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The Way Forward, an update from the team behind Cities: Skylines (forum.paradoxplaza.com)

submitted 7 months ago by simple@lemm.ee to c/games@lemmy.world

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TL;DR:

They apologized (again)
They will refund everyone who bought the beach DLC and make it a free addition to the game, admitting it was tasteless that they made paid DLC when the game is in a broken state
They will focus on base changes and better modding tools before starting to make more DLC (previously announced DLC has been delayed to 2025)
Console release delayed

Honestly, this is a good update. It's everything we wanted to hear. Looking forward to buying the game when it gets fixed.

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[-] arudesalad@sh.itjust.works 94 points 7 months ago

This was too late. Paradox's in house development studio did the same thing with Victoria 3. Do something way too greedy (lock historical characters behind a preorder for a dlc that was already bad). Waited to see the backlash, and when it was too much, they make the bonuses free.

At least they're doing something, but the dlc should have been pushed back at launch.

[-] FooBarrington@lemmy.world 67 points 7 months ago

It's not just greedy, at this point it's blatant. The release itself was already bonkers, but they could have saved things by working hard on the base game and releasing additional free content. But this? How many "sowwy we fucked up, we promise to do better, buy our new 132 DLCs" will they pull before people stop giving them the benefit of the doubt?

[-] CosmoNova@lemmy.world 23 points 7 months ago

I'm not hopeful at all. If Bethesda or Blizzard are anything to go by, they can keep messing up big time for years, maybe decades to come and consumers will keep coming back, begging to be disappointed once more. You'll have more luck looking for alternatives out there in the ocean of indie games.

[-] A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world 15 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Yep. It will never change As long as gamers continue to buy from shitty companies, the companies have no incentive to change in any direction but worse. Bethesda is a brilliant example of it, how every game is more simplistic and devoid, and more reliant on randomly generated content than the previous.

Ubisoft is another example, with the outright hostility, hatred and downright contempt they have towards their own customers.

and they are both still multi-billion dollar companies, cause idiots keep throwing them tons of money.

These updates from C:SL team mean nothing, cause they keep doing stupid shit despite of their sweet words. Like they did with trying to sell DLC for a broken game. Their actions and focus speak far louder than any of their honeyed words.

[-] arudesalad@sh.itjust.works 6 points 7 months ago

I am actually planning on not buying anything more from paradox if they fuck up the launch of eu5, only dlc from current games (if they're worth it/required)

[-] MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.works 5 points 7 months ago

Dlc should never feel required

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[-] Moneo@lemmy.world 24 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

I've hated Paradox ever since I bought CK2 and then realized how many minor features were locked behind $5 DLCs. I later pirated the game to play all the DLC and there is absolutely no fucking way that shit was worth what they are charging. Decided then never to buy a Paradox game again.

Compare that to the Factorio devs Wube. They released their game as a beta and then just kept updating it and adding features until it was done. Then they spent years fixing basically every bug in the game. As far as I know they never decreased the price or put the game on sale, and at one point they increased the price of their game because of inflation. Which honestly is fine, they made a great game and they are continuing to support the game, why decrease the price?

I know I'm coming off as a Wube shill but in my eyes they are ideal devs. Paradox in theory make really interesting games but in practice they poison them with shitty monetization strategies. If they just made games and added free updates for a while afterwards if they wanted to I probably would have spent a shit load on their games.

I'm ranting but as a side note, Paradox definitely abuses fomo. They make games that basically require you to watch videos of how to play and those videos inevitably mention DLCs which you then start wondering what you're missing out on. That's definitely what made me want to buy their DLC.

Fuck paradox

[-] arudesalad@sh.itjust.works 6 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

It is a shame they're such a greedy company because, similarly to what you said in your 3rd paragraph, they make good games, some can be as good as games like factorio at times, but it's always ruined by their dlc.

You mentioned free updates at the end, I believe they are doing that for victoria 3, but their first big expansion for the game, spheres of influence, comes out in June so we'll see if they stick to that.

I love paradox games and have the money to by their dlc most the time and will keep buying the ones I want (because the beach dlc was too far even for the largest paradox shills) as long as the game's stability and the free players are prioritised, unlike the way they have been treated in cities: skylines 2.

And yes, fuck paradox, shame their games are ruined by their greed.

[-] 31337@sh.itjust.works 4 points 7 months ago

CK2 was a complete game at launch IIRC. They just kept releasing new DLC for it for many years, much of which was outside the scope of the original game (playing as Arabic rulers, vikings, Indians, etc). I think that's fine. Them selling music, portraits, and new models separately was kinda shitty though.

[-] cobysev@lemmy.world 74 points 7 months ago

Remember when games used to be a finished product on a cartridge/CD? You just bought it at the store for a base price of a video game and that was it. Any bugs found in the game became widely accepted, and maybe even exploited by competitive gamers. But there was no patching, no updates, no DLC. You paid for a game up front and that was it.

I miss those days.

[-] Moneo@lemmy.world 35 points 7 months ago

idk if this is a stupid opinion but I feel like us, the consumers are to blame. If everyone just waited a week and read reviews before buying games then publishers wouldn't be able to get away with this shit.

[-] cobysev@lemmy.world 12 points 7 months ago

Honestly, I always felt the $60 price tag for games (now $70+ for AAA titles!) was way too much, so I usually wait about a year or more, then buy it on sale.

So I get to sit back and watch the shitshow when people pre-order games and then get screwed when the game is garbage.

Dragon's Dogma II was super hyped up recently, and even I got the free character customization demo to pre-build a character. Then it announced day-one microtransactions the day before release and pissed off the gaming community.

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[-] simple@lemm.ee 25 points 7 months ago

I remember a few cases where a rare bug softlocked my game and I had to reset my entire progress. It wasn't all that good I would say. They definitely had some standard of quality on release though.

[-] expr@programming.dev 17 points 7 months ago

It wasn't all sunshine and rainbows. I remember losing hundreds of hours of progress on games due to memory card corruption. Or game cartridges/CDs no longer working, requiring you to buy a new copy. Or consoles getting straight-up bricked.

Hell, a ton of people have memories of blowing into N64/SNES cartridges to get them to work since they had notoriously unreliable connectors. But even though it was something that didn't work great, everybody has fond memories of doing it since there wasn't this amalgamation of voices from every direction telling you to be upset about it and clamoring for retribution. If something was broken, you got frustrated about it, complained to your friends, and then moved on with your life since there wasn't anything else you could do.

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[-] johannesvanderwhales@lemmy.world 14 points 7 months ago

Games were also significantly less complex then. It takes teams of 100s of people to make a AAA game now. But don't kid yourself, there were definitely game-breaking bugs back then. And in the pc world, patches arrived much, much earlier than in the console world.

[-] gens@programming.dev 7 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

FF7 and supreme commander were complex. And devs then didn't have the tools we have today, not to mention game engines (there were, but not like today). And ps3 was a pain to program for. And, and...

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[-] AEsheron@lemmy.world 4 points 7 months ago

Arguably, patches started even earlier. It wasn't uncommon to release another whole title that was basically a bug/balance patch. See Japanese Pokemon Blue, and all the various Street Fighter 2 versions.

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[-] TrousersMcPants@lemmy.world 8 points 7 months ago

A lot of games were significantly more expensive bc back then too

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[-] nekusoul@lemmy.nekusoul.de 43 points 7 months ago

They've basically perfected keeping the community mostly happy by toeing the line between putting out solid base games and putting out greedy DLC.

What we're now seeing is what happens when you don't immediately change course after you skimp on making a good base game.

[-] Ashtear@lemm.ee 18 points 7 months ago

It's all sheer greed, too. Paradox has fully embraced the model of releasing sequels with less content than their DLC-enhanced previous games after 2K showed the market had tolerance for it with Civilization. Considering how that already puts them ahead of the curve, it's amazing that Paradox let this game come out in this state.

[-] SuperSpruce@lemmy.zip 14 points 7 months ago

To be fair, I don't expect the sequel's base game to have more content than the previous game with all its DLCs, but I do expect the base game to have at least as much content as the previous game's base game.

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[-] Rentlar@lemmy.ca 31 points 7 months ago

The Beach DLC was distasteful, you still can't even make convincing beaches with the terrain.

I'm very glad Paradox reversed course here. It sounds like they are starting to take seriously what it means to make a finished, solid game. Cities:Skylines fans are tired of half-baked shit.

[-] TipRing@lemmy.world 34 points 7 months ago

I'm not convinced Paradox knows what they are doing as publisher. Millenia was similarly pushed out the door before it was ready (though in a better state than Cities: Skylines 2). And both games pushed out the door in the last week of the quarter in a transparent effort to boost their earnings. The shortsightedness of the publisher is now impacting their reputation in ways that will be hard to recover. I no longer consider buying Paradox published titles until they are at least a year old or have at least a few months of reviews showing they are solid (like AoW4).

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[-] sunbytes@lemmy.world 30 points 7 months ago

We're riding this wave over in the Total War community too. Broken game, weak and overpriced DLC.

We kicked off (and then all their other games managed to flop at once, so they came crawling back) and now we've got a notable amount more effort into the DLC coming at the end of the month, as well as price cuts, refunds and redoing of the bad DLC.

Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, but I'm seeing positive movements in general on legacy resting-on-laurels games.

[-] steal_your_face@lemmy.ml 23 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Thanks for the tldr :)

[-] wowwoweowza@lemmy.ml 17 points 7 months ago

City Skylines Team to their fans: We’re sorry. Making good.

George R.R Martin to his fans: Go get fucked.

[-] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 11 points 7 months ago

What's the scuttlebutt with GRRM?

[-] wowwoweowza@lemmy.ml 5 points 7 months ago

Refuses to finish next installment of Game Of Thrones — like ten years waiting.

[-] menemen@lemmy.world 10 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

13 years. :)

If he'd just say "It is over, no more books." people would just move on. But him constantly stating that he'll publish "next year" for 10 years years or so now is really annoying.

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[-] CosmicCleric@lemmy.world 8 points 7 months ago

Refuses to finish next installment of Game Of Thrones — like ten years waiting.

His D&D group probably stopped meeting years ago. No new ideas.

(I kid, I kid. Er, I think.)

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[-] Jimmycakes@lemmy.world 6 points 7 months ago

He did finish it we saw it on TV and hated it. So now he's not gonna do it because he knows no matter what he does we will hate it. He wrote himself into a corner

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[-] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 5 points 7 months ago

Oh, nothing more than that? Yeah, that's just a man who hasn't done his job. If he averaged a page a day, he'd have finished years ago.

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[-] FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today 14 points 7 months ago

NGL I wast pretty excited to play Cities Skylines a few years ago, but the EA style DLC market is disgusting.

[-] Krakaval@jlai.lu 12 points 7 months ago

It’s not the devs who are to blame for this fiasco. The management who pushed for releasing unfinished product is. There were some people sitting in a meeting room who decided that it was a good idea to publish a worthless DLC. Change is needed at management level.

The apology looks like honest but some part of me feels like they are sorry because their strategy for ripping our wallets did not work as expected.

I’m not planning to buy any Paradox game in the future.

[-] Harbinger01173430@lemmy.world 8 points 7 months ago

Stellaris optimization update, when?

[-] Montagge@lemmy.zip 6 points 7 months ago

NEVER!

[-] Nithanim@programming.dev 5 points 7 months ago

I did not even know that a DLC came out. I am sure I would have if it was good news because streamers I follow would have tested it.

But it is so sad. I really liked cities skylines because it basically is what I wanted from sim city. But with a million mods it would always break at certain points and force me to stop playing. I had such high hopes with 2 but seeing this game at launch and now seemingly still broken is so... well I am not really sure how I (should) feel.

The good thing is, that I do not have to keep reading and researching but rather wait for some "news" to pop up in my feed again. So I can get back to forgetting about it.

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