The State of the Release 4.0 “Phoenix -> Why this really happened?

[Munin]

I find what Eladrin is saying reminds me of the most downvoted post in reddit history.
Only one marked difference, the dev is actually apologizing and giving an argument that is quite too painfull to not be the truth: "Not finishing because he and his team couldn't make the deadline with summer holidays"

-> What do you think is the root cause for the problem of early release?

The reason for failure in my opinion is in a lot of ways the same as why the EA reddit post was downvoted so much, it is the monetisation of the games with season passes (dlc's). Gone are the days of Blizzard before activision when a game release was delayed without fear of apology. Blizzard Entertainment was famous for saying, "It is done when it's done," and declining to set release dates.

Why the game was released before it was ready? Well as in the opinion of Eladrin that is because the deadline is not "it is done when it's done" as Blizzard used to say, it is it has to be done as paradox already sold the game dlc's with the promised date of delivering it. It is because marketeers and sales made the decision when it is done. When the business model of pardadox has become famous for selling developped items (season passes) before developping them we should not be surprised that this could happen.

Take a look at some game history it is quite interesting to see what makes game companies fail and more often than not it is consumers seeing through the marketing and sales schemes, the lesson here for us as consumers is not to buy something if you don't know what it is (pre orders and season passes).

"Electronic Arts was voted the worst company in America not once, but TWICE!"

"The Deadly Decisions Destroying Ubisoft"

"Blizzard Accidentally Created Their Worst Enemy"

"The Controversial Rise of Rockstar Games"

I do think that developpers get rewarded for not monetising their games, see the release of kickstarter wasteland 2 (game with no dlc) and "The Controversial Rise of Rockstar Games" and how old original Blizzard devs continue "it is done when it is done" policy in Blizzards competitors: "Blizzard Accidentally Created Their Worst Enemy".


A second reason and this is speculation on my side as I don't know enough about game developping to understand if this was the case here. I think they tried to change the existing game too much in a dlc in what should have been a release of a new game called "Stellaris 2". If you are going to change a lot of core mechanics of the game, maybe better create a new one? To be honest I didn't recognize stellaris and how to play it anymore so for me the dlc was a new game. And if it worked with performance improvement it would have been a hell of a deal to get a new stellaris game for the price of a dlc.



I hope one point companies should realise that just as in a restaurant you don't have the sales department deciding how food should be cooked and when it is ready to serve, it should be in the end the food expert or chef deciding when the meal is ready. The food is done, when it is done. A game should be no different. And a chef should always taste its food before it is served. It reminds me of how the game industry used to be, Interplay's and Black Isle's motto, from back when Fallout first came: "By gamers, for gamers". And rockstar has been proven right in that aspect, game devs are rockstars when they use the approach of making games for gamers first instead of a sales driven approach first.



State of relase dev post:

Hello everyone!

We’re one day early with the dev diary this week, but I wanted to get this out to all of you as soon as possible.

The State of the Release​

The Stellaris 4.0 “Phoenix” update and BioGenesis have been released.

BioGenesis is a fantastic expansion and I’m incredibly proud of what we accomplished with it, but I have to be honest - like its namesake, the free patch alongside BioGenesis has been a little bit on fire.

During the lead-up to the release, I was confident that we would be able to finish the revamp and clean up the most critical bugs. We fell short of that goal, and we’re committed to continuing to fix things until the 4.0 release is in the state it needs to be in.

While some suggested delaying the release until the game was in better shape, I wanted to keep as much distance as we could from the summer holidays. I was concerned about repeating a 2.2-style situation, where we couldn't provide full post-launch support for the game and it remained broken for too long. Like the 2.2 changes, however, I strongly believe that the system changes in 4.0 improve Stellaris and will give us the platform we need to rise from those ashes and grow for years to come.

I’m incredibly thankful for the passion of our fans and apologize for disappointing you.

​

​

EA most downvoted post:

 

[Psykhes]

Stellaris made even fun of this in one of the reliquary outcomes.

 

[grommile]

If you are going to change a lot of core mechanics of the game, to be honest I didn't recognize stellaris and how to play it anymore so for me the dlc was a new game.

To be clear: the issues were mostly with the accompanying free patch, not the Biogenesis DLC.

(Also, major reworks are pretty much part of the Stellaris brand at this point.)

 

[Psykhes]

To be clear: the issues were mostly with the accompanying free patch, not the Biogenesis DLC.

(Also, major reworks are pretty much part of the Stellaris brand at this point.)

Technically correct, but the free patch had to be released at the same time als the DLC, because the DLC would not work without it.
Without the DLC they could have postponed the new patch a month or three(*).

And the issue isn't that it is a major rework, but that it was basically only half done.


(* Although I do not follow the argumentation of Munin completely - yes, they pre-sold the DLC, but there are plenty of cases where a game or DLC was pre-sold and its release date was still postponed.
They should have done it, but that they didn't wasn't in itself the "fault" of the DLC or Season Pass. )

 

[Munin]

Technically correct, but the free patch had to be released at the same time als the DLC, because the DLC would not work without it.
Without the DLC they could have postponed the new patch a month or three(*).

And the issue isn't that it is a major rework, but that it was basically only half done.


(* Although I do not follow the argumentation of Munin completely - yes, they pre-sold the DLC, but there are plenty of cases where a game or DLC was pre-sold and its release date was still postponed.
They should have done it, but that they didn't wasn't in itself the "fault" of the DLC or Season Pass. )

Thanks for defending my argument, that was indeed what I ment to say.

You are saying there was no pressure to release a working DLC Biogenisis in Q2? (including patch)
-> What was pushing paradox to release before the summer holidays rather than after the summer holidays?


The promise made about the release dates seems pretty clear, every quarter another DLC. Would delaying the Q2 expansion in Q3 not endanger the development time for Q3 and Q4 expansions?

 

[grommile]

there are plenty of cases where a game or DLC was pre-sold and its release date was still postponed.

there are!

But due to much worse scandals than the one setting this forum on fire, Valve, Inc. dba Steam have decreed that if you run a season pass, you must set deadlines for the release of every item on the pass, with fairly strict commercial consequences for missing them.

 

[WoodenP]

The OP's post is basically nonsense.

I mean, the principles sound nice in theory and all - but the details are totally wrong.

"Phoenix" (4.0) was not sold as a part of the season pass. The broken 4.0 stuff did not necessarily have to be released at all. There was no economic pressure. Biogenesis, which is a part of the season pass and did have that economic pressure and release mandate, was in actuality very well made. They'd been making Biogenesis for a long time. It was decently QA tested. Aside from some wilderness empire issues, it works great. It actually stands as reasonable evidence against OPs presumption.

Remember that 4.0 and Biogenesis are not the same thing. Biogenesis has almost zero interactions with the new 4.0 feature set. The two branches were only merged together a matter of days before the release of the expansion! (This merging is what caused the 4.0 betas to end early).

But PDX decided on their own terms to tie the two together. They did this when they didn't need to in order to get 4.0 out as quickly as possible. It wasn't about the money and it wasn't about scary unknown "executives" that people like to cry boogey-man over. It was the Phoenix team, plain and simple. They have a lot of ambitious plans for the future (see the polls before Christmas) and wanted to knock this stuff out of the way first. To delay "Phoenix" until after Biogenesis would have seen the update land on a dodgy pre-summer-holidays release window. Delay after that and the year is closing already! So they opted to move fast.

That's all pretty reasonable, I think.

But then they bit off more than they could chew. They pursued unnecessary scope creep (district specialisations), didn't give attention to detail to other features (civilians, trade, focus system) and rationalised they could use the community to QA test it for them since they have limited resources of their own (a satellite was recently closed down). It blew up in their face. Perhaps rightly so. Just a lot of fundamentally terrible design work and a short release window. Incompetence. That's what happened.

Spoiler

As for the actual season passes and expansions, honestly it looks like things are going well and we'll probably have a few more good years of them.

 

[Abdulijubjub]

Technically correct, but the free patch had to be released at the same time als the DLC, because the DLC would not work without it.
Without the DLC they could have postponed the new patch a month or three(*).

And the issue isn't that it is a major rework, but that it was basically only half done.


(* Although I do not follow the argumentation of Munin completely - yes, they pre-sold the DLC, but there are plenty of cases where a game or DLC was pre-sold and its release date was still postponed.
They should have done it, but that they didn't wasn't in itself the "fault" of the DLC or Season Pass. )

There was way too much finished content in Biogenesis for it to have been developed mainly on the incomplete 4.0. And there were a few things in it that were evidently added for 3.14 style economies (ex. tooltips per pop, instead of per 100 pops), but broke under 4.0 and had to be updated post release.

I think it's reasonable to assume that Biogenesis was made with 3.14 code, then ported along with everything else.

It's 4.0 that didn't have enough time to bake.

---

This entire thread seems backwards, if you remove the assumption that the need to release paid DLC is what broke the game (instead of a sincere, but evidently halfbaked attempt to improve the game that came out at the same time).

Though it is true that they would have been between a rock and a hard place if they had already ported Biogenesis over to 4.0, and had to release Biogenesis, but 4.0 wasn't ready...

 

[HFY]

"Phoenix" (4.0) was not sold as a part of the season pass. The broken 4.0 stuff did not necessarily have to be released at all. There was no economic pressure. Biogenesis, which is a part of the season pass and did have that economic pressure and release mandate, was in actuality very well made. They'd been making Biogenesis for a long time. It was decently QA tested. Aside from some wilderness empire issues, it works great. It actually stands as reasonable evidence against OPs presumption.

Wasn't Wilderness the specific thing which needed 4.0 changes (workforce in particular)?

Biogenesis without Wilderness could have been a successful, happy 3.14 endnote with a summer-long open beta to shake out the 4.0 problems.

 

[Psykhes]

Though it is true that they would have been between a rock and a hard place if they had already ported Biogenesis over to 4.0, and had to release Biogenesis, but 4.0 wasn't ready...

That is the thing.
You are right that Biogenesis and 4.0 likely started as 2 seperate branches, but I think it is a pretty save assumption that they started merging them at around the same time as the beta started. I do not think they would have had time to separate them again in a workable state by the time it was clear trains will get wrecked.

The promise made about the release dates seems pretty clear, every quarter another DLC. Would delaying the Q2 expansion in Q3 not endanger the development time for Q3 and Q4 expansions?

Yes and no.

Would delaying it endanger the Q3 and Q4 expansions? Maybe. But that is the wrong question.
The right question is: would delaying it endanger the future expansions more than fixing the bugs after release as it happened? There I think: No.

 

[Thiend]

Wasn't Wilderness the specific thing which needed 4.0 changes (workforce in particular)?

Biogenesis without Wilderness could have been a successful, happy 3.14 endnote with a summer-long open beta to shake out the 4.0 problems.

Wilderness could basically work perfectly fine in 3.14 by just adding a job to the planetary capital that applies species traits of the pop working it to all flat production on the planet, then making Wilderness swap to all buildings/districts that provide flat production instead of jobs.

4.0 Wilderness is impossible in 3.14, but Wilderness as a concept isn't. That's basically 4.0 in a nutshell, the entire patch adjusts things that actually DID work fine with the new Biogenesis features, they just then also modified them to be slightly different. It's why people keep saying it's a pointless change to "make it theirs" (compared to previous dev teams) even if I disagree with that. The ONLY necessary change in 4.0 is cutting the performance costs of pops to allow Cloning ascension, and there are many possible solutions to that.

 

[VexacionRT]

Technically correct, but the free patch had to be released at the same time als the DLC, because the DLC would not work without it.
Without the DLC they could have postponed the new patch a month or three(*).

And the issue isn't that it is a major rework, but that it was basically only half done.


(* Although I do not follow the argumentation of Munin completely - yes, they pre-sold the DLC, but there are plenty of cases where a game or DLC was pre-sold and its release date was still postponed.
They should have done it, but that they didn't wasn't in itself the "fault" of the DLC or Season Pass. )

Nothing in the free patch was required for Biogenesis. It would have been significantly less work to make a 3.15 branch and update JUST biogenesis to work with 3.X planet/pop system than update ALL PAST DLC AND CONTENT IN THE GAME for 4.X.

Edit: A lot of people talking about Wilderness and how it "wouldn't work" in 3.14. I would like to point out that it doesn't work in 4.0 either....which is why we now have a beta for just Wilderness... Easily could have told people "hey this isn't our original vision for Wilderness Origin but we have the following plans for it which will happen when we update to 4.0!"

 

[Nakkivene]

It does seem like the DLC was the reason to make these pop changes. I was hoping for better performance, but instead mid-lategame is an absolutely unplayable lagshow with much smaller galaxies than what I used to play on. I'm not sure I'd buy the next expansion at this point. The game isn't playable anymore for me.

 

[Kingman]

Frankly my biggest disappointment in the patch has been the performance. This to me was what I so much looking forward to because its what normally kills the game for me.

I understand bugs can happen and I have learned to just accept the first month or so is usually bug fixing.

But the performance was the biggest selling point for me and it has been quite demotivating seeing it even worse than 3.14

I was really hopeful on it being much better performance wise.

 

[CrazyJ]

Honestly they need to stop tying major reworks to DLC, or at the very least stop tying them into DCL that need them to function.

If they'd made a species pack that dropped at the same time as 4.0 they could have delayed the rework without impacting the DLC much and avoided this whole dumpsterfire.

A DLC with features that don't are mostly unaffected by reworks would mean they could easily make it usable in both the pre-rework version and the post rework version.

 

[TitaniumMan91]

Haven't played on the new patch yet, but it really does feel like 4.0 should have been Stellaris 2 1.0

This is the 4th major revision to core mechanics and I'll grant maybe there wasn't enough to justify a full sequel, but you can find more things to add or modify from the original to justify a sequel, it's a big game with lots of systems and (when I played last) plenty of undercooked jank that inevitably builds up over the course of 10 years of expansions.

Update the graphics, finagle the fleets/armies more, and fully detangle the spaghetti code holding the whole thing together (makes future expansions easier) and call it a sequel.

 

[WoodenP]

Frankly my biggest disappointment in the patch has been the performance.

Yeah the performance situation is an outrage.

I remember the tacit admittance we wouldn't see much performance "yet" buried in one of the dev diary comments. It was a major alarm bell to me but this forum community seemed very happy to bury their heads in the sand over it.

Phoenix is filled with dodgy, compromised design decisions in the name of performance and we don't even get it.

You can roll back to 3.14, install the trade lane removal mod, and have exceptionally fast sim speed. Not to be too rude but how is the Phoenix team is so incompetent they didn't even get that far?

And now the current situation, where they don't even really seem to know what to do about performance, is what we're left with.