the past stellaris overhauls have shown then it is to beta early and often. the beta was announced to be early, rough and unfinished and that a bunch of features are gonna be added along the way. as long as not all the big overhauls are live we cant judge the state of 4.0 but i am hopeful that it'll be fine. and i'd expect lots of post 4.0 patches as well.

 

[Thiend]

They're working HARD on the beta, so I'm optimistic that they'll be done in time for a relatively simple release.

I was a little concerned before, but that was before they released a dev diary on a Monday. We're only going a couple days between updates at most, instead of a week to two weeks per update.

 

[tappi]

1 and a half months is a worryingly short time. The beta has been improving a lot in just the 2 weeks it's been going but I still have my worries. I do hope they manage to get everything mostly bug free before then, but it is a tight schedule.

 

[Falrinn]

Honestly my only hope is that they are willing to push back the release date if needed. We'll have a better idea of if it's needed over the course of the next couple of weeks as the open beta shapes up.

Legally the only consequence is that they would then have to offer unconditional refunds, which isn't great from a business perspective, but it beats releasing something that is genuinely unplayable.

 

[OluapPlayer]

I'm not familiar with how Paradox's game development works, but the impression I had from the beta diaries, particularly the mentions of how some of the new features like the new free mammalian portraits are in a separate dev branch, makes me assume Stellaris has multiple teams working on separate parts of development.

Grand Archive was released at the end of October of last year. One could assume this means BioGenesis has been in development for around 4-5 months (not counting the part of december where the dev team went on holiday), presumably being done by a separate team from the one handling the 4.0 free content update which includes the open beta content currently being playtested.

All in all, I don't believe there's much reason to worry about either the pop rework or the DLC being rushed, unless I'm completely wrong about this or some catastrophic problem happens.

 

[tappi]

I'm not familiar with how Paradox's game development works, but the impression I had from the beta diaries, particularly the mentions of how some of the new features like the new free mammalian portraits are in a separate dev branch, makes me assume Stellaris has multiple teams working on separate parts of development.

Grand Archive was released at the end of October of last year. One could assume this means BioGenesis has been in development for around 4-5 months (not counting the part of december where the dev team went on holiday), presumably being done by a separate team from the one handling the 4.0 free content update which includes the open beta content currently being playtested.

All in all, I don't believe there's much reason to worry about either the pop rework or the DLC being rushed.

Yeah, from what they've talked, I do think they're having multiple build branches that the teams are working on sort of separately. I'm not really worried on the state of biogenesis content as it's probably been in the oven for a while as you said, but the timeframe to finishing, polishing and bugtesting for the new 4.0 content is kinda short, especially if they have to slot biogenesis into it as well (probably being worked on at the same time, but). The current beta doesn't have nearly all of the base systems even in yet, and after those are fully in there's the work of adapting every single origin, trait and civic to work on the new base systems, same with all events and so.

It's by no means an insurmountable task, but I do still think 1,5 months is quite the tight schedule.

 

[exi123]

See the current beta as an alpha and the first two weeks of the release as a beta and you will go well with releases for this game.

 

[Troyen]

I'm not familiar with how Paradox's game development works, but the impression I had from the beta diaries, particularly the mentions of how some of the new features like the new free mammalian portraits are in a separate dev branch, makes me assume Stellaris has multiple teams working on separate parts of development.

Grand Archive was released at the end of October of last year. One could assume this means BioGenesis has been in development for around 4-5 months (not counting the part of december where the dev team went on holiday), presumably being done by a separate team from the one handling the 4.0 free content update which includes the open beta content currently being playtested.

All in all, I don't believe there's much reason to worry about either the pop rework or the DLC being rushed, unless I'm completely wrong about this or some catastrophic problem happens.

The DLC has been done by a separate team (Crisis team) whereas 4.0 was likely mostly Custodians. I don't think the concern is with the BioGenesis content itself (last year's MA was good, it was the later DLCs that didn't have enough time/resources), but with the 4.0 free patch. Season 9 is almost certainly built with 4.0 systems in mind (especially the pop growth and species modification changes), they couldn't easily swap to 3.15 even if they are on a separate branch.

If you look at the history of Stellaris open betas, the state of the last beta build gives you a pretty reasonable idea on how rough the launch will be. 3.6 ran out of time on the fleet rework, so there were issues with some weapon slots and combat computer behaviors that took until 3.6.x or 3.7 to get fixed. 3.9 ran an open beta on the habitat rework and they incorporated some feedback, but other annoyances (like orbital construction micro) took until 4.0 to address. 3.11 had a pretty solid beta candidate and went live almost as-is.

So if 3.99's last beta build at the end of March has a whole bunch of WIP or non-functional stuff, well, their code freeze is a few weeks in advance of launch so don't expect too many changes from the beta. They'll continue taking feedback from the beta and you'll see adjustments in 4.0.x or later in 4.x, but it'll be a rough May.

Now that they put the release date out there, they've set themselves a hard deadline that they think they can make. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. In my opinion, the alarm you see is this is the roughest beta out of all the ones they've done, and unlike the other betas they're hard-committed to forging forward even if something isn't working out.

 

[Juboboman]

If something comparatively simple as the leader rework took a couple months of iteration post release to finally get right, then I think it's safe to assume 4.0 is going to be a buggy unbalanced unrefined mess for at least 3 months after release. In fact it wouldn't surprise me if they have to continue tinkering with it for the rest of the year.

They really only have like 3-4 weeks of work left before they have to freeze everything in the last couple weeks before 4.0 release. There is no shot it's actually ready for prime time by then.

 

[Meneye]

i tend to agree but we know the dev team has been working on a bio and psionic expansion for literally over a year and the work on the expansion should be mostly independent from the work on 4.0

That would be bad though, wouldn't it? If the team was independently working on the expansion for a year, but the 4.0 update came out recently, much of their planning and actual development would have been on outdated systems. They would only have a brief time window to rework everything.

 

[Troyen]

That would be bad though, wouldn't it? If the team was independently working on the expansion for a year, but the 4.0 update came out recently, much of their planning and actual development would have been on outdated systems. They would only have a brief time window to rework everything.

No? The devs might be split between implementing 4.0 and Season 9 but they're working for the same Game Director and presumably share long-term plan information. 4.0 isn't something they came up with over the winter, Eladrin said they've been working on it for about a year (which includes planning and design discussions). DLC development for PDX games is also roughly about a year, so both teams would've been coordinating on long-term vision.

 

[tappi]

No? The devs might be split between implementing 4.0 and Season 9 but they're working for the same Game Director and presumably share long-term plan information. 4.0 isn't something they came up with over the winter, Eladrin said they've been working on it for about a year (which includes planning and design discussions). DLC development for PDX games is also roughly about a year, so both teams would've been coordinating on long-term vision.

Yeah, they most likely have designed and planned the update for a while now, but regardless the actual code changes have not been worked with for that long seeing how little was in 3.99.1

I do also think that the update and expansion have been designed to function together, but I still worry for the polish of the initial launch.

 

[Losttruppen]

makes me assume Stellaris has multiple teams working on separate parts of development.

4.0 has been tasked to the Custodian Team(per DD#366, read about their division in DD#214)

Looking at the Steam Store pages for the Season 09 content shows:

Biogenesis - Paradox Development Studios(the "expansion team")

Shadows of the Shroud - PDS and Abrakam(who did Astral Planes and Grand Archive, though it has a different link on Steam than those ones)

Infernals - PDS and Forgotten Empires(Age of Empires and Mythology seems to be their previous work, I think this is their first work on Stellaris)

 

[Calvax]

Shadows of the Shroud - PDS and Abrakam(who did Astral Planes and Grand Archive, though it has a different link on Steam than those ones)

This kind of worries me. Astral planes is incredibly linear in how every empire gets the exact same abilities in the same order. I think it’s a detriment that every empire eventually ends up summoning inter dimensional fleets.

Grand archive also has a lot of weird stuff like how the archive can’t easily swap stuff between storage and display. Though at least it’s not linear.

Not knocking the external team specifically, I can’t speak to who decided what, but I hope the shroud rework is suitably polished and diverse.

 

[Losttruppen]

This kind of worries me. Astral planes is incredibly linear in how every empire gets the exact same abilities in the same order. I think it’s a detriment that every empire eventually ends up summoning inter dimensional fleets.

Grand archive also has a lot of weird stuff like how the archive can’t easily swap stuff between storage and display. Though at least it’s not linear.

Not knocking the external team specifically, I can’t speak to who decided what, but I hope the shroud rework is suitably polished and diverse.

I think the work they did was to spec and polished well enough; the PDS team side of those two DLCs needed more time for implementing them into the greater game I feel, both mechanically and as you said, to meet the diversity of Empires that access them.

It does suck how every AI will spam those Fleets, and how much time I spend on the Wiki making sure I'm not taking the "your Leader dies horribly" vs the "you get a million Solaris", but I do feel they both expanded the mid-game and added a lot of cool side-quest stuff which was a plus while they're also immersive enough in the game's style, aside from the Astral Fleet prevalence.

The volume of content they added was nice(though they raised the price alongside it), but they needed some more blending of all that content into the rest of the gameplay and variety of Empire types. Hopefully the Custodians will have time to get to them soon, but I doubt it at the current pace and looking over the horizon of 4.0+.

 

[Normannus]

For the Stellaris dev team, overhauling a core game system is just Tuesday, so I have faith it’ll be playable in time. That being said, I also guarantee that there will be some weird behaviors and bugs, and they’ll be working on ironing those out and tinkering with the system for the next year or so, because there will definitely be some issues on release. I just don’t think the issues will make the game unplayable or anything that bad

 

[Ikael]

It is indeed, an extremely tight schedule. However, the pace of updates for the beta has been quite faster than I expected, so perhaps the economy/pop rework will be stable and balanced by the time the DLC releases.

My only fear is about communication between the two teams (Custodians & Crisis team). I mean, the DLC content would have to adapt not only to the pop rework, but also to whichever multiple balance passes the beta demands. I am afraid that DLC content will be all over the place, but let's hope for the best!