The game is starting to feel more like "use the mission tree"

[Pavía]

This thread has come to the attention of the dev team, so let me say a couple of things.

Mission trees are not a mandatory feature of the game, as some people have already pointed out. What they do is expand the gameplay experience of EU4, which by this time, almost 9 years after it was released, is already difficult to achieve.

And it's difficult not because of a lack of creativity or fresh ideas in the team, but because there is a legacy that had to be assumed when Paradox Tinto was put in charge of the development of the game, in 2020. The problems experienced after the release of Leviathan were a consequence of that legacy, and since then, we've spoken out loud on what we're doing: fixing as much as possible the state of the existing game systems while developing new content.

On the first objective, I think the changelogs of the last updates speak for themselves on our work. Regarding the second, it's true that the main way of developing new content is being in the form of missions, but not that we're avoiding adding more depth to the game. In the last mission trees, we've been experimenting and developing less railroaded paths for them, giving more agency to the player to develop and create its own gameplay, based on both branching missions, but also on variable triggers and rewards. And what we're also doing is implementing new content to the existing game mechanics, instead of introducing new ones that would compromise again the state of the game. Also because the game at this point is already quite dense and complicated to learn for newcomers, something that veteran players with thousands of hours into the game are not always aware of.

What are the changes to the base game we've been working on? I'll talk a bit more about them in a DD in a couple of weeks. But we've already shown a lot of new government reforms, not only giving modifiers but also affecting other game mechanics; new naval doctrines; changes in the combat system; next week we'll show improvements to the AI... And all of them coming for free in the next update.

So, it's fair to criticize the mission system if you don't like it. But, at the same time, we think some of the critics poured into the game development are unfair, on the other hand.

And, also, let me note that comments like these:

Mission trees are added by Paradox's 'content designers' which are about the lowest on the totem pole in their studios. I doubt many have any programming background at all -- they're basically just paid modders. Meanwhile Paradox also seems to be skimping on programmers because after all, why hire programmers to make noteworthy changes and improvements to the game when you can just use interns, fresh history grads, and people who are willing to work for peanuts to work in the gaming industry to churn out endless DLC 'content' like mission trees?

It’s sad, but my opinion of the work of « content designers » is really low indeed.

Are completely out of place in this forum, regarding the new code of conduct. As I said in another thread, devs deem respect, and more if you want us to continue interacting directly with the community, one of the things that we're proud of in Paradox.

PD: In our CD Team there are no interns, the only historian here is me and I held a Ph.D. (so I know a couple of things about historical research and History), and we also have some programmers. So I suppose ignorance is bold.

 

[PDXBigBoss]

That's nice to hear, and changelogs are definitely impressive. However, I'm curious if you have any QA folks there. Or just anybody in your team who can play the game sometimes? Björn said you have no open QA positions, but your QA department still seems non-existent to me. A lot of entries from aforementioned changelogs address really trivial issues which could have been easily spotted by anyone playing the game. Yet, somehow a number of them were fixed only after I've filed them to the bug reports forum.

BTW I've started new campaign in 1.33, and already filed 2.5 pages of new bug reports, so you definitely have some more work to do for 1.34 and 1.35

We have both external and internal QA teams of multiple people who have been working for months since we delivered the first iteration of the 1.34 content. They're just quiet people and not in the limelight I suppose. But they are extremely hard-working folks and I have discussions with them daily.

A lot of entries from aforementioned changelogs address really trivial issues which could have been easily spotted by anyone playing the game. Yet, somehow a number of them were fixed only after I've filed them to the bug reports forum.

Since 2020 we have fixed over 3000 bugs according to internal analytics, some may slip through the cracks. We are humans after all ^_^ Please feel free to submit any and all bug reports and we will get to them as soon as we can!

Or just anybody in your team who can play the game sometimes?

I have nearly 12.000 hours in the game, about 2k of them probably on modding, I love playing the game personally. I know our QA guys have at least 4-5k hours of pure gameplay each, so there's also that! I play MPs with my friends as frequently as time allows it and we have a weekly game going on internally ( rip Gotland ).

 

[Pavía]

If you and the other devs are unhappy with negative feedback, maybe you should consider your situation. You work for a company which relies on the "sunk cost fallacy" (aka spending good money after bad) to get it's customers to spend up to 1/3 of the game itself for DLC which heavily hints that it will fix issues that have been around since the game's release but never does. You work for a company which uses "sponsored" YouTubers to create heavily edited videos purporting to be live playthroughs (seriously, look at any YouTuber's vid and watch the dates closely) to sell the game. A company that leans hard on unpaid fans to provide tech support and additional content and tries to pass off unintuitive, arbitrary rules and needless complexity as depth and challenge.

There's no problem with the negative feedback, as long as it can be used to improve our work. Another different thing is the unfair feedback. For instance, you say that '[we] will fix issues that have been around since the game's release but never does', which is not true, as some other people in this thread have already pointed out. Right now we have internal 'debt' backlogs that we're reducing with each released update since last year, along with the new content.

Whoa. Then I'm sorry, my bad for not giving them a proper credit. (I actually suspect that most of those 3k bugs were found in pre-release iterations where it's mostly known where to look for bugs, but it's still a solid number). Perhaps they enjoy the game too much and don't pay attention when some things are off if they don't ruin gameplay completely

Son, you ARE the QA (spoken like the gears of war line) lol.

But no, even historically QA testing/ID of bugs wasn't the issue in EU 4. There were times where the line "we are the QA" could have been considered a lot more true than it is now. There was never a dearth of bugs identified. The issue in EU 4's patch history was always that long-confirmed bugs simply weren't fixed. You can't fix already ID'd bugs with more testers or more gameplay knowledge. You need someone who can actually program the game to go in and fix the enormous quantity of problems already identified, and to allocate resources so that someone is able to do it.

Prior to 2020, that was happening a lot less than it is now, and the backlog was pretty immense. Tinto more or less had to not only try to keep up with issues introduced by new stuff, but also fix remaining issue from new stuff from the past 6+ years. I know this, because bugs I'd known about for longer that which always annoyed me went away. Which means they reached that far back, but also addressed other known issues introduced in that 2016-2020 window too.

It's a massive improvement and while I have my criticisms of some design choices (nobody will get a game 100% to preference that still sells) and UI elements (somewhat more low-hanging fruit), IMO Tinto should be commended for both overall direction choice and making up for lost time wrt cleaning up the game. Previous devs have talked about catching up on tech debt, but in the past two years we've actually *observed* it happening.

To me, a meme Gotland tree is a small tradeoff for that, assuming we don't go into HOI territory.

Thanks for the kind comments giving credit to our bug-fixing work, it's really appreciated. As said by my colleague, we already fix hundreds of issues before each release, but those aren't commented out of the team, for obvious reasons. And even if we do our best for catching all the issues before a release, there will always be issues slipping into them, as it's nearly impossible to deliver a bug-free version.

And yet you're (team, not necessarily you individually) still releasing patches with blatant, easily corrected, bugs in newly added content such as the +100% instead of 1% in the horde ideas so something is clearly broken. Either QA is not being organized properly to ensure all new content is properly reviewed along with more general gameplay testing or said reviews are incompetent or the issues they raise aren't being addressed in a timely manner. Whichever area is the problem is irrelevant to the consumers, all we see is one broken release after another...

And, again, it's not fair saying things like 'one broken release after another'; 1.32 and 1.33 updates have been much more stable than the disaster 1.31 was, and we're aiming for an even smoother 1.34 release, and we're making preparations with that objective in mind.

It would get really interesting if AI was smart enough to actually follow these mission trees without external help. If results for the world's picture were horrible enough, developers would consider making missions more balanced

There will be some words about this in tomorrow's DD.

Having a Ph.D. in history, are you aware that the text for the new Danzig Confederation was lifted entirely from Wikipedia? Doesn't seem like good historical research to me.

Prussian Confederation - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

First and foremost, I consider Wikipedia as a really interesting source, as depending on the article, it will have references and links to other sources, so it can be checked the actual accuracy of what is told on it.

That said, this may be an overlook on our behalf, as paraphrasing is something that can be taken into consideration, but copy-pasting not; sometimes we are a bit pressed by time constraints to finish some of the content to be tested, etc., and we forget to double-check properly what we've written.