My thoughts of the Paradox DLC controversy

MY thoughts on the eu4 drama of late.

[sirangles]

I enjoyed the video but felt like you should be more specific with your criticisms. What broke your game exactly? A bug in the DLC or a specific feature of the DLC? What was your problem with WOW?

Other than that, perfectly reasonable points and of course no company ever deserves blind trust from consumers.

[remansparadox]

Great video. I too remember the days of EU3's money slider and trying to scrape by with just the yearly census tax. It was always funny to see the AI go bananas with minting and all end up 100%+ inflation by 1700.

You also bring up a good point with the free patches. I think a lot of people take them for granted, but it's pretty clear we're only getting them because enough people buy the DLCs to bankroll free stuff like institutions. Some people have posited that EU4's DLCs are overpriced, but the free patches are underpriced. It's an interesting way of looking at the issue.

[Makofueled]

Good take. Companies will always betray those principles if it becomes expedient to do so, and I'm glad consumers aren't showing blind faith in bad practice.

[auzandil]

The thing with recent price raising shenanigans is that, they even raised the prices of their older games like EU III and Victoria II with all their DLCs just before the summer sale. I cannot speak for other regions but in Turkey there's almost %50 increase in the price of Paradox games. The expansions were already expensive before the raise and now they cost a fortune. They also tend to break the game ( e.g. to play a balanced game in Asia you either have to pay more than the base game's cost for Mandate of Heaven or roll back to a previous patch since with the relase of patch 1.20 Ming no longer has +%50 autonomy in their provinces and if you don't have the DLC there isn't a Celestial Empire to balance it out - if you don't have the Common Sense DLC you won't have good time embracing those instututions when you're playing outside of Europe). On top of that there's some features that should've been in the base game coming with DLCs such as asking for support independence or transferring occupations. Don't get me wrong, I like most of the DLCs but you shouldn't put as basic features as asking for support independence, transferring occupations or debasing currency behind a pay wall.

[gekkenhuisje]

Interesting about the free-patch institutions. Paradox made institutions so that it would be easier to play outside of Europe, but people are saying ever since Institutions came out, it has been harder.

[larsnelson]

Good thoughts you have shared here.

My top three games: Civilization, Heroes of Might and Magic, EU4.

[Ribcageler]

Right now all ddrjake cares for right now is making those sweet ducats in patrician 4. Oh yes. Delicious.

[YorkshireSpud]

Nice video Monk, Just be a bit clearer on some of your points and nice roast on DarkFire! :P

[frozengrip]

Does anyone else play without the Cossacks? I fucking hate that expansion with all the favors and shit.

Edit : If you are also trying to get the Ottomans to support your independence then you might need to restart a couple of times till that random negative opinion (even tho you have positive relations) goes away.

[DigDug]

"They release a large patch that adds to the game when they make an expansion"
Yes and they often lock desired features in with the paid alternative. Not only that
but you have an entire modding community that has overhauled the game time and time again, updating their mods to fit Paradox's updates and patches. In their mods, these guys have spent hours working on countless models, code and GUI and have yet to paywall those who enjoy them because obviously a modding community does not have that power (unless we're talking about that one brief instance in Skyrim we shall henceforth not mention) Paradox is not a lowly small company who keeps their games up to date out of respect to their playerbase, their drive and motivation is purely financial, and that's natural for a business, but it doesn't mean that we as players have to accept it the way it is.

[woodzy]

If you think the Eu4 dlc policy is bad, ohhhh booooyyy are you in for a treat with HoI4 dlc. In one year of the game being out, they basically released two flavour packs. Yes they had small changes to gameplay, (licensing of equipment, and telling your AI to continuously attack, which should have been in the base game in everyone's opinion!) but ignoring the flavour, gameplay elements were mostly included in the free patch. However if you pre-ordered the game, with the added bonus of this being that you would get the first few dlc for free... welp this is what you got.

[lord]

I haven't minded the prices in general - the base game is really fun, prices are in general 1/2 of listed because you always buy on sale, other than non-game content like soundtracks or unit fluff I think you can pick up most everything for 50-60$? I also compare it to their competitors - EUIV is staying good/getting better with each expansion imho, whereas look at Civ - has gotten progressively worse with every release Civ 5 > BE > Civ 6. That being said, i haven't bought the last expansion and a half, I'm still enjoying playing on the patch I'm on and don't feel the need for the most recent content. And you can certainly do that with EU4 - buy the base game and 2-4 expansions and be totally happy, and that is pretty cheap, whereas look at other games once again, like civ - Firaxis is milking that HARD and offering much less in expanded content at much higher price than Paradox.

[fox]

I now have this game for about a year. I enjoy(ed - I stopped playing for a few months now) it to death because I love (geopolitical) history and the recreation of it. However, I had the chance to buy the game and much of the dlc at a significant discount (with dlc at -50%). Now a year later, even after waiting and waiting for months on end, the max discount we get on "newer" dlc is -10%, which is quite frankly laughable. I can understand why people get fed up with their dlc policy, especially when dlc impacts the game so heavily as EUIV's does. Try to convince a friend to buy this game now, with the age it has and THAT price tag on it. It's ABSURD.

[craxusalby]

They raised the prices in other places to adjust for inflation.

[nkelDktr]

I don't really understand why the price of this game should be compared to a AAA game. They are way too far from what this game is. EU4 is a proper niche game and those come usually in two flavours: 1. cheap and cheerful indie game or very complex games that are almost always very expensive. Simulators are a good example of that. Think of the money one can pay for a flight simulator like FSX or DCS (if you want a little bit more than just the base game).

EU4 is 6 years old now and there are 11 major expansions for the game, if you bought them all at full price you spent about 270€ (or whatever your equivalent is) for the expansions + base game. If that is too much, don't buy it. It is that simple. I think though, that for a game that has (for me personally) literally thousands of hours of potential play time, I'd gladly spend that sum. If someone has played it over 3000 hours over those 6 years, that is a lot cheaper per gametime than buying a normal 50$ game every year, even if it is one you can play for a long time like say Skyrim, and let's face it, you won't really play that for hundreds of hours without buying the content DLCs so the price goes up even further.

[willscott]

They were adjusting for regional currencies.

[adebowalekonstantinov]

I'm gonna be so pissed when EU5 comes out. If the trend holds truth, eu4 came out 6 years after eu3, so that means only 2 years more for 5.

[StrikingShadow]

I think you should try some other game content on this channel Monk. Maybe Total War Warhammer or another paradox game or just anything you enjoyed playing. See how it is received. Variety is always good and you don't want to get trapped in 1 game all the time. People watch you for you and your analytic mind of a game, not for the game itself necessarily

[tr-r]

Institutions makes playing outside Europe impossible without DLC.

[RyknowChaos]

Buying a new dlc everyfew months isnt that hard and what u get for your money is a dev team constantly making new content constantly refreshing the game and increasing replayability.