Their dlc's have always been overpriced, but there hasn't been one that actually broke the game in years.
Well... Eu4's newest expansion, "Leviathan", has actually broken the game, it is actually unplayable. And the worst part? Even if you don't have the DLC, you're still screwed because the free patch that came with the DLC also breaks the game.
Oh, and also this dlc is 20$.
So please shit on paradox interactive in this thread.
WHY DOESN'T NAZI GERMANY HAVE THE NAZI FLAG PARADOX?
WHY AREN'T DISCUSSIONS OR DEPICTIONS OF NAZI ATROCITY ALLOWED ON YOUR FORUMS PARADOX?
COULD IT BE YOU KNOWINGLY CULTIVATE A FASCIST FANBASE FOR YOUR GAMES?
The first one is excusable imo because they want to sell their game in germany but the second is basically just historical revisionism when they have events for the bengal famine and the great purge is literally a game mechanic.
I like how they both paint the Great Purge as an atrocity but also justify it since there's a Soviet civil war otherwise.
Yeah, though I sorta was happy to see that, even if they don't make it clear while playing how bad the civil war will be if you let a few waves of purges off. I'd maybe have risked it otherwise.
I mean, if you want to keep both Rokossovsky and Tukhachevsky, a “little” civil war doesn’t seem that bad.
If they really wanted to be consistent, they would have just given a few debuffs at most if you don’t do any purging.
oh and the game is balanced for germany having a 'fair' and winnable fight
Couldn't both of those things attract a fascist fanbase? They'd love to play a game that lets Nazi Germany have a swastika.
it sanitizes it for normal players and the game is clearly intended for people to play germany. not allowing discussion and mods is enlightened centrist bullshit cuz paradox would alienate fascist players if they were forced to moderate it in a decent way
The TNO mod shows perfectly well that you could show Nazi Germany in all of its ugliness without having a sizeable Nazi fanbase. Then again, TNO is quite a bit different in both tone and formula from vanilla.
I used to read the paradox forums in HoI2 days, and all the paradox forums had their After Action Reports where people would make sort-of novelised stories out of their campaigns from the perspectives of the higher-ups in the countries (I'm sure they still do). They were dorky but harmless except half the hoi ones were these stories from their german campaigns where they had Goering and Himmler etc chatting as the protagonists, it was really fucking creepy. I kinda sorta understand why Germany was kinda their default “can you change the course of history?” campaign (though of course this raises broader questions about how fundamentally psychopathic the inbuilt "default" way of playing most strategy games is), but it always felt way too gross for me to ever play as them, and the people going further and doing fash cosplay before it was cool were suuuuuuper fucking sketchy.
I've read a couple of those AARs you are talking about back in the day, and while I'm sure you have your hitler fanboy stories that are garbage and trash writing anyway, many history grognards like myself just find perverse enjoyment in imagining general staff conversations between famous/infamous historical figures. I've written similar AARs for the USSR where its just Marshal Zhukov eating a sandwich and complaining about ammunition shortages. The good German AARs still acknowledge the horrors of war and Nazism, even if paradox rules mean you can't ever discuss them directly. I personally also don't like playing Nazi Germany, it feels way better to stomp them as someone else (especially USSR)
Oh yeah I totally get the grognard appeal of these things, but from memory the german ones I read all seemed rather too excited about their protagonists (I remember that the better ones had a mod or whatever where the nazis were overthrown and there were aggressive-but-totally-not-actual-nazis running germany)
My thoughts are also coloured by the time when I made fun of Himmler on one of the HoI forums for being such a massive loser, and this whole gang of people leapt to his defense and dogpiled on me with shit about how at least he made something of himself and ran a whole government agency, while I of course just sit in my mums basement... it was pretty disconcerting back in the day, before being openly fash was cool
John French and Haig after the Battle of Loos blaming each other, but then they start kissing.......
fun fact: paradox forums were the first place i ever had contact with actual nazis on the internet as a teen because that fucking place is a cesspol
It's been a while since I played HOI4 unmodded but I'm pretty sure Hitler's blacked out in the American release too.
Shoutout that time they added space communism to stellaris and triggered the shit out of their fash fanbase tho
Just got Stellaris, and it's a perfectly cromulant 4x. But I don't play a ton of Paradox games. I've always been a Blizzard guy.
Yeah, I sail the seven seas from time to time as well, but this dlc is so bad that it isn't even worth pirating lol.
I really don't know why I haven't started doing this. I guess I just like the convenience of have all my games in one place and easy to install, set up and access. Plus I'd imagine it fucks up multiplayer gaming with friends since you can't just easily invite people to lobbies through the store client. None of my close friends pirate shit lol
I guess I just like the convenience of have all my games in one place and easy to install, set up and access.
HDD prices are $13-18/TB, if you check a couple times a day until you get a good deal. There's nothing more convenient than having everything already downloaded (or even already installed if you don't use a SSD for installed stuff), and it's still cheaper than buying the actual games.
But yeah setting up Hamachi for multiplayer takes a bit of work.
Yes but have you seen this dlc? It's unlike anything in years.
“oh sorry you need white neighbors to fix your culture/religion/technology!”)
Are you talking about westernazation? because that hasn't been in the game for years.
The new model of tech is still eurocentric but much less so.
Oh, no I misunderstood you, yes American Natives still get mistreated and infantilised just as much as before, this dlc fixes nothing besides finally recognizing that Aboriginal People were a thing.
Asia and Africa are in a much better position now then before at least.
Also the problem with most strategy games is that the way they model technology as a tree is inherently flawed, just because native Americans didn't have muskets and didn't build cities, doesn't make them technologically inferior to europeans, considering the kinds of canals and systems they made. Unfortunately this isn't modeled in strategy games. Eu4 is actually a bit better than most, because it actually does give different kinds of tech to different cultures, but still does it in a eurocentric way. Well, at least Native American tech is really op if you manage to survive the colonizers.
You can of course import or create a Sunset Invasion Americas where they start equal in tech to Europe, but even that has issues.
Crusader Kings might be better suited for you, I think, it only has the old world, but has a lot of what you want, and the second one is free if you've never tried it before
eu4 is untouchable to me like what the fuck do I even do there's 10 million different menus and shit.
The reason paradox games a re liked so much is that they offer a lot of depth, I have over 1000 hours in the game, and I still probaly only know about around 30% the content, if that. You basically just gotta take it slow and learn the most important things first without trying to understand everything at once, because that's impossible.
Yeah i like other paradox games but eu4 is just magic to me. I have combined 1.5k hours in all of the hearts of iron games and over a hundred hours in vic 2 but eu4 makes me cry
I feel like eu4 is the simplest paradox game. Victoria 2 is full simulationist and hoi is PAIN FOR MY BRAIN.
I'm the exact opposite. EU4 just sort of clicks for me in a way that other Paradox games don't.
Me, simply having a good time making a utopia in modded Cities: Skylines. :josus-stalin:
I was actually looking forward to Leviathan because of the native American focus. Oh well.
At least today's HoI4 has me in good spirits. With this new expansion, we're finally getting a new Soviet tree, railroads, and a tank designer :tank: Gonna be hell for modders, though.
(Sidenote, but we need a KV-2 emoji)
I once added it up and Stellaris + all of its DLCs, if not on sale, would cost 184 EUR (~223USD). Imagine spending 223$ on a single game :what-the-hell:
And that was a while back, probably costs more today. Thank god for pirate releases.
When it's spread out over 5 years it doesn't seem that bad. My steam library is worth like $8000 at full price but I only paid like $2000 for it (over 14 years)
Imagine spending 223$ on a single game
At least Steel Battalion gives you a cool controller
Yes, and EU4 is also pretty bland compared to something like MEIOU and Taxes.
The fact that half a dozen nerds with limited tools can release free mods with more content than the actual game developers who have full access to code can for 20$ dlc is tragic.
100%. If it wasn't for this, multiplayer would be basically impossible in paradox games.
I agree, they are very good games, but the dlc policy still sucks, and that is what this thread is about.
True. You have a point, I don’t buy the games I just pirate it all
Everyone always shits on EA for having a predatory DLC model, but somehow Paradox does the same and gets a pass.
Eh, I don't think they "get a pass" because they get shat on whenever they release a dlc (and rightfully so), it's just that they are smaller than EA so less people talk about them.
This is true. I wish there was a good city building game not developed my a company that sucks with DLC 😭
Yep, the worst part about paradox is that they generally make very good games for the niches they develop for, it's just that their DLC policy sucks.
I don't even have a problem with games with a lot of DLC, my problem is that the DLC paradox release are so overpriced and buggy. Most of them are 3,4 or even 5 times as expensive as they should be. The worst part is how some of the dlc has content that really should be in the base game.
I only play HoI4 and Stellaris but I imagine this is the same across all their games, their tendancy to lock significant features behind DLC fucking sucks. I have to pay 20$ just to have an intelligence service in a game about WW2??? Lame as fuck.
Yes, I talked about that in my post, but I really should make it clear for those who don't know. This last dlc for EU4 in particular was so badly tested, that anyone who plays for more than an hour can notice huge bugs, like several game-breaking bugs. That is , of course, if the game doesn't just crash.
The eu4 dlc before that one was also badly tested and buggy, but at least it didn't break the whole game.
Just paradox returning to their roots
For the longest time they had a rep for releasing such buggy messes that accepted wisdom was that you should wait at least a year before buying. This culminated with HoI3, which was the biggest steaming pile of completely unplayable garbage on release that I've ever seen (cyberpunk had nothing on HoI3). Of course HoI3 remained unplayable throughout its entire lifespan due to micromanagement hell and overly-ambitious systems that could never be made to work right, but that's a different story. They started actually hiring QA after that shitshow to rehabilitate their terrible rep, but I guess nobody ever learns anything
As a sidenote, the whole saga of Magna Mundi the mod that got funded to turn into a modder-developed paradox game was another amazingly hilarious paradox trainwreck
Victoria 2, the holy grail of the PDX fanbase, is abysmal without the two main DLCs. People seem to forget about that a lot.
Yep, I am a long time paradox fan, I am aware of it's history which is why I specified that this is the most broken dlc in years, because before that there was the rajas of india dlc for ck2 and before that hoi3 as you've mentioned.
One of my favourite ones was Vicky 2 at release, where clearly nobody had playtested beyond the midgame, and the economy and pop wants/needs were so borked that mid-lategame was just constant hordes of rebels flying ancom flags spawning in every country forever :ancom-heart:
Cities Skylines DLCs are garbage, they literally just chopped off features that should've been in the base game in the first place and resells it to you.
Honestly SimCity 2013 still squares up to Cities Skylines to this day even with its glaring flaw.
ayo PDX any chance of Stellaris ever being not broken?
yeah didn't think so
dunno, i thought every major update just fucked the game or crippled the AI
The AI doesn't play by the rules, it basically just has a set growth rate depending on the difficulty.
