Crusader Kings II and Europa Universalis IV to both receive expansions in November

@ Mountain Man, Rutine and everyone else quoting me with counter arguments:

Don't want to sound harsh or pick a fight, but gullible fans like you are the reason publishers can keep up manipulative schemes like this.

You say you can skip the expansions and just stay with the free patches? I've tried this and the game gets more broken every time it's patched unless you buy the expansion. The base game is basically a demo, for which they are charging you 40€.

You say it's okay to split expansions into two or three DLC's (gameplay, graphic assets, music). Did you realize that just the gameplay package costs 20€ alone? This doesn't seem to be in line with the rest of the gaming industry. I can spend 10€ on a Arma 3 DLC and get gameplay, art and music assets and that's not even discounted. The price of EUIV expansions are not justified IMO. They aren't comparable to something like Arma 3 Apex in scope. They are more like Arma 3 Marksman or Helicopters DLC.

This is going to be somewhat related to the last section. You say they often have discounts? Looks to me like the 75% discounted prices are in line with what other companies would charge normally without any discount. If they discounted everything, which they never do at the same time, it would still be 60-70€. As a comparison, The Witcher 3 GOTY with all expansions and content is normally 50€, without discount. The latter provides way more content.

That's it for now I guess, but do you see how you are being manipulated?

Edit,
Just a little TL,DR:
They know exactly how you are thinking and what your buying habits are, and they are using it to their full advantage to make maximum profit.


Last edited by Brisse on 25 October 2017 at 8:05 pm UTC

Quoting: BrisseAs much as I love these games, I despise Paradox for their DLC strategy, which is designed to milk every last penny out of us. The base game currently costs 39.99€ on Steam, but that is just a shell of what the game should be. To get the full experience you have to throw another whopping 279.74€ on DLC. It's the same disgusting thing EA did with The Sims.

Edit: They don't even have the decency to sell a complete expansion. Instead they split every expansion up in two pieces, one with gameplay mechanics, and another with art assets. How disgusting is that!?

Quoting: Things no-one ever saidIt's launch day, and wow, this Paradox grand strategy game is massively incomplete! It'll take them six years and a ton of DLC to make it good!

I bought Europa Universalis IV shortly after launch, before any expansions had been released. It sucked me in. Over the next week, I spent more time playing EU4 than I did working. Over the next year, I poured well over a hundred hours into it. That's, what, less than a dollar per hour of entertainment? If that's an "incomplete" game, then a "complete" game is impossible to achieve.

If Paradox had left off there, had never done anything except balance patches and bug fixes, EUIV would still be one of the best grand strategy games of all time. By no means was it "incomplete" at launch. If I have a house, and I live in it, and I think, "Hey, this is a pretty nice house, there's nothing wrong with it," the house is not incomplete. If I then add a front porch, was the original house incomplete? Another bedroom? Re-do the kitchen? The completeness of the house is down to how acceptable it is to live there. Wanting a bigger garage does not make your house incomplete. Wanting to change your kitchen does not make your house incomplete. Wanting to add a fireplace does not make your house incomplete. Not having a bathroom makes your house incomplete. Not having a bedroom makes your house incomplete. Not having a kitchen makes your house incomplete. Not having a roof makes a house incomplete. The metric for a house's completeness is it's livability.

Similarly, the metric for completeness of a game is it's playability. If a large number of players are able to dump a massive amount of time per player into the game, it's hard to argue that the game is incomplete, most especially if none of the players are arguing that there are major elements of the game missing. Fallout 4, for example, suffered from major elements of the game being missing or being done vastly incorrectly, and players made note of this, in spite of putting a massive amount of time into the game. Europa Universalis IV, on the other hand, was complete AT LAUNCH. It did not need anything else to be a complete game, it already was one. But like a complete house can be expanded or re-modeled, a complete game can have mechanics or art added or changed. This does not detract from the completeness of the original.

Let's now consider another unstated part of your argument. Let's look at the history of grand strategy games, going back to last century's old standby, the board game Risk. My father has a very, very old copy of Risk. It's single-unit markers are plastic three-point stars, and it's five-unit markets are five-point stars. The fact that they aren't soldiers, cavalry, and cannons does not lessen the experience of my dad totally wrecking everyone who plays against him. It doesn't change the experience at all. To a new player, sure, it might help visualize things slightly, but I suspect a new player at Risk is going to be more focused on the rules than on the abstract representations of army strength. Risk would not be improved by having each different player's armies have a completely different appearance. It would gain nothing from it except added expense. The upgrade from plastic stars to actual representations of army units might make it easier for some players to get used to the game, but moving from that to having each player's armies have a completely unique representation gains you nothing, and may actually lose you clarity in playing the game. Appearance only matters for the purpose of achieving rapid understanding and clarity, not for having maximum prettiness. If you're playing your grand strategy game for looks, I'm not sure you're playing the right game.

So, based on that, we can remove any DLC from the price computation which makes no change to gameplay. This takes us from your stated $275-ish, down to $215. This, of course, completely ignores the regularity of Steam sales. If we factor that in, the price of having all elements which change gameplay comes down to about $113.50, ignoring bundle pricing. Bundles are, of course, regularly used by Paradox, and I've taken advantage of them before. That can drop the price even further, but honestly, I've done more legwork here than you've bothered to do, so I don't see why I should track down what bundle prices have been like during sales for EUIV.

Quoting: Brisse@ Mountain Man, Rutine and everyone else quoting me with counter arguments:

Don't want to sound harsh or pick a fight, but gullible fans like you are the reason publishers can keep up manipulative schemes like this.

You say you can skip the expansions and just stay with the free patches? I've tried this and the game gets more broken every time it's patched unless you buy the expansion. The base game is basically a demo, for which they are charging you 40€.

You say it's okay to split expansions into two or three DLC's (gameplay, graphic assets, music). Did you realize that just the gameplay package costs 20€ alone? This doesn't seem to be in line with the rest of the gaming industry. I can spend 10€ on a Arma 3 DLC and get gameplay, art and music assets and that's not even discounted. The price of EUIV expansions are not justified IMO. They aren't comparable to something like Arma 3 Apex in scope. They are more like Arma 3 Marksman or Helicopters DLC.

This is going to be somewhat related to the last section. You say they often have discounts? Looks to me like the 75% discounted prices are in line with what other companies would charge normally without any discount. If they discounted everything, which they never do at the same time, it would still be 60-70€. As a comparison, The Witcher 3 GOTY with all expansions and content is normally 50€, without discount. The latter provides way more content.

That's it for now I guess, but do you see how you are being manipulated?

Edit,
Just a little TL,DR:
They know exactly how you are thinking and what your buying habits are, and they are using it to their full advantage to make maximum profit.

You assert that Paradox grand strategy fans are gullible, but have provided no evidence of that statement. The Paradox fans, on the other hand, have openly stated their reasons for why they accept Paradox's practices. Paradox's practices are by no means manipulative. If I don't care about the art assets, I don't need to buy them. I don't tend to look at them anyway. If I don't listen to the music, I don't need to buy it, I usually play my own music anyway. If I want the gameplay changes, I typically wait for a sale. It's what I do with most games, anyway.

You also argue that the gameplay changes that EUIV expansions bring around are on the scale of the smaller Arma 3 DLCs. I contest this. Paradox grand strategy DLCs typically bring fairly sizeable changes to mechanics. Sometimes, the mechanics changes are specific to a given region or religion, other times the changes are global, but in all cases, the changes are very noticeable. In spite of this, however, EUIV remains a fully-playable and complete game without DLCs. Arma 3's DLCs, however, have historically left me with a sour taste in my mouth. Don't own the Helicopters DLC? Can't fly that helicopter we just captured, even though I'm the guy with the nice joysticks. Don't own the Marksmen DLC? Enjoy the annoying pop-over text and screen-blurring you get when you loot a gun off the corpse of a guy you just killed in Wasteland. Don't have Apex? Can't join your friends on their current server. Arma 3's DLCs serve to split the community and force you to purchase them in order to keep playing effectively and competitively with your friends. Paradox DLCs do not. Who's the real monster here?

Quoting: Brisse@ Mountain Man, Rutine and everyone else quoting me with counter arguments:

Don't want to sound harsh or pick a fight, but gullible fans like you...

And that's where I stopped reading. Thanks anyway.

niarbeth: That was one of the longest self-wanks I have read on internet.

Paradox removed westernization and added "idea" spread (whatever it is called). But you can't interact with it unless you have several DLCs.

Thats like taking away bathroom in your house, improving it, adding bathtub, but locking away shower, bathtub and water unless you "unlock" it with additional payment. Also, in the process, electricity in living room does not work any more.

Many people have stated before that Paradox DLC policy, although a good idea, contains several broken premises. And that Paradox is haemorrhaging fans, while those who are staying are becoming more and more extreme (extremization is common process in this case, similar to political parties).


Also, that nonsense that patches are somehow FREE... could you please STOP repeat this nonsense? Especially when the same people were so rabid about criticizing Armello devs for not supporting Armello on GoG any more?

Quoting: Brisse@ Mountain Man, Rutine and everyone else quoting me with counter arguments:

Don't want to sound harsh or pick a fight, but gullible fans like you are the reason publishers can keep up manipulative schemes like this.

Well, I might not agree with you, but that doesn't mean I am a gullible fan, thank you very much. I did not say in my post that you were stupid or anything, I tried to state my opinion, that is contrary to yours, in the most respectful way I could.
Try to do the same.

Quoting: BrisseEdit,
Just a little TL,DR:
They know exactly how you are thinking and what your buying habits are, and they are using it to their full advantage to make maximum profit.

Yeah, because other gaming companies are just offering things out of love, and developers and artists don't like being paid.


Concerning the rest of your arguments I hear them and they make some sense. But you always exagerate. You talk about 20€ as if all EU4 expansions cost 20 € which is not true.

Just for the sake of it I am going to try an EU4 game today deactivating all DLC's, to see how it looks like, and what you can do.

Quoting: ColomboParadox removed westernization and added "idea" spread (whatever it is called). But you can't interact with it unless you have several DLCs.

Institutions. Interacting with them requires the ability to develop, which is unlocked by a single DLC. That being said, I will agree that's one of the few things that should not have been a paid feature, as Paradox then proceeded to balance things around it that they really shouldn't have. They've tacitly admitted themselves that it was a mistake, but aren't sure how to fix it yet.

Quoting: ColomboAlso, that nonsense that patches are somehow FREE... could you please STOP repeat this nonsense?

I'm sorry, but what? I get patches for each Paradox game I own every couple of months that I can download without paying a cent. That seems like (one of) the definition(s) of "free" to me. :)

Oh boy , here we go




Last edited by razing32 on 26 October 2017 at 9:21 am UTC

Quoting: ColomboAlso, that nonsense that patches are somehow FREE...

Um... are they not free? Last time I looked, Paradox has never charged us for a patch.

QuoteI'm sorry, but what? I get patches for each Paradox game I own every couple of months that I can download without paying a cent. That seems like (one of) the definition(s) of "free" to me.

QuoteUm... are they not free? Last time I looked, Paradox has never charged us for a patch.

Last time I looked, post-release support was critical to continued success of game. Game that was released broken and not patched up was often heavily criticized. If devs announce that they will stop supporting game (i.e., patching bugfixes) when there is a long list of bugs (especially after newly released DLC/expansion), they would often trash their reputation and sales.

If there is such expectation, and previously, while Paradox was known for releasing games in state that can be described as open beta, it was also known for eventually fixing all the bugs and people bought their knowing and expecting that, then it is not "free". It is part of the price I bought the game for.

I say it again, if on one say you say that these patches are "free", but on other said complain that some other company stopped support and didn't release patches (or that some product is less good because it wasn't patched), than something is wrong with your opinion consistency.

Quoting: ColomboIf there is such expectation, and previously, while Paradox was known for releasing games in state that can be described as open beta, it was also known for eventually fixing all the bugs and people bought their knowing and expecting that, then it is not "free". It is part of the price I bought the game for.

On the other hand, I bought EU IV sometime after it'd had its second expansion. I'd never heard of Paradox before and had no knowledge of their practices; two expansions was usually the limit for most games I'd played up to that point. I therefore bought it "as-is", with no expectation of further improvements (and was perfectly satisfied with what I got, too). Ergo, by your logic, the patches are free for me because I wasn't expecting them when I bought the game.

And here we have a logical contradiction. Patches cannot objectively be both free and not-free at the same time. If a new patch does not cost you additional money at the time of download, then by the accepted dictionary definition of the term it is objectively free. End of story.