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.
But this was such an edge case, removing assets resulting in the unavailability of said assets in game, that this interruption simply couldn’t have been for foreseen.
They couldn’t foresee issues created by removing assets, in a game that is supposed to support user mods, which can be added/removed at any time? Really?
The explanation I’ve seen is that they wanted to pull the DLC as soon as possible, since it was - literally - the worst-rated product on Steam. I’m 99% sure the bean counters responsible for all of the terrible decisions (release the game, no matter what state! Release the DLC, no matter the amount of content!) pulled the lever on this one again - no chance they’ll see any responsibility with themselves.
This is but their legit response was “dunno, that wasn’t supposed to happen but it kinda did, maybe don’t do anything now, we’ll try to fix it sometimes”, so this is not that far:
I guess, but so the owner chose to get a refund, right? If so then that’s to be expected, if that’s the case then I don’t see what the fuzz is about. Unless the refund was forced onto the customer.
I think the refund would have been right to do from the company side once everything was prepared - it wouldn’t be right for them to keep any money from customers after the content has been integrated into the base game. But only once they are sure nothing will break due to the refund.
Yeah, via automated testing. Old school change management with a group of random managers who don’t know shit sitting in a room once a week running up a really expensive meeting never has and never will actually prevent issues from going to prod.
I devops for startups going through high tiers of compliance and basically half my job is killing change management boards/change control boards/release managers in organizations and replacing them with actual working processes that aren’t just smoke and mirrors for people with no critical thinking skills
Yeah, the industry as a whole has been moving away from these types of processes for the last 15 years. There are exceptions where it can still make sense but they have significantly higher risk profiles than video games do.
Truth be told, i don’t have an ounce of care in me about this community council. I want them to make a product that was advertised, because so far it’s just a scam of colossal orders of magnitude (ha)
The angry customers and the state of the game are problems.
it's hard to feel sorry for people who pre-ordered because they got exactly what they paid for - a game of unknown quality and quantity of content
it's hard to feel sorry for people who bought post-release because they also got exactly what they paid for - a game where reviews detailed poor quality and quantity of content
customers being disappointed and/or wanting a refund is perfectly reasonable
people wanting the game to be better is also reasonable
people abusing the devs is not reasonable
I'm not going to defend the poor quality of the game because it's obviously bad (from what I gather, anyway - I've not played it myself) and should be improved. But I do think gamers could learn to be a little more responsible with their purchases and inform themselves before buying a game.
I'm pretty over the whole cycle of games coming out and not meeting expectations, people buying them anyway (through pre-orders or day-one purchases), people being unnecessarily rude/hostile/sending death threats to developers as if they were forced to buy the game as gunpoint. Yes, developers should try to do better, yes publishers should often give developers more time to polish up games rather than announcing the release date two years in advance and refusing to delay, but also consumers could really take some responsibility for what they decide to give money to.
these people SHOULD be putting this negative pressure on them. It’s deserved
Was it not implied I agree with that when I said:
The angry customers and the state of the game are problems.
and;
customers being disappointed and/or wanting a refund is perfectly reasonable
people wanting the game to be better is also reasonable
I'm not going to defend the poor quality of the game because it's obviously bad (from what I gather, anyway - I've not played it myself) and should be improved.
?
I don't see why that would make my opinion stupid. Yes, the studio/publisher should be held to account for the crappy release. But a big part of holding them to account should be not giving them money for it in the first place; not just handing over money and then complaining afterwards. Complaining afterwards is reasonable for the people who did hand over money, but they should also hold themselves accountable for financially rewarding a company that puts out a crappy product - they're part of the problem.
I think it's important to look for the nuance in situations and not treat everything as zero-sum. Both sides can have good points and be open to criticism at the same time (this isn't an "enlightened centrist" take, I promise!). I think a lot of discussion online does tend to strip away nuance and take the position that if you show any empathy with one side then it means you must hate the other - I do my best to avoid that!
The last time I believed trailers was dead island.
The only reason why I played cs1 so much was because of the mods. I like to play the vanilla game before modding. I bought the game knowing that I would like it for a month or two, then I would wait for mods to come out and I'd hop back into it. I knew what I was getting and I didn't have a problem with the game. I don't need a city builder to be high frames. I didn't have a lot of bugs. I'm totally fine with the game, as long as the modding scene stays with the game.
My worry is that all the negativity around the game will make less modders appear for cs2.
Looking back at other city builders releases cs2 release is fine. I don't understand the extent of negativity. Just ask for a refund. If the game gets better with age then buy it when it is cheaper. I'm sure these people have other games to play. CS1 seems to be popular still. Nothing happened to that game.
That said, I just fired up the game yesterday for the first time since launch and was surprised by how much progress was being made. I was surprised to find that mod support is already available; I thought it was still a work in progress cause I didn’t hear anything about it. You think that Paradox would have been making a huge announcement about it since it’s a huge important thing, but if they did, I surely can’t find it on their website nor on the produce page in Steam.
I was also surprised to find that my performance issues were fixed too. Now getting a solid 40-60 FPS on high settings with a medium-sized city @ 4K. Not bad, given that I usually averaged 20-30 on the same machine in C:S1.
Now all they gotta do is make the economy easier to understand. I still don’t get how I can be losing money every month, yet my balance keeps going up. But other than that, all of my complaints with the game have been fixed. If anyone reading this hasn’t played the game in several months, I suggest you give it a try again. You might be pleasantly surprised.
CSII has been a shitshow, and the devs rightfully should be ashamed, but honestly reading the comments on that forum makes me really not feel bad for a lot of those people doing the complaining.
Like yeah the game is broken, you got an incomplete product, and it’s ok to be upset. They didn’t fucking kill your dog, there’s no need to fucking dig into them quite so hard, dude. Stop acting like your abusive parents did to you.
CO and Paradox are a public joke at this point. The only value they bring to the gaming community these days is the entertainment derived from shitting on their inept public relations.
I think we need to admit that paradox is a shitty greedy company that cares more about selling a million DLCs than they do about making a quality product.
Paradox’s business practices have always been greedy and over monetized. Not sure why anyone is surprised their latest product sucks.
Hmm, I’ve only played Stellaris from this company and that game is great. A bit pricey with all the DLC, but the alternative of releasing a new Stellaris every few years probably amounts to the same.
Also, I’d rather play a well fleshed out 8 year old game, than getting a bare boned husk with each iteration - which sadly tends to be the norm for 4x games.
Furthermore, “releasing a new stellaris every few years” is not the only alternative. Look at all the games that exist that have regular free content updates.
Dont know about stellaris but I got Cities Skylines (1) with all the content DLCs at the time for under $50, which I consider a very good deal for the hours I put in. For reference, I paid roughly the same amount for BF5 which I played for about a month and then forgot about it
The link suggests the opposite of what you’re claiming
you were of course supposed to keep access to the Beach Properties content until the patch that moves it to the base game arrived. Assets are replaced by the placeholder boxes, but as the waterfront zoning isn’t available in the base game yet, I recommend holding off on loading saves with a lot of those zones.
Putting dlc content into the base game doesn’t sound like they are trying to sell millions of dlc
Only because there was major backlash for releasing dlc content before the base game is even in a finished state and is still missing content that players feel should be in the base game.
Yes, CO did bad releasing an unoptimized game, but if you put pressure for a cosmetic DLC to be removed you can’t be angry that they removed said DLC.
I strongly disagree with this for two reasons:
Nobody put pressure on them to remove the content from the game. “Removing the DLC” can be done in productive or non-productive ways, the latter of which happened here - a better solution would be to set it as non-buyable on Steam and wait with refunds until the patch has been released which allows people to continue playing.
It’s not just grey boxes (which would be bad enough on its own - these people paid for the content, there’s no technical reason for them not to have it right now) - the CO employee literally says:
Assets are replaced by the placeholder boxes, but as the waterfront zoning isn’t available in the base game yet, I recommend holding off on loading saves with a lot of those zones.
So the people who bought the shitty DLC, as in the die-hard fans, can’t play on their saves due to COs fuckup.
Our continuous internal reviews and beta test groups have highlighted areas that we need to focus on more, mainly performance and content
From the FAQ:
Is the game canceled?
No, the game is not canceled.
What happens to pre-orders?
All pre-orders will be refunded in the upcoming weeks. The option to pre-order the game will be removed and the bonus will instead be added to the base game for all
Is there going to be Early Access or Beta Access to the game?
There will not be an early access or extra beta access right now
In the blog there are the steps to how to get the refunds, I’m not copying them in case they change.
All of this could have been said about PDX’s Sims competitor Life By You when it got “delayed indefinitely” too. But then a week later it was cancelled. And then a week after that the lead dev came out and said there was no reason for it to have been cancelled because they had been on track for release before Paradox pulled the plug.
I loved 1 - but 2 didn’t make any sense to me. Slapping 3D on it didn’t seem like something it needed, and it makes it a very different game. Plus, it’s not made by introversion - that’s where 95% of the humor and novel game mechanics came from.
Yeah I thought the same. I played 1 from the very beginning up until release. When I heard about 2 I wasn’t even interested, it seemed to me it would be doomed from the start.
Prison Architect 1 was amazing, up until Paradox bought it. I didn’t have high hopes for PA2 (not like I was going to play it anyway) but I definitely wasn’t expecting this
I really loved the first game, but have zero faith in the sequel. I think the whole 3d rework makes no sense, and on top of that, it’s led by a company, that’s historically made the worst choices in every aspect of development
forum.paradoxplaza.com
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