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

As 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!?


Last edited by Brisse on 25 Oct 2017 at 1:16 pm UTC

Hmm , I never thought about it like that.
But maybe because I don't see Paradox as a major publisher.
Sure their expansions are iffy but I usually buy them only when heavily discounted 75% up.
I think the DLC is there to keep the game alive after so many years , but then again a lot of people complained bug fixes are only in the DLC/expansion and not in the base game.

Guess what I'm saying is that I am on the fence on this one.

Yes, I'd love to start playing both games. Many times was I very close to clicking the purchase button. However, the sheer amount of DLC make the base games feel incomplete. If one would add all DLCs, the prices becomes ridiculous and thus I never did get them.

A pitty, they both seem to be awesome, but I will not spend €200+ on a single game. They should just pack all past DLCs and sell it as a bundle for something reasonable. €40 or so would be the max I'd give for them.

Would be nice if they could fix crossplatform multiplayer which is broken since over 3 years but still advertised on the store page -.-

Yes, I'd love to start playing both games. Many times was I very close to clicking the purchase button. However, the sheer amount of DLC make the base games feel incomplete. If one would add all DLCs, the prices becomes ridiculous and thus I never did get them.

A pitty, they both seem to be awesome, but I will not spend €200+ on a single game. They should just pack all past DLCs and sell it as a bundle for something reasonable. €40 or so would be the max I'd give for them.

Wait for a sale or Humble Bundle
They show up quite often.

Would be nice if they could fix crossplatform multiplayer which is broken since over 3 years but still advertised on the store page -.-

yeah thats so bad. With every major patch my friends and I play at least one multiplayer game and everytime I try the native linux client. But nope the game always desyncs after a few minutes/seconds. Switching to wine works, but it is sad to see that bug for such a long time.

Guys I may be the cheapest guy around but I own almost all content DLCs for both CK2 and EU4 (not the skin packs tough). How did I do that without spending hundreds? I waited for 75% discounts, bundles etc. I spent hundreds of hours on Paradox games and they were definitely worth more than I paid.

It is a problem, but on the other hand it certainly seems to be true that while with many games, people buy it when it's new, play it for 15-20 hours or something, and then done . . . with Paradox games people tend to buy the base game, play it for 30-40 hours, buy a DLC, play for another 12-15, buy another DLC, rinse and repeat, with a few extra stints of just going back to it and losing a weekend without having bought anything new, adding up very often to hundreds of hours. So if you talk $$$/hour of entertainment, Paradox tends to actually stack up fine against most of the competition near as I can figure.
And it would be frankly financially impossible to just put out a game with the depth and complexity of something like CK II with a dozen DLCs already rolled in at launch. They'd have to ask for megabucks for the game (and so it wouldn't sell), except they'd probably fold before release just developing the damn thing for as long as it would take. So while the situation isn't perfect, I'm not sure what I'd advocate as a solution.


Last edited by Purple Library Guy on 25 Oct 2017 at 5:02 pm UTC

As 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!?

Well, disgusting and despising seems like a bit too much in my opinion. I can understand that you disagree with their DLC policy but :

1 -When I bought EU4, around v1.5, I bought it "naked" without any DLC's, just to see if it was worth it. And for me it was very much worth it at the time. Even then, it was so much better than EU3 for me. So that's to say that yes, the base game can probably feel incomplete right now, when you have played or heard about all the DLC's but even the base game has been very much improved, so I don't think it's a shell of what it should be.
2 - Concerning the splitting of expansions.. would you prefer that they force you to buy the arts along with game content ? I personally buy the DLC's at 33-75% discount, depending on how interesting they sound but art content I buy it a 75%. So I am very happy with the fact that they sell them separately. Plus, you can buy them bundled if you want, every time (for example http://store.steampowered.com/bundle/1557/Europa_Universalis_IV_Rights_of_Man_Collection/)
3 - Concerning the price too.. well, ok, it's impressive let's say around 300€ to have everything at full price. Probably too much. But very often you can find the game at the base game at -75% (10 €) and if you like the base game you can then buy the DLC's also discount, for 4 or 5 € each.

This is not so much for the author of the comment I am quoting that is of course very much entitled to his or her opinion, but for other people that do not know EU4 yet.

And sorry for saying almost the same thing than Teodosio and Purple Library Guy, but I think this game is awesome and I too have played it for countless hours (544 now). And it's not only the number of hours, but the feeling when you are playing. The feeling to be playing the best strategy title, light years ahead of any of the civilization games for example.

As 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!?

I disagree. I think Paradox is one of the few publishers/developers to do DLC the right way.

Here's the thing: First of all, if you bought the vanilla version of, say, Crusader Kings 2, or Europa Universalis IV at launch and never bought a single piece of DLC, the game in and of itself remains a complete experience that you can easily sink dozens and hundreds of hours into. You're not missing essential or necessary content by not having the DLC.

And secondly, with every major expansion, Paradox traditionally releases a substantial patch that expands the game and adds new content for free (in some cases, they give away so much for free that the expansions themselves are almost not worth buying!), so the vanilla game you can buy today is a much larger, fuller experience than the vanilla game that was released on Day 1 -- and you don't have to pay anything extra to get it. In fact, my recommendation to new Paradox gamers is to play the vanilla game first, and once you've gotten a feel for it, only then should you look at the DLC and see which of it appeals to you, because not all of it will, and none of it is essential.

To put it another way, either Paradox charges a reasonable fee for the continued development of their games over a period of years, or they release a couple of patches, maybe an expansion, and then move on to their next project. I don't know about you, but I prefer the former. Not to mention the fact that it is in no way reasonable to expect that Paradox would release years worth of work without charging for it.

As far as splitting the art content from the gameplay features, I don't understand why this upsets people. Sure, Paradox could include everything in one package, but then they would simply charge a higher price for it, or they can split it up and charge a little less for each piece, and in the end, it works out exactly the same. Basically, if you want more then you pay more. I don't see how that's "disgusting".


Last edited by Mountain Man on 25 Oct 2017 at 6:47 pm UTC

@ 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 Oct 2017 at 8:05 pm UTC

As 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!?

It'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.

@ 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?

@ 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?

@ 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.

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.

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.

Paradox 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.

Also, 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 Oct 2017 at 9:21 am UTC

Also, that nonsense that patches are somehow FREE...

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

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.

Um... 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.

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.

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.