Why Paradox Games Have Fewer Start Dates

Channel:

Wonder Productions

Subscribers:

7,870

Published on November 19, 2022 3:00:10 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5L8rTzUv_c

Game:

Victoria 3 (2022)

Duration: 3:27

3,182 views

113

Paradox Interactive over the past few years with their new games has slowly weeded about at developing many start dates or scenarios for their games. From CK2 and EU4 with almost unlimited start dates, to just one in VIC3, Two in Hoi4 and two in CK3 (Not to mention one in stellaris but that is less of a fair comparison). Overall this trend comes down to a few major things for Paradox that they feel they need to change from eu4 to vic3.

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Title: Why Paradox Games Have Less Start Dates
Topics: A video on why paradox games have slowly begun to have less start dates. Starting on in a change in development in eu4 and ck2, to modern day changes with hoi4, ck3 and vic3. Especially with the vic3 launch (but not related to stellaris haha)

Video Script:
One trend that has slowly persisted its way into paradox interactives game design, is the decrease in start dates. When looking at the older generation of paradox games, start dates seemed to be boundless, ck2 for example had almost infinite, with every day for centuries playable, eu4 similarly set up the same standard of thousands of different moments playable. I will say that this is a bit of a overexaggeration, while those dates were playable, they were not fully fleshed out like a few ck2 dlc start dates (867, 1066 etc…) or eu4 with 1444. But even games like victoria 2 had two start dates, 1836 and 1861, and hoi3 had many different periods and scenarios. When you compare that to newer paradox games, ck3 has two start dates, unlike the higher amount of playable dlc dates in ck2 and the infinite scenarios they made unrelated to updates and dlc. Vic3 has one start date compared to two from vic2, and hoi4 only has two start dates compared to hoi3. Now why would paradox move away from more content for players. I few major reasons appear obvious with some investigation. Firstly, the many start dates of eu4 or ck2 did not really work well, they were not properly fleshed out, were quite buggy and many were just placeholders on the map, which did not feel as the game intended to be with the full start dates like 1444 with eu4. A second major reason is the time and effort it takes to make more start dates. Whenever you update the game you need to or should update these dates (not like they really updated the dates with each eu4 update), and this takes significant time, especially where now eu4 just has many broken scenarios. Similarly, the initial development of one or two quality start date seems to be more important to paradox’s devs and can save time in releasing a new game such as vic3, where they only have to worry about one scenario instead of many. Finally, one thing that really has permeated throughout games like hoi4 and ck3, is the development of in depth mods that make up for the lack of start dates. Mods can cover time period that never would have been included in the older games start dates, for example the modern era or ww1 for hoi4, but also modders can spend there own time fleshing out scenarios which would have been in hoi3, like ensieg has done for hoi4. Making quality experiences that include new features and even things that the devs would not have added to the games. Especially for victoria 3 and how it may effect vic 3 gameplay. Overall, start dates in paradox have slowly trended down because of the time it takes to the develop them, the quality of the many start dates, and how modders can make better experiences most of the time than the devs could for all but a few of the start dates.

#paradoxinteractive #paradoxstartdates #victoria3 #vic3 #eu4 #stellaris #hoi4 #ck3 #paradoxinteractivedlc #ck2 #vic2 #vic3war #startdates

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