The Stellaris Curse strikes again

[Masked Ermine]

Stellaris now has a subscription.

It IS a live service game.

I refuse to use the subscription system. Paradox gets my money on updates WHEN/IF I think they are up to snuff...Not before... Every time they put out one of these broken patches every one that subscribes should get a 100% rebate for their subscription period...

 

[Thiend]

I refuse to use the subscription system. Paradox gets my money on updates WHEN/IF I think they are up to snuff...Not before... Every time they put out one of these broken patches every one that subscribes should get a 100% rebate for their subscription period...

I agree on all counts, I'm just saying comparing it to a live service game that does a better job with updates is completely fair... because it is one.

 

[grommile]

If it was after, we'd be able to play Biogenesis without it and they could run a beta until it was actually ready without a looming deadline.

I suggested exactly this. Unfortunately, here we are.

Doing a big pop-related DLC, then changing the entire pop system immediately afterwards? That sounds even crazier than what they actually did.

 

[T5_k]

I hope the devs, and more importantly the business suit people are reading this thread, the pre-patch approach deffinately sounds better than the current state of things. Buying a DLC which gives you permanent ownership and waiting two weeks or months for bugs to get fixed is one thing, however, subscriptions are time-limited and if the game is in an buggy state when I get it I'd deffinitely want my money back.

 

[Imp0815]

You know it's almost like they should've delayed publishing it for a couple of weeks or a month or two months if that's 'all it would take to fix all the bugs'; maybe they could avoid the bad reviews then huh...that's a strange and novel thought innit?

If I were them, I would create a beta program like the PTS of MMOs, where players can test all the new stuff—DLC and all—and then proceed to fix EVERYTHING until the bug backlog is only very minor or empty. Then I would push to release. That's what I thought when they had their open beta, which was cut down halfway through to release in a sorry state.
Marketing? Nah, that's so 2010—word of mouth is what pushes sales now! Make the game good and make it well—that will be the best marketing there is. In addition, you can save money by reducing the marketing departments and cutting advertising costs.
Spoilers? Well, it might happen, but having some spoilers is not as bad as having a bugged and broken release preventing you from experiencing the spoilers in the first place.

Early access titles are just that—and that's why, when they release, they’re in a massively better state. Sure, it’s not the big bang of traditional releases, but if we now see one thing: tradition in the gaming industry is dying, and they need to adapt or die with it.

 

[Imp0815]

I refuse to use the subscription system. Paradox gets my money on updates WHEN/IF I think they are up to snuff...Not before... Every time they put out one of these broken patches every one that subscribes should get a 100% rebate for their subscription period...

I think if this keeps up Valve/Steam will shut them down like they did on preorder vapor ware and NFT games.

 

[csebal]

Another awesome DLC.
Another great patch.

And the DLC reviews are getting ruined because of a ton of bugs that are going to be fixed within 2 wekks, while the negative reviews are most likely never getting updated.

I swear, Stellaris has many "mixed" awesome DLCs, some of paradox best works, and most of them are tainted by the exact same problem, they always come out with a new, radical patch that changes everything, creates a bunch of bugs, and people review the latest DLC negatively because of a free patch that had nothing to do with it.

In all fairness, this is a self-inflicted injury by PDX.

This patch has great potential. The changes are going in a good direction, they are pretty smart even, but the execution is horrendous. It doesn't matter how great the changes could be, when they are rendered useless by a dysfunctional UI even before we consider all the bugs. In a game that relies so heavily on deep systems interacting, there should be clear UI clues on how things work.

OG Stellaris was great at this, the original game's systems and UI were in sync and you intuitively learned everything you had to by just looking at the information presented to you either directly or through tool tips.
NG Stellaris is sloppy in this regard. tool tips don't give nearly enough information to understand mechanics, the UI is convoluted and is lacking important information especially when it comes to population, which suddenly became very important to properly manage, yet it lacks the tools needed to do so.

I'm certain that this DLC and 4.0 will be a great step in the game's path eventually, but I'm also certain that it turned quite a few people away from the game either new or old simply because of how badly these ideas were executed on.

Paradox must put more emphasis on quality and usability. Also, when you buy a DLC and the game is bad, you will rate the thing you bought, not the base game... I see nothing wrong with that. PDX should learn and improve. Put more emphasis on quality control to prevent cases when players can't play the game for days because it's a minefield of game breaking / game ending bugs.

I've found 3 in just 8 hours of playing and I didn't even venture too far into the extreme combinations, these were really just on the nose, how the heck did QC not catch these type of bugs.