Paradox needs to stop forcing these incredibly complex simulation games out the door before they are ready. Victoria 3 is still littered with performance problems, undercooked systems, and broken mechanics.
Games developed by Paradox have been like this for decades and it’s fine. The player base is aware of it and buys the game with the expectation that it will take an additional 2 years and several dlcs for the game to be actually good. Everyone knew Victoria 3 won’t be good on release.
And crucially, the developers of Paradox are also aware of that and delivery a product that is still somewhat enjoyable on release. They know where to cut corners that will be fixed with dlcs and what needs to be focused on for release.
But when Paradox is just the publisher things don’t work out that well. Because the developers might not actually plan their game around that kind of thing. And when they are then forced to release early, their game is still a huge mess.
Wish the factorio devs would make a city builder. It’d be so much more enjoyable and have so much more depth than any big corp production could have.
A thousand times, yes. I love Factorio and want to get my partner into it, but she finds the logistics tedious and doesn’t like the gritty art style. We love Cities Skylines (the original, I haven’t tried this new one yet). There aren’t enough city builders (or games focused on building and without much combat) that have good multiplayer.
Does anyone have any recommendations for that? We loved Stardew Valley but I want something with more building. The multiplayer mod for Rimworld works pretty well. I considered vanilla Minecraft but it seems like the buildings don’t feel important enough without mods like FTB.
OpenTTD seems like it should be exactly what we want (also it’s free! And runs on weak hardware, and mobile), but maybe we were playing it wrong. Airports seem to give way too much easy money. And when we first played through we only made transportation for passengers, and I think we should have focused more on industry. I tried it again myself later and did better after focusing on industry, but it still seemed like airports were better money (and way easier).
OpenTTD is great with a bunch of mods or a bunch of rules. My friends and I used to do yearly games and we outright banned air travel because it’s just too overpowered and makes you have endless money.
Trains though, thems the ticket. Really satisfying.
Awesome, thanks for confirming my suspicion that air travel is too overpowered. I feel better about giving OpenTTD another try some time. It’s hard to find time where we’re both free and in the mood to learn a new game. Plus I much prefer just figuring something out myself over reading comprehensive guides (I don’t mind looking up specific things).
I’m also excited to look into mods!
We’ve had some crazy things happen when you make a large map with ~10 people coming in and out.
One of our friends focused on bus service in these few towns, set up a bunch of lines, and then logged off for a few days - his area grew to become basically four or five contiguous cities, it was pretty rad.
Our endgame goal was to build maglevs hitting every single player’s main city, and it took a while, but it was really fun when we finished it.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
If this hugely ambitious city builder simulation would have been released some time ago, patched over and over again, and updated with some gap-filling DLC, it would be far better off.
Or its technical debts could have been slowly paid off to let its underlying strengths come through, as with Disco Elysium or The Witcher 3.
It has a rough-draft look when compared to its predecessor, which has accumulated eight years of fixes, DLC, and mods to cover a dizzying array of ideas.
Worst of all, it was highly anticipated by fans, some of whom have high-end systems that still can’t properly run the sluggish game.
When he was at EA, Zubek saw how a game slipping from one year to the next could mean an entire division falls short of expectations.
Slipping can make it harder to convince a publisher to hire or reassign the people you really need to finish a game.
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If that was a troubled launch sign me up for more of those lol
