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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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)
Dlc should never feel required
But it does, sadly.
This is why I stopped buying Paradox games and just pirate them if I’m curious. No way I’m getting trapped in a fomo cycle everytime they release a minor feature for $5.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No, the consumers are never to blame for stuff like this!
This is something that is just that we get told by the people that are lying about and hyping up a product, putting up manipulative incentives for buying it before letting us inspect it. Then releasing trash, but still appealing on our empathic nature and promising that it might get fixed later. And when things turn to shit, then it is our trust and empathy, willingness to support them, that is to blame for it. No!
If the industry exploits our good and trusting nature, then we need to fight them with regulation and laws. Our civilization and the human nature is built on trust, and that should not be undermined by short profit oriented, exploitative companies or business practices.
I do wait, and the publishers don’t get away with selling me unfinished games. It’s great.
I wait at least a month for any game, 8 months for a Bethesda game.
I waited a year for cyberpunk, until everyone was saying it was all fixed, and I hated all the bugs and some bad design decisions. Nothing major, but it felt like death of a thousand cuts.
I shudder to imagine how that game looked at release that this feels like a polished product to people.
Hah, yeah I also played cyberpunk quite recently. I really liked it for the most part, I’m considering playing it again with a totally different build.
Yeah, I saw some early gameplay videos from cyberpunk… I think it has indeed come a very long way.
I can’t say I didn’t like it. Quite the opposite, but for a supposedly fixed game, there were still too many annoyances.
It’s preorders. Stop preordering, and either the products will improve or studios will collapse.
To be precise, the new generation is to blame, who constantly preorders a game, and spends a lot on mobile games. Companies realize that bad products sell, so why would they improve?
“The new generation”
So there are no 40 year olds who blindly pre order the 15th CoD game because that’s all they play? This is a general issue in the gaming community as a whole.
Instead of getting hung up on an actual age number, consider it as older society versus the current newer society.
We can all argue the details, but today’s consumer who purchase games seem to be a lot more willing to accept an inferior product, than those of the past.
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.
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.
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.
Cart version revisions weren’t uncommon either. But they would only be for new purchases.
A lot of games were significantly more expensive bc back then too
You don’t miss those days.
You don’t have to! Pretty much all of those games are available, and you can play them for free if you’re willing to pirate.
But let’s be honest, modern games are better which is why you won’t do this instead.
Yeah. Good ol’ Pong.
Why do you miss things being permanently broken and unfixable?
The thing is, it forced the people making games to release them as a finished, working product, with the bugs (mostly) stamped out.
Today it’s just push something out the door now, and we’ll
patch itsoak them for even more money with DLC later.
Yes but this comment is generic to the game industry overall, and has been made thousands of times with slightly different wording. I’d rather use this thread to celebrate the rare event of a company admitting a mistake and actually making customers whole.
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.
City Skylines Team to their fans: We’re sorry. Making good.
George R.R Martin to his fans: Go get fucked.
What’s the scuttlebutt with GRRM?
Refuses to finish next installment of Game Of Thrones — like ten years waiting.
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.
HAHAHAHAHAHA
The Elder Scrolls fans: First time?
It is pretty comparable tbh. It is also the same for Elders scroll fans. Before Skyrim and before A Dance with Dragons both published constantly and both started publishing on the mid 90s, both published 5 times, both started publishing side project stuff.
Elders Scroll fans have it somewhat better though, not depending on a single person, who also isn’t the youngest.
I am also an Elder Scroll fan since Arena btw, so I am quite f…d.
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.)
Chuckled. That was unexpected.
But you should read some of this guy— he’s the most legit… except for this delay.
But you should read some of this guy— he’s the most legit… except for this delay.
I know, I was just going for the comedic route (er, I think :p ). I’ve read his books.
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
Yeah I remember some interview or something where he said the show just did a shittier version of the ending he wanted and it kind of killed his drive to finish. Imagine the adaptation being so bad it actually does ruin the source.
He should just plagiarize a few fanfics
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.
He made his money. I wonder if he’ll ever have to do his job again.
Thanks for the tldr :)
deleted by creator
thats how most people behave most of the time.
When corporations acting in their best interest also act in the consumers best interest, the system is working as it should.
Intent matters for individuals, not for societal systems like governments and corporations. Incompetent governments/corporations need to be removed just as much as evil ones.
That’s what every apology is.
That’s not true. Intent matters, accidents do happen.
Stellaris optimization update, when?
Meanwhile, Indie games: Yeah, we fixed the wonky balancing with that super niche strategy and we’re working on 3 new DLCs (all free, btw)
This team has been making the exact same game for multiple decades. Look at this developer’s game history. It is literally the same exact game redeveloped over and over every few years and then they repackage and resell the same DLCs for the new versions. What a con of a game dev.
13 years since Cities in Motion 1 is not multiple decades, and Cities in Motion 1 is in no way the same game as Cities Skylines
So you think they’ve been making entirely new games for their entire existence? You don’t think it’s conny at all that literally all they do is make city builders and sell DLCs and then make a new one when interest dries up? Doesn’t seem very creative or innovative in my opinion it sounds like pure capitalism. Publisher is a microcosm EA.
That’s not a con, that’s someone perfecting their art.
Oh so Cities II is better than 1 across the board? And the Hobbit movies were better than lotr? I feel like you’re being a tad naive.
