by cmsellers » Mon Oct 02, 2017 3:10 am
I fee like I'm done with Paradox, but we'll see what happens.
Basically, after several runs where I failed to complete the same objective, for a variety of reasons that are annoying but won't make sense if you don't play EU4. In the meantime, I was looking forward to the new DLC, which I hoped would fix a lot of these issues. And I realized that they didn't. In one case, what they did to fix a longstanding issue was really underwhelming, so I commented on it on the forums. I tried to be as polite as possible and put a positive spin on it, but still got overwhelmingly downvoted.
The thing is, I've known that Paradox's forums are toxic for awhile, with tons of stupid rules and any criticism of Paradox getting flooded with downvotes and random people downvoting things for stupid reasons. But I realized that I really have to bite my tongue on the forums to minimize my downvotes and there's some things I just still can't say. And though I don't know why, I've seen several users I mostly agree with who have had their accounts on probation, likely for violating one of the forum's many inane rules. So I realized I just can't take the forums anymore. And that's a problem because a lot of the appeal of Paradox was how engaged with the community the devs are.
Then, the next dev diary, I saw that they were determined not to fix a longstanding issue that would be easy to fix. And that was the final straw for me. This isn't a bug so much as a design choice, but Paradox makes a lot of baffling design choices which draw strong criticism (given the fanboyish nature of the forums, any criticism which comes up a lot and usually gets more upvotes than downvotes I count as a strong one), but they double down on anyways. Paradox games seem to be designed firstly around multiplayer and secondly around achievement hunting, which in a supposedly sandbox game where 25% of people play Ironman and around 5% of people play multiplayer is incredibly irritating if you're in the non-Ironman, non-MP majority.
Then there's the issue of the cost of Paradox games. Already they've stopped offering old DLCs at 75% off (they'd previously stopped offering them at 90% off before I played), and they've always refused to bundle DLCs or incorporate really essential parts of them into the base game. I thought I might still try Stellaris on the summer sale, but it seems like they're also waiting well over a year before that's more than 50% off. Which means that instead of trying other Paradox games, I tried Civ V.
And I was amazed at how well the DLC work together in Civ V, and how good the peacetime mechanics are, as well as how Civ V makes playing tall viable. In fairness to Paradox their diplomacy system and how they handle war is way better than Civ V, and I have way more hours on EUIV than I'll ever have on Civ V. But one of the things I liked about EUIV was the immersion, and new patches and DLC have reduced the immersion and increased the micro.
Basically, Paradox seems to be moving in the wrong direction. Their games were always known for being buggy, but despite finally becoming a big-name company they've decided to double down on DLC that increase micro, break immersion, and don't play well with existing DLC. They balance around a minority of their players, who just happen to be the majority of members on their forums. They encourage community participation via those forums whose rules I've never much liked, and which have become toxic. And I just feel like I'm done.
But we'll see. Maybe the DLC after this one will get me psyched on EUIV again, maybe I'll buy Stellaris when it finally hits 75% off and love it. If I make it a year without playing EUIV or buying Stellaris, it's safe to say I actually am done. It's a pity, because I really liked EUIV at first.