The Way Forward, an update from the team behind Cities: Skylines

Submitted ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨simple@lemm.ee⁩ to ⁨games@lemmy.world⁩

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/the-way-forward-an-update-from-the-team-behind-cities-skylines.1665858/

TL;DR:

They apologized (again)
They will refund everyone who bought the beach DLC and make it a free addition to the game, admitting it was tasteless that they made paid DLC when the game is in a broken state
They will focus on base changes and better modding tools before starting to make more DLC (previously announced DLC has been delayed to 2025)
Console release delayed

Honestly, this is a good update. It’s everything we wanted to hear. Looking forward to buying the game when it gets fixed.

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Comments

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arudesalad@sh.itjust.works ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
This was too late. Paradox’s in house development studio did the same thing with Victoria 3. Do something way too greedy (lock historical characters behind a preorder for a dlc that was already bad). Waited to see the backlash, and when it was too much, they make the bonuses free.

At least they’re doing something, but the dlc should have been pushed back at launch.

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- FooBarrington@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  It’s not just greedy, at this point it’s blatant. The release itself was already bonkers, but they could have saved things by working hard on the base game and releasing additional free content. But this? How many “sowwy we fucked up, we promise to do better, buy our new 132 DLCs” will they pull before people stop giving them the benefit of the doubt?
  
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  - CosmoNova@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I’m not hopeful at all. If Bethesda or Blizzard are anything to go by, they can keep messing up big time for years, maybe decades to come and consumers will keep coming back, begging to be disappointed once more. You’ll have more luck looking for alternatives out there in the ocean of indie games.
    
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  - arudesalad@sh.itjust.works ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I am actually planning on not buying anything more from paradox if they fuck up the launch of eu5, only dlc from current games (if they’re worth it/required)
    
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- Moneo@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I’ve hated Paradox ever since I bought CK2 and then realized how many minor features were locked behind $5 DLCs. I later pirated the game to play all the DLC and there is absolutely no fucking way that shit was worth what they are charging. Decided then never to buy a Paradox game again.
  
  Compare that to the Factorio devs Wube. They released their game as a beta and then just kept updating it and adding features until it was done. Then they spent years fixing basically every bug in the game. As far as I know they never decreased the price or put the game on sale, and at one point they increased the price of their game because of inflation. Which honestly is fine, they made a great game and they are continuing to support the game, why decrease the price?
  
  I know I’m coming off as a Wube shill but in my eyes they are ideal devs. Paradox in theory make really interesting games but in practice they poison them with shitty monetization strategies. If they just made games and added free updates for a while afterwards if they wanted to I probably would have spent a shit load on their games.
  
  I’m ranting but as a side note, Paradox definitely abuses fomo. They make games that basically require you to watch videos of how to play and those videos inevitably mention DLCs which you then start wondering what you’re missing out on.
  
  Fuck paradox
  
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  - arudesalad@sh.itjust.works ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    It is a shame they’re such a greedy company because, similarly to what you said in your 3rd paragraph, they make good games, some can be as good as games like factorio at times, but it’s always ruined by their dlc.
    
    You mentioned free updates at the end, I believe they are doing that for victoria 3, but their first big expansion for the game, spheres of influence, comes out in June so we’ll see if they stick to that.
    
    I love paradox games and have the money to by their dlc most the time and will keep buying the ones I want (because the beach dlc was too far even for the largest paradox shills) as long as the game’s stability and the free players are prioritised, unlike the way they have been treated in cities: skylines 2.
    
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  - 31337@sh.itjust.works ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    CK2 was a complete game at launch IIRC. They just kept releasing new DLC for it for many years, much of which was outside the scope of the original game (playing as Arabic rulers, vikings, Indians, etc). I think that’s fine. Them selling music, portraits, and new models separately was kinda shitty though.
    
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cobysev@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Remember when games used to be a finished product on a cartridge/CD? You just bought it at the store for a base price of a video game and that was it. Any bugs found in the game became widely accepted, and maybe even exploited by competitive gamers. But there was no patching, no updates, no DLC. You paid for a game up front and that was it.

I miss those days.

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- Moneo@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  idk if this is a stupid opinion but I feel like us, the consumers are to blame. If everyone just waited a week and read reviews before buying games then publishers wouldn’t be able to get away with this shit.
  
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  - cobysev@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Honestly, I always felt the $60 price tag for games (now $70+ for AAA titles!) was way too much, so I usually wait about a year or more, then buy it on sale.
    
    So I get to sit back and watch the shitshow when people pre-order games and then get screwed when the game is garbage.
    
    Dragon’s Dogma II was super hyped up recently, and even I got the free character customization demo to pre-build a character. Then it announced day-one microtransactions the day before release and pissed off the gaming community.
    
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  - Konraddo@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    To be precise, the new generation is to blame, who constantly preorders a game, and spends a lot on mobile games. Companies realize that bad products sell, so why would they improve?
    
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  - cmhe@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    No, the consumers are never to blame for stuff like this!
    
    This is something that is just that we get told by the people that are lying about and hyping up a product, putting up manipulative incentives for buying it before letting us inspect it. Then releasing trash, but still appealing on our empathic nature and promising that it might get fixed later. And when things turn to shit, then it is our trust and empathy, willingness to support them, that is to blame for it. No!
    
    If the industry exploits our good and trusting nature, then we need to fight them with regulation and laws. Our civilization and the human nature is built on trust, and that should not be undermined by short profit oriented, exploitative companies.
    
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  - Cocodapuf@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I do wait, and the publishers don’t get away with selling me unfinished games. It’s great.
    
    I wait at least a month for any game, 8 months for a Bethesda game.
    
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  - KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    It’s preorders. Stop preordering, and either the products will improve or studios will collapse.
    
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- simple@lemm.ee ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I remember a few cases where a rare bug softlocked my game and I had to reset my entire progress. It wasn’t all that good I would say. They definitely had some standard of quality on release though.
  
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- johannesvanderwhales@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Games were also significantly less complex then. It takes teams of 100s of people to make a AAA game now. But don’t kid yourself, there were definitely game-breaking bugs back then. And in the pc world, patches arrived much, much earlier than in the console world.
  
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  - gens@programming.dev ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    FF7 and supreme commander were complex. And devs then didn’t have the tools we have today. Not to mention game engines (there were, but not like today). And ps3 was a pain to program for. And, and…
    
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  - AEsheron@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Arguably, patches started even earlier. It wasn’t uncommon to release another whole title that was basically a bug/balance patch. See Japanese Pokemon Blue, and all the various Street Fighter 2 versions.
    
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- expr@programming.dev ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  It wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows. I remember losing hundreds of hours of progress on games due to memory card corruption. Or game cartridges/CDs no longer working, requiring you to buy a new copy. Or consoles getting straight-up bricked.
  
  Hell, a ton of people have memories of blowing into N64/SNES cartridges to get them to work since they had notoriously unreliable connectors. But even though it was something that didn’t work great, everybody has fond memories of doing it since there wasn’t this amalgamation of voices from every direction telling you to be upset about it and clamoring for retribution. If something was broken, you got frustrated about it, complained to your friends, and then moved on with your life since there wasn’t anything else you could do.
  
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  - slumberlust@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Want the blowing for NES?
    
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- TrousersMcPants@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  A lot of games were significantly more expensive bc back then too
  
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- EatATaco@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  You don’t miss those days.
  
  You don’t have to! Pretty much all of those games are available, and you can play them for free if you’re willing to pirate.
  
  But let’s be honest, modern games are better which is why you won’t do this instead.
  
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  - viking@infosec.pub ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I’ve tried time and time again to enjoy “modern” games, but nothing released after Oblivion or The Witcher 3 was worth my time.
    
    Plenty of old games however have an extremely high replay value, thanks to their immersive missions and bugfree gameplay. Recently played Thief: The Dark Project again (from 1999), and it’s a bloody masterpiece.
    
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- wowwoweowza@lemmy.ml ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Yeah. Good ol’ Pong.
  
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- yildolw@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Why do you miss things being permanently broken and unfixable?
  
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  - toddestan@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    The thing is, it forced the people making games to release them as a finished, working product, with the bugs (mostly) stamped out.
    
    Today it’s just push something out the door now, and we’ll ~~patch it~~ soak them for more money with DLC later.
    
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- ZeroPoke@lemmy.ca ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Actually there were update still cause the games were only little less broken. It’s updates were so much harder for everyone. Hosting them, finding them, knowing there were updates, having to apply updates in specific orders.
  
  Steam has been a good send for that.
  
  Maybe I’m just old
  
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  - Ashtear@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Not old enough, heh. The cartridges/CDs this commenter are talking about had to have rock-solid code because patching wasn’t possible. You’d have to make an entire new print run, and very few games of that era ever had those.
    
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- intensely_human@lemm.ee ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Yes but this comment is generic to the game industry overall, and has been made thousands of times with slightly different wording. I’d rather use this thread to celebrate the rare event of a company admitting a mistake and actually making customers whole.
  
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nekusoul@lemmy.nekusoul.de ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
They’ve basically perfected keeping the community mostly happy by toeing the line between putting out solid base games and putting out greedy DLC.

What we’re now seeing is what happens when you don’t immediately change course after you skimp on making a good base game.

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- Ashtear@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  It’s all sheer greed, too. Paradox has fully embraced the model of releasing sequels with less content than their DLC-enhanced previous games after 2K showed the market had tolerance for it with Civilization. Considering how that already puts them ahead of the curve, it’s amazing that Paradox let this game come out in this state.
  
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  - SuperSpruce@lemmy.zip ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    To be fair, I don’t expect the sequel’s base game to have more content than the previous game with all its DLCs, but I do expect the base game to have at least as much content as the previous game’s base game.
    
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  - ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    That doesn’t make it sheer greed; it’s what’s feasible to develop. A systems driven game like a city builder or a 4X game mean that you can’t just drag and drop old content in the new systems and expect it to work and look cohesive. Every fighting game launches with fewer characters than the previous version, and it’s not because it’s some conspiracy to delay dropping the SFV characters in SF6; it’s because swapping out the V system for the Drive system is a massive change, and the old characters take a lot of work to port over. Even the art style in Civ 6 is very different from Civ V. When you try to just copy and paste content between two different styles of art direction, you end up with nightmare fuel Chun-Li in Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite.
    
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Rentlar@lemmy.ca ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
The Beach DLC was distasteful, you still can’t even make convincing beaches with the terrain.

I’m very glad Paradox reversed course here. It sounds like they are starting to take seriously what it means to make a finished, solid game. Cities:Skylines fans are tired of half-baked shit.

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- TipRing@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I’m not convinced Paradox knows what they are doing as publisher. Millenia was similarly pushed out the door before it was ready (though in a better state than Cities: Skylines 2). And both games pushed out the door in the last week of the quarter in a transparent effort to boost their earnings. The shortsightedness of the publisher is now impacting their reputation in ways that will be hard to recover. I no longer consider buying Paradox published titles until they are at least a year old or have at least a few months of reviews showing they are solid (like AoW4).
  
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  - Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I feel like maybe Paradox expanded too much too fast.
    
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sunbytes@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
We’re riding this wave over in the Total War community too. Broken game, weak and overpriced DLC.

We kicked off (and then all their other games managed to flop at once, so they came crawling back) and now we’ve got a notable amount more effort into the DLC coming at the end of the month, as well as price cuts, refunds and redoing of the bad DLC.

Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, but I’m seeing positive movements in general on legacy resting-on-laurels games.

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steal_your_face@lemmy.ml ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Take for the tldr :)

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wowwoweowza@lemmy.ml ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
City Skylines Team to their fans: We’re sorry. Making good.

George R.R Martin to his fans: Go get fucked.

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- ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  What’s the scuttlebutt with GRRM?
  
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  - wowwoweowza@lemmy.ml ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Refuses to finish next installment of Game Of Thrones — like ten years waiting.
    
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FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
NGL I wast pretty excited to play Cities Skylines a few years ago, but the EA style DLC market is disgusting.

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Krakaval@jlai.lu ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
It’s not the devs who are to blame for this fiasco. The management who pushed for releasing unfinished product is. There were some people sitting in a meeting room who decided that it was a good idea to publish a worthless DLC. Change is needed at management level.

The apology looks like honest but some part of me feels like they are sorry because their strategy for ripping our wallets did not work as expected.

I’m not planning to buy any Paradox game in the future.

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BaardFigur@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Remember they’re just doing damage control. They are still acting in their own interest

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- Sorgan71@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  thats how most people behave most of the time.
  
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- DreamlandLividity@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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.
  
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- Phil_in_here@lemmy.ca ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Rather, they’re not sorry they tried to scam you, they’re sorry it didn’t work.
  
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- rickyrigatoni@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  That’s what every apology is.
  
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  - slumberlust@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    That’s not true. Intent matters, accidents do happen.
    
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FunnyUsername@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
This team has been making the exact same game for multiple decades. Look at this developer’s game history. It is literally the same exact game redeveloped over and over every few years and then they repackage and resell the same DLCs for the new versions. What a con of a game dev.

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- yildolw@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  13 years since Cities in Motion 1 is not multiple decades, and Cities in Motion 1 is in no way the same game as Cities Skylines
  
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  - FunnyUsername@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    So you think they’ve been making entirely new games for their entire existence? You don’t think it’s coming at all that literally all they do is make city builders and sell DLCs and then make a new one when interest dries up? Doesn’t seem very creative or innovative in my opinion it sounds like pure capitalism.
    
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- intensely_human@lemm.ee ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  That’s not a con, that’s someone perfecting their art.
  
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  - FunnyUsername@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Oh so Cities II is better than 1 across the board? And the Hobbit movies were better than lotr? I feel like you’re being a tad naive.
    
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Harbinger01173430@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Stellaris optimization update, when?

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- Montagge@lemmy.zip ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  NEVER!
  
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Nithanim@programming.dev ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I did not even know that a DLC came out. I am sure I would have if it was good news because streamers I follow would have tested it.

But it is so sad. I really liked cities skylines because it basically is what I wanted from sim city. But with a million mods it would always break at certain points and force me to stop playing. I had such high hopes with 2 but seeing this game at launch and now seemingly still broken is so… well I am not really sure how I (should) feel.

The good thing is, that I do not have to keep reading and researching but rather wait for some “news” to pop up in my feed again. So I can get back to forgetting about it.

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Gabu@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Meanwhile, Indie games: Yeah, we fixed the wonky balancing with that super niche strategy and we’re working on 3 new DLCs (all free, btw)

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