I like Paradox DLC policies. Most of them are actually good and add a lot to the game. It also lets them service the game for a long period of time and push free updates along with DLCs.
I really dislike Paradox DLC policies. Most of them are actually really bad and add nothing to the game. It also lets them procrastinate bigger updates and bugfixes for a long period of time and push free updates along with breaking 50% of the mods.
The base game gets updated over a period of what, 10 years? Core gameplay mechanics which don’t work well or at least don’t make the developers happy are tweaked or revamped all the time. I only really play Stellaris, but the changes to the game throughout the years have kept things interesting.
The alternative is… not updating things which they don’t like? Perhaps that means mods never break, but then we’re shifting the onus of fixing the game to a third party, who can decide to quit whenever they want and let their (closed source) code deprecate. I’ve seen that kind of thing in Civ and I wasn’t a fan.
I guess with a studio that has demonstrated a pattern of long-term support for their games, this is what we get.
It’s already kinda annoying not to have all the old content but I can see the reasons behind that. But a new game starting from scratch of a genre they are experienced with should have much better performance now that there aren’t all those additional mechanics. Failing at both of these is just an utter disregard to their customers.
Well the game is out and luckily the rumors weren’t true.
With a medium-density city, I get about 40 FPS @ 4K in the sequel. With the same-sized city, I used to get 20 FPS in the original, so twice the FPS is a massive improvement IMO. But people are still salty cause we live in a world where anything less than 60 FPS @ 1440p is unacceptable. Which is stupid as fuck cause you don’t need 240+ FPS in a city-building game with next to no action in it that would require such a high framerate.
Exactly, they completely miss the point of a city builder and don’t fit neatly at all into the main game systems. And the zoo example was just because I find zoos revolting.
I enjoyed adding the new areas / zones to my cities, but the mechanics were dry as fuck and required “cheesing” to unlock all buildings.
I think there was a disconnect between what CO intended CS to be, and what it became. The people playing 8+ years after release want a sandbox where they can create their dream cities, not minuscule goals that made that dream harder.
I’m excited for CS2 because it seems more catered to the sandbox but with better city simulation mechanics, but let’s hope they do something interesting with the DLCs (and fix performance, obviously).
That sounds fun to me considering I liked the original Zoo Tycoon and nothing modern scratches that itch.
Was it at least done well, though? I’ve never really looked through the DLCs. I figured most of them were just visual content additions like new styled buildings and what not.
Some of the DLC, like After Dark (adds day/night cycle with changing resource use depending on the time of day) and Mass Transit (adds a bunch of new transportation methods along with new roads) feel almost essential to the game. Most of the others (like Parklife, which adds the zoo and some other stuff) just add a little more to do in the game once you’ve nailed down what it takes to run a city.
And then there’s the radio stations, in case you wanted to pay $4 to listen to the same 3 songs and 4 fake ads on loop.
This is the classic problem with all paradox games that I don’t really have a solution for. Like as players we want them to support the game for a long time and keep updating it, but unless that’s through dlcs then they can’t really do that without getting paid somehow. The other alternatives are just not doing any updates and releasing a full new game every couple years which would probably have less features added compared to doing dlcs. Or having a subscription that you pay to get new updates which while I’m personally fine with I know a lot of people aren’t. So that just leaves the current strategy of constantly doing dlcs and every once in a while releasing a new game and bringing over as many dlc features as they can to the new one while not making the development time unreasonable.
They could make games outside newer versions of the same game. Game studios used to (and many still do) make a game, put it out, then get started making a whole different game. Even with the modern ability to update games,
Put game out
Update game to deal with unforeseen bugs found once the masses have access
That’s the FIFA, Madden model… release a game, fix a couple things, improve a thing here and there, pull a new roster in and voilà! This year’s new sports game.
To be honest, I’d prefer for them to keep expanding a game I like. That’s what kept me playing SC1 for the past 65 years (or however long it has been since the game has been released).
But they point the comment above is making is that the years of support add a bunch of features that wouldn’t exist otherwise. Sure, they could just not. Why would they do that though if they have a team who knows how to work on a thing and people willing to pay for it.
For example, BG3 exists because the studio continued to make games in the same style in the same engine for a very long time. They became absolute experts in it, and continuously improved their tools and techniques. You don’t get that by constantly making new different games.
Yeah people don’t seem to be understanding that this is a technical and pragmatic issue, not a business decision.
It’s the “new and improved” problem. If it’s new, it’s not improved. And if it’s improved, it’s not new.
If you want a new, cutting edge game, you aren’t just improving the old game. So the old stuff likely won’t be compatible.
If you want an improvement/extension of the old game, you won’t be getting a shiny new game.
They made the choice to make a shiny new game but they need to try to prevent the inevitable backlash from people being upset that they’re favorite X/Y/Z is missing.
Yeah it’s very different these days. In the past DLC was just content (like extra levels) and people don’t expect that in the new game (maybe more levels than when the first game came out), but now DLC usually adds features as well as levels and people want all the features in the new game too.
You’re saying remake all the DLCs and not have people pay for it I assume. How the hell are they going to afford that? That’s not mentioning they might not want to make identical DLCs, and many of the features from them are included in vanilla now.
When did I say that? I just let you know Paradox aren’t the developers like you seem to think. They still need to keep the lights on though. Honestly, tiny indie devs can afford to do crazy things because there are a lot fewer people on the line who need to get paid. The larger the studio, the more careful they have to be. An indie game can run on passion alone.
Of course they will. Don’t they deserve to be paid for their work? They’re making a fairly niche product and constantly making improvements to it. What’s to complain about?
$404 divided over 10 years is different than as a lump. But getting the whole bundle for 80% off because it’s been successfully developed for 10 years is value.
C:S1 is basically designed around most players not buying every DLC. You only buy the ones you want. Also, wait for a sale. $404 over the entire time the game has been out is also not that bad. Sure, buying it all at once it’s a lot, but the player buying every DLC has probably been playing since launch. Think of it as a subscription for new content. You can not subscribe and still get plenty of content (every DLC added stuff to vanilla for free), or you can pay the fee to get everything. If this is your genre, you want to give then money to keep making improvements. If they don’t make money you don’t get anything new.
I picked up I think literally every DLC for CK2 a few months before CK3 was announced. It’s was maybe $50. I think much less (although I already owned the base game and maybe a few DLCs). No one is expecting new players to purchase that at retail price. The sale price is the actual price for a new player. I don’t think it actually really scares anyone off. If you want a city builder, there’s only one option. You stick it on your wishlist for a sale and buy what you want.
I always find this discussion interesting. I don't personally tend to play Paradox games at all so I've no real horse in the race, but I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with the model. It's designed around people being able to buy the specific parts they want, and those specific things having a good level of quality / depth to them.
Like, if you're really into early 20th century Japanese architecture, would you rather have a single house thrown into a "kitchen sink" DLC pack that you can copy-paste over and over into your city with no options to customise or expand on that, or would you prefer an entire DLC dedicated to that style so you can build a full district or city in that style?
And conversely, if you're not into early 20th century Japanese architecture, would you rather have a single house in that style thrown into your DLC pack that you don't care about and won't ever use, or would you prefer your DLC pack to contain things you are interested in?
Maybe the average consumer does look and think "wow, I really need to spend $404.40 to be able to play the game" and decide against it, I don't know. But personally, if I see a game has DLCs like "specific niche cosmetic option pack #2" then I see them as not at all necessary, and figure I can play the base game first and just buy any additional packs I want later.
My take is that they’re trying to sell the game to people who haven’t already purchased CS:1, or who haven’t purchased any DLCs from CS:1. If you’ve already purchased DLC’s, you’ve already served your purpose to the company.
Seems counter intuitive. If that was the case then the true would be of all the Sims games. I bet the majority of buyers will be from CS:1. The market audience is only so big.
As much as I like C:S, the thought of getting a relatively barebones game with $200 in DLC over the next 5-7 years to make the city feel complete makes me feel depressed.
That was the bummer in the original game. Only two ways to deal with trash, unless you bought $30 of DLC. I’ll be waiting to see if the game is good or not, or if they totally gimped certain parts of the game like bridges, ports and transit to resell back as a la carte DLC.
I don’t understand this attitude that the new game needs to include the DLC of the old one that’s never been a thing in games. New versions of an old game never previously included the DLC for the old game apart from anything else because it wouldn’t make sense because they’ve changed so many systems.
I think the difference now is that DLC adds features, and so people are upset when the new game is missing features from the old DLC. Where in the past, say with Oblivion or Skyrim, it was just more story, maybe some new skills, in one case there was a new feature (house building) and their newer games do include that feature. But people don’t expect the story line from the DLC in the new game.
Features in DLC feel different these days. In the past DLC had a more limited scope, and you looked forward to the new game for new features. But now if the new game comes out with less features it can be a bummer for people used to the old game. There isn’t really a great solution because I don’t think it always makes sense to add all the DLC features in the new game.
I’m planning to try and build an offset hex grid city
Basically there’s one hex pattern for car traffic, and an offset hex pattern that’s for pedestrians and cyclists, and where there’s any intersections between the two, the car traffic gets raised to give pedestrian traffic an underpass.
Also every car intersection is a roundabout, and I’m considering doing alternating one way lanes with every pair being bracketed by transit only lanes.
Way I see it the addresses would be kinda like how NYC is organized, one parallel has roads, one has lanes, one has boulevards, and then on the pedestrian side you have street, alley, and row.
Doesn’t just save number space, it’ll also give you an idea of the best way to get to that address since street/alley/and row addresses won’t have curbside parking, because pedestrian route.
All the people I’ve seen playing it don’t seem to show any specific way to do mixed use, so if it does exist it’s probably just a thing that happens automatically on high density housing units
It gets unlocked later and the embargoes were staggered so they couldn't show certain milestones in the game. The newer videos will have it now, so look at those to see everything, including how their computers are chugging even with brand new hardware on high settings.
"We absolutely cannot have ten years of Cities Skylines 1 content done" for the launch of the sequel, Colossal Order CEO Mariina Hallikainen says in the latest issue of PC Gamer. As a result, the studio decided to focus on "those things that we feel should have been in the original Cities: Skylines, but we didn't have the time or manpower."
Anyone that's not a fucking idiot already knew this, because we understand how temporal reality works. But the whiny "everything sucks and is bad" Stephanie Sterling crowd won't care.
But it looks like they did incorporate DLC into the sequel; it just isn’t obvious. The current implementation of extractive versus value added industry looks better than what they did with Industries. The quantity of different transit types also feels like an equivalent to a couple of DLC for the original game. I also feel like the sequel’s approach to power would also be most of a DLC for the original.
It isn’t perfect, but it looks like Collosal Order at least implemented a lot of lessons learned from the original game. It doesn’t seem as empty as C:S at launch.
I’ve played enough CS1 to know that I can’t play it any more, no matter how much content it has. Its absolutely braindead traffic AI destroys my enjoyment of if the game once a city gets sufficiently big.
The traffic AI fixes were all I needed to see to be interested in CS2.
I see a whole new generation of gamers who have grown up on these new games that they think are perfect, who didn’t see the decades of toil and crap that we did growing up. They expect everything to be the most amazing game they’ve ever seen, not understanding that perfect games are in fact, exceedingly rare. That most games have bad mechanics, quirks, boring areas, and things we put up with. But younger folks just stamp it as a “bad game” and refuse to see the nuance.
Things like games are a spectrum. There’s only 3ish games I mark as perfect. Most will have some things wrong with them. If you don’t like that, then just be content with maybe one perfect game a decade.
While that’s true, there’s also a huge difference from like 20+ years ago when they more often than not released games as a complete functional product as opposed to a “we hit the date” buy-in beta test. Games just tend to release with less features and polish than they used to, for the most part companies will keep working on it and get it where it needs to be so the final product is comparable, but it makes for a murkier cycle, buy in at release and probably suffer or wait and try to time when it’s actually ready.
I haven’t played Cities: Skylines in years, this looks great but hopefully they fixed the stupid traffic AI. I hated that when you built a wider road to decrease congestion half of the cars would ignore the opened lanes and still pile up in the original ones.
This article on their website goes into detail on exactly how they’re planning on fixing the traffic issues. The AI will actually change lanes this time!
You could fix it somewhat with mods, by forcing cars to take specific lanes. Didn’t solve the problem, but it helped. Can’t wait to try the new traffic AI in the sequel.
Widening roads is never a good answer in game or real life, it induces new demand and will eventually become more congested. Need to build a train line instead
It does increase the capacity of roads. Two lanes holds twice as many cars as one lane. Four lanes hold twice as many cars as two lanes.
You’re probably thinking of induced demand, but that’s related to traffic congestion and not capacity. More lanes ultimately means more cars are getting places, but any individual car will see that congestion is just as bad as it used to be.
yeah see what’s happening here is that you’re completely ignoring junctions: even in the ideal case of a completely straight road you still need junctions to get on and off the road, which will put a hard limit on throughput.
This is why traffic in america is miserable, the traffic engineers fail to recognize that you can’t just put businesses right next to roads as that will cause stupendous amounts of choking every time someone wants to pop in for some mcdonalds.
3 lanes in each direction is about the most you’ll ever need, which is what you’ll tend to see on big highways in europe. And really most of the time you’ll do just fine with 2 lanes.
I actually had a whole paragraph about junctions being a limit and then deleted it since i didn’t feel like it added to my point. I also was going to add a point about how much space the lanes take up and that even if more lanes added capacity, it didn’t necessarily mean they were the right option.
This is why traffic in america is miserable, the traffic engineers fail to recognize that you can’t just put businesses right next to roads as that will cause stupendous amounts of choking every time someone wants to pop in for some mcdonalds.
Yeah, fuckin’ Americans, putting their McDonald’s right next to roads… I mean, just look at this. What a disgrace.
there’s a difference between a road and a street, a road is meant for quick throughfare and streets are destinations.
what happens a lot especially in america is trying to do both at once, which results in a street that is incredibly stressful to try and enter/leave and is miserable to be near outside of a car, and yet doesn’t allow traffic to flow smoothly and quickly.
These are commonly referred to as “stroads”, and the solution is to decide whether you want a street or a road and design it as such. In dense areas this means you have to bite the sour apple and accept that not everything can be a dedicated throughfare, the best solution is a backbone network of throughfares with streets branching off.
In less dense areas you can have the best of both worlds by simply putting a street on the side of the road, with some greenery between them so people have somewhat of an enjoyable view, and then connect the streets to the road at either end.
And then you’ve got absolute mad men like Concerned Ape making stardew valley 10 times better with free updates for years and years. Showing these money hungry companies how it’s done.
The scale is just a little bit different here, isn’t it. One guy (maybe a few more) and an indie sensation that makes a ridiculous amount of sales vs. a company that needs to pay wages for 30 people.
We can have a discussion here, but comparing standard run rates vs. a massive exception isn’t a great starting point.
Yeah it’s also one guy who got so rich off it he never has to work again if he doesn’t want to. Haunted Chocolatier isn’t because concerned ape is a game dev now and needs money, it’s concerned ape wants to make a new game. He clearly loves stardew valley and that’s part of why he keeps updating it.
Terraria is a better exception to use but still an exception. I’m not asking for every game to give free unplanned massive expansions, though I will continue praising those who do such things and absolutely add them to my list of “buy their next game if I’m remotely interested”.
What I want is games that feel like they’re trying to give everyone a fair deal. A base game that’s good on its own and doesn’t feel like a downgrade from the previous game. A few expansions that are good, reasonably priced, and make the game further into its best version of that iteration of the series. And a reasonable number of non expansion dlc that add something and ideally don’t leave me trying to decide what ones I want to get. And by the end of life the game can be not quite the cheapest but full, good, and complete. That way when the next iteration of the series is dropped I’m not left thinking it was because they just wanted to sell me the same things over again. Civilization does this excellently.
I feel like Stellaris is a measurably different game than release. I bought the game on steam like 10 years ago and while it looks largely the same, the mechanics have seemingly had complete makeovers or renovations every few years. As far as I can tell most of the modified mechanics have been introduced to the base game as well, so those without DLC aren’t completely left out.
The game used to be some weird rock-paper-scissors game of either wormholes, gateways, and jump drives with corvette death columns. There was an optimal way to play and everything else was a handicap
Honestly, why would we need a Stardew Valley 2? There’s so many harvest moon games but are they really anything more than small iterations? Not to mention those have been garbage since the IP was basically stolen from the original developers.
Yes, companies with 30 employees are, in fact, money hungry because that's how the employees fucking eat. One person's recurring costs are nowhere near the recurring costs of dozens of people. WEIRD HOW MATH.
Stardew Valley, Undertale, Braid, all of these one-man (mostly) shows generated enough revenue to effectively retire their creators overnight but if they had to pay 30 motherfuckers with the proceeds... yeah, not so much.
I’ve worked for those (sized) companies and employee pay is not as much as you’d think. Not to mention higher sales don’t equal more pay (for the actual workers.)
This is a trend that I have recently started noticing. PAYDAY 3 came out with basically nothing included after PAYDAY 2 had literally 10 years of continuous content/80 DLCs pumped into it. As another example, The Sims always comes out with a new release that has every feature removed so they can sell you all the same DLC again and again.
In some cases this would appear to be a (corporate) success, but it seems it’s actually been part of the downfall of recently-released PAYDAY 3. As of this moment in time, the rolling 24-hour peak of player count in PAYDAY 3 is 4,699. The rolling 24-hour peak of PAYDAY 2 is 37,399. Why would players who have a fully finished game with all DLC already available want to play your new barren game?
I think there ie a middle ground as a rule but a lot of games use dlc as an excuse to sell the game for more.
Sims is a great example. It costs over $1k to buy everything for Sims 4 and the Sims 4 stans will defend it going “you’re not SUPPOSED to guy every pack”. Sims 3 vs Sims 4 is something as well. Sims 3 didn’t get as much dlc, but each one had so much more content and gameplay than Sims 4. 9 years and like 50 packs later, Sims 3 STILL has more content overall. The game was just poorly optimized and badly coded and is only now becoming playable in terms of load times and lag. A lot of the Sims 4 packs don’t even work that well together, or the opposite where they release a feature and you need another pack to fully utilize it. (The goats and sheep in the horses dlc don’t do anything without cottage living. And they already didn’t do much WITH it)
The Weather expansion with Sims 2 made sense at the time. Weather was a mechanic that not many games had and quite the milestone, it was groundbreaking for the time. Weather dlc for Sims 3 you could begrudgingly forgive, since it’s such a big thing and the base for Sims 3 was so big. But Weather being sold as an add on for Sims 4 was just unacceptable. The game was barren, weather is a base feature for every single game within that kind of genre. It feels like they remove the feature to sell it later. And you see this with the pets packs too. Sims 3 you had cats, dogs, horses, and small animals. With Sims 4 you have cats and dogs, my first pets stuff, cottage living (for the small animals, it does FINALLY add SOMETHING new with the cows/lamas and chickens), and horse ranch- for the same experience Sims 3 pets gave - and even THEN there is less gameplay and features. No unicorns, no wild horses, no pet jobs (I think) since you can’t control them, no nothing. Sims 4 still doesn’t have fairies somehow but there’s rumbles that they might be the next occult and they could bring unicorns but… you won’t be able to do anything with the unicorns without horse ranch.
So, it’s not even than Sims 4 costs more than 3, you are getting an objectively worse and more barren experience even when you do buy everything. The dlc for Sims 3 made sense and added so much, barring maybe the weather one as an arguable one. Almost none of the dlc in Sims 4 makes sense to be sold to the player instead of in the base game. City living, island living, cottage living, the vacation one… for that’s about it really. But becausethey are supposed to bring new content and gamellay experiences. But the dlc for Sims 4 was just such an obvious money cash cow that they are like “what pieces of the same dlc can we upsell as separate packs?” They barely add anything new.
I have no problem with dlc like how it is with Witcher 3 was with new stories, gameplay experiences, quests, etc, rather than selling base features of a game for morr.
I’ve been playing Sims since 2006. Sims 4 feels like an insult. I want to like it, and aesthetically it is pleasing, the build tools are nice. But game play wise I need so many mods to make it enjoyable. The packs don’t really integrate with each other and the relationships feel very shallow in vanilla experience. I have Sims 3 and Sims 2 and I love both of them, I used mods but I also it was a fun vanilla experience. I never felt robbed when I bought dlc for them, but at this point with sims 4 unless the dlc is on sale I will not buy it at all. Every sims 4 thing I have bought except base game has been sale. It didn’t even release with pools or toddlers.
I am interested in Life By You from paradox games just to see something different in the genre, it helps that Rob Humble is on the development team. I also keep an eye on Paralives to see how that grows. I just want something new in the life sim genre.
If not for mods, I would not play 4 at all. It’s just bland. It has no soul. And don’t get me started on how broken the few recent expansions were. Not just “egh, an occasional bug that would prompt a restart”, straight up irreparable damage to your save, and broken features that are still not fixed
I feel really bad for the people working on these games. PAYDAY 3 will eventually reach success in a niche, but will likely be hated by those same people.
The objective behind a game like this, or Sims, or FIFA/FC, is not to create a great gameplay experience. Sadly, they make a passable game, that will help them leech money sustainably for a considerable amount of time, through endless DLC. Paradox will inevitably make Colossal Order do the same with C:S2, despite them claiming that it’ll be fewer but larger DLC.
There are very few studios I will refuse to show respect for, and the one behind PAYDAY is one of them. Just like what remains of Maxis
Yeah for an example of a series that has found a reasonable equilibrium there companies should be looking at Civ. By making every game significantly enough different moving to the next doesn’t feel like 20 downgrades to get a slight upgrade, but more like 5 has reached the conclusion of what it will ever be, 6 is now new and will have 2 major expansions and a variety of minor ones, but you only see a bit of how it’s incomplete until years later when you’re reminded that some feature came in rise and fall and you’ve just taken it for granted for several years.
What trend? You basically just explained it yourself. 10 years of updates and 80 DLCs. In order to match this with their new game, they would have to stop supporting Payday 2 and sink 10+ years into Payday 3 before releasing it. That’s simply not possible. So it’s either a new game with less content or no new game at all for these types of games with lots of support.
The trend would be developers that are unwilling or unable to release a new game that is better than the old one (especially in formulaic series like a racing game), or that they intentionally withhold features in order to resell them again. I’m not saying there aren’t sometimes good reasons for it, just that it’s something I’ve personally noticed happening now that developers are leaning harder and harder into DLC, and now that games are stagnating in innovation and reasons to buy the next entry in the series.
Also for PAYDAY 3 specifically if you don’t have any familiarity with Overkill/Starbreeze I wouldn’t defend them on this one. They have chosen money over their players every single chance they could get, including breaking their promise to never include microtransactions in the game, and then breaking their promise in 2017 that they wouldn’t release any more paid DLC. In 2017 they released the Ultimate Edition with this promise, and in 2019 they went back on it. In 2019, they started releasing DLC again with the mission statement of “hey any money you put into this DLC will help fund PAYDAY 3 development”. The community immediately noticed that the DLC from 2019 onwards was of lower quality and more expensive, and although people frequently brought this up, others would defend it and say “yes, but we need to support Overkill or PAYDAY 3 won’t be made.”
They started development on PAYDAY 3 in 2016, so they’ve had 7 years to develop it before it released, whereas PAYDAY 2 has been out for 10 years at this point. The moral of the story is they kept releasing mediocre DLC for PAYDAY 2 because it was easy and lucrative, and it became such an addiction that they neglected PAYDAY 3’s development to the point where it released with barely any features or content even after 7 years of development.
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