Sphere of Influence / Update 1.7: New Release Date

[Wizzington]

Hello Victorians, this is Martin here with an update on the release date of the Sphere of Influence expansion.

A few weeks ago we announced we were planning to release the expansion and its accompanying update on May 6th. Since that time we’ve unfortunately come to the conclusion that both the update and the expansion are in need of more time for bug fixing and polish. Both update 1.7 and Sphere of Influence contain several fundamental changes to how the game functions, particularly in the form of the Building Ownership Revision and Power Blocs, which has resulted in bugs, as well as balance and technical stability issues.

While we are happy with the features on offer in 1.7/Sphere of Influence, we simply do not believe that sticking to the original release date will allow us to deliver those features in a polished and balanced state, and we frankly do not want your enjoyment of them to be marred by excessive bugginess, crashes or general lack of polish. We believe that a delay will allow us to release the update and expansion in a state that both we as the developers and you as the players will be much more happy with.

The new release date will be Monday the 24th of June. We will continue releasing weekly dev diaries up to that point, as there is still quite a lot to cover with both the DLC and the update. We know many of you are eagerly anticipating the expansion and apologize for the extended waiting that this will create, but we really want Sphere of Influence to meet your expectations and for this release to be one that we can be proud of as a development team!

 

[PDX_Pelly]

I hope MP works with this new update. On the current 1.6 patch, large scale MP is not possible without desyncs.

We recently made some fixes specifically for MP coming in 1.7.

 

[PDX_Pelly]

This is frankly the absolute best thing I could read from you. I've been asking for it since the announcement. With each Dev Diary the scale of this DLC showed more and more ambitious features, so I grew increasingly discomforted.

This decision gives you the chance to make things right and, for once, release a product players will be happy with, no strings attached. This could change the Steam store Review average, bring back players that avoided the game a few hours in after each bad release, and make the game a more popular streaming option.

Way to go! If needed, count on the community to help tackle polishing with an open Beta from the middle of may on! I'm sure many would be happy to help, such as with 1.5.

An Open Beta is not something we will go for with this release, due to the time and resource investment going into running the program. This doesn't mean we never want to do more Open Betas in the future however! (I personally really like helping to run them)

 

[Wizzington]

It's good that you prefer to refine these DLCs and updates before releasing it.

Does this mean that you will add something "extra and unannounced" to the DLC and free update???

The plan is not to use the extra time to expand the scope of the update/expansion but to use it entirely for polish. Anything 'extra' will instead be more bugfixes, more balancing, more work on AI and so on.

We will however have time to go everything we're doing properly in the weekly dev diaries, previously we had to compress it a bit to fit the release date.

 

[Wizzington]

That is a good decision.
Just, don't you Swedes also celebrate Midsummer's Eve?

The final build we'll be releasing will be wrapped, completed and tested well in advance of midsummer festivities! We don't generally tinker with the builds right before the release date, and last-minute code changes being pushed from the surströmming table seems like an especially bad idea.

 

[PDX_Pelly]

That is a good decision.
Just, don't you Swedes also celebrate Midsummer's Eve?

Yes, however Midsummer is on the 22nd and Eve on the 21st! We also will have the build in advance of this

Edit: Martin was quicker on the keyboard than I!

 

[Wizzington]

Okay, I understand. Although it's a pity that there is no chance for the Kingdom of Poland (Congress) to be at the start of the game.

It was a state in personal union with the Russian Empire in the years 1815–1915, the Tsar of Russia was the king of Poland. I think this would be justified by the presence of the Grand Duchy of Finland at the start of the game - and most likely the United Baltic Provinces will also be in update 1.7.

At least from what can be seen on the maps from version 1.7, you can count on the fact that the territory of Congress Poland is undergoing a map rework (I think the Lublin and Podlasie regions have been added).

This has been considered and pretty extensively discussed in the past, the gist of that discussion is that Poland's autonomy was basically completely gone by 1830 and it really was more of a province with some special rights than any of sort of self-governing entity, even when compared to say the Baltic States. Not having Poland playable is a deliberate choice as we feel it accurately reflects the historical reality at the time.

 

[Wizzington]

Out of curiosity, was the release date pushed back because you found more bugs that needed fixing, or ones that were already known proved too difficult to fix within the original time frame?

Both, honestly. The balance of certain features has also taken much longer than expected to get right, particularly for the Building Ownership Rework.

 

[Wizzington]

I think that it's a good decision to postpone the release in order to properly polish it. Frankly, I was very surprised by the original plans for the release date (it being so soon after the previous 1.6 release), due to the massive scope of changes coming in 1.7. The new timeline seems much more feasible (simply judging from how much time the previous patches/DLCs took).

What worries me is that PDS goes on holidays in July and August, and there will be basically no time between the new 1.7 release date and these holidays. So if some gamebreaking bugs still end up slipping into the 1.7 release version (and, to be honest, I wouldn't bet against that, even given the additional polishing time), it's likely that they wouldn't get fixed all the way until September, due to most of the staff being on holidays until then. Wouldn't planning the release for late August/early September be better for this reason?

We have accounted for the summer as part of our delay planning. Not everyone takes vacation at the same time and we will have enough people in place over July to make and release needed hotfixes.

 

[PDX_H4n1baL]

I would like to ask if this is because this update needs to fix a lot of balance and bugs, or because the previous updates were full of bugs and this time I spent more time fixing them.

I mean, do we end up receiving an update of the same quality as before, or is it a very polished, high-quality update that's free of imbalances and bugs?

I want to try to give some context around this:
It is very hard for us to judge at this point.
But what is basically a given is that there will be bugs and imbalances of some kind. That's true for every update we put out. The complexity of systems and the different ways of playing Victoria 3 make it incredibly hard to oversee all effects a change will have.

We always work towards releasing with as few imbalances and bugs as possible of course. Very often it has been the case that we never encountered a particular issue in testing ourselves, but on day 1 it was encountered by the players. This can be due to a multitude of factors, e.g. hardware, OS or as in most cases basically a numbers game.

This is a big oversimplification, but let's roll with it and say we have 10 QA each working 40hrs a week on quality assurance. And let's assume they have exclusively worked on SoI for 6 full months.
That ends up at 9.600 hours of QA time.
Within one hour after release, players will have spent more time ingame than our entire QA team has spent over the course of 6 months. Again, simplification, but you get the comparison I think.
Players will always find issues we could not discover on our own because nobody had the time to dedicate a playthrough with a communist Brunswick that relied exclusively on trade to fuel its economy only to realize that the balancing for firewood consumption is off when you reach 1885 under these conditions.

All that being said, personally I am hopeful we will end up at a good release which doesn't require a lot of effort to fix afterwards. But I can't say with certainty, because certainly something will appear on day 1.

 

[PDX_Pelly]

Will the next dev diary contain an updated schedule for future dev diaries? Love to see what the team has come up with to keep us busy until June 26.

It won't this week, but is more likely next week, I am evaluating if we do so now! We do have the subjects set, and well I know what the order is, just confirming everything! Some of them you know already from the previous schedule, and what we said in recent diaries e.g. Catalysts, Art of Sphere of Influence and The Great Game.