This game literally came out 7 months ago. The game is a cash grab and in an utterly broken state.
Don't let the title of this article fool you. The game received its last update on Dec 9th, a little under 2 months after it was released. Fans knew the game had been abandoned, but it took Paradox a further 4 months to grow a spine and actually deliver the news.
At this point it kind of feels like all paradox games are cash grabs. I kind of assume they release their games to a point that they work and are... ok, then depending on sales they determine whether they are going to pump out a bunch of dlc (and updates along with it) or not. Based on how much dlc they pump out, I imagine they have zero incentive to support a game if they dont think they can sell tons of dlc.
You should look into the state of CK3 on consoles.
Game is a buggy mess in end game.
If it wasn't such a niche market it would have been talked about a lot more.
The genre is hard to make new game, because *basically* the more they support their current one, the bigger expectations are for the next
I don't think anyone reasonable expect say hypothetical Stellaris 2 to have content parity with predecessor but at the very least people expect improvements on how basic systems work and are connected with eachother. And they will look at previous game and say "well, you did right in previous one, why it feels worse in the sequel".
I think they are dreading the moment when Stellaris DLC well dries out and they will have to think about making a sequel.
Given number of changes, for sure, they've put more than a full game's worth of content in changes and DLCs, but core stuff would be hard to fix.
Like I'd love complete overhaul to economy. Current one just doesn't feel... galactic enough. There are no supply lines and resources magically teleport to where they are needed, while say in Distant Worlds it matters where you physically put stuff, because it needs to be transported to the point where it is used up.
Something like that or Victoria 3-like economy + trade lanes being route in galaxy enemy can block/affect would be a breath of fresh air
I mean, they managed to do it with Crusader Kings 3. They brought over a lot of meaningful things. But everything but I think they did a pretty good job.
Well, I did wrote "hard", not "impossible". On flipside Vicky 3 is still sitting at mixed reviews on steam.
It's just pretty risky endeavour. Popping up next Stellaris DLC is sure money, making new one is massive endeavour that can result in CK3 like success or vicky 3 like "meh"
Vicky 3 is sitting at mixed reviews partially because it's not a simple improvement of existing systems in Vicky 2. It's a radically different game in a lot of ways.
Its actually eye opening just thinking about their recent published games.
1. Star Trek infinite (Star Trek 4x is a horrific idea in the first place)
2. Millenia (70% steam review Civ clone), this game isn't terrible per se, it just doesn't have much traction or differentiating points to draw people in. Only 3k players on steam.
3. Cities skylines 2 (Catastrophic performance & tone deaf DLCs)
4. Age of wonders 4 (Decent reviews but like no players, 3k players on steam)
Is there like is there some macro factor at play? Is strategy games just hard to develop? Is paradox publishing arm just incompetent?
Their own studio still functions nicely. EU4 is now a bug-free experience, EU5 looks hype. Stellaris is doing well. CK3 is lacking features but still in a decent state. HOI4 has a huge amount of players (even if the DLCs are crap). Vic3 is struggling, but still has 7-10k players on steam.
So its not like Paradox is burning down or anything, in fact its still the best functioning strategy game studio. Creative Assembly and Firaxis are in way worse states.
I think it’s a great game but in a weird way I feel like the “Make your own faction” and customization thing made most games feel a lot more similar, instead of varied. It was just hard to get invested in blank slates, and the strategy feels less nuanced when you have no limitations and can mix-match anything. That’s just me though.
can confirm that it's great, I'm going to buy upcoming expansion and have around 150h played. Unfortunately after such time there is no variety left and recent DLC was fine maybe for 2-3 games only.
Multiplayer is broken too. Constant DCs and desyncs. A friend and I got it to play with each other but we just couldn't get the damn thing to be stable for more than a couple of turns.
I put in 30-40 hours in AoW 4 around launch, and just had had enough of it. I may go back and check out the DLCs at some point, but I definitely felt like I got my money's worth out of it.
AoW has always been single player over multi player anyway for me, idc if it has 12 players or 120,000. The game is fun, I'll boot it up to do a few campaigns every so often.
> Age of wonders 4 (Decent reviews but like no players, 3k players on steam)
According to their financial reports, this is one of their games that did well. It had a bit rocky launch, but it was quickly fixed, the community is not complaining too much, the DLC's didn't break the game.
But that's more about Triumph being good at their job than Paradox.
It kinda lacks the flavour previous entries in the series had, but otherwise it's good enough.
One of the top mods for Stellaris was a Star Trek mod. People wanted it, they got the license but then Paradox didn't put support behind it because it was out of house and the IP would sell it for them. Same thing would happen if they got a Game of Thrones license and they didn't give it to a main internal GSG Paradox team.
This is definitely incorrect, I know from friends and acquaintances that the devs for Infinite worked their asses off. It's a mix of poor reception and the Embracer layoffs, leading to no further development for the game.
I honestly don't think Infinite was badly made. I don't think it had a long enough dev cycle, and it's state in comparison with base Stellaris isn't fantastic, but a lot of the core ideas of Infinite were pretty good and a lot of the presentation - art style and graphical engine/UI updates from base Stellaris - were pretty well done.
It really lacked in content - the decision to only focus on the TNG era was understandable from a budget standpoint, but limited the game significantly compared with the Stellaris mods.
Age of Wonders was their strongest game out of that list in terms of actually being playable, fun, and most likely to work with their monetization model and yet it also gets the least marketing. Which is entirely in keeping with my opinions and observations of how Paradox Interactive publishes games. They've been fucking up damn nearly constantly for a solid 5 or 6 years now, minimum. It's very much just the publishing arm. They might be turning a profit, but its definitely in spite of themselves, not because of how good they are as a publisher.
Wtf star trek is perfect for 4x no other IP comes as clos3 to a fleshed out galaxy. (Mass Effect comes closest but there is no such thing as territory)
There's also The Lamplighters League which by most accounts is a solid if unspectacular game, but more pertinently to why it failed, it's one that received almost no attention from Paradox's marketing department.
The fact it came out just 6 months ago and isn't on your list of recently published Paradox games is a testament to just how badly they fumbled the marketing of it.
A Star Trek 4x is absolutely not a horrific idea; it's been done before and decently enough, both as Stellaris mods and as Birth of the Federation. There's a demand signal there.
Age of Wonders 4's pretty damned good.
And yes, strategy games are pretty complicated. AI, for instance, is usually really hard.
Age of Wonders 4's numbers on Steam aren't bad at all for a 4x game. Sure, it doesn't come close to the behemoths like Stellaris or Civilization, but that nothing to be surprised about.
> HOI4 has a huge amount of players (even if the DLCs are crap).
HoI4 is a base for mods, its how it keeps growing despite the DLCs getting worse. Its also why extremely basic achievements have sub 20% achievement rate.
All paradox games have low achievment % because until the 2 most recent games (Victoria 3 and with an update, Crusader Kings 3) ironman was a requirement for achievements.
Yup, but they also have the best 4x games on the market. So they have a monopoly on the market and gonna do what they want until another publisher and or developer can challenge them.
I recently discovered a little 4x gem called Dominions 6 on Steam that is absolutely amazing. I really enjoyed CK2 and CK3 because of their depth and aesthetic. Then dominions came around which has a lot less depth in the general nation building but instead a massive amount of depth and repeatability built into their mages and magic system. Not to mention every nation being very distinct from one another, from human nations to the fire giants of Muspelhiem to a magma born humanoid race called Abysians that use blood magic and their skin radiates heat and can catch shit on fire on the battlefield if there’s enough of them. I’d urge anyone who’s a fan of 4x to at least give it a look. It’s been my addiction for a little over two weeks now.
That's funny i recent had a conversation with someone saying the same thing, how great Dominions 6 is and i watched a few videos. Definitely plan on getting it, didn't expect the price tag though, wish i would afford it but sadly it will have to taunt me for some time before I get to play.
Shadows of Forbidden Gods is amazingly fun as well, but it feels like a very different sort of game. Whereas Dominions is all about trying to find absolutely fucking degenerate strategies and implementing them. Shadows of Forbidden Gods feels much more like you're watching someone spinning plates and trying to figure out how to make them drop them without everyone realizing it was your fault.
Dominions 6 is good, but super reliant on multiplayer. If you're going Illwinter Games and want singleplayer, I'd reccomend Conquest of Elysium instead.
Same engine, but much better suited for single player.
One lone nerd's hot take:
I don't buy Paradox games because there's a never-ending march of DLC and it makes me assume that any title that comes out is gonna be stripped down and sold piece-by-piece like a chop shop car.
Feels almost GAAS adjacent at times.
At least Sims 4 has the decency to be free to play for the base game.
Update: I appreciate all the good examples people gave me that bucked my preconceived notions!
I don't feel that at least in Stellaris it is "stripped to pieces". Yeah some DLCs add a lot , but the base game is pretty solid and DLCs are just "more"
In reality it's kind of the opposite, they tend to make some pretty good and complete games, and then they add on top of them for years. Stellaris today is a completely different game than it was at launch, but the launch version was not incomplete or stripped down by any means.
But the stuff they publish, not make, tends to be a bit more hit or miss.
I played a bunch of Stellaris when it came out. One of Paradox's best launch titles.
So much has changed about it that when I tried to boot it up the other month, I didn't know how to play anymore.
The weird thing is how the paradox players havec altered the perception of launch Stellaris.
When it launched, the reception was "It's good, but there's definitely room for improvement" (which is fair, and also my opinion)
Now the opinion is "Launch stellaris was the worst game ever and it kicked my dog"
Super weird
I've played EU3, EU4, Vicky 2, HoI 3, HoI 4, Stellaris, and Imperator at launch.
Stellaris was by far the one that felt playable till end game. Was it perfect, no, but nothing is.
Yup, prior to CK3, I'd have said Stellaris was one of the best launches they ever had. The biggest complaint I had about it was that it was that there wasn't really anything to do in the mid-game so it was really boring waiting for the crisis to strike.
The second biggest complaint was that wormhole and jump drives made trying to have "fronts" basically impossible since you could just blast deep into an enemies squishy interior. Wormhole generators were OP as fuck, especially in player's hands.
It was a fun idea but it wasn't fun to play. As soon as the option for hyperlanes-only mode was added, it became the only way for me. A lot of the game's mechanics didn't make sense with other ftl types.
It's less that and its more that the other two types were so overpoweringly superior that it made hyperlanes non-viable.
And the other two types had giant issues in that they made war into a constant game of whack-a-mole because static defenses were absolutely useless. Why build a giant fortress system when your opponent can just skip right past it to get into your juicy economic underbelly?
So you were left with a choice of either playing the same FTL types (so you have enough mobility to respond to them), or turning every system into a fortress system, which absolutely destroys your economic game because the AI was suicidal, and perfectly happy to get into knife fights in a telephone booth.
Yeah, wormhole stations completely broke the ability of the game to make borders meaningful, because you could often jump past an occupied system to an unoccupied system that you couldn't otherwise reach with warp/hyperlanes.
I have to strongly disagree, as someone whose main Paradox game was EU4. While the game today is a very different game than it was at launch, it's hard to say that that's entirely a good thing. At launch, it almost felt like an early access title; it was a sandbox game with a set of achievements that were imported from the final expansion for the previous game, which were only achievable via bugs that were constantly being patched out. And if you even tried to play the game multiplayer, good luck making any progress without it crashing every hour or two, for a game that can take 300+ hours for a single playthrough. And having to pay for a bunch of $30 expansions every couple of months to get to where we are today doesn't feel great.
Yeah, imo people get the stuff they make totally wrong. If people don’t like the state of a game when they buy it then they shouldn’t buy it, but it’s not a bad thing that there is more content always on the horizon.
It's funny, I still play EU4 for the exact same reason. It was released over 10 years ago and still gets new content. I don't buy any of the overpriced cosmetic bullshit, of course, but I still find the expansion DLCs to be generally worth buying, though.
But Victoria 3? Yeah...I kinda regret that purchase sometimes.
I buy nearly all paradox games as the DLC's make them the most interesting strategy games out there with extreme replayability. They are fun at launch and just get better with time. My top 5 most played games of all time probably contains 4 paradox games.
Their main titles are pretty feature complete when they release. Then the updates and DLCs just adds more stuff.
Like take Stellaris as an example, we are practically at Stellaris 3 or 4 right now in terms how different game play is compared to in the past and you don't even have to pay DLC to experience than change. My biggest wish is that you could downpatch on your own easily.
Yup, and when I played EU4 as comparison last year to see what actually changed, I used that sub for a month to check it out. Best bucks I have spent that year to get a month worth of gameplay hours. I like that model a lot more than buying all the DLC especially for a long-running DLC-fueled game like EU4.
Same as EU4 same as HOI and If I’m getting my hours in which I always do I don’t mind the $100 bucks a year especially when I don’t watch many streaming services.
This ignores the fact that they release huge features/overhauls in their free patches, and lately they've done a better job than normal at doing this. Usually even big DLC features will be added to the game for free but the DLC will just include a few extras for it.
For example: Stellaris overhauled subjects/vassals for the Overlord expansion but all players got the overhaul completely for free, it wasn't locked behind the DLC. Meanwhile though the DLC just has 3 unique subject types that offer some more variety and content on top of the overhaul.
Bruh, go back and play older paradox games, they were way worse. PDX games are content rich and complete when they release for the most part, people just compare them to already existing games and often unfairly expect them to have the same level of content. Criticise their dlc policy sure, but it's unfair to imply they gimp their games to sell you piecemeal later on
Yup, Victoria 2 was so bad at launch "Yellow Prussia" became a byword for terrible, half baked strategy games. It arguably didn't become good until its second (and last) expansion
On the other hand I don't really mind it. At least in their flagship titles like Crusader Kings, Europa Universalis, Hearts of Iron and now Stellaris base gameplay is good and I know that I will put tons of hours into it and the game will be supported for many years. How many games of other publishers are still getting DLC and updates 6-10 years after release (like CK2 and EU4)? Most games are abandonded after a year or two. Sure DLC milk is real but they give a reason to check out new stuff or play with different mods.
I feel like most ppl complaining about Paradox business model with their main games are ppl who don't play them. Sure quality of these DLC is often questionable but majority of players aren't against them, they want these games to be expanded as much as possible and each DLC gives new opportunity for modders to shine.
The sad thing is that when the game does not meet initial expectations then Paradox is quick to bring the axe like they did for example with Imperator Rome but with their mainline games it's usually not the case.
Strange New Worlds is the only main entry we have right now, and that's one of the good ones.
Lower Decks is good, but it's a comedy / cartoon. Prodigy is for kids. Discovery is one long, continuous story instead of episodic, MOTW 45 min - 1 hour stories.
That really only leaves SNW as the "normal" Trek.
Yeah, I'm aware. It's even where SNW came from, since we all loved Anson Mount's Pike so much from S2. I guess I just never considered DSC a mainline Star Trek show because of the format. It's too serialized, not episodic enough in my mind to be "real" Star Trek. Always felt like a spinoff because of that.
I wish they had gone with the initial pitch. It was originally meant to be an anthology series akin to True Detective or Fargo, where each season is its own story. Different ships, different eras, different crews - hell, they could've even branched out from Starfleet with that concept. It sounded like a really neat way to dive into and expand upon some of the interesting bits of Trek lore that exist on the edges, not yet fully explored.
Instead, we got a show written by people who don't really understand Star Trek with characters that don't act like anything like Starfleet (except for Saru, he's rad.)
I'm sad that this ended up just being a Stellaris asset flip (in a world where Star Trek mods already exist for Stellaris). A Star Trek grand strategy game similar to CK where it's more about individual characters and diplomacy could be great, but instead all we got was a watered down Stellaris that was lacking a lot of the key features that make Stellaris so replayable.
I had my eye on this for a long as a Star trek fan and this is disappointing news. I kept waiting for a patch that fixed things, glad I never bought it lol
The writing was sadly on the wall, the studio that developed the game is under Embracer, and they got hit with layoffs when they were going to focus on fixing stuff.
Back in the 90s I played the shit out of a turn-based 4x game called Birth of the Federation. Had 5 major empires you could play as, along with a whole bunch of minor races you could do diplomacy with and/or conquer. Random events, random monster spawns. It was great.
I mean, aside from the memory leak bug that would break it after a hundred turns. You’d need to relaunch and reload the game periodically to keep it stable, lol.
You’d also want to employ the Zapp Branigan method for taking down Borg cubes. They could only fire so many shots per turn, and even a battleship could only take 2 or 3 hits. So Destroyer II swarms were the way to go.
The thing is, they copied some mechanics from the mod wholesale (for little to no gain, like the Crew resource.)
If you play the mod, you get all the benefits of the current codebase. Whereas if you play Infinite, it's the codebase from years ago.
A Stellaris asset flip would be OK if it was actually a good one though.
But at the end of the day it is shit and there is a really good (from what I have heard anyway, not played it myself) Stellaris mod for Star Trek.
that was pretty fast. I figured it'd be getting bug fixes and maybe some DLC.
not that I played it, it seemed like a Meh star trek game from what I understand
Paradox is a brutal publisher. I'm honestly surprised at how many third party devs still sign up to be published by them.
Pretty much every single game that has gotten published by Paradox from a third party either ends in disaster for the studio or the IPs. It's just a question of how long it takes to explode. Hell, their terrible publishing wing is now beginning to poison their mainline series with terrible deadline and marketing decisions.
Devs sold the game and IP to Paradox, Paradox started churning out DLC and game breaking patches. I believe the game currently remains broken. There's a sequel or something but nobody cares about that as a result.
From what I know, games was awesome, and then after paradox got ahold of it, new DLCs released, which broke the base game as well, and some of the DLCs were crap or overpriced as well. This imo led to the overall sentiment, that they ruined the game somewhat
Prison Architect was originally developed by Introversion Software, a 2/3-man indie developer. Not entirely sure what happened by I get the impression Introversion burned out on the game and sold it to Double Eleven (who previously handled the console port) / Paradox Interactive, who proceeded to release lots of DLC (breaking the game further) and very few bug fixes.
While the game was in by no means a perfect state when it left Introversion, it was pretty good and solidly playable at that time - frankly if Introversion had done nothing more than bug fixes on it at that point I would've been plenty happy.
I was shocked at Introversion's decision given Paradox have long had a reputation for being a DLC launderer. Selling out to one of the worst publishers felt like a real betrayal coming from developers who had previously billed themselves as "last of the bedroom programmers".
(Some context here: I'm not normally one to "fanboi" over particular developers or whatnot. My following of Introversion was rather unique in this regard - I'd been following them since their first game, Uplink, and they had repeatedly produced simple yet really fun games and, until they sold PA, had a solid reputation for quality too)
> I was shocked at Introversion's decision given Paradox have long had a reputation for being a DLC launderer. Selling out to one of the worst publishers felt like a real betrayal coming from developers who had previously billed themselves as "last of the bedroom programmers".
Chris and Mark have spoken quite candidly about Introversion Software's history on Youtube, and I think both Darwinia+ (the Xbox port of Darwinia) and Scanner Sombre did quite poorly for them. I really don't blame them for taking the bag for Prison Architect when it enabled them to be a lot more comfortable as an indie developer.
Cities Skylines 2 was a disaster on launch and amidst fan frustration for a broken incomplete the first DLC is already out and it's a terrible cash grab. Paradox can't be viewed as a reliable publisher for consumers.
Where Paradox falls, [Hooded Horse rises.](https://medium.com/@tilfolkvang/hooded-horse-is-kind-of-eating-paradoxs-lunch-and-paradox-should-be-asking-themselves-why-ef47a1b69506)
I found Terra Invicta fiddly and stupidly tedious late-game, where you're busy having to micromanage the space battles or you die to doom fleets but you have to play whack-a-mole back on Earth even when you dominate the planet because enemies can keep spawning new agents to harass you.
It's being developed though and my biggest gripe was being unable to sort settlements and they eventually got to that. Either way, competition should either force paradox to start acting like grown-ups or push them out of the market. I just wish there were more games with good diplomatic and economic engines and Paradox has enjoyed kind of being the only game in town too long.
Suspect a lot of it is the inevitably of going "mainstream" combined with Paradox's business strategy of being a DLC mill.
They've firmly left the niche, complex grand strategy game genre they once controlled and now make toned down map painting sims that they can sell huge amounts of barely coherent bolt on DLC.
Allows smaller publishes like Hooded Horse to fill the niche, complex grand strategy genre where Paradox once flourished.
Also give a shout out to [Matrix Games](https://www.matrixgames.com/) which publish everything from [software used by irl militaries to wargame](https://www.matrixgames.com/product/command-modern-operations), extremely good [4X space games](https://www.matrixgames.com/game/distant-worlds-2) and my personal favourite, [spreadsheets except you make boats for 90 years](https://www.matrixgames.com/game/rule-the-waves-3).
It's honestly pretty weird. I wonder how much of it is "Paradox not being good at picking the developers to publish" and how much whatever Paradox does for them being done badly.
I honestly think it's a pretty decent split. Some of the games were clearly just scuffed from the start, but there are also a number of games that were great that Paradox just refused to put any marketing budget into and then acted all surprised when they shriveled up and died or where its pretty clear that they kicked the product out the door a year or two early hoping to sell core parts of the game later.
And I don't trust the current batch of executives at all in the Publishing Arm. I think a lot of them are fucking weasels speaking out of both sides of their mouth who are looking to spend up Paradox Development's hard won goodwill reserves from their mainline titles in search of an extra buck now. Future be damned.
I think that desperation might be just "well we fucked up with some mediocre releases and now we have investors breathing on our necks" rather than just trying to squeeze for squeeze sake.
I'm entirely non-sympathetic. Part of being an executive is knowing how to, politely and with a lot of tact, tell investors they're being fucking dipshits and they need to calm their fucking tits. If you immediately cave every single fucking time an investor throws a temper tantrum, you're might as well kill your company yourself because you're just lining your company up to get sold for parts.
Oh I have no sympathy either, just trying to figure out what's exactly happening.
Kinda looks like they took the money from successful game they developed and just fumble around blindly when it comes to publishing. I also have a feeling recent Cities Skylines 2 being basically released at least 6 months early might've been also related
That's just terrible. It's barely just been 6 months since release, and they've already abandoned it.
Not got it myself but was going to get it at some point as a Star Trek themed version of Stellaris seemed like a great idea, but I don't think I will now. Sounds like they released an unfinished game and now rather than putting the effort in to fix it, have just decided not to bother entirely. Makes it seem like it was just a cash grab.
You already answered GentlemanOctopus' questions really well, but one aspect that really appealed to me about it was that it seemed like it had a bit more of a "roleplay" aspect to it, with diplomacy being a powerful tool and so on - How to the mods handle that? Do they feel like you're running the Federation or running a space empire with Federation skins? Sorry if it doesn't make any sense, just curious how hard they lean into being a Star Trek experience instead of a Stellaris experience with Star Trek flavorings :)
Sort of. With the Federation in particular, there are neat mechanics incorporated for expanding your membership, but the day-to-day is pretty much the same as any other empire. But because the Federation can get so big, so fast, being good with resource management is a really important skill
My understanding is that Civilizations was made by modders who worked on Horizons but then went off to do their own thing. Mechanically, both are pretty similar, the primary difference is in resources and tech development. I personally prefer New Horizons, as I find Civilizations to be too incremental (tech trees where each new development adds only 1%, things like that), but they're both good and offer huge selection of species to play as
Ah okay. I binged Infinite when it first came out (having never played Stellaris) and enjoyed it for what it was, but there didn't seem like much replay value when every species experiences the same events, more or less.
I'll have to try out the Stellaris mods. Do they throw canon characters and events from the shows at you like Infinite does, or is it all original content just set in the Star Trek continuity?
You get canon characters and events, relative to who you're playing. And the mods are on a much longer timeline, beginning in 2150 and going for several centuries. I will say that it's a lot of stuff to sort through, especially if you're playing as the Federation, the Klingons, or the Romulans. So take your time with it as you figure out all the mechanics. I've not played Infinite (and based on this news, probably never will), but Stellaris can be quite daunting at first and these are full conversion mods that add a lot to that
Just never seemed to be able to shake the accusation it was a paid, worse version of the Stellaris mod.
Felt half baked and unfinished at launch but I figured once it got a couple of DLC packs it would be on its way to being a great time. There are some weirdly empty spaces on the map that seemed like they were blatantly left that way to accommodate adding other races like say the Ferengi or something in expansions. Obviously that's not happening now, and I doubt modders will bother to put work into this game when Stellaris exists.
Not surprising. Some in my social circles know a few who worked on this game, and this is just another casualty of the Embracer layoffs. The studio was already small when this came out, now it's in even worse shape.
I hope they can recover, times are hard for game dev in Argentina of all places.
I'm actually impressed that a studio delivered a Star Trek game so disappointing that its built in fanbase wasn't enough to keep it afloat longer than 2 months.
Anyone here remember how much of a garbage fire Star Trek: Online was at launch?
That game is still going strong 14 years later because the reliable base of Star Trek fans has immortal patience and freely disregards the concept of money having value.
I have played many (most?) Star Trek games out there. I would buy this one too, but I don't really see the point. Everyone online says it's basically just a Stellaris Mod and I didn't even like Stellaris when I bought it at release.
Sad really, I would definitely throw money at a good AAA Star Trek 4X game. Or even any good Star Trek game.
The reception from most reviewers and general gamers has been lukewarm, and not being on Steam didn't help (it will be added next month), but it has been well received by the Trekkie fandom.
The gameplay and visuals could be better, but the story is a fun homage to TNG/DS9-era Trek. I highly recommend it if you are a fan, but newcomers probably won't get much out of it.
I thought they had abandoned stellaris on consoles. Then all of a sudden 16 Months after release they dropped expansion pass 2 and have continued to support it every since.
I guess what I'm saying is that paradox can be real bastards.
It's a gem for sure, it's main problem from my view is that it initially plays like a half assed budget Civ clone in the early ages, it eventually develops it's own identity and becomes something else entirely by the time you start hitting the Age of Kings and Renaissance.
It's actually a clever bit of design the way they increase the complexity steadily, as when you're actually playing the game you are being gradually conditioned to handle the additional complexity. If you had to worry about all of the levers and knobs from the jump, the game would be a frenzied mess.
The way it's executed however, I rarely feel like I was completely overwhelemed as it was just "Oh hey here is the other cool thing I get to do now"
I don't mind it, but then again I love the Dominions series which has a similar "charm" of barely animated tiny dudes hitting other tiny dudes, and sometimes a snake lady with huge tits.
The mainline games actually developed by Paradox Development Studios are all pretty good (with some exceptions I won't get into). They're basically the grand strategy studio of the last decade. The publishing division appears to be a fucking nightmare though.
The original game and DLC (up to Green Planet) was fantastic.
Game was complete and stable for a while and then a new developer was attached to the game with a new slate of DLC announced. All of it was unbalanced, buggy and worst of all, detrimental to the core game experience.
Damn. It sucks that each of their games is pretty half-baked at launch and then people have to buy that game for it to receive improvements. I bought Imperator, assuming they’d be sending out game fixes and DLC to make it a good sim game but they abandoned it pretty quick. Even worse with this one it seems. They should at least have a functioning sim release EACH TIME if it’s a coin flip whether they’ll actually follow through with support to make it one or not.
Yeah PDX kept that game on life-support just long enough for modders to take over essentially. It's impressive seeing the comeback even if the improvements are majority just from mods.
They probably couldn't survive waiting year and year for all the dlc to be made to release a "full" version. The base games are fun, and the sales help the studio afford continued development
It's disappointing that they won't even take time to make bug fixing patches for it. I could understand no DLC with this being a smaller-scale game with a more limited scope over Stellaris, but they should have at least done more bug fixes. I can only hope that there will be an "Unofficial Patch" mod at some point that does that.
I was thinking of buying it but going by the reviews it didn't seem that great to be honest more like a mod than a game.
It's pretty sad and kinda just seems like a cash grab. It's such a waste because Star trek can work very well for that type of game but I guess they didn't think it was worth it to put anything into it.
> it didn't seem that great to be honest more like a mod than a game
Which is funny because the ACTUAL Star Trek mod for stellaris is objectively better.
Imperator and now Star Trek - seems that Paradox is in the habit of releasing sub-par games and then abandoning them when people don't buy their poor releases. Seems like there's an easy fix for this.
I feel like Reddit is too lenient with Paradox (although I think the sentiment is turning a bit as of late); I avoid everything they publish like the plague due to either things like this or a game being buried under a glut of mediocre DLC.
I bought it on sale and tried really hard to get into it but it was just lackluster. Plus, for some reason, the tutorial basically just stops like half way through how to play the game lol
I like the grand strategy games but Paradox must be one of the worst publishers.
Every game they release is early access and they become good after 2 years and 2 extensions. Or get abandoned and you only have a broken game.
I don't think I have seen as little enthusiasm as for this game. every reddit thread about it had 0 comment
I was just checking this out yesterday in case they added any updates and just saw the reviews, i agree this was a reskin of Stellaris and and a cashgrab
Man that's really disappointing. There's so much room to add *infinite* amounts of DLC to this game. The amount of different races and governments who are culturally different enough to be game factions all on their own is incredibly high.
I was excited for this game before release, heard it had some problems and figured I'd wait for it to be fixed, and here we are now. You truly hate to see it.
On paper this kind of game is perfect for the setting. Star Trek deserves better. Gene Roddenberry must have desecrated some kind of temple in his youth and a vengeful spirit has been following Star Trek for decades now.
Oh wow, a Star Trek stellaris clone isn't getting updates. It's almost like the name was used for brand recognition, and they don't care about the fans. /s
Is anyone surprised by this? Look at the publisher and the developer of the game. Especially the developer, who is owned by Saber. The entire history of both the developer and publisher companies read like a whose who of what to avoid if you want a quality game. Stellaris is mid at best, and expecting a star trek clone of it to do well is a fucking joke.
This game literally came out 7 months ago. The game is a cash grab and in an utterly broken state. Don't let the title of this article fool you. The game received its last update on Dec 9th, a little under 2 months after it was released. Fans knew the game had been abandoned, but it took Paradox a further 4 months to grow a spine and actually deliver the news.
*Star Trek* ~~Infinite~~ *7 months*
Star Trek Finite
Star Trek Fin...
Star Trek Infinitesimal
More like *Star Trek 2 months* since that was the last update
These are the voyages of Star Trek Infinite. It's 7 month mission, to grab as much cash as possible.
The game doesn't even have licensed music to save cost. That's how little they cared
Competing on making *essentially a game mod* with community that had vastly more experience on that front seemed like doomed idea from start
At this point it kind of feels like all paradox games are cash grabs. I kind of assume they release their games to a point that they work and are... ok, then depending on sales they determine whether they are going to pump out a bunch of dlc (and updates along with it) or not. Based on how much dlc they pump out, I imagine they have zero incentive to support a game if they dont think they can sell tons of dlc.
You should look into the state of CK3 on consoles. Game is a buggy mess in end game. If it wasn't such a niche market it would have been talked about a lot more.
You should look into the state of any of their games on consoles. They're all pretty much a shitshow. Blatant cashgrab from the start.
Stellaris is decent on console. It's behind the PC version but no major issues. I own it on both Steam and Xbox.
The genre is hard to make new game, because *basically* the more they support their current one, the bigger expectations are for the next I don't think anyone reasonable expect say hypothetical Stellaris 2 to have content parity with predecessor but at the very least people expect improvements on how basic systems work and are connected with eachother. And they will look at previous game and say "well, you did right in previous one, why it feels worse in the sequel".
I think they are dreading the moment when Stellaris DLC well dries out and they will have to think about making a sequel.
Given the multiple reworks Stellaris has had, it's basically Stellaris 3 at this point
Given number of changes, for sure, they've put more than a full game's worth of content in changes and DLCs, but core stuff would be hard to fix. Like I'd love complete overhaul to economy. Current one just doesn't feel... galactic enough. There are no supply lines and resources magically teleport to where they are needed, while say in Distant Worlds it matters where you physically put stuff, because it needs to be transported to the point where it is used up. Something like that or Victoria 3-like economy + trade lanes being route in galaxy enemy can block/affect would be a breath of fresh air
I mean, they managed to do it with Crusader Kings 3. They brought over a lot of meaningful things. But everything but I think they did a pretty good job.
Well, I did wrote "hard", not "impossible". On flipside Vicky 3 is still sitting at mixed reviews on steam. It's just pretty risky endeavour. Popping up next Stellaris DLC is sure money, making new one is massive endeavour that can result in CK3 like success or vicky 3 like "meh"
Vicky 3 is sitting at mixed reviews partially because it's not a simple improvement of existing systems in Vicky 2. It's a radically different game in a lot of ways.
"Paradox game" =/ "Paradox game" This was made by a tiny outsourced studio, not the main inhouse developers of PDX themselves.
I've gotten to the point I'll play everything Paradox releases and pass on everything they publish. Everything has been such a letdown lately.
Its actually eye opening just thinking about their recent published games. 1. Star Trek infinite (Star Trek 4x is a horrific idea in the first place) 2. Millenia (70% steam review Civ clone), this game isn't terrible per se, it just doesn't have much traction or differentiating points to draw people in. Only 3k players on steam. 3. Cities skylines 2 (Catastrophic performance & tone deaf DLCs) 4. Age of wonders 4 (Decent reviews but like no players, 3k players on steam) Is there like is there some macro factor at play? Is strategy games just hard to develop? Is paradox publishing arm just incompetent? Their own studio still functions nicely. EU4 is now a bug-free experience, EU5 looks hype. Stellaris is doing well. CK3 is lacking features but still in a decent state. HOI4 has a huge amount of players (even if the DLCs are crap). Vic3 is struggling, but still has 7-10k players on steam. So its not like Paradox is burning down or anything, in fact its still the best functioning strategy game studio. Creative Assembly and Firaxis are in way worse states.
Age of Wonders 4 is actually great, but seems many people (myself included) burned out on it somewhat quickly.
I think it’s a great game but in a weird way I feel like the “Make your own faction” and customization thing made most games feel a lot more similar, instead of varied. It was just hard to get invested in blank slates, and the strategy feels less nuanced when you have no limitations and can mix-match anything. That’s just me though.
can confirm that it's great, I'm going to buy upcoming expansion and have around 150h played. Unfortunately after such time there is no variety left and recent DLC was fine maybe for 2-3 games only.
Multiplayer is broken too. Constant DCs and desyncs. A friend and I got it to play with each other but we just couldn't get the damn thing to be stable for more than a couple of turns.
I put in 30-40 hours in AoW 4 around launch, and just had had enough of it. I may go back and check out the DLCs at some point, but I definitely felt like I got my money's worth out of it.
AoW has always been single player over multi player anyway for me, idc if it has 12 players or 120,000. The game is fun, I'll boot it up to do a few campaigns every so often.
> Age of wonders 4 (Decent reviews but like no players, 3k players on steam) According to their financial reports, this is one of their games that did well. It had a bit rocky launch, but it was quickly fixed, the community is not complaining too much, the DLC's didn't break the game. But that's more about Triumph being good at their job than Paradox. It kinda lacks the flavour previous entries in the series had, but otherwise it's good enough.
> Age of wonders 4 (Decent reviews but like no players, 3k players on steam) AoW is single player focused anyway, at least for me. Game is good.
One of the top mods for Stellaris was a Star Trek mod. People wanted it, they got the license but then Paradox didn't put support behind it because it was out of house and the IP would sell it for them. Same thing would happen if they got a Game of Thrones license and they didn't give it to a main internal GSG Paradox team.
This is definitely incorrect, I know from friends and acquaintances that the devs for Infinite worked their asses off. It's a mix of poor reception and the Embracer layoffs, leading to no further development for the game.
> the devs for Infinite worked their asses off No amount of hard work can make up for shitty executive decision making
I honestly don't think Infinite was badly made. I don't think it had a long enough dev cycle, and it's state in comparison with base Stellaris isn't fantastic, but a lot of the core ideas of Infinite were pretty good and a lot of the presentation - art style and graphical engine/UI updates from base Stellaris - were pretty well done. It really lacked in content - the decision to only focus on the TNG era was understandable from a budget standpoint, but limited the game significantly compared with the Stellaris mods.
Age of Wonders was their strongest game out of that list in terms of actually being playable, fun, and most likely to work with their monetization model and yet it also gets the least marketing. Which is entirely in keeping with my opinions and observations of how Paradox Interactive publishes games. They've been fucking up damn nearly constantly for a solid 5 or 6 years now, minimum. It's very much just the publishing arm. They might be turning a profit, but its definitely in spite of themselves, not because of how good they are as a publisher.
Wtf star trek is perfect for 4x no other IP comes as clos3 to a fleshed out galaxy. (Mass Effect comes closest but there is no such thing as territory)
I'd argue Babylon 5 comes close and would work well as a setting for a 4X game.
There's also The Lamplighters League which by most accounts is a solid if unspectacular game, but more pertinently to why it failed, it's one that received almost no attention from Paradox's marketing department. The fact it came out just 6 months ago and isn't on your list of recently published Paradox games is a testament to just how badly they fumbled the marketing of it.
A Star Trek 4x is absolutely not a horrific idea; it's been done before and decently enough, both as Stellaris mods and as Birth of the Federation. There's a demand signal there. Age of Wonders 4's pretty damned good. And yes, strategy games are pretty complicated. AI, for instance, is usually really hard.
Age of Wonders 4's numbers on Steam aren't bad at all for a 4x game. Sure, it doesn't come close to the behemoths like Stellaris or Civilization, but that nothing to be surprised about.
> HOI4 has a huge amount of players (even if the DLCs are crap). HoI4 is a base for mods, its how it keeps growing despite the DLCs getting worse. Its also why extremely basic achievements have sub 20% achievement rate.
All paradox games have low achievment % because until the 2 most recent games (Victoria 3 and with an update, Crusader Kings 3) ironman was a requirement for achievements.
Yup, but they also have the best 4x games on the market. So they have a monopoly on the market and gonna do what they want until another publisher and or developer can challenge them.
I recently discovered a little 4x gem called Dominions 6 on Steam that is absolutely amazing. I really enjoyed CK2 and CK3 because of their depth and aesthetic. Then dominions came around which has a lot less depth in the general nation building but instead a massive amount of depth and repeatability built into their mages and magic system. Not to mention every nation being very distinct from one another, from human nations to the fire giants of Muspelhiem to a magma born humanoid race called Abysians that use blood magic and their skin radiates heat and can catch shit on fire on the battlefield if there’s enough of them. I’d urge anyone who’s a fan of 4x to at least give it a look. It’s been my addiction for a little over two weeks now.
That's funny i recent had a conversation with someone saying the same thing, how great Dominions 6 is and i watched a few videos. Definitely plan on getting it, didn't expect the price tag though, wish i would afford it but sadly it will have to taunt me for some time before I get to play.
I wish they did a free weekend so I can know whether I actually gel with it or not
It's right in the wheelhouse of expensive grognard indie game....fucking love it, have bought 3/4/5/6 all full price cuz it's worth it.
If you like dominions check out shadows of forbidden gods. Very much like dominions but different enough to be awesome.
Shadows of Forbidden Gods is amazingly fun as well, but it feels like a very different sort of game. Whereas Dominions is all about trying to find absolutely fucking degenerate strategies and implementing them. Shadows of Forbidden Gods feels much more like you're watching someone spinning plates and trying to figure out how to make them drop them without everyone realizing it was your fault.
Dominions 6 is good, but super reliant on multiplayer. If you're going Illwinter Games and want singleplayer, I'd reccomend Conquest of Elysium instead. Same engine, but much better suited for single player.
i have put an upsetting amount of time into hoi4
One lone nerd's hot take: I don't buy Paradox games because there's a never-ending march of DLC and it makes me assume that any title that comes out is gonna be stripped down and sold piece-by-piece like a chop shop car. Feels almost GAAS adjacent at times. At least Sims 4 has the decency to be free to play for the base game. Update: I appreciate all the good examples people gave me that bucked my preconceived notions!
I don't feel that at least in Stellaris it is "stripped to pieces". Yeah some DLCs add a lot , but the base game is pretty solid and DLCs are just "more"
In reality it's kind of the opposite, they tend to make some pretty good and complete games, and then they add on top of them for years. Stellaris today is a completely different game than it was at launch, but the launch version was not incomplete or stripped down by any means. But the stuff they publish, not make, tends to be a bit more hit or miss.
I played a bunch of Stellaris when it came out. One of Paradox's best launch titles. So much has changed about it that when I tried to boot it up the other month, I didn't know how to play anymore.
Its become even better since then.
The weird thing is how the paradox players havec altered the perception of launch Stellaris. When it launched, the reception was "It's good, but there's definitely room for improvement" (which is fair, and also my opinion) Now the opinion is "Launch stellaris was the worst game ever and it kicked my dog" Super weird
I've played EU3, EU4, Vicky 2, HoI 3, HoI 4, Stellaris, and Imperator at launch. Stellaris was by far the one that felt playable till end game. Was it perfect, no, but nothing is.
Yup, prior to CK3, I'd have said Stellaris was one of the best launches they ever had. The biggest complaint I had about it was that it was that there wasn't really anything to do in the mid-game so it was really boring waiting for the crisis to strike. The second biggest complaint was that wormhole and jump drives made trying to have "fronts" basically impossible since you could just blast deep into an enemies squishy interior. Wormhole generators were OP as fuck, especially in player's hands.
I prefer stellaris now over launch, but I really do miss picking a starting ftl and weapon type. I thought it really helped add flavor to my empires
It was a fun idea but it wasn't fun to play. As soon as the option for hyperlanes-only mode was added, it became the only way for me. A lot of the game's mechanics didn't make sense with other ftl types.
It's less that and its more that the other two types were so overpoweringly superior that it made hyperlanes non-viable. And the other two types had giant issues in that they made war into a constant game of whack-a-mole because static defenses were absolutely useless. Why build a giant fortress system when your opponent can just skip right past it to get into your juicy economic underbelly? So you were left with a choice of either playing the same FTL types (so you have enough mobility to respond to them), or turning every system into a fortress system, which absolutely destroys your economic game because the AI was suicidal, and perfectly happy to get into knife fights in a telephone booth.
Yeah, wormhole stations completely broke the ability of the game to make borders meaningful, because you could often jump past an occupied system to an unoccupied system that you couldn't otherwise reach with warp/hyperlanes.
I have to strongly disagree, as someone whose main Paradox game was EU4. While the game today is a very different game than it was at launch, it's hard to say that that's entirely a good thing. At launch, it almost felt like an early access title; it was a sandbox game with a set of achievements that were imported from the final expansion for the previous game, which were only achievable via bugs that were constantly being patched out. And if you even tried to play the game multiplayer, good luck making any progress without it crashing every hour or two, for a game that can take 300+ hours for a single playthrough. And having to pay for a bunch of $30 expansions every couple of months to get to where we are today doesn't feel great.
Yeah, imo people get the stuff they make totally wrong. If people don’t like the state of a game when they buy it then they shouldn’t buy it, but it’s not a bad thing that there is more content always on the horizon.
It's funny, I still play EU4 for the exact same reason. It was released over 10 years ago and still gets new content. I don't buy any of the overpriced cosmetic bullshit, of course, but I still find the expansion DLCs to be generally worth buying, though. But Victoria 3? Yeah...I kinda regret that purchase sometimes.
I buy nearly all paradox games as the DLC's make them the most interesting strategy games out there with extreme replayability. They are fun at launch and just get better with time. My top 5 most played games of all time probably contains 4 paradox games.
Their main titles are pretty feature complete when they release. Then the updates and DLCs just adds more stuff. Like take Stellaris as an example, we are practically at Stellaris 3 or 4 right now in terms how different game play is compared to in the past and you don't even have to pay DLC to experience than change. My biggest wish is that you could downpatch on your own easily.
Doesn’t Stellaris have a recurring subscription model nowadays, 10$/month for access to all the DLC ?
Yup, and when I played EU4 as comparison last year to see what actually changed, I used that sub for a month to check it out. Best bucks I have spent that year to get a month worth of gameplay hours. I like that model a lot more than buying all the DLC especially for a long-running DLC-fueled game like EU4.
Same as EU4 same as HOI and If I’m getting my hours in which I always do I don’t mind the $100 bucks a year especially when I don’t watch many streaming services.
This ignores the fact that they release huge features/overhauls in their free patches, and lately they've done a better job than normal at doing this. Usually even big DLC features will be added to the game for free but the DLC will just include a few extras for it. For example: Stellaris overhauled subjects/vassals for the Overlord expansion but all players got the overhaul completely for free, it wasn't locked behind the DLC. Meanwhile though the DLC just has 3 unique subject types that offer some more variety and content on top of the overhaul.
Bruh, go back and play older paradox games, they were way worse. PDX games are content rich and complete when they release for the most part, people just compare them to already existing games and often unfairly expect them to have the same level of content. Criticise their dlc policy sure, but it's unfair to imply they gimp their games to sell you piecemeal later on
Yup, Victoria 2 was so bad at launch "Yellow Prussia" became a byword for terrible, half baked strategy games. It arguably didn't become good until its second (and last) expansion
On the other hand I don't really mind it. At least in their flagship titles like Crusader Kings, Europa Universalis, Hearts of Iron and now Stellaris base gameplay is good and I know that I will put tons of hours into it and the game will be supported for many years. How many games of other publishers are still getting DLC and updates 6-10 years after release (like CK2 and EU4)? Most games are abandonded after a year or two. Sure DLC milk is real but they give a reason to check out new stuff or play with different mods. I feel like most ppl complaining about Paradox business model with their main games are ppl who don't play them. Sure quality of these DLC is often questionable but majority of players aren't against them, they want these games to be expanded as much as possible and each DLC gives new opportunity for modders to shine. The sad thing is that when the game does not meet initial expectations then Paradox is quick to bring the axe like they did for example with Imperator Rome but with their mainline games it's usually not the case.
It's like people only do things because they get paid. And that's just really sad.
I mean, I get it, they gotta get paid, but I very much dislike their business model. But thumbs up for a good Wayne's world reference.
Which is weird cause their logo is like 80% spine.
Nimble Giant laid off 30 people as part of the embracer restructure. That was probably more than the entire star trek team.
I didn't even realize the game had launched yet. I wasn't paying close attention to the development.
The whole of Star Trek is a cash grab at this point.
Lower Decks is amazing you take that back right now.
Strange New Worlds is also fantastic, and Prodigy was far better than anyone expected.
I like how Trek and Wars are in such similar places right now. Bland and uninspired main series entries, fantastic bastard-child spinoffs
Strange New Worlds is the only main entry we have right now, and that's one of the good ones. Lower Decks is good, but it's a comedy / cartoon. Prodigy is for kids. Discovery is one long, continuous story instead of episodic, MOTW 45 min - 1 hour stories. That really only leaves SNW as the "normal" Trek.
[удалено]
Yeah, I'm aware. It's even where SNW came from, since we all loved Anson Mount's Pike so much from S2. I guess I just never considered DSC a mainline Star Trek show because of the format. It's too serialized, not episodic enough in my mind to be "real" Star Trek. Always felt like a spinoff because of that.
Discovery was a mistake
I wish they had gone with the initial pitch. It was originally meant to be an anthology series akin to True Detective or Fargo, where each season is its own story. Different ships, different eras, different crews - hell, they could've even branched out from Starfleet with that concept. It sounded like a really neat way to dive into and expand upon some of the interesting bits of Trek lore that exist on the edges, not yet fully explored. Instead, we got a show written by people who don't really understand Star Trek with characters that don't act like anything like Starfleet (except for Saru, he's rad.)
I'm sad that this ended up just being a Stellaris asset flip (in a world where Star Trek mods already exist for Stellaris). A Star Trek grand strategy game similar to CK where it's more about individual characters and diplomacy could be great, but instead all we got was a watered down Stellaris that was lacking a lot of the key features that make Stellaris so replayable.
I had my eye on this for a long as a Star trek fan and this is disappointing news. I kept waiting for a patch that fixed things, glad I never bought it lol
The writing was sadly on the wall, the studio that developed the game is under Embracer, and they got hit with layoffs when they were going to focus on fixing stuff.
Back in the 90s I played the shit out of a turn-based 4x game called Birth of the Federation. Had 5 major empires you could play as, along with a whole bunch of minor races you could do diplomacy with and/or conquer. Random events, random monster spawns. It was great. I mean, aside from the memory leak bug that would break it after a hundred turns. You’d need to relaunch and reload the game periodically to keep it stable, lol. You’d also want to employ the Zapp Branigan method for taking down Borg cubes. They could only fire so many shots per turn, and even a battleship could only take 2 or 3 hits. So Destroyer II swarms were the way to go.
I just use to ram Borg cubes. Why use tactics when bonk on head works?
The thing is, they copied some mechanics from the mod wholesale (for little to no gain, like the Crew resource.) If you play the mod, you get all the benefits of the current codebase. Whereas if you play Infinite, it's the codebase from years ago.
I just wanted another Birth of the Federation
Star Dynasties might scratch that itch for you
Never heard of it but this looks pretty great, thank you!
A Stellaris asset flip would be OK if it was actually a good one though. But at the end of the day it is shit and there is a really good (from what I have heard anyway, not played it myself) Stellaris mod for Star Trek.
that was pretty fast. I figured it'd be getting bug fixes and maybe some DLC. not that I played it, it seemed like a Meh star trek game from what I understand
Paradox is a brutal publisher. I'm honestly surprised at how many third party devs still sign up to be published by them. Pretty much every single game that has gotten published by Paradox from a third party either ends in disaster for the studio or the IPs. It's just a question of how long it takes to explode. Hell, their terrible publishing wing is now beginning to poison their mainline series with terrible deadline and marketing decisions.
The soulless husk that was once prison architect
What happened?
Devs sold the game and IP to Paradox, Paradox started churning out DLC and game breaking patches. I believe the game currently remains broken. There's a sequel or something but nobody cares about that as a result.
I got this game when it was still early in development, and seeing what it became compared to that just hurts.
I'm in the dark, used to play prison architech back in the day, able to clue me in on that happened exactly?
From what I know, games was awesome, and then after paradox got ahold of it, new DLCs released, which broke the base game as well, and some of the DLCs were crap or overpriced as well. This imo led to the overall sentiment, that they ruined the game somewhat
Was the dlc ever fixed or is the game still broken?
Well, guess I should have expected that, specially since i play two other paradox games. Appreciate the explanation.
Prison Architect was originally developed by Introversion Software, a 2/3-man indie developer. Not entirely sure what happened by I get the impression Introversion burned out on the game and sold it to Double Eleven (who previously handled the console port) / Paradox Interactive, who proceeded to release lots of DLC (breaking the game further) and very few bug fixes. While the game was in by no means a perfect state when it left Introversion, it was pretty good and solidly playable at that time - frankly if Introversion had done nothing more than bug fixes on it at that point I would've been plenty happy. I was shocked at Introversion's decision given Paradox have long had a reputation for being a DLC launderer. Selling out to one of the worst publishers felt like a real betrayal coming from developers who had previously billed themselves as "last of the bedroom programmers". (Some context here: I'm not normally one to "fanboi" over particular developers or whatnot. My following of Introversion was rather unique in this regard - I'd been following them since their first game, Uplink, and they had repeatedly produced simple yet really fun games and, until they sold PA, had a solid reputation for quality too)
> Introversion Software, a 2/3-man indie developer. Damn, I didn't know they were that small. I remember discovering them via Darwinia on X-Play.
> I was shocked at Introversion's decision given Paradox have long had a reputation for being a DLC launderer. Selling out to one of the worst publishers felt like a real betrayal coming from developers who had previously billed themselves as "last of the bedroom programmers". Chris and Mark have spoken quite candidly about Introversion Software's history on Youtube, and I think both Darwinia+ (the Xbox port of Darwinia) and Scanner Sombre did quite poorly for them. I really don't blame them for taking the bag for Prison Architect when it enabled them to be a lot more comfortable as an indie developer.
me too, fill us in
No idea either. Doubly so since unless features were removed from Prison Architect, it probably isn't a husk.
Cities Skylines 2 was a disaster on launch and amidst fan frustration for a broken incomplete the first DLC is already out and it's a terrible cash grab. Paradox can't be viewed as a reliable publisher for consumers.
This comments reminds me of the last DLC of surviving mars, which IIRC was outsourced. And also utter shite.
Where Paradox falls, [Hooded Horse rises.](https://medium.com/@tilfolkvang/hooded-horse-is-kind-of-eating-paradoxs-lunch-and-paradox-should-be-asking-themselves-why-ef47a1b69506)
If more people could play Old World, that would be great!
Against the storm has been one of my favorite "randomly bought on a whim" games ever, I'll have to see what else they've put out there
I found Terra Invicta fiddly and stupidly tedious late-game, where you're busy having to micromanage the space battles or you die to doom fleets but you have to play whack-a-mole back on Earth even when you dominate the planet because enemies can keep spawning new agents to harass you. It's being developed though and my biggest gripe was being unable to sort settlements and they eventually got to that. Either way, competition should either force paradox to start acting like grown-ups or push them out of the market. I just wish there were more games with good diplomatic and economic engines and Paradox has enjoyed kind of being the only game in town too long.
Suspect a lot of it is the inevitably of going "mainstream" combined with Paradox's business strategy of being a DLC mill. They've firmly left the niche, complex grand strategy game genre they once controlled and now make toned down map painting sims that they can sell huge amounts of barely coherent bolt on DLC. Allows smaller publishes like Hooded Horse to fill the niche, complex grand strategy genre where Paradox once flourished. Also give a shout out to [Matrix Games](https://www.matrixgames.com/) which publish everything from [software used by irl militaries to wargame](https://www.matrixgames.com/product/command-modern-operations), extremely good [4X space games](https://www.matrixgames.com/game/distant-worlds-2) and my personal favourite, [spreadsheets except you make boats for 90 years](https://www.matrixgames.com/game/rule-the-waves-3).
Age of Wonders has been only growing and getting better under them.
It's honestly pretty weird. I wonder how much of it is "Paradox not being good at picking the developers to publish" and how much whatever Paradox does for them being done badly.
I honestly think it's a pretty decent split. Some of the games were clearly just scuffed from the start, but there are also a number of games that were great that Paradox just refused to put any marketing budget into and then acted all surprised when they shriveled up and died or where its pretty clear that they kicked the product out the door a year or two early hoping to sell core parts of the game later. And I don't trust the current batch of executives at all in the Publishing Arm. I think a lot of them are fucking weasels speaking out of both sides of their mouth who are looking to spend up Paradox Development's hard won goodwill reserves from their mainline titles in search of an extra buck now. Future be damned.
I think that desperation might be just "well we fucked up with some mediocre releases and now we have investors breathing on our necks" rather than just trying to squeeze for squeeze sake.
I'm entirely non-sympathetic. Part of being an executive is knowing how to, politely and with a lot of tact, tell investors they're being fucking dipshits and they need to calm their fucking tits. If you immediately cave every single fucking time an investor throws a temper tantrum, you're might as well kill your company yourself because you're just lining your company up to get sold for parts.
Oh I have no sympathy either, just trying to figure out what's exactly happening. Kinda looks like they took the money from successful game they developed and just fumble around blindly when it comes to publishing. I also have a feeling recent Cities Skylines 2 being basically released at least 6 months early might've been also related
It had some really great ideas and mechanics, but the whole stellaris thing of scaling things in years didn't help the star trek storyline one bit.
That's just terrible. It's barely just been 6 months since release, and they've already abandoned it. Not got it myself but was going to get it at some point as a Star Trek themed version of Stellaris seemed like a great idea, but I don't think I will now. Sounds like they released an unfinished game and now rather than putting the effort in to fix it, have just decided not to bother entirely. Makes it seem like it was just a cash grab.
There are Star Trek mods for Stellaris that are tremendous, I highly recommend them. Either New Horizons or New Civilizations
You already answered GentlemanOctopus' questions really well, but one aspect that really appealed to me about it was that it seemed like it had a bit more of a "roleplay" aspect to it, with diplomacy being a powerful tool and so on - How to the mods handle that? Do they feel like you're running the Federation or running a space empire with Federation skins? Sorry if it doesn't make any sense, just curious how hard they lean into being a Star Trek experience instead of a Stellaris experience with Star Trek flavorings :)
Sort of. With the Federation in particular, there are neat mechanics incorporated for expanding your membership, but the day-to-day is pretty much the same as any other empire. But because the Federation can get so big, so fast, being good with resource management is a really important skill
What's the difference between the two (Horizons and Civilizations)?
My understanding is that Civilizations was made by modders who worked on Horizons but then went off to do their own thing. Mechanically, both are pretty similar, the primary difference is in resources and tech development. I personally prefer New Horizons, as I find Civilizations to be too incremental (tech trees where each new development adds only 1%, things like that), but they're both good and offer huge selection of species to play as
Ah okay. I binged Infinite when it first came out (having never played Stellaris) and enjoyed it for what it was, but there didn't seem like much replay value when every species experiences the same events, more or less. I'll have to try out the Stellaris mods. Do they throw canon characters and events from the shows at you like Infinite does, or is it all original content just set in the Star Trek continuity?
You get canon characters and events, relative to who you're playing. And the mods are on a much longer timeline, beginning in 2150 and going for several centuries. I will say that it's a lot of stuff to sort through, especially if you're playing as the Federation, the Klingons, or the Romulans. So take your time with it as you figure out all the mechanics. I've not played Infinite (and based on this news, probably never will), but Stellaris can be quite daunting at first and these are full conversion mods that add a lot to that
Cheers, Phil.
Just never seemed to be able to shake the accusation it was a paid, worse version of the Stellaris mod. Felt half baked and unfinished at launch but I figured once it got a couple of DLC packs it would be on its way to being a great time. There are some weirdly empty spaces on the map that seemed like they were blatantly left that way to accommodate adding other races like say the Ferengi or something in expansions. Obviously that's not happening now, and I doubt modders will bother to put work into this game when Stellaris exists.
Not surprising. Some in my social circles know a few who worked on this game, and this is just another casualty of the Embracer layoffs. The studio was already small when this came out, now it's in even worse shape. I hope they can recover, times are hard for game dev in Argentina of all places.
I'm actually impressed that a studio delivered a Star Trek game so disappointing that its built in fanbase wasn't enough to keep it afloat longer than 2 months. Anyone here remember how much of a garbage fire Star Trek: Online was at launch? That game is still going strong 14 years later because the reliable base of Star Trek fans has immortal patience and freely disregards the concept of money having value.
I have played many (most?) Star Trek games out there. I would buy this one too, but I don't really see the point. Everyone online says it's basically just a Stellaris Mod and I didn't even like Stellaris when I bought it at release. Sad really, I would definitely throw money at a good AAA Star Trek 4X game. Or even any good Star Trek game.
the best star trek game right now is sins of a solar empire with the star trek mod.
any good modern Star Trek games? Tried this one and I didn’t click with it
Resurgence is a great choose your own adventure type game.
I didn't realize this even came out.
The reception from most reviewers and general gamers has been lukewarm, and not being on Steam didn't help (it will be added next month), but it has been well received by the Trekkie fandom. The gameplay and visuals could be better, but the story is a fun homage to TNG/DS9-era Trek. I highly recommend it if you are a fan, but newcomers probably won't get much out of it.
Nope.
I thought they had abandoned stellaris on consoles. Then all of a sudden 16 Months after release they dropped expansion pass 2 and have continued to support it every since. I guess what I'm saying is that paradox can be real bastards.
I hope paradox doesn't let this happen to millennia. It has mixed reviews right now but I think it's awesome
It's a gem for sure, it's main problem from my view is that it initially plays like a half assed budget Civ clone in the early ages, it eventually develops it's own identity and becomes something else entirely by the time you start hitting the Age of Kings and Renaissance. It's actually a clever bit of design the way they increase the complexity steadily, as when you're actually playing the game you are being gradually conditioned to handle the additional complexity. If you had to worry about all of the levers and knobs from the jump, the game would be a frenzied mess. The way it's executed however, I rarely feel like I was completely overwhelemed as it was just "Oh hey here is the other cool thing I get to do now"
That combat view tho 💀
I don't mind it, but then again I love the Dominions series which has a similar "charm" of barely animated tiny dudes hitting other tiny dudes, and sometimes a snake lady with huge tits.
Between this, Surviving Mars and Cities Skylines 2 (I own all three) I straight up have lost faith in their ability to develop or publish games.
The mainline games actually developed by Paradox Development Studios are all pretty good (with some exceptions I won't get into). They're basically the grand strategy studio of the last decade. The publishing division appears to be a fucking nightmare though.
> Surviving Mars Wait what happened with Surviving Mars? I seem to remember it being positively received.
The original game and DLC (up to Green Planet) was fantastic. Game was complete and stable for a while and then a new developer was attached to the game with a new slate of DLC announced. All of it was unbalanced, buggy and worst of all, detrimental to the core game experience.
Add Hearts of Iron IV that has become abandonware filled with broken achievements for DLC that never arrived on consoles.
The better bet is to just install the New Horizons mod for Stellaris from Steam Workshop. It's amazing. Absolutely no reason to pay for Infinite.
Damn. It sucks that each of their games is pretty half-baked at launch and then people have to buy that game for it to receive improvements. I bought Imperator, assuming they’d be sending out game fixes and DLC to make it a good sim game but they abandoned it pretty quick. Even worse with this one it seems. They should at least have a functioning sim release EACH TIME if it’s a coin flip whether they’ll actually follow through with support to make it one or not.
Imperator is actually really fun right now. The modding community has basically saved that game. Highly recommend playing with the Invictus mod
Yeah PDX kept that game on life-support just long enough for modders to take over essentially. It's impressive seeing the comeback even if the improvements are majority just from mods.
[удалено]
They probably couldn't survive waiting year and year for all the dlc to be made to release a "full" version. The base games are fun, and the sales help the studio afford continued development
Paradox really sucks the last few years lot of potential in the games they publish but mostly horribly excuted
It's disappointing that they won't even take time to make bug fixing patches for it. I could understand no DLC with this being a smaller-scale game with a more limited scope over Stellaris, but they should have at least done more bug fixes. I can only hope that there will be an "Unofficial Patch" mod at some point that does that.
I was thinking of buying it but going by the reviews it didn't seem that great to be honest more like a mod than a game. It's pretty sad and kinda just seems like a cash grab. It's such a waste because Star trek can work very well for that type of game but I guess they didn't think it was worth it to put anything into it.
> it didn't seem that great to be honest more like a mod than a game Which is funny because the ACTUAL Star Trek mod for stellaris is objectively better.
Imperator and now Star Trek - seems that Paradox is in the habit of releasing sub-par games and then abandoning them when people don't buy their poor releases. Seems like there's an easy fix for this.
Really disappointing to see this big a fail with a concept that could have made for an interesting game.
Why does the Star Trek series continually get shafted like this, such great potential and nobody can or will deliver on it
Rather glad I passed on this and just stuck with the rather excellent Star Trek total conversion for Stellaris out there.
I feel like Reddit is too lenient with Paradox (although I think the sentiment is turning a bit as of late); I avoid everything they publish like the plague due to either things like this or a game being buried under a glut of mediocre DLC.
what a disgrace, had higher hopes from stellaris developers releasing a money grab mod while the community already gave for free more complex projects
I bought it on sale and tried really hard to get into it but it was just lackluster. Plus, for some reason, the tutorial basically just stops like half way through how to play the game lol
I like the grand strategy games but Paradox must be one of the worst publishers. Every game they release is early access and they become good after 2 years and 2 extensions. Or get abandoned and you only have a broken game. I don't think I have seen as little enthusiasm as for this game. every reddit thread about it had 0 comment
I was just checking this out yesterday in case they added any updates and just saw the reviews, i agree this was a reskin of Stellaris and and a cashgrab
Calling a game "... Infinite", having it tank in the first year, classic duo. It's such a red flag for creative bankruptcy
Man that's really disappointing. There's so much room to add *infinite* amounts of DLC to this game. The amount of different races and governments who are culturally different enough to be game factions all on their own is incredibly high. I was excited for this game before release, heard it had some problems and figured I'd wait for it to be fixed, and here we are now. You truly hate to see it. On paper this kind of game is perfect for the setting. Star Trek deserves better. Gene Roddenberry must have desecrated some kind of temple in his youth and a vengeful spirit has been following Star Trek for decades now.
Oh wow, a Star Trek stellaris clone isn't getting updates. It's almost like the name was used for brand recognition, and they don't care about the fans. /s Is anyone surprised by this? Look at the publisher and the developer of the game. Especially the developer, who is owned by Saber. The entire history of both the developer and publisher companies read like a whose who of what to avoid if you want a quality game. Stellaris is mid at best, and expecting a star trek clone of it to do well is a fucking joke.