PDX is one of the few companies I’ll (barely) forgive for this behavior.
Their degree of experience and institutional knowledge on making systems that function well for strategy games is frankly unmatched, they’re like 10ish years ahead of the rest of the genre, usually.
Employing those people for that length of time to build up the experience necessary to deliver consistency like this probably means you need a very reliable, predictable income stream, something you can count on like clockwork. That’ll give you the freedom to let some random dude iterate the same thing for 10 years, making it gradually better and better.
Given how much room for improvement the grand strategy genre still has, and how difficult it seems to be to perfect compared to something like a shooter, I understand why this might be necessary to give any kind of high chance of continuing success.
So, I barely forgive them for this bs, more than I forgive others that do it. WoW pioneered this pattern, I think, and it did work for them.
You’re making some good points here. But this doesn’t explain why naval combat in every Paradox game seems to be a counterintuitive mess.
Minimal resources devoted to improving it because they don’t consider it a core component, I imagine. The systems as they exist now are highly abstracted, but they do make some sense to a naval aficionado. They are a bit lazy though.
There’s a lot of systems they could have, but don’t. Internal politics are poorly modeled for instance, compared to how complex they actually are. These things would fall under that room for improvement category, which is very large still. This entire genre has only hit like 5% or less of its potential so far. Where several other genres are closer to 95%.
If you want genuinely accurate naval simulation though, you need specialists for that, it’s not as easy as it sounds. Most games that try do pretty poorly unless they’re focused on it. PTO by Koei was pretty good, back in the day, though that’s probably my rose colored glasses talking.
Been making the same game for ten years.
“Complete” editions of the games sell for hundreds of dollars when not on a practically mandatory steam sale.
Developed an entire game based on naval combat in space, with a good ship designer and interesting events.
Still can’t make the naval units in HOI4 anything other than “click here to stop enemy from getting resources from water” and showing navy battles as an actual battleship board in a pop up.
People will pay hundreds of dollars for this.
Paradox developed themselves right into a niche, and then they charge a premium to the few people who enjoy staring at a map with gifs on it. They have barely innovated on the idea for 20 years. 20 years ago, we had the greatest grand strategy game ever released: Rome: Total War. Paradox has not even come close to touching the greatness of that game.
Shit I’ll take expansions over battle passes and what passes for “seasonal content” these days.
DLCs/Expansions are one time upfront payment you bought it you own it and upload it. Unlike IAPs pure cosmetics and even ruins the game. And reboots are worst
Not to mentioning releasing the same game twice, 10 years apart…
Looking at you, Cities: Skylines.
