izigame.me

Alright, let me spit some real game at you here. I play Crusader Kings 2 currently, I have a blast while doing so, and I have all 68 downloadable content packs for this game, acquired over the handful of years since I bought it. At the time I wrote this, I have 2,005 hours in this game, if that adds an iota of legitimacy to what I have to say here. This review isn't negative because of CK2, and I'm not bitter about the CK2 subscription model from a "I should have waited because then I would have saved money" point of view. This review is negative because of the disturbing pattern that I've noticed and thought about regarding all of Paradox Development Studio's current "grand strategy" titles (CK3, EU4, Stellaris, HOI, Imperator). This is just my perspective, and I know I will find many enemies amongst those who drank PDX's kool-aid, but I believe that what I have to say here is right and true, and all I ask is that you consider this before buying, if for nothing more than for hearing a well-informed critical perspective from the inside.
You, potential player, will find that Crusader Kings 2 seems to have a high financial barrier to entry. At the time I write this, the core, gameplay-affecting expansions cost ~$183 minus a 10% bundle discount. The full, *developer-intended* experience, including everything made for the game (including 2 e-books and the completely self-contained Sunset Invasion DLC), is ~$317 minus a 17% discount. Those price points are somewhat ludicrous, but this game is the kind I’ll still be playing 10-20 years from now. As one of those grand strategy games whose gameplay partially exists in your mind, it has the potential for that sort of soft longevity if that’s your thing.
Now, let me tell you my real beef, which is with PDX’s remarkable history of releasing DLCs that can range from competent, significant additions to unpolished or unfinished to just straight broken. Make no mistake: PDX is capable of releasing DLCs that at least seemed like it’s quality was assured by playtesters, and not all DLCs come out in a bad state, but any fellow CK2-heads will recall Way of Life’s release (every AI took the seduction focus, so the whole world had herpes and syphilis) and Conclave’s release (The threat system was unbalanced to the point where an Irish duke taking a single county would result in the Pope and the Caliph banding together to take you down a peg. The council was so overpowered that one funny review said something like “tl;dr: paradox thinks there were constitutional elective monarchies in the 8th century”). Let’s not forget EU4’s Common Sense and its patch (gave the AI the ability to develop provinces, but not the player unless you bought the DLC; only recently rectified), and what appears to be the case with Stellaris’s Overlord (haven’t bought it, but the reviews detail a similar experience on launch of a clearly untested DLC that introduces bugs and design issues). All that is to say that there is definitely a lack of QA testing done by PDX for their DLCs. On the one hand, this makes sense. The people who made this game are in their 30s and 40s and 50s with families, kids, and mortgages. They don’t have time to play a video game for long enough to provide adequate QA suggestions, and PDX (or any company that controls a game as a service) will not pay for the QA testing required to ensure a good product because (1) their games get too big, ergo (2) to properly QA test everything to ensure a well-made product would require a robust QA department and an amount of money and time on their end that they are unwilling to spend. That would eat into the bottom line for no other purpose than to make a better game, which isn’t necessarily profitable. I think you’ll find that PDX grand strategy DLCs and their accompanying patches mirror strongly the patches of League of Legends in both execution and outcome: Changes will be introduced to a game by people who don’t play said game, resulting in changes that don’t accurately reflect what the game needs to be healthy or complete, leading to the frustration of players on the ground and a loss of goodwill from cynics like me. This is the natural sacrifice of a game as a service, and you need to realize this before buying into CK2, whether monthly or wholesale: CK2 and all extant PDX grand strategy games are services whose cost for full ownership of the *developer-intended* experience is obscenely high.
I was there for Stellaris on launch day. I even pre-ordered it for the little bug guy portrait in-game. For those who can recall, 1.0 Stellaris, from a design perspective, is unrecognizable from what we have today. There are so many added and removed systems in current Stellaris that weren’t even considered before its release. This makes me question “Why?” Why would they release a game only to so radically change it down the line? Wouldn’t they have been better off taking a few years and just making one finished game? This can be a matter of perspective, though. Where some people see that and say “Well, PDX needs money to continue the development of the game,” I see that and say “I paid for a game, not a service, so I expect a complete product for my $40-$60, not a perfectly breakable platform to sell me further products.” My problem with all the PDX Dev Studio DLCs isn’t that I don’t like extra stuff being made for a game I like. It’s that there are certain features baked into the CK2 DLCs (excluding Sunset Invasion) that are arguably essential, even if some consider them to just be nice-to-haves. For instance, the Old Gods DLC is fantastic, thematic, and absolutely essential. The component I think is most essential to the DLC and ought to have been baked into the game to begin with was the pushing back of the start date from 1066 (this was way before the free Iron Century update) to 867. To me, the pushing back of the start date is literally more game that is added by just adjusting a couple of values and looking at some real life maps for reference. The analogy I came up with is that this part of Old Gods DLC and those like it (i.e., those DLCs containing non-relevant features that affect the core gameplay) are like the back door to a house you buy. Sure, the back door isn’t strictly necessary for the house to be a house, but having to specifically pay extra for it on top of the house itself is kinda sus. Why wasn’t a back door specified in the original design for the house?
In the end, I can’t recommend CK2. I can’t recommend it in good faith without informing you of the DLC practices of the company that made it. If you in the future choose to buy a PDX Development Studio grand strategy game, you should be prepared for that game to meet one of three fates: either it becomes bloated beyond belief (EU4), it becomes a complete product after almost a decade (CK2), or it will be shelved indefinitely in a somewhat polished yet undercooked and barren state (Imperator: Rome).
TL;DR: The PDX Grand Strategy model enables the release of sub-standard games and DLCs, and you paying $5 a month (or God forbid $317) for the *developer-intended* CK2 experience after the highs and lows it has been through is an endorsement of that release practice, which I don’t think you should do. If you buy any other PDX Dev Studio title on launch day, just know you are buying into a service, not a complete game.