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Comment by uncletaco | Hacker News Reader

Paradox Interactive is right there and thriving? They’re like the next step into the 4x rabbit hole and their fanbase is pretty loyal.

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I'm a big paradox fan, especially eu4 and hoi4, but their dlc policy is downright toxic. There are tons of dlcs, they are all overpriced and they all break the base game in their own ways, and the only way to "fix" it is to buy the dlc. Oh and often time the quality of their dlcs is shit because it's all outsourced to other firms who don't know the game, or the code and are stuck with tight deadlines and budgets

Once a year paradox releases a dlc. Its pretty reasonable. It only seems unreasonable if you jump in 15 years after.

I honestly like the Paradox model, game mechanics breaking until patches aside.

Give a chunk of new base functionality as a free update.

Charge for a more expanded form of that functionality as a DLC.

We can quibble over whether this DLC or that DLC was worth the price, and there are certainly balance issues that are patch resolved, but it keeps expanding their games for years with pretty serious new stuff.

That's more than you can say for other publishers' post-release behavior.

   EU4: 11 years
   HOI4: 8 years
   Stellaris: 8 years

How many games that old are still getting major feature patches/DLC?

How about we don't drip feed content over the years, causing problems and then graciously fixing them?

I mean, do you expect them to have created these massive games with multiple expansions’ worth of content at the beginning? Hasn’t Stellaris been essentially rebuilt over the years with DLC?

Stellaris has had at least two Ship of Theseus level reworks over the years.

Why not? The only thing I think you could reasonably say is that it would be nice if there was a built-in way to freeze the game at a certain state, so that you can still play, say, Stellaris 2.0 if that's what you liked, and not get any of the patches that essentially assume you'll also have certain paid DLCs to function fully.

But Stellaris 1.0 and all the other were massive games people enjoyed playing, they weren't stripped down skeletons to build DLC on.

Were they as good at release as they are 8 years later? Not at all. But having them change and generally evolve over those 8 years is a key part of what makes people still play Stellaris today, when many other games from that time have long been abandoned.

Not to mention, plenty of people would have actually preferred it if instead of Civ VI and Civ VII, we were getting Civ V 4.0 today.

More like Civ IV 5.0 but close enough.

Yeah, it's hard to call their model particularly predatory, when a lot of the industry is going with battle-pass models that rely on FOMO to keep the revenue constant. At least with Paradox you can still buy-in on a sale years after release and not be forever locked out of anything because you weren't playing sooner.

OSG!!But If You Do that than you would be stuck in an endless time loop,a never-ending cycle of losing the game and forgetting about it just to respawn again at the point of conundrum and frustration,to be laughed at and mocked by the winner for all time...and then some!You didn't do that though,right?

There was a time Paradox was releasing almost 2 paid DLCs and even a couple of unpaid ones every year. Particularly in the case of EU4, where some DLCs ended up overriding the content of previous, even paid ones, to the point that they have 37 expansions for that game alone (and that's not even including the paid aesthetic expansions).

Civ 7 launched with 3 DLCs

and has more DLCs planned for release in march and april

This math doesn't add up: I just checked a random paradox game, Stellaris, and it has 24 paid DLC (26 actually, but I've excluded an eBook and soundtrack as neither seem to have an in-game impact) - but was released in 2016.

That's cause They aren't stuck in the ring w you.Bye.

Stellaris has been consistently getting at least two DLCs per year [1]. Arguably one of them is a story pack and the other a gameplay one, but a lot of interesting mechanics are blocked behind DLC-only species.

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/dlc/281990/Stellaris/#browse

and this is how they keep updates flowing to games released 9 years ago. I'll take that over "log in every day to get your battlepass coins" MAU engagement psychological warfare any day of the week.

It also sucks that all the Paradox competitors seemed to have failed so far. The genre really needs some innovation.

Yep and paradox 4x games honestly take a brute force approach by adding too many limits of various kinds to ensure you don’t break the game.

Eg. fleet cap, star base cap, empire size, new systems requires spending influence that ticks over slowly, leader caps, etc.

Yes there’s ways you can increase things like influence 25% faster but that means you’re only 25% larger in size (and you’ll then be hit by the empire cap). In general I just don’t think paradox makes great 4x games compared to what I’ve played in the past. There must be a smarter way to have a fun 4x without resorting to a ton of different types of caps to stop you getting too far ahead. I will definitely +1 that the genre needs a shakeup.

Crusader Kings and Stellaris always felt more like… story-generation games than strategy games, to me. Sorta like Dwarf Fortress or Rimworld at a different scale.

Yep, which makes them so amazing after Civ decided to abandon that approach and heavily push into trying to be a static boardgame.

How could Civ abandon that? Civ never was a story-generation game (arguably, VII is a very slight move toward that, but Civ I was pretty much Empire with a tech tree, more varied terrain, a more detailed (terrain-based) production system, and founding/growing cities replacing conquering independents.

I’m not sure I disagree. Civ certainly doesn’t have a lot of “flavor” events or characters. The standards of the era were pretty low for this kind of stuff though, so there was a little bit of a feeling of building a story, for me at least.

As a sidenote, somehow the setting, leaders, and tech blurbs in Alpha Centauri managed to construct a much better facade of a story generation game, IMO. Despite being very similar mechanically. The system allowed a lot more customization… even if it was just a bunch of little +1 bonuses here and there, it made it feel like “your” faction.

Anyway, it’s all a facade. Other than dwarf fortress. I’m sure those dwarfs will achieve sentience soon.

I really wish they believed in UX, though. Going from Civ to EU4 is like going from one of those meal kit recipes to someone handing you some raw olives, grain, and a live chickens and expecting you to figure out the details.

You chose your path poorly.

The correct order is Civ to classic Dwarf Fortress to EU4.

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