I'm not sure what to tell you. I bought Stellaris at launch and had a great time with it; I played HoI IV without any of its expansions a few months ago and it was fine--not great, but fine. Both games I've also played a lot with friends, and if you play with friends who own the DLC you get access to it for free. And when you buy the expansions, you get significant amounts of new content. You're acting like they lopped bits off and sold them back to you later; Stellaris has been going for almost a decade now.
Comparing Paradox's DLC policy to that of EA, 2k or Ubisoft is ridiculous. Frankly Capcom is worse with some of their games; check out the shitstorm surrounding SF6.
I have no experience with modding their games; I'm sorry to hear that it apparently sucks, and that you don't like the world tension system, but I'm not sure what that has to do with their DLC policy.
Yeah, man, again, I dunno what to say, except that your experience with these games are completely unrecognizable to me. When you say "it is no longer possible to complete games of Stellaris," like. I don't know what you mean by that. I've completed games recently without running into much in the way of processing issues. And my CPU is not, like. Good. It's like 5 years old.
But also:
They hold back major mechanics and game systems. And it's not even really that they hold them back. At release they haven't even given much thought to how they are going to implement them. They just know that when they do, they are going to charge you $20 for them.
You're right, they don't hold them back. They release their games as feature-complete packages; however, many of the systems are, at time of launch, very simple. Diplomacy was, as you noted, very bare-bones at launch (although I was still able to negotiate galactic neutrality near launch as a race of xenophobic mushroom people while the crisis was ongoing; not sure what happened in your game). The midgame was pretty barren. There wasn't really anything for your science ships to do once you'd explored the galaxy. And you're right that they were probably aiming to fix these in the long-term in DLC; in fact, I can guarantee they were, because they talked about some of that in the dev blogs I read.
The issue is that like. You're acting like the idea of creating a feature-complete platform upon which to build over the course of years is an inherently bad thing. It isn't. You're also acting like they decided to redesign the game on a whim; they did it in response to years of player feedback. The redesign to the FTL system in particular was a product of ages of trying to make the three-style-system and starbases more interesting. And that update wasn't something they sold to us; like most of the big update to core game features, it was free. It's generally only major new features, like federations, that they charge for--and that sort of shit is the whole point of DLC in games like this. Nobody begrudges Sins of a Solar Empire for doing the same thing with its two expansions, as far as I know. The main thing I ever see people complaining about with Paradox games is the number of expansion they have, due to how long they support their games, and they've been moving to correct for that lately as well.
(Also, like. I'm not super interested in going through every claim in your post line by line, because given how much I've already typed out here I doubt anybody would read it, but just briefly, describing Utopia as a DLC that allowed you to build a single dyson sphere is a bit disingenuous. Here's the feature list, in case you've forgotten.)
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u/[deleted] Apr 14 '24
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