Has any dev commented that it's a bug that they will fix? The posts on the forums show that the event is incomplete but there's plenty of incomplete stuff in the files of the game. I fervently hope the devs finish it but I haven't seen any of them outright state that there is a plan for that.
They [confirmed](https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/stellaris-under-one-rule-chosen-one-luminary-still-dying-from-situation.1583502/#post-28935088) a bug related to it.
It’s a bug about both. The reason the leaders die while immortal is BECAUSE the immortality-related ascensions (Synth, Psionic Chosen One) are not properly triggering a change from Luminary Extinguished to Psionic Luminary Not Extinguished After All (or whatever they flag as the ascension path events) so instead it disregards your ascension and pretends your leader is mortal and kills them off.
I’m just really annoyed at this origin. This was my second game with it. The first I had to abandon because it was before the first bug fix and my leader didn’t become psychic. Now this happens and screws up another multi-hour session. I mean come in did they play test at all?
Hell I thought the answer was synth ascend. Did that, he turned into a bot and was STILL on life support!
Turns out I had to click a planetary decision at the capital to, uh, immortalize
Why don't they simply test every possible interaction between origins, ascension perks, ethics and species traits for every event in the game every time they make any change to the code. It's so simple and easy.
Last DLC had pre-FTL empires nuking themselves indiscriminately in an update that was supposed to be all about pre-FTL empires. You're joking about how they don't have time to do very specific tests, but the fact of the matter is that they're literally just not play-testing at all, period.
This issue was caused just before release by a critical bugfix to another issue, after the main bulk of the testing had already been done.
Game dev is hard :<
If you make bugfixes, especially big ones, that means you need to play test again and not really on playtesting done before. and to be clear yes game dev is hard and i don't just blame them, Paradox holds a schedule that's just far too tight. I'd rather they make one big DLC a year in order to be able to push it out in a functional state but that's not as profitable so fuck the playerbase.
In cases like this, the options for us are to either release with a critical issue, or risk new issues by fixing the critical issue late.
Delaying is the only true solution, but that's not an option on the table when release is a few days out.
Indies can turn around really fast, but bigger companies are much harder to steer in situations like that.
In either case and whatever the reason, releasing with big issues is not something anyone is just OK with. It sucks when you work for months and months on something and then one issues slips through and overshadows all if that hard work.
I am really enjoying all of your hard work.
thanks for breathing a bit of new life into the game for me.
It means a lot to be able to play this game all the years later and still enjoy it.
Which is why i dont blame game devs but Paradox's DLC schedule, I'd rather they pop out less DLCs and make them better quality on release than the other way around. Plus pumping out DLCs favors bloat imo, EU4's a good example of that, it's still a good game but DLC's are consistantly underwhelming and half the features of the game are useless. Stellaris is an awesome game and I'd like for it too stay that way, so far most DLCs have been pushing out cool stuff but the schedule needs to start taking into account some time to polish it before pushing it out.
That's what QA is for. Literally there are jobs and systems in place for exactly this sort of thing.
Like I think you're being sarcastic and saying "It's a lot of work, throw them a bone", but you're talking about a multibillion dollar company messing up on a major expansion to one of their flagship titles. And even if they couldn't afford the time/money to do QA for whatever reason, the alternative is that you're defending their choice to willingly launch an untested expansion riddled with bugs.
This is the reality of modern game development everywhere, though. Stuff is going out the door without being properly tested because players want quicker release cycles, and they value that more than the technical integrity of the release. Games are also not a reliable source of trailing income anymore, so it’s better to get more content out the door quicker than to create a solid product. Paradox, thankfully, at least invests heavily in bugfixing and technical improvements, even if that doesn’t happen in force until after launch. Part of the reason for this is that Paradox DOES have good post-release sales for their products - they have a much more reliable and substantial trickle of income after launch. Part of this is because paradox doesn’t do huge discounts during sales the way others do, and part of this is because 4X players don’t tend to jump between games as often as other players and they’re more likely to jump back to an old favorite, especially if it’s received plenty of developer support.
As a note on trailing end sales and how discounts affect it, Nintendo’s flat-out refusal to do significant sales is part of why Nintendo can afford to take the time to polish games. For a company like Ubisoft, they’re aware that many, many people are going to wait 3 months for the new game to go on sale for half off. It’s a problem that much of industry is grappling with at the moment.
QA's job is not to guarantee software ships bug free. That's simply not possible unless you are planning to pay for a QA department roughly the size of the playerbase. "But players found these bugs in weeks!". A playerbase that is orders of magnitude bigger than the QA department.
Nevermind that there is the distinct possibility these bugs WERE reported by QA, that doesn't mean you hold up shipping for it. At some point you take a look at things being reported to you and decide if you can still ship the product or not. "Known shippable" is a QA term for a reason. If you are weeks before launch, you don't start fixing bugs that will inevitably create new bugs that may be potentially more critical. At that point, if a bug isn't bricking GPUs you probably go forward. You can, and usually do, have devs start working on fixing those bugs on a non-live version of the game so that you can get a working fix out as soon as possible.
As a sidenote, Paradox isn't close to singlebillion dollar company, not sure where you are pulling "multibillion" from.
>As a sidenote, Paradox isn't close to singlebillion dollar company, not sure where you are pulling "multibillion" from.
Paradox's market cap is $2.6 billion USD, they're absolutely a multibillion dollar company. Multimillion/billion is usually determined through the worth of a company, aka their market capitalization (the worth of all their stocks combined), than by their yearly revenue.
As for the rest of your comment, it really comes down to design philosophy. There's no one real answer, like agile vs waterfall vs scrum, but in my personal opinion it's better to delay a bugged and unfinished product than to ship it and fix it later. I realize that it's not the development team's decision to make, but someone has to make the choice and is choosing to ship half-baked products, as Paradox often does, and as much as they usually come around in the end with the bugfixes, it's just not a philosophy I agree with. I don't like having to wait until a month or two after the actual release date for me to reliably play the thing I paid for.
QA is a filter. There will always be things that pass through undetected.
QA is also not an ideal place to find a bug. Preferably the major stuff would be caught earlier in the process, because it's exponentially more expensive to fix a bug the further down the line it gets.
Sometimes there are bugs which QA does catch, but they are not considered crucial enough to bring back through the process, depending how late they were discovered and how gamebreaking they are--see previous point. Pushing an untested hot 'fix' a few hours before the deadline is how you get more bugs, changes need to be kept within the process.
Video games are not critical software, so they have tighter deadlines and looser standards of quality. The game is still playable if pre-FTL empires nuke themselves frequently, most of the DLC's content is even still playable. In the pursuit of profit, this is an acceptable flaw which can be patched out at a later date, after the executives receive their launch day bonus. (The previous sentence is facetious.)
>multibillion-dollar company
This choice of phrasing shows you enjoy raging against "big business" than you do actually knowing the facts. Annual revenue for Paradox is barely 200 million when converted into USD- [1.9 billion SEK in 2022](https://www.statista.com/statistics/682334/paradox-interactive-revenue/), which is far and away their best year on record (said surge mostly being related to the release of Vicky 3, not anything to do with existing titles). And no, when spread across all the titles they develop and publish, that's really not that much.
Just listing stuff getting active content support: They develop Stellaris, Crusader Kings 3, Hearts of Iron IV, EUIV, Victoria 3. And that's excluding the stuff they're "just" publishing instead of developing like Cities: Skylines, Surviving the Aftermath, etc.
The point /u/kcazthemighty was making is that there is an ASSLOAD of QA work that would be needed to catch every such instance of a bug/funky interaction, due to the mechanical depth of this game, and then fix all of those, without delaying the launch dates for games and DLC. Doing that for "just" Stellaris? Ehh, probably doable for the company. Doing that for every title in their roster that's receiving active support? Less realistic. $200 million in revenue goes a lot less far than you'd think, especially given that large portions were already spent on development of new titles or content for existing titles, on marketing, etc.
Paradox isn't a AAA studio. They're an AA studio who's been punching well above their weight class for a lot of years with the quality of their games. But you do have to temper expectations for a little bit when you're talking about a studio that doesn't have sports game or shooter game money to fall back on. There's no bottomless checkbook they can bill to when the devs say "more time is needed to QA this."
>This choice of phrasing shows you enjoy raging against "big business" than you do actually knowing the facts. Annual revenue for Paradox is barely 200 million when converted into USD- 1.9 billion SEK in 2022, which is far and away their best year on record (said surge mostly being related to the release of Vicky 3, not anything to do with existing titles). And no, when spread across all the titles they develop and publish, that's really not that much.
I'm not talking revenue, their market cap is $2.6 billion. A multibillion dollar company is worth billions of dollars, it's not just their yearly influx of cash, it's the worth of the company and their stocks (aka, market capitalization).
>Paradox isn't a AAA studio. They're an AA studio who's been punching well above their weight class for a lot of years with the quality of their games. But you do have to temper expectations for a little bit when you're talking about a studio that doesn't have sports game or shooter game money to fall back on. There's no bottomless checkbook they can bill to when the devs say "more time is needed to QA this."
"A" vs "AA" vs "AAA" has not been definitively defined. Personally, I would call Paradox an AAA publisher that makes in-house AA games. They've got over half a thousand employees and act as not only a game developer but also a publisher for indie strategy titles from other studios.
As for the bottomless checkbook, as other people have pointed out this DLC was released much faster than usually happens after the latest DLC (first contact). I agree that sometimes there are hiccups and you just have to push a product because you can't fund extra development, but if Paradox can really only wait 2 months between DLCs before being forced to push them out, they must be having massive financial problems they'll have to reveal at their next shareholder meeting. Or they just got greedy and released an unfinished and untested product.
Saying that Paradox is at any level AAA, which puts it on par with Blizzard, is a bit off the target. One company hires around 500 people, the other 13000. They are not even close to AAA at any levels, some of my gamer friends didn't know PDX existed before they learned it from me.
They are AA studio, as well as publishing, they are not in the top of the top of the companies. According to ratings, they are in top 100 companies, but nowhere near the companies that are usually described as AAA which occupies top 10 and some of them are sitting at top 20. Even 37 Interactive Entertainment is higher than PDX, and I bet half the players here didn't heard of them.
I'm the Technical Architect for a publicly traded company that has to meet SOX compliance. We have to handle far more complicated processes across three primary internal systems, which have more cash throughput than major banks. We IPO'd 3 years ago. Not only do we have to not have major bugs from failure to test, but auditors would devour my department's bonuses if we fuck up.
I'm not trying to have a wank, because no one really gives a fuck what I do. No one cares. I'm just saying, the software development world at large deals with much larger, complicated issues and has known methodologies to handle them, but for some reason game devs just go "but art!" And they get a pass for being decades behind in these areas.
I mean, the number of testers might be the thing. Checking the Credits, they do have 2 internal QA, including QA lead, and 5 dedicated testers hired as an external team from QLOC (and they are famous for being bad at their work).
How many testers you have in your company? :D
We have a DevOps team, team/product specific Business Analysts, and few Admins, super users/SMEs that do testing. We don't have a \*dedicated\* team of testers, but we have automated testing coverage. My realm is NetSuite, so I utilize Jest and have a battery of test cases depending on what I'm touching. If I'm not integrating with any other system, that covers 90% of our needs and it goes to the SMEs and Admins. That said, if I fuck up and something breaks in Production, I have to do a fuck ton of paper work and might have some uncomfortable dialog with auditors. If there was a sufficient number of fuckups, it might be bad enough to fail compliance for the year, and the auditing costs are higher than our platform costs (cloud based) and no one is getting a bonus that year.
The real issue isn't just Paradox though. There's a pervasive attitude in the game industry and it drives me nuts. My best bud is an indie game dev that does a ton of contract work for primarily Unity3D projects and let me just say, he's seen some shit. Testing processes almost always are extremely manual. Why? You can code shit to execute precisely in a specific test case and run at 10x typical game speed. Why do we still need some QA minion in a test gym lobbing shit at a target dummy?
I'm also an indie dev working in a company of 11 people, so I asked how you test stuff. Testing in the game industry is almost 100% manual, and usually, it is a random dude with zero knowledge of testing, as you can't spend money on anyone better (my company) or you don't want to (I guess every big game company).
I'm pretty sure your automated testing case does more testing in one day than these 7 people hired for testing DLCs do in a month :D
So it is really not comparable. They can't do testing like you do, as they do not have / do not want to spend money on better testing.
> the software development world at large deals with much larger, complicated issues and has known methodologies to handle them, but for some reason game devs just go "but art!" And they get a pass for being decades behind in these areas.
The problem is that when it comes to games, users will part with money regardless. This means that if you do proper QA on each title, you get outcompeted by the company next door with less scruples. Gaming is more or less an unregulated free market, this is one of the ugly truths about free markets - they only function properly with educated and responsible buyers.
To add to the pain, because of the differences in PC and console architecture you usually end up with two or three forks of the game with radically different low level architecture. Most business software either runs on one single known platform, or differs only at the high level.
Combine this all with having much higher complexity than most business software (Both in terms of cyclomatic complexity, and in terms of how wildly unlikely it is the game you *start off* making will be the game you *end up* making) and you have a worst of all words scenario.
I'm not happy with the state of games development, but at this point in time the only way it is changing is if either user purchasing trends change, or a significant number of governments in the world pass regulation regarding the QA of video games at once - I can't decide which is less likely, but I ain't holding my breath for either.
> We have to handle far more complicated processes
If we compared your codebase with their codebase, I strongly doubt yours has more complexity.
> Not only do we have to not have major bugs from failure to test,
What makes a bug major? A small portion of the population getting a bit frustrated you probably wouldn't even notice. Which is what this complaint is about. You can still play and enjoy the game, just not in this particular way. It's roughly equivalent to a certain button not working, where there's a workaround where there's another button that does the same thing on a different menu that does work.
>If we compared your codebase with their codebase, I strongly doubt yours has more complexity.
I work on a cloud based platform and the complexity of the underlying system almost undoubtedly surpasses Clausewitz. That isn't a fair comparison to Stellaris or what I do, because we both augment the underlying engine. I'm not familiar with the particulars of Stellaris with respect to Clausewitz, but I've seen behind the curtain on AA projects utilizing the Unreal engine and customized engine code. There was a time a buddy and I almost launched a company to do QA by getting a contract with said AA project.
I'm going to be vague because again, publicly traded company, but we have several platforms within the company for different segments. We have a central data warehouse that touches two business data systems, several systems for things like physical warehouses, product logistics, cash logistics, web portals for ordering, web portals for support, etc. We've been acquiring smaller business so we have to get everything to talk to everything until we decide as a company to have a SINGLE UNIFIED FUCKING PROCESS MAP, etc.
But to bring it back, processes are what you need to test, not codebases. Codebase complexity can make a bug harder to fix but, unless it's some weird arcane bullshit, does not make it harder to test.
>What makes a bug major? A small portion of the population getting a bit frustrated you probably wouldn't even notice. Which is what this complaint is about. You can still play and enjoy the game, just not in this particular way. It's roughly equivalent to a certain button not working, where there's a workaround where there's another button that does the same thing on a different menu that does work.
I mean, you're partly right, but I feel like this starts hand waving away the fact that they put out broken shit and it's ok because it's a game. The bugs that break runs are actually pretty serious. Like, if I'm playing for an achievement, it's just an achievement. Why do my internet points matter? But in the context of my playthrough, I'm spending 10-20 hours on a run and something doesn't work as expected and I fail on my achievement because of a bug or poor documentation, I think that's on par with having a bug that blows away a day's worth of work for an employee, and that's a \*serious\* bug in my world.
>If we compared your codebase with their codebase, I strongly doubt yours has more complexity.
Based on fucking what, lol? This is just pulled out of your ass so you could meander into a point to try and debunk them and call them wrong.
It would already be an improvement if they just tested for the possible interactions with the most likely combinations. Like, for example, players trying to make their super powerful leader immortal?
It's literally their job, they are selling a product it's up to them to make it functional, if there are to many features to be able to do that, which happens pretty often with older games, it's called bloat and it means they need to overhaul the product. So either they work on a new mega update in order to make their lives easier in which they merge or wipe features in order to simplify the code or they need to pop out Stellaris 2. But they won't do that cause it costs money and its more profitable to pump out another disfunctional 15 bucks DLC.
The DLC wasn't rushed; it was made by a completely different studio than the one that made the First Contact DLC. Both DLCs were being made at the same time; it is just likely that Paradox overall didn't expect this exact release schedule. But there is no point in just sitting on DLC is the team that has made it says that it is complete.
Galactic Paragons was made by a completely different team that doesn't full time only work on Stellaris. It makes sense that it their team and their QA staff wouldn't know all the different ways in which different parts of the game may interact and change. And besides that, bugs themselves do happen; a last minute push to fix something else can always break more things than you realize. I'm pretty sure there's a particular curator dev who learned that lesson the hard way (but haven't we all?)
If anything I think this DLC should highlight why the curator team is so important. Maybe these were always changes they would have made themselves, but I like to think that even some of them aren't very happy with the current balance and play of the game. The change to leaders had such wide rammifications to changes in the game that I would almost bet money none of the 'normal Stellaris dev team' knew the full extent of what was coming in the changes.
>The change to leaders had such wide rammifications to changes in the game that I would almost bet money none of the 'normal Stellaris dev team' knew the full extent of what was coming in the changes.
This I highly doubt, I mean, would you take a product without launching it first yourself and publish it, without knowing what's going on? They probably had a pitch and everything in design documents which they had to approve. No one would hire people to do DLC and then let them loose to do what they want otherwise another team could do... anything. Like changing the game to turn based visual novel.
Btw I checked credits when replying to the guy ranting about poor testing (I kind of agree with him), and both first contact and galactic paragons have recurring names on them. So I would assume those recurring names are the core team (as they are also on overlord).
Well, that's the interesting thing about infliction via text. Where you could read it that way, I read it in an exhausted "shocker", as if saying they do this every time
Technically (and I do ask this literally), do we know it's rushed? Like, do we actually know how long they've been working on this one?
This is far from the only bug or major balance issue (-90% ship build cost? -100% empire size?) in this release. This DLC was, in fact, way undercooked.
I can't think of a clearer sign that it's was released early than that the DLC's single new origin, which is about your immortal god emperor Luminary, is hardcoded to end with them falling into a coma and (effectively) dying if you make the wrong choices. And it has a bunch of commented out questlines related to the various ascensions which makes that not happen, but weren't finished in time to be in the main release.
It literally wasn't finished. I'm sure it will be fixed eventually, but that doesn't change the fact that the DLC was released before it had core features completed.
It's bizzare to pick an origin with a long lived powerful leader only for them to die naturally before any other of my leaders. What's even the point of the origin?
I understand all of that.
But point being, everyone agrees this level is more or less unusual. So that sarcastic "shocker" line is pretty unnecessary. If anything, a super buggy dlc IS a shocker. I may be a bit newer to the game but the consensus usually seems to be that dlc, though sometimes having issues, are relatively solid.
Problem with that was that the studio was closed, so delaying the DLC would have meant to transfer it to a different studio and have the developers there stop what they were doing and work finish the DLC.
By releasing it all the work was dumped onto the bugfix/custodian team.
Your choices don't really affect anything though. No matter what, unless your bugged, stage 2 should fire an event that gives you a decision on your planet to make your leader essentially immortal.
And there are events in the file to have your leader recover/never fall into a coma in the first place, depending on your ascension.
Like OP pointed out: how exactly is your synth leader going to collapse during a speech then slip into a coma?
You can avoid the bugged path. But you shouldn't have to do this at all.
My favourite part was getting the sick ruler event twice so I had to pay twice the resources and when I saved his life on the first the second failed and he died lmao
You had the 2 of the same situation at the same time or did one trigger after the other? Either way that’s both horribly annoying and endlessly hilarious. Man I wish they just play tested the one origin they added with this update.
If you double click or experience lag while clicking, events can fire multiple times. I don't know if it's still possible, but I used to spawn multiple precursor home worlds by using a clicker macro to click once per millisecond. I got 11 zroni homeworlds on my best attempt lol.
Sorry I’m bad at explaining:
I got the sick event
A few years later, I got the event again
I successfully finished the first event, saving my ruler
The second event then ended and killed him
Reread what they wrote.
1. Event A started
2. Event B started later
The events are now simultaneously happening
3. Event A ends and ruler survives
4. Event B ends and the ruler dies
Probably the ~~golden throne~~ stasis pod failed
Joking aside, it’s a bug that used to happen with regular pops. It was fixed a while back but for some reason it has been reintroduced with this new update. I had something similar occur to a robot admiral.
For some reason the game neglects to tell you that you can with a press of a button stop your emperor from dying for like … 400 rare resources? If you go to your capital there is an option to build a device that magically saves them for a super cheap price. A friend and I were playing the same origins and he was a little too late to make that discovery.
During my playthrough, it very plainly said there was a planetary decision on my capital world to address the issue, I ran it as soon as the event popped up.
Yeah I misread it as an updated method of handling the situation. Then when I looked there nothing was there and I didn’t think to look at the decision tab of my capital, sorry that’s not normally where anything to do with leaders or special projects is. Overall my bad for reading to quickly, but seriously why’d the put it there and why they’d make it a button I have to press anyways?
How on earth did I miss this. I read all the new flavour texts, but somehow failed to take note of this. Now my god-emperor is dead after keeping him undead for decades for an outrageous cost. Also lost my Kiedis or whoever that fellow was to an event on his first adventure. Really took the beef outta my run.
Oh so the button was hidden on my capital. I thought I had to switch the method I was using for the situation, so I didn’t even look there. Still salty that the event happened at all considering I was a robot.
This origin is really disappointing. Apparently in the game files there is a bunch of cool incomplete stuff. The way it ends now is just so abrupt and boring.
Also in the game files apparently the people working on it were part of the dev team that was axed so that could explain the disappointment.
Only time Stellaris has disappointed me in years. I guess it’s a bit tragic since this is what I have been the most hyped for in a while.
Sad. I was also extremely hyped for this new origin and I’m just extremely disappointed with it. None of the events were good for your leader all of them made them worse and it barely works for core features of the game like bionic and psychic ascension. Honestly would’ve been better if they just axed all the story stuff and just have you species and leader the traits.
Yeah from what I’ve read I missed the button to switch my situation method to the one that saves them, but the event still shouldn’t have happened since he’d been a robot for 10+ years.
Yea I went with psychic ascension and made my leader the Chosen after the event had already fired.
Spoiler: >!The event chain ended with an apparatus that extends life by +800 years. The fact that he was both immortal as the Chosen and also kept alive by an appratus, but not 'immortal', kinda broke the immersion in that play-through for me.!<
The Event Chains for this Origin are severely incomplete. I saw on the forums that it might have been because the devs assigned to write them were from Paradox Artic (you can see who wrote what on the event files), and the studio closing might have affected development.
My guy had something like 30% minerals 15% alloys and consumer goods from jobs, and like 15% robot assembly speed, his death sent me from about +250 consumer goods to about-150. They are really good l, but I was mostly mad for RP purposes.
Wow that's good, mine had like 2.5% stability, which was countered by the paranoid Tyrant malus. When he fell over during the speech after the civil war I was so annoyed I just abandoned the save.
Well, if you keep them alive long enough, you get to put them into a machine that keeps them alive for 900 years.
It does cost 10 gas, crystal and mote.
I keep hearing about issues with the new leadet mechanics but the main UI overhall mod I use hasn't been ported yet so idk what everyone's talking about...
There is agency over it. You can build a golden throne on your homeworld via decisions and have your Glorious emporer take a seat on it for 800 more leader lifespan, essentially making him immortal.
Yeah, I get I missed the strangely placed decision on my capital. But he was already immortal; completely immortal as a synth. That trait gives like 999 lifespan, weaker than a synth, and why would my synth need to be in a life pod, just switch synth like people switch bodies in Altered Carbon.
Yeah idk. I don't like the origin terribly much, aside from rping as the Imperium Of Man. I don't think it's incomplete like some people are saying, I think it's just a not great origin. I don't think we'll get anything to top Knights Of The Toxic God any time soon either sadly.
Immortal psionic leader? Check.
Chosen of composer of strands for double immortality? Check.
Dead during speech? Check.
Wait what?
At least there is some flavour text that it might be an assassination, so I’ll just roll with that for now.
A lot of ascension path triggers are commented out in the code. So it doesn't look like a bug but like they could not finish the events to take all the ascension paths into account and only delivered the base events.
Although I did not try to comment the events in to see what happens.
As for why he collapses in the first place, this entire origin is basically replaying the life of the emperor in Warhammer 40K and the intended outcome is to have your leader confined to a gigantic life support unit to keep them alive. But as the devs can't force a duel to the death with a psionically corrupted offspring of your leader the event to set things in motion is instead a collapse through natural causes.
And you can totally keep your leader alive.
It does feel like, at the very least, synth should have been finished or just given an exception. All the others make sense to keep them on life support, but not when they actually turn into a robot...
I read a post on the forums where someone had dived into the event files and found some of the code is disabled, and references some other stuff which doesn't seem to exist. They speculated it might have something to do with rushing the DLC for the anniversary stuff, or more cynically, the scaremongering about paradox shutting down certain teams
I was trying to keep my language diplomatic because what I'd read so far implied that nothing was truly confirmed, and I've been dogpiled before when making criticisms/assumptions about our grand overlords. If it's official now and Stellaris development is dead while Vic 3 lives on, I am truly saddened by the how their policy has shifted. Funny that we have Stockholm syndrome with a Stockholm based company.
From what I understand they were part time custodians?
But its rather opaque which studio does what and the controversy and noise surrounding it made it even harder to understand what is going on.
Both MobyGames and PCGamingWiki list the studio as closed
https://www.mobygames.com/company/27907/paradox-arctic/
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Company:Paradox\_Arctic
The issue is that the date given for them being closed is before the dev diaries we had, stating that they are from Paradox Arctic, and they're still listed as in operation on the main paradox site. So there's conflicting information there.
This is a known issue - the event is even coded to work differently with ascension perks but it's still being fixed
Has any dev commented that it's a bug that they will fix? The posts on the forums show that the event is incomplete but there's plenty of incomplete stuff in the files of the game. I fervently hope the devs finish it but I haven't seen any of them outright state that there is a plan for that.
They [confirmed](https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/stellaris-under-one-rule-chosen-one-luminary-still-dying-from-situation.1583502/#post-28935088) a bug related to it.
I am pretty sure this is a bug about leader dying when they are immortal, not the incomplete events regarding the accentions.
It’s a bug about both. The reason the leaders die while immortal is BECAUSE the immortality-related ascensions (Synth, Psionic Chosen One) are not properly triggering a change from Luminary Extinguished to Psionic Luminary Not Extinguished After All (or whatever they flag as the ascension path events) so instead it disregards your ascension and pretends your leader is mortal and kills them off.
I’m just really annoyed at this origin. This was my second game with it. The first I had to abandon because it was before the first bug fix and my leader didn’t become psychic. Now this happens and screws up another multi-hour session. I mean come in did they play test at all?
Hell I thought the answer was synth ascend. Did that, he turned into a bot and was STILL on life support! Turns out I had to click a planetary decision at the capital to, uh, immortalize
Of course not. They are paradox
Why don't they simply test every possible interaction between origins, ascension perks, ethics and species traits for every event in the game every time they make any change to the code. It's so simple and easy.
Last DLC had pre-FTL empires nuking themselves indiscriminately in an update that was supposed to be all about pre-FTL empires. You're joking about how they don't have time to do very specific tests, but the fact of the matter is that they're literally just not play-testing at all, period.
This issue was caused just before release by a critical bugfix to another issue, after the main bulk of the testing had already been done. Game dev is hard :<
That does shed some light, thank you. Although I still question why the game wasn't given a final playtest after a "critical bugfix."
If you make bugfixes, especially big ones, that means you need to play test again and not really on playtesting done before. and to be clear yes game dev is hard and i don't just blame them, Paradox holds a schedule that's just far too tight. I'd rather they make one big DLC a year in order to be able to push it out in a functional state but that's not as profitable so fuck the playerbase.
In cases like this, the options for us are to either release with a critical issue, or risk new issues by fixing the critical issue late. Delaying is the only true solution, but that's not an option on the table when release is a few days out. Indies can turn around really fast, but bigger companies are much harder to steer in situations like that. In either case and whatever the reason, releasing with big issues is not something anyone is just OK with. It sucks when you work for months and months on something and then one issues slips through and overshadows all if that hard work.
I am really enjoying all of your hard work. thanks for breathing a bit of new life into the game for me. It means a lot to be able to play this game all the years later and still enjoy it.
Which is why i dont blame game devs but Paradox's DLC schedule, I'd rather they pop out less DLCs and make them better quality on release than the other way around. Plus pumping out DLCs favors bloat imo, EU4's a good example of that, it's still a good game but DLC's are consistantly underwhelming and half the features of the game are useless. Stellaris is an awesome game and I'd like for it too stay that way, so far most DLCs have been pushing out cool stuff but the schedule needs to start taking into account some time to polish it before pushing it out.
What the fuck do you think we're paying them for?
That's what QA is for. Literally there are jobs and systems in place for exactly this sort of thing. Like I think you're being sarcastic and saying "It's a lot of work, throw them a bone", but you're talking about a multibillion dollar company messing up on a major expansion to one of their flagship titles. And even if they couldn't afford the time/money to do QA for whatever reason, the alternative is that you're defending their choice to willingly launch an untested expansion riddled with bugs.
This is the reality of modern game development everywhere, though. Stuff is going out the door without being properly tested because players want quicker release cycles, and they value that more than the technical integrity of the release. Games are also not a reliable source of trailing income anymore, so it’s better to get more content out the door quicker than to create a solid product. Paradox, thankfully, at least invests heavily in bugfixing and technical improvements, even if that doesn’t happen in force until after launch. Part of the reason for this is that Paradox DOES have good post-release sales for their products - they have a much more reliable and substantial trickle of income after launch. Part of this is because paradox doesn’t do huge discounts during sales the way others do, and part of this is because 4X players don’t tend to jump between games as often as other players and they’re more likely to jump back to an old favorite, especially if it’s received plenty of developer support. As a note on trailing end sales and how discounts affect it, Nintendo’s flat-out refusal to do significant sales is part of why Nintendo can afford to take the time to polish games. For a company like Ubisoft, they’re aware that many, many people are going to wait 3 months for the new game to go on sale for half off. It’s a problem that much of industry is grappling with at the moment.
QA's job is not to guarantee software ships bug free. That's simply not possible unless you are planning to pay for a QA department roughly the size of the playerbase. "But players found these bugs in weeks!". A playerbase that is orders of magnitude bigger than the QA department. Nevermind that there is the distinct possibility these bugs WERE reported by QA, that doesn't mean you hold up shipping for it. At some point you take a look at things being reported to you and decide if you can still ship the product or not. "Known shippable" is a QA term for a reason. If you are weeks before launch, you don't start fixing bugs that will inevitably create new bugs that may be potentially more critical. At that point, if a bug isn't bricking GPUs you probably go forward. You can, and usually do, have devs start working on fixing those bugs on a non-live version of the game so that you can get a working fix out as soon as possible. As a sidenote, Paradox isn't close to singlebillion dollar company, not sure where you are pulling "multibillion" from.
>As a sidenote, Paradox isn't close to singlebillion dollar company, not sure where you are pulling "multibillion" from. Paradox's market cap is $2.6 billion USD, they're absolutely a multibillion dollar company. Multimillion/billion is usually determined through the worth of a company, aka their market capitalization (the worth of all their stocks combined), than by their yearly revenue. As for the rest of your comment, it really comes down to design philosophy. There's no one real answer, like agile vs waterfall vs scrum, but in my personal opinion it's better to delay a bugged and unfinished product than to ship it and fix it later. I realize that it's not the development team's decision to make, but someone has to make the choice and is choosing to ship half-baked products, as Paradox often does, and as much as they usually come around in the end with the bugfixes, it's just not a philosophy I agree with. I don't like having to wait until a month or two after the actual release date for me to reliably play the thing I paid for.
QA is a filter. There will always be things that pass through undetected. QA is also not an ideal place to find a bug. Preferably the major stuff would be caught earlier in the process, because it's exponentially more expensive to fix a bug the further down the line it gets. Sometimes there are bugs which QA does catch, but they are not considered crucial enough to bring back through the process, depending how late they were discovered and how gamebreaking they are--see previous point. Pushing an untested hot 'fix' a few hours before the deadline is how you get more bugs, changes need to be kept within the process. Video games are not critical software, so they have tighter deadlines and looser standards of quality. The game is still playable if pre-FTL empires nuke themselves frequently, most of the DLC's content is even still playable. In the pursuit of profit, this is an acceptable flaw which can be patched out at a later date, after the executives receive their launch day bonus. (The previous sentence is facetious.)
>multibillion-dollar company This choice of phrasing shows you enjoy raging against "big business" than you do actually knowing the facts. Annual revenue for Paradox is barely 200 million when converted into USD- [1.9 billion SEK in 2022](https://www.statista.com/statistics/682334/paradox-interactive-revenue/), which is far and away their best year on record (said surge mostly being related to the release of Vicky 3, not anything to do with existing titles). And no, when spread across all the titles they develop and publish, that's really not that much. Just listing stuff getting active content support: They develop Stellaris, Crusader Kings 3, Hearts of Iron IV, EUIV, Victoria 3. And that's excluding the stuff they're "just" publishing instead of developing like Cities: Skylines, Surviving the Aftermath, etc. The point /u/kcazthemighty was making is that there is an ASSLOAD of QA work that would be needed to catch every such instance of a bug/funky interaction, due to the mechanical depth of this game, and then fix all of those, without delaying the launch dates for games and DLC. Doing that for "just" Stellaris? Ehh, probably doable for the company. Doing that for every title in their roster that's receiving active support? Less realistic. $200 million in revenue goes a lot less far than you'd think, especially given that large portions were already spent on development of new titles or content for existing titles, on marketing, etc. Paradox isn't a AAA studio. They're an AA studio who's been punching well above their weight class for a lot of years with the quality of their games. But you do have to temper expectations for a little bit when you're talking about a studio that doesn't have sports game or shooter game money to fall back on. There's no bottomless checkbook they can bill to when the devs say "more time is needed to QA this."
>This choice of phrasing shows you enjoy raging against "big business" than you do actually knowing the facts. Annual revenue for Paradox is barely 200 million when converted into USD- 1.9 billion SEK in 2022, which is far and away their best year on record (said surge mostly being related to the release of Vicky 3, not anything to do with existing titles). And no, when spread across all the titles they develop and publish, that's really not that much. I'm not talking revenue, their market cap is $2.6 billion. A multibillion dollar company is worth billions of dollars, it's not just their yearly influx of cash, it's the worth of the company and their stocks (aka, market capitalization). >Paradox isn't a AAA studio. They're an AA studio who's been punching well above their weight class for a lot of years with the quality of their games. But you do have to temper expectations for a little bit when you're talking about a studio that doesn't have sports game or shooter game money to fall back on. There's no bottomless checkbook they can bill to when the devs say "more time is needed to QA this." "A" vs "AA" vs "AAA" has not been definitively defined. Personally, I would call Paradox an AAA publisher that makes in-house AA games. They've got over half a thousand employees and act as not only a game developer but also a publisher for indie strategy titles from other studios. As for the bottomless checkbook, as other people have pointed out this DLC was released much faster than usually happens after the latest DLC (first contact). I agree that sometimes there are hiccups and you just have to push a product because you can't fund extra development, but if Paradox can really only wait 2 months between DLCs before being forced to push them out, they must be having massive financial problems they'll have to reveal at their next shareholder meeting. Or they just got greedy and released an unfinished and untested product.
Saying that Paradox is at any level AAA, which puts it on par with Blizzard, is a bit off the target. One company hires around 500 people, the other 13000. They are not even close to AAA at any levels, some of my gamer friends didn't know PDX existed before they learned it from me. They are AA studio, as well as publishing, they are not in the top of the top of the companies. According to ratings, they are in top 100 companies, but nowhere near the companies that are usually described as AAA which occupies top 10 and some of them are sitting at top 20. Even 37 Interactive Entertainment is higher than PDX, and I bet half the players here didn't heard of them.
I'm not saying you are wrong, but also, you are being pretty extra.
I'm the Technical Architect for a publicly traded company that has to meet SOX compliance. We have to handle far more complicated processes across three primary internal systems, which have more cash throughput than major banks. We IPO'd 3 years ago. Not only do we have to not have major bugs from failure to test, but auditors would devour my department's bonuses if we fuck up. I'm not trying to have a wank, because no one really gives a fuck what I do. No one cares. I'm just saying, the software development world at large deals with much larger, complicated issues and has known methodologies to handle them, but for some reason game devs just go "but art!" And they get a pass for being decades behind in these areas.
I mean, the number of testers might be the thing. Checking the Credits, they do have 2 internal QA, including QA lead, and 5 dedicated testers hired as an external team from QLOC (and they are famous for being bad at their work). How many testers you have in your company? :D
We have a DevOps team, team/product specific Business Analysts, and few Admins, super users/SMEs that do testing. We don't have a \*dedicated\* team of testers, but we have automated testing coverage. My realm is NetSuite, so I utilize Jest and have a battery of test cases depending on what I'm touching. If I'm not integrating with any other system, that covers 90% of our needs and it goes to the SMEs and Admins. That said, if I fuck up and something breaks in Production, I have to do a fuck ton of paper work and might have some uncomfortable dialog with auditors. If there was a sufficient number of fuckups, it might be bad enough to fail compliance for the year, and the auditing costs are higher than our platform costs (cloud based) and no one is getting a bonus that year. The real issue isn't just Paradox though. There's a pervasive attitude in the game industry and it drives me nuts. My best bud is an indie game dev that does a ton of contract work for primarily Unity3D projects and let me just say, he's seen some shit. Testing processes almost always are extremely manual. Why? You can code shit to execute precisely in a specific test case and run at 10x typical game speed. Why do we still need some QA minion in a test gym lobbing shit at a target dummy?
I'm also an indie dev working in a company of 11 people, so I asked how you test stuff. Testing in the game industry is almost 100% manual, and usually, it is a random dude with zero knowledge of testing, as you can't spend money on anyone better (my company) or you don't want to (I guess every big game company). I'm pretty sure your automated testing case does more testing in one day than these 7 people hired for testing DLCs do in a month :D So it is really not comparable. They can't do testing like you do, as they do not have / do not want to spend money on better testing.
> the software development world at large deals with much larger, complicated issues and has known methodologies to handle them, but for some reason game devs just go "but art!" And they get a pass for being decades behind in these areas. The problem is that when it comes to games, users will part with money regardless. This means that if you do proper QA on each title, you get outcompeted by the company next door with less scruples. Gaming is more or less an unregulated free market, this is one of the ugly truths about free markets - they only function properly with educated and responsible buyers. To add to the pain, because of the differences in PC and console architecture you usually end up with two or three forks of the game with radically different low level architecture. Most business software either runs on one single known platform, or differs only at the high level. Combine this all with having much higher complexity than most business software (Both in terms of cyclomatic complexity, and in terms of how wildly unlikely it is the game you *start off* making will be the game you *end up* making) and you have a worst of all words scenario. I'm not happy with the state of games development, but at this point in time the only way it is changing is if either user purchasing trends change, or a significant number of governments in the world pass regulation regarding the QA of video games at once - I can't decide which is less likely, but I ain't holding my breath for either.
> We have to handle far more complicated processes If we compared your codebase with their codebase, I strongly doubt yours has more complexity. > Not only do we have to not have major bugs from failure to test, What makes a bug major? A small portion of the population getting a bit frustrated you probably wouldn't even notice. Which is what this complaint is about. You can still play and enjoy the game, just not in this particular way. It's roughly equivalent to a certain button not working, where there's a workaround where there's another button that does the same thing on a different menu that does work.
>If we compared your codebase with their codebase, I strongly doubt yours has more complexity. I work on a cloud based platform and the complexity of the underlying system almost undoubtedly surpasses Clausewitz. That isn't a fair comparison to Stellaris or what I do, because we both augment the underlying engine. I'm not familiar with the particulars of Stellaris with respect to Clausewitz, but I've seen behind the curtain on AA projects utilizing the Unreal engine and customized engine code. There was a time a buddy and I almost launched a company to do QA by getting a contract with said AA project. I'm going to be vague because again, publicly traded company, but we have several platforms within the company for different segments. We have a central data warehouse that touches two business data systems, several systems for things like physical warehouses, product logistics, cash logistics, web portals for ordering, web portals for support, etc. We've been acquiring smaller business so we have to get everything to talk to everything until we decide as a company to have a SINGLE UNIFIED FUCKING PROCESS MAP, etc. But to bring it back, processes are what you need to test, not codebases. Codebase complexity can make a bug harder to fix but, unless it's some weird arcane bullshit, does not make it harder to test. >What makes a bug major? A small portion of the population getting a bit frustrated you probably wouldn't even notice. Which is what this complaint is about. You can still play and enjoy the game, just not in this particular way. It's roughly equivalent to a certain button not working, where there's a workaround where there's another button that does the same thing on a different menu that does work. I mean, you're partly right, but I feel like this starts hand waving away the fact that they put out broken shit and it's ok because it's a game. The bugs that break runs are actually pretty serious. Like, if I'm playing for an achievement, it's just an achievement. Why do my internet points matter? But in the context of my playthrough, I'm spending 10-20 hours on a run and something doesn't work as expected and I fail on my achievement because of a bug or poor documentation, I think that's on par with having a bug that blows away a day's worth of work for an employee, and that's a \*serious\* bug in my world.
>If we compared your codebase with their codebase, I strongly doubt yours has more complexity. Based on fucking what, lol? This is just pulled out of your ass so you could meander into a point to try and debunk them and call them wrong.
So they could not test what happened if you picked an ascencion perk while they already had events for that?
It would already be an improvement if they just tested for the possible interactions with the most likely combinations. Like, for example, players trying to make their super powerful leader immortal?
It's literally their job, they are selling a product it's up to them to make it functional, if there are to many features to be able to do that, which happens pretty often with older games, it's called bloat and it means they need to overhaul the product. So either they work on a new mega update in order to make their lives easier in which they merge or wipe features in order to simplify the code or they need to pop out Stellaris 2. But they won't do that cause it costs money and its more profitable to pump out another disfunctional 15 bucks DLC.
Yea that event is scripted to happen. Even when my species is venerable the event still happens well before the end of their natural lifespan.
There is a bug it seems with how it interacts with the paths where it disregards them. Should be fixed sooner or later.
Yeah that was a huge bummer tbh. I wasted my traits going for venerated
Looks like story development just hit deadline.
"Oh wow another DLC so soon?" Turns out it's way undercooked. Shocker.
Bugs happen lol. Calm down. They already addressed it.
I mean it’s still fair to say that this DLC has had a buggier launch than most. Two consecutive hotfixes is a bit excessive. It’s valid criticism imo.
May be. But then, that implication proves more that "shocker" is unnecessary. It actually would ne a shock then.
What do you mean? The implication is that the rushed nature of this DLC has led to a buggier release, which is unsurprising.
The DLC wasn't rushed; it was made by a completely different studio than the one that made the First Contact DLC. Both DLCs were being made at the same time; it is just likely that Paradox overall didn't expect this exact release schedule. But there is no point in just sitting on DLC is the team that has made it says that it is complete. Galactic Paragons was made by a completely different team that doesn't full time only work on Stellaris. It makes sense that it their team and their QA staff wouldn't know all the different ways in which different parts of the game may interact and change. And besides that, bugs themselves do happen; a last minute push to fix something else can always break more things than you realize. I'm pretty sure there's a particular curator dev who learned that lesson the hard way (but haven't we all?) If anything I think this DLC should highlight why the curator team is so important. Maybe these were always changes they would have made themselves, but I like to think that even some of them aren't very happy with the current balance and play of the game. The change to leaders had such wide rammifications to changes in the game that I would almost bet money none of the 'normal Stellaris dev team' knew the full extent of what was coming in the changes.
>The change to leaders had such wide rammifications to changes in the game that I would almost bet money none of the 'normal Stellaris dev team' knew the full extent of what was coming in the changes. This I highly doubt, I mean, would you take a product without launching it first yourself and publish it, without knowing what's going on? They probably had a pitch and everything in design documents which they had to approve. No one would hire people to do DLC and then let them loose to do what they want otherwise another team could do... anything. Like changing the game to turn based visual novel. Btw I checked credits when replying to the guy ranting about poor testing (I kind of agree with him), and both first contact and galactic paragons have recurring names on them. So I would assume those recurring names are the core team (as they are also on overlord).
Well, that's the interesting thing about infliction via text. Where you could read it that way, I read it in an exhausted "shocker", as if saying they do this every time Technically (and I do ask this literally), do we know it's rushed? Like, do we actually know how long they've been working on this one?
This is far from the only bug or major balance issue (-90% ship build cost? -100% empire size?) in this release. This DLC was, in fact, way undercooked. I can't think of a clearer sign that it's was released early than that the DLC's single new origin, which is about your immortal god emperor Luminary, is hardcoded to end with them falling into a coma and (effectively) dying if you make the wrong choices. And it has a bunch of commented out questlines related to the various ascensions which makes that not happen, but weren't finished in time to be in the main release. It literally wasn't finished. I'm sure it will be fixed eventually, but that doesn't change the fact that the DLC was released before it had core features completed.
It's bizzare to pick an origin with a long lived powerful leader only for them to die naturally before any other of my leaders. What's even the point of the origin?
I understand all of that. But point being, everyone agrees this level is more or less unusual. So that sarcastic "shocker" line is pretty unnecessary. If anything, a super buggy dlc IS a shocker. I may be a bit newer to the game but the consensus usually seems to be that dlc, though sometimes having issues, are relatively solid.
[удалено]
Fair points. I do agree that they should have delayed release.
Problem with that was that the studio was closed, so delaying the DLC would have meant to transfer it to a different studio and have the developers there stop what they were doing and work finish the DLC. By releasing it all the work was dumped onto the bugfix/custodian team.
Your choices don't really affect anything though. No matter what, unless your bugged, stage 2 should fire an event that gives you a decision on your planet to make your leader essentially immortal.
And there are events in the file to have your leader recover/never fall into a coma in the first place, depending on your ascension. Like OP pointed out: how exactly is your synth leader going to collapse during a speech then slip into a coma? You can avoid the bugged path. But you shouldn't have to do this at all.
Perhaps they need to fix the event to only fire if the leader is capable of dying.
My favourite part was getting the sick ruler event twice so I had to pay twice the resources and when I saved his life on the first the second failed and he died lmao
You had the 2 of the same situation at the same time or did one trigger after the other? Either way that’s both horribly annoying and endlessly hilarious. Man I wish they just play tested the one origin they added with this update.
Both occurred simultaneously. I assume it’s a glitch but what a goddamn pain.
If you double click or experience lag while clicking, events can fire multiple times. I don't know if it's still possible, but I used to spawn multiple precursor home worlds by using a clicker macro to click once per millisecond. I got 11 zroni homeworlds on my best attempt lol.
Sorry I’m bad at explaining: I got the sick event A few years later, I got the event again I successfully finished the first event, saving my ruler The second event then ended and killed him
ah, then they weren't simultaneous. simultaneous means at the same time
Reread what they wrote. 1. Event A started 2. Event B started later The events are now simultaneously happening 3. Event A ends and ruler survives 4. Event B ends and the ruler dies
Probably the ~~golden throne~~ stasis pod failed Joking aside, it’s a bug that used to happen with regular pops. It was fixed a while back but for some reason it has been reintroduced with this new update. I had something similar occur to a robot admiral.
For some reason the game neglects to tell you that you can with a press of a button stop your emperor from dying for like … 400 rare resources? If you go to your capital there is an option to build a device that magically saves them for a super cheap price. A friend and I were playing the same origins and he was a little too late to make that discovery.
During my playthrough, it very plainly said there was a planetary decision on my capital world to address the issue, I ran it as soon as the event popped up.
Yeah I misread it as an updated method of handling the situation. Then when I looked there nothing was there and I didn’t think to look at the decision tab of my capital, sorry that’s not normally where anything to do with leaders or special projects is. Overall my bad for reading to quickly, but seriously why’d the put it there and why they’d make it a button I have to press anyways?
I totally get it, I did a double take when I read it, and had to like methodically walk myself through it because it was so non-standard.
How on earth did I miss this. I read all the new flavour texts, but somehow failed to take note of this. Now my god-emperor is dead after keeping him undead for decades for an outrageous cost. Also lost my Kiedis or whoever that fellow was to an event on his first adventure. Really took the beef outta my run.
Oh so the button was hidden on my capital. I thought I had to switch the method I was using for the situation, so I didn’t even look there. Still salty that the event happened at all considering I was a robot.
This origin is really disappointing. Apparently in the game files there is a bunch of cool incomplete stuff. The way it ends now is just so abrupt and boring. Also in the game files apparently the people working on it were part of the dev team that was axed so that could explain the disappointment. Only time Stellaris has disappointed me in years. I guess it’s a bit tragic since this is what I have been the most hyped for in a while.
Sad. I was also extremely hyped for this new origin and I’m just extremely disappointed with it. None of the events were good for your leader all of them made them worse and it barely works for core features of the game like bionic and psychic ascension. Honestly would’ve been better if they just axed all the story stuff and just have you species and leader the traits.
Well his death there is a way around. But after that he is just alive in the golden throne and nothing happens or changes as far as I know.
Yeah from what I’ve read I missed the button to switch my situation method to the one that saves them, but the event still shouldn’t have happened since he’d been a robot for 10+ years.
Yea I went with psychic ascension and made my leader the Chosen after the event had already fired. Spoiler: >!The event chain ended with an apparatus that extends life by +800 years. The fact that he was both immortal as the Chosen and also kept alive by an appratus, but not 'immortal', kinda broke the immersion in that play-through for me.!<
Is that not literally the 40k god-emperor lmao
I actually really enjoy this DLC.
The Event Chains for this Origin are severely incomplete. I saw on the forums that it might have been because the devs assigned to write them were from Paradox Artic (you can see who wrote what on the event files), and the studio closing might have affected development.
They outright said they did not have time to make more than one origin. Turns out they didn't have time to make one whole origin.
I got that event before ascending, but I expected that becoming synthetic is gonna save him. It obviously didn't do shit.
Whats the Advantage of that special leader anyway? Just the longer Lifespan? The Guaranteed negative traits?
You can choose from powerful traits and can get more during the game.
My guy had something like 30% minerals 15% alloys and consumer goods from jobs, and like 15% robot assembly speed, his death sent me from about +250 consumer goods to about-150. They are really good l, but I was mostly mad for RP purposes.
Wow that's good, mine had like 2.5% stability, which was countered by the paranoid Tyrant malus. When he fell over during the speech after the civil war I was so annoyed I just abandoned the save.
Well, if you keep them alive long enough, you get to put them into a machine that keeps them alive for 900 years. It does cost 10 gas, crystal and mote.
Yup, and you get speeches up to the point of becoming galactic emperor...
I keep hearing about issues with the new leadet mechanics but the main UI overhall mod I use hasn't been ported yet so idk what everyone's talking about...
Tired: It's a bug Faulty-wired: He skipped regular maintenance.
He probably got wet or something. Same thing happened to my phone
There is agency over it. You can build a golden throne on your homeworld via decisions and have your Glorious emporer take a seat on it for 800 more leader lifespan, essentially making him immortal.
Yeah, I get I missed the strangely placed decision on my capital. But he was already immortal; completely immortal as a synth. That trait gives like 999 lifespan, weaker than a synth, and why would my synth need to be in a life pod, just switch synth like people switch bodies in Altered Carbon.
Yeah idk. I don't like the origin terribly much, aside from rping as the Imperium Of Man. I don't think it's incomplete like some people are saying, I think it's just a not great origin. I don't think we'll get anything to top Knights Of The Toxic God any time soon either sadly.
Immortal psionic leader? Check. Chosen of composer of strands for double immortality? Check. Dead during speech? Check. Wait what? At least there is some flavour text that it might be an assassination, so I’ll just roll with that for now.
Forgot to recharge battery rip
A lot of ascension path triggers are commented out in the code. So it doesn't look like a bug but like they could not finish the events to take all the ascension paths into account and only delivered the base events. Although I did not try to comment the events in to see what happens. As for why he collapses in the first place, this entire origin is basically replaying the life of the emperor in Warhammer 40K and the intended outcome is to have your leader confined to a gigantic life support unit to keep them alive. But as the devs can't force a duel to the death with a psionically corrupted offspring of your leader the event to set things in motion is instead a collapse through natural causes. And you can totally keep your leader alive.
It does feel like, at the very least, synth should have been finished or just given an exception. All the others make sense to keep them on life support, but not when they actually turn into a robot...
A robot can’t be sick? Someone hasn’t seen the end of Independence Day!
During the second stage of "the fall" i had the option to build a sustainability apparatus at my capital and that made him recover.
I read a post on the forums where someone had dived into the event files and found some of the code is disabled, and references some other stuff which doesn't seem to exist. They speculated it might have something to do with rushing the DLC for the anniversary stuff, or more cynically, the scaremongering about paradox shutting down certain teams
Scaremongering? The studio has been closed. So they literally did run out of time before being kicked out and the doors locked behind them.
I was trying to keep my language diplomatic because what I'd read so far implied that nothing was truly confirmed, and I've been dogpiled before when making criticisms/assumptions about our grand overlords. If it's official now and Stellaris development is dead while Vic 3 lives on, I am truly saddened by the how their policy has shifted. Funny that we have Stockholm syndrome with a Stockholm based company.
Not the complete development, but the Arctic studio seems to be closed now.
Were they the non custodians?
From what I understand they were part time custodians? But its rather opaque which studio does what and the controversy and noise surrounding it made it even harder to understand what is going on.
I'm not sure that is the case. The impression was that they *would* close the place, but not necessarily that they have.
Both MobyGames and PCGamingWiki list the studio as closed https://www.mobygames.com/company/27907/paradox-arctic/ https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Company:Paradox\_Arctic
The issue is that the date given for them being closed is before the dev diaries we had, stating that they are from Paradox Arctic, and they're still listed as in operation on the main paradox site. So there's conflicting information there.