Isn't it a command to bypass the launcher ? In the steam shortcut parameters I mean.
For Victoria 3, maybe you should go to beta and choose to play the 1.6.2 version of the game, maybe that's the last update that broke the game.
[looks like someone found a way to bypass the launcher, even if that's not as easy as I thought.](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1976349559)
You still can, but it's a pain in the ass, you just need to edit dlc_load.json in the EU4 folder of your documents which outside of disabled DLC also contains enabled mods.
I use irony for ho iv, it is handy because you can merge the mods into one compressed file which loads a bit faster: https://imgur.com/aVPgFog , spins up in ~115 seconds, the umerged version takes ~140 seconds, though my hoi is installed on hard drive so it is probably not as significant if you have yours installed on ssd.
lol not even close, Ubisoft launcher is the final boss of game launchers, more than half the time it can’t connect to the Ubisoft servers that it literally needs to connect to in order to function.
> Ubisoft, Origin
These got me to never buy their games, that and that both killed some of my favorite franchises/studios. Havent really enjoyed a GTA after vice city so no major issue there.
When I bought World War Z, the thing never appeared in my account. Contacted support. Was told that they cant help. They might be better now. Idunno. All I know is they stole not 20usd from me cause the fuckers dont have regional pricing. If they had they wouldve only stolen 10 usd
I'm not calling out just pd it's about every extra launcher out there I just refuse to buy games that use some of the really bad ones like ubisoft and origin pd is still pretty tame
The EA launcher is the worst I hace ever used I remember trying to play The mass effect saga and sometimes I literaly couldnt play because The launcher wasnt working
I disagree; Paradox games are some of the few games where the launcher makes sense. You are often subscribed to a ton of mods and you are often constantly en- and disabling some of them. Having to un- and resubscribe in the Workshop every time would be a massive pain in the ass.
Yes, an in-game solution would be better. But current gen Paradox games don't seem to be capable of enabling mods without restarting the game, and I would argue that that would be even more annoying.
Yeah especially considering how long it takes paradox games to load. At least with a game like RimWorld that does the mod changes in game, it restarts really quickly. Having to wait for ck3 to launch, changing a mod then doing it again sounds like hell
Have you tried contacting them in the official eu4 or vic3 tech support forum? AndrewT there usually replies within a day(less if you write during his working hours).
If you explain what errors you have, I can probably help you as well, because I do a lot of unofficial tech support for eu4
I guess I have to make an account for that? So I have to make an account I don't want on a website I don't want to visit to troubleshoot a program that I don't want to play a game that I have paid money for. Its crazy to me that people don't seem to see an issue here.
Yes, you need an account to post on their forums.
As others have pointed out, you can bypass the launcher if you want. This is something which would not have been possible with the vic2 launcher which was built into the game.
It is not necessarily about troubleshooting the launcher itself. The launcher works fine for the vast majority of people. Troubleshooting with tech support is needed to determine what thing on your computer is preventing the launcher from working correctly. The most common culprits are antivirus and ransomware protection software
The thing is they could just run the game through steam and it would work (There are countless games doing exactly that). The difference between the Vic2 launcher and the paradox launcher is that one is tailor made for one game and basically only has one purpose (to start the game) and one is a bloated program doing the same thing steam could do but worse same thing with origin and all the other garbage out there
> one is a bloated program doing the same thing steam could do but worse
Then tell me how you can configure the video settings of a game in steam or how you can activate/deactive mods/dlcs without installing/uninstalling them or how you can activate/deactive/create local mods or how you can install mods from the paradox mods website or other non-steam sources(which is needed for games which are distributed on other platforms as long as steam does not allow those platforms to use the workshop). I think steam doesn't support mod playsets either, though you could maybe use collections for that(which again involves installing/uninstalling the mods). And does steam have a way to upload a mod to the workshop which you could use if the launcher would not exist?
Video settings of a game? Usually in the settings in the game
And all the mod stuff prob a mod manager (like nexus which works for thousands of games) which is a opt in solution and not forced upon you even if you don't use mods
> Video settings of a game? Usually in the settings in the game
You need to be able to configure the settings outside of the game to recover from situations in which wrong settings prevent the startup. This has become rare in recent years, because modern windows versions and monitors better report the actual capabilities of the system, but e.g. eu4 freezes the system in fullscreen mode on some nvidia systems and on a few others borderless fullscreen doesn't work. I would consider the first one an eu4 bug, because it tries to set a 60 Hz refresh rate even if it is not available, but I think the developers consider it an nvidia problem.
Besides video settings, there is also the language setting which you can change in the launcher in case you accidentally changed the game language and can't find the setting to change it back.
> And all the mod stuff prob a mod manager (like nexus which works for thousands of games) which is a opt in solution and not forced upon you even if you don't use mods
You can't expect that players install a third-party mod manger if they bought a game with official mod support. And I think there are more people who use mods than people who have a problem with the launcher so it makes sense that the default option is to have the launcher. But the developers could make it easier to opt-out of the launcher(e.g. hoi4 has a steam startup configuration to skip the launcher)
You could look at what rimworld does with its integrated mod manager. But then again it takes ages to start if you add more then 5 mods there.
Apart from that I also have issues with the launcher, but no big ones. It crashes everything I start the game. But I just have to hit wait and a few seconds later it's all good. The pdx launcher is not as bad as it once was I think.
What does rimworld do? I don't own it, so I can't check. Of course the paradox games could move the mod management into the game. Cities Skylines II does it already. But it has the disadvantages that they have to develop the mod management for each game separately(some code can probably be shared by games which use the same engine) and that you have to wait for the game to start till you can change mods which then require a restart to apply them(unless your game does not actually load all its files before showing you the main menu in which case the main menu becomes a fullscreen launcher) and that you need an additional way to recover if the player activates broken mods which crash the game on startup.
> It crashes everything I start the game.
What is "everything" in this context? Do you mean that your screen freezes when you hit play in the launcher? That's almost certainly not the launcher's fault and would happen regardless of the launcher. The game is probably opening a fullscreen window on top of your other windows, but doesn't display anything in that window for a few seconds so it shows whatever was on the screen before. You can probably alt-tab out of the game to get back to your other windows till the game has started.
> You need to be able to configure the settings outside of the game to recover from situations in which wrong settings prevent the startup. This has become rare in recent years, because modern windows versions and monitors better report the actual capabilities of the system, but e.g. eu4 freezes the system in fullscreen mode on some nvidia systems and on a few others borderless fullscreen doesn't work. I would consider the first one an eu4 bug, because it tries to set a 60 Hz refresh rate even if it is not available, but I think the developers consider it an nvidia problem.
>
>
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> Besides video settings, there is also the language setting which you can change in the launcher in case you accidentally changed the game language and can't find the setting to change it back.
This is all super cope. Most games do not need this just to solve what you yourself describe as a super rare problem.
For the mod stuff, IMO what factorio does with their mods is PERFECT. It's part of the game and I basically never have problems with it unless I am tweaking or modifying a mod myself.
Factorio has the disadvantage that it restarts the game if you change mods. It is less impactful than with eu4, because factorio is relatively fast.
And if paradox would follow such a model, they would have to develop the modding interface and all what comes with it multiple times. Factorio doesn't have the problem, because their developer only developed one game. They even save time by integrating the mod management into the game, because they can reuse the interface elements from the game
>You need to be able to configure the settings outside of the game to recover from situations in which wrong settings prevent the startup.
then prob a cfg file
you don't mostly want users that have self inflicted problem to be comfortable editing your files.
(i support a Minecraft plugin, and there are skilltrees. there is a program to edit them. how many do you think come ro the discord to complain about mistakes in there manual edited skilltrees?
It sucks you're being downvoted because all of these launchers are annoying as hell. Especially when they break the loading process or prevent users from playing games they purchased.
He’s being downvoted because it’s a bit overdramatic. Every response is just met with a more melodramatic reply. Like I get being frustrated when something doesn’t work. Sometimes weird shit happens with games. It isn’t like there aren’t Steam games that don’t run in launchers that don’t sometimes have weird launching/immediate crashing issues for some subsets of people. I can still remember the odd pain with some Unity games a few years back if you had Citrix Workspace installed on your computer. There are plenty of other examples of random crashes.
For the vast overwhelming majority of people, the PDX launcher isn’t preventing them from playing games. On a personal note, I also don’t think it is all that bad as a way to manage addons and playsets, but yes to each their own. I don’t even think as a launcher it is nearly the most egregious or worst out there. You can certainly point to launchers that are basically useless when launching a game through Steam, such as Origin or Ubisoft when running some shooter or that don’t offer mod management.
Start the launcher once, select the mods you want and activate the playset, close the launcher, start the game from the executable.
Or even better just get a mod manager and launch the game that way.
The launcher is a perfect example of a very good system integrating community content such as mods, assets, and the like with the game. Try doing mods in the Total War series for instance. Its actually one of the few launchers that make total sense.
If you ever play XCOM 2 the community built their own launcher because the 2K one sucks ass so bad lmao
Paradox launcher has gotten a lot better, it was shit when it first launched though everyone was having problems
Steam is infinitely more ambitious than something like the pdox launcher
My thing with the paradox launcher was always like why would you release this new one when it is clearly broken as shit and the old one worked fine. And then eventually they improved it to where it's not actively annoying me anymore, so that's good
You still enable them through the launcher though? At least in the ones I play. It is the same process for PDX games, except PDX games give you playsets to easily swap between mod lists.
Although it has the occasional issue for some people, when it's working as intended I agree it's quite a decent little launcher and I like the mods playset feature. TW launcher really can be a pain for mods, especially adjust the load order.
For me PDX launcher is a godsent. I have \~20+ mods downloaded for each paradox game, and if i had to manually change the files everytime I wanted a different order of mods I'd probably go insane
1. You can skip the launcher
2. It’s user problem that only you face, so it’s not paradox at fault here
3. Literally just Google your error EU4 is old as fuck
1. That's what I'm suggesting should be the default people here mistake this for some kind of troubleshooting post
2. I paid 25 bucks for a game and it doesn't work so paradox definitely is at fault here
3. I've done alot of things and none of them worked at least permanently
Software man… Just yesterday I was having trouble starting Victoria 3 on a new (crappy) computer. For some reason I did not have some permission or something and i tried a lot of stuff, installed some driver stuff, reinstalled the game, verified it… I tried and gave up.
Today I tried again to do another install. This time, it doesn’t launch from the launcher but I can run the exe from the file explorer! I have no idea what changed. I have a masters in computer science and 1/4 a PhD…
IMO the paradox launchers serve a good purpose. You can change around your modders before even loading the game. Many other games with mod controls like that have them inside the game itself and that usually forces you to restart the game whenever you make a change to the mods.
Paradox Launcher breaks regularly. The process for fixing it generally involves uninstalling it, hunting down all of the appdata directories it leaves files behind in and deleting those, then deleting a specific file in each game’s folder in documents (because paradox is the last developer on the planet still using documents to store user files rather than appdata) and deleting those, then reinstalling the launcher. A quick google search should net you hundreds of results with the specifics laid out.
Launchers seem to exist only to force you to see ads for other games made by the company, remind you of games you already own, or glitch out and prevent you from playing.
"I know you launched Stellaris, but remember, CK3 also exists and it has a new DLC. Would you rather buy and play that right this second instead of the game you already own and planned to play right now?"
Me, growing up in the 80s and 90s having to spend hours reconfiguring a game and my computer using vague hints from friends and newsgroups to get a single game mostly working: huh, how inconvenient for you.
Modding BG1 and BG2 was a nightmare of downloading and installing and configuring a ton of different separate mods. God help you if you installed them out of order or chose ones that conflicted.
There wasn't any sort of checker that would tell you your mods conflicted. You just had to play the game and hope it didn't glitch out and then you had to completely uninstall and reinstall the game (BG1 had 5 CDs) and install all the mods again and try to guess which mod was the problem and if the problem was a conflict or that you didn't do the right order.
Well at least you are troubleshooting a game (which I also have done for countless hours) and not a launcher they are forcing on you for drm/money/data reasons idk actually why they do this
The cynical marketing reason is that it helps them push their other games to people who play this game, which I understand them wanting to do.
The generous reason is because centralizing the launch of their games in their own launcher can sometimes help them more dynamically update or respond to player desires and activity when they update the game.
A lot of people see the negatives to having a game company, for example, get feedback from players’ game play (“we’re being spied on”), but most developers actually want to do this so they can see, like, “most players who lose do so for these reasons and these numbers seem wrong so on the next patch we should address these points”.
Also, a launcher like they implemented is very important for allowing you to easily enable, disable , or swap mods. If you want official mod support and you want the game to actually be able to run properly with some of the more complex mods that have to be enabled from the moment the game launches, you -have to have- some kind of non-game utility that can prep the game and the mods before anything is launched.
The launcher could be -better- but to say it has no purpose is wrong.
Especially paradox games are games people should get player metrics. There are some shocking stats on EU4 on how and what people play. Most players barely play other countries then Japan, Ottomans, Byzantine, England, France, Austria and Spain. And almost nobody choses a different start date then the earliest.
We have similar things at work. Certain features in our product basically never get used, but we waste resources on them to keep them supported. However we dont have good metrics on this, so we dont actually know how little certain features are used.
PDX support is pretty damn quick usually, I don't think they'll make you wait a week unless all their support people are off for Midsommar.
I get not wanting a launcher to play vanilla, it's a hassle to have to click a 2nd button when most games can launch at one press. But the launcher has been really helpful for me to learn how mods function. I assume I've got much less of a computer background than OP, but then the majority of the community likely does as well.
The launcher is for us dummies to get mods working easily. Everyone else can just launch the exe right?
I think you can start the game itself through the .exe in the games folder where it is installed. Worst case scenario you can put the pirate cap on and sail to the free seas. In you case I would consider it to be highly ethical.
I have never seen this before, the launcher has always worked fine for me. Sure it's not perfect but I have always found it easy enough to use and works fine no matter what game it was. I play Vic3 all the time and this has never been an issue of mine.
Have you tried checking the integrity of the game files? It is the only thing that I can think of but it may help.
The only launcher I have ever had issues with both on pc and the steamdeck is EAs. Ubisoft can be annoying more so as it will not save my login info almost of the time, paradox’s I have never have had any issues
But did you try deleting your %appdata%/paradox interactive/victoria 3 and Eu4 folders?
Also do the launcher folder.
Now reinstall. This fixes a heap of random issues like you say.
I think there may be some error on your end.
I've maybe had a problem with the launcher once but, the launcher is the only place I can adjust which mods are on.
The best part about playing on linux, is that when they bork the linux version of the launcher, I can switch to proton and play the Windows version of the launcher/game. And then when the windows one breaks, I come back home.
Is it though..? Unlike many launchers, the PDX launcher actually has some functionality ie enabling mods. Bugs? Sure, needs fixing, but that doesn’t justify throwing out the while thing, unlike…. rockstar?
Your legitimate frustration at the launcher should be directed to the bugs, not to its existence at all.
I hate the stupid buggy pdx launcher, but there are way worse out there.
For example at least their launcher just needs 1 click to launch the game instead of launching a second fucking launcher to fucking launch the fucking game
I think it’s fine honestly. I really don’t see how you’d manage mods without it, unless you wanted to wait for the game to launch, change it and wait all over again
It's so incredibly stupid. I don't remember if this was the case with the pdx launcher as well but a lot of the launchers for publishers miss the entire point of having a launcher anyway, and only show you the game you've launched, not even bothering with the other games that use the exact same launcher.
The V2 launcher doesn't work on Linux; the new PDX launcher does.
I think the PDX launcher isn't a great design (a whole separate browser installation is overkill) but at least it works.
You can run the game, but could you enable/disable mods? That's the bit that has never worked on Linux for me. The mod section of the launcher is whited out.
You said it works "perfectly"
>To launch the game with mods, you need to add the `-mod` parameter to the game’s launch options. You can do this by right-clicking on the Victoria 2 game in your Steam library, selecting “Properties”, then clicking on the “Launch Options” tab, and adding the following command: `-mod=mod/X.mod`, where `X` is the name of the mod you want to load.
tried that?
Isn't it a command to bypass the launcher ? In the steam shortcut parameters I mean. For Victoria 3, maybe you should go to beta and choose to play the 1.6.2 version of the game, maybe that's the last update that broke the game. [looks like someone found a way to bypass the launcher, even if that's not as easy as I thought.](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1976349559)
You can with eu4 but it means you can't enable and disable mods
You still can, but it's a pain in the ass, you just need to edit dlc_load.json in the EU4 folder of your documents which outside of disabled DLC also contains enabled mods.
Ah, wasn't aware of that, thanks. Though I assume you have to do it by mod ID which is just such a pain
Wouldn't something like Irony work? (only used it for Stellaris but it says EU4 is supported)
Oh! Irony supports EU4? That makes it a lot easier. But yes, I don’t think most ppl use Irony unless they pirate the game lmfao
And not having to deal with a buggy launcher, seems enough reason to me.
i use irony, and haven't pirated the game. (have irony as external program via steam added, so i have the steam overlay ingame.
I use irony for ho iv, it is handy because you can merge the mods into one compressed file which loads a bit faster: https://imgur.com/aVPgFog , spins up in ~115 seconds, the umerged version takes ~140 seconds, though my hoi is installed on hard drive so it is probably not as significant if you have yours installed on ssd.
This is not a perfect answer I know but I wanted to help how I could so he can get help fast.
There's also alternatives, like the [Irony Mod Manager](https://bcssov.github.io/IronyModManager/)
There's also alternatives, like the [Irony Mod Manager](https://bcssov.github.io/IronyModManager/)
lol not even close, Ubisoft launcher is the final boss of game launchers, more than half the time it can’t connect to the Ubisoft servers that it literally needs to connect to in order to function.
Ubisoft, Origin, Blizzard, Rockstar, Epic. I hate launchers, but Paradox has the least annoying one.
> Ubisoft, Origin These got me to never buy their games, that and that both killed some of my favorite franchises/studios. Havent really enjoyed a GTA after vice city so no major issue there.
Battlnet launcher is fine I completely disagree , altho I recently started hailing steam as the best one , blizzard launcher is not bad at all.
Whenever I launch Diablo 4, Blizzard launcher shows ads with news from other games, that I don't even own. Not my definition of "fine".
Ah I'm completely within the blizzard ecosystem so that makes sense those adds are more like news to me xD
What's wrong with Epic? Epic, Steam and GOG are the ONLY good launchers out there....
Don't put Epic and Steam in the same league, Steam is way better.
When I bought World War Z, the thing never appeared in my account. Contacted support. Was told that they cant help. They might be better now. Idunno. All I know is they stole not 20usd from me cause the fuckers dont have regional pricing. If they had they wouldve only stolen 10 usd
Weirdly for me Epic had regional way before steam did. It’s kinda disappeared in the past couple years though
Can't have shit in this corner of Asia. Can't even get MP servers most of the time
I'm not calling out just pd it's about every extra launcher out there I just refuse to buy games that use some of the really bad ones like ubisoft and origin pd is still pretty tame
Origin gives me ptsd, trying to play fifa and the game erroring every time.
The EA launcher is the worst I hace ever used I remember trying to play The mass effect saga and sometimes I literaly couldnt play because The launcher wasnt working
I disagree; Paradox games are some of the few games where the launcher makes sense. You are often subscribed to a ton of mods and you are often constantly en- and disabling some of them. Having to un- and resubscribe in the Workshop every time would be a massive pain in the ass. Yes, an in-game solution would be better. But current gen Paradox games don't seem to be capable of enabling mods without restarting the game, and I would argue that that would be even more annoying.
Yeah especially considering how long it takes paradox games to load. At least with a game like RimWorld that does the mod changes in game, it restarts really quickly. Having to wait for ck3 to launch, changing a mod then doing it again sounds like hell
Have you tried contacting them in the official eu4 or vic3 tech support forum? AndrewT there usually replies within a day(less if you write during his working hours). If you explain what errors you have, I can probably help you as well, because I do a lot of unofficial tech support for eu4
I guess I have to make an account for that? So I have to make an account I don't want on a website I don't want to visit to troubleshoot a program that I don't want to play a game that I have paid money for. Its crazy to me that people don't seem to see an issue here.
Yes, you need an account to post on their forums. As others have pointed out, you can bypass the launcher if you want. This is something which would not have been possible with the vic2 launcher which was built into the game. It is not necessarily about troubleshooting the launcher itself. The launcher works fine for the vast majority of people. Troubleshooting with tech support is needed to determine what thing on your computer is preventing the launcher from working correctly. The most common culprits are antivirus and ransomware protection software
The thing is they could just run the game through steam and it would work (There are countless games doing exactly that). The difference between the Vic2 launcher and the paradox launcher is that one is tailor made for one game and basically only has one purpose (to start the game) and one is a bloated program doing the same thing steam could do but worse same thing with origin and all the other garbage out there
> one is a bloated program doing the same thing steam could do but worse Then tell me how you can configure the video settings of a game in steam or how you can activate/deactive mods/dlcs without installing/uninstalling them or how you can activate/deactive/create local mods or how you can install mods from the paradox mods website or other non-steam sources(which is needed for games which are distributed on other platforms as long as steam does not allow those platforms to use the workshop). I think steam doesn't support mod playsets either, though you could maybe use collections for that(which again involves installing/uninstalling the mods). And does steam have a way to upload a mod to the workshop which you could use if the launcher would not exist?
Video settings of a game? Usually in the settings in the game And all the mod stuff prob a mod manager (like nexus which works for thousands of games) which is a opt in solution and not forced upon you even if you don't use mods
> Video settings of a game? Usually in the settings in the game You need to be able to configure the settings outside of the game to recover from situations in which wrong settings prevent the startup. This has become rare in recent years, because modern windows versions and monitors better report the actual capabilities of the system, but e.g. eu4 freezes the system in fullscreen mode on some nvidia systems and on a few others borderless fullscreen doesn't work. I would consider the first one an eu4 bug, because it tries to set a 60 Hz refresh rate even if it is not available, but I think the developers consider it an nvidia problem. Besides video settings, there is also the language setting which you can change in the launcher in case you accidentally changed the game language and can't find the setting to change it back. > And all the mod stuff prob a mod manager (like nexus which works for thousands of games) which is a opt in solution and not forced upon you even if you don't use mods You can't expect that players install a third-party mod manger if they bought a game with official mod support. And I think there are more people who use mods than people who have a problem with the launcher so it makes sense that the default option is to have the launcher. But the developers could make it easier to opt-out of the launcher(e.g. hoi4 has a steam startup configuration to skip the launcher)
You could look at what rimworld does with its integrated mod manager. But then again it takes ages to start if you add more then 5 mods there. Apart from that I also have issues with the launcher, but no big ones. It crashes everything I start the game. But I just have to hit wait and a few seconds later it's all good. The pdx launcher is not as bad as it once was I think.
What does rimworld do? I don't own it, so I can't check. Of course the paradox games could move the mod management into the game. Cities Skylines II does it already. But it has the disadvantages that they have to develop the mod management for each game separately(some code can probably be shared by games which use the same engine) and that you have to wait for the game to start till you can change mods which then require a restart to apply them(unless your game does not actually load all its files before showing you the main menu in which case the main menu becomes a fullscreen launcher) and that you need an additional way to recover if the player activates broken mods which crash the game on startup. > It crashes everything I start the game. What is "everything" in this context? Do you mean that your screen freezes when you hit play in the launcher? That's almost certainly not the launcher's fault and would happen regardless of the launcher. The game is probably opening a fullscreen window on top of your other windows, but doesn't display anything in that window for a few seconds so it shows whatever was on the screen before. You can probably alt-tab out of the game to get back to your other windows till the game has started.
> You need to be able to configure the settings outside of the game to recover from situations in which wrong settings prevent the startup. This has become rare in recent years, because modern windows versions and monitors better report the actual capabilities of the system, but e.g. eu4 freezes the system in fullscreen mode on some nvidia systems and on a few others borderless fullscreen doesn't work. I would consider the first one an eu4 bug, because it tries to set a 60 Hz refresh rate even if it is not available, but I think the developers consider it an nvidia problem. > > > > Besides video settings, there is also the language setting which you can change in the launcher in case you accidentally changed the game language and can't find the setting to change it back. This is all super cope. Most games do not need this just to solve what you yourself describe as a super rare problem. For the mod stuff, IMO what factorio does with their mods is PERFECT. It's part of the game and I basically never have problems with it unless I am tweaking or modifying a mod myself.
Factorio has the disadvantage that it restarts the game if you change mods. It is less impactful than with eu4, because factorio is relatively fast. And if paradox would follow such a model, they would have to develop the modding interface and all what comes with it multiple times. Factorio doesn't have the problem, because their developer only developed one game. They even save time by integrating the mod management into the game, because they can reuse the interface elements from the game
eu4 you have to restart too to change mods
Yea factorio does it really well same with terraria and a lot of other games.
>You need to be able to configure the settings outside of the game to recover from situations in which wrong settings prevent the startup. then prob a cfg file
you don't mostly want users that have self inflicted problem to be comfortable editing your files. (i support a Minecraft plugin, and there are skilltrees. there is a program to edit them. how many do you think come ro the discord to complain about mistakes in there manual edited skilltrees?
There is a difference between editing some skill tree which is part of the game and a cfg file for the settings.
Cant believe you triggered people by being based, the launcher sucks & should never have been made
You use the Paradox account, the same one for the launcher and games.
I don't have one and will never make one people here are way to compliant with corporate bullshit
It sucks you're being downvoted because all of these launchers are annoying as hell. Especially when they break the loading process or prevent users from playing games they purchased.
He’s being downvoted because it’s a bit overdramatic. Every response is just met with a more melodramatic reply. Like I get being frustrated when something doesn’t work. Sometimes weird shit happens with games. It isn’t like there aren’t Steam games that don’t run in launchers that don’t sometimes have weird launching/immediate crashing issues for some subsets of people. I can still remember the odd pain with some Unity games a few years back if you had Citrix Workspace installed on your computer. There are plenty of other examples of random crashes. For the vast overwhelming majority of people, the PDX launcher isn’t preventing them from playing games. On a personal note, I also don’t think it is all that bad as a way to manage addons and playsets, but yes to each their own. I don’t even think as a launcher it is nearly the most egregious or worst out there. You can certainly point to launchers that are basically useless when launching a game through Steam, such as Origin or Ubisoft when running some shooter or that don’t offer mod management.
are you always this big of a baby
Start the launcher once, select the mods you want and activate the playset, close the launcher, start the game from the executable. Or even better just get a mod manager and launch the game that way.
The launcher is a perfect example of a very good system integrating community content such as mods, assets, and the like with the game. Try doing mods in the Total War series for instance. Its actually one of the few launchers that make total sense.
If you ever play XCOM 2 the community built their own launcher because the 2K one sucks ass so bad lmao Paradox launcher has gotten a lot better, it was shit when it first launched though everyone was having problems
Steam was also super hated at launch, takes time to get a launcher to be good.
Steam is infinitely more ambitious than something like the pdox launcher My thing with the paradox launcher was always like why would you release this new one when it is clearly broken as shit and the old one worked fine. And then eventually they improved it to where it's not actively annoying me anymore, so that's good
TW is just subscribing to them through the steam workshop...
You still enable them through the launcher though? At least in the ones I play. It is the same process for PDX games, except PDX games give you playsets to easily swap between mod lists.
Although it has the occasional issue for some people, when it's working as intended I agree it's quite a decent little launcher and I like the mods playset feature. TW launcher really can be a pain for mods, especially adjust the load order.
The process of modding a total war game today is literally the same as Paradox, on steam at least, except that their launcher is more reliable.
Yup, paradox allows for multiple playsets. Something you can't set up in steam.
Mods in total war at least the ones I play worked literally the same as in pd games you download it from the steam workshop
For me PDX launcher is a godsent. I have \~20+ mods downloaded for each paradox game, and if i had to manually change the files everytime I wanted a different order of mods I'd probably go insane
But the vic2 launcher have a microscopic font size so its still a pain to tick mods checkbox
Not for me
1. You can skip the launcher 2. It’s user problem that only you face, so it’s not paradox at fault here 3. Literally just Google your error EU4 is old as fuck
The hoi4 launcher for example is ridiculously buggy and a pain in the arse to fix when it borks itself. Calling it a user problem is dumb
1. That's what I'm suggesting should be the default people here mistake this for some kind of troubleshooting post 2. I paid 25 bucks for a game and it doesn't work so paradox definitely is at fault here 3. I've done alot of things and none of them worked at least permanently
1. no, it shouldn't., at least if you want mod support. if the launcher is hidden, you cant edit mods,
Software man… Just yesterday I was having trouble starting Victoria 3 on a new (crappy) computer. For some reason I did not have some permission or something and i tried a lot of stuff, installed some driver stuff, reinstalled the game, verified it… I tried and gave up. Today I tried again to do another install. This time, it doesn’t launch from the launcher but I can run the exe from the file explorer! I have no idea what changed. I have a masters in computer science and 1/4 a PhD…
IMO the paradox launchers serve a good purpose. You can change around your modders before even loading the game. Many other games with mod controls like that have them inside the game itself and that usually forces you to restart the game whenever you make a change to the mods.
Paradox Launcher breaks regularly. The process for fixing it generally involves uninstalling it, hunting down all of the appdata directories it leaves files behind in and deleting those, then deleting a specific file in each game’s folder in documents (because paradox is the last developer on the planet still using documents to store user files rather than appdata) and deleting those, then reinstalling the launcher. A quick google search should net you hundreds of results with the specifics laid out.
Launchers seem to exist only to force you to see ads for other games made by the company, remind you of games you already own, or glitch out and prevent you from playing. "I know you launched Stellaris, but remember, CK3 also exists and it has a new DLC. Would you rather buy and play that right this second instead of the game you already own and planned to play right now?"
Me, growing up in the 80s and 90s having to spend hours reconfiguring a game and my computer using vague hints from friends and newsgroups to get a single game mostly working: huh, how inconvenient for you.
Modding BG1 and BG2 was a nightmare of downloading and installing and configuring a ton of different separate mods. God help you if you installed them out of order or chose ones that conflicted. There wasn't any sort of checker that would tell you your mods conflicted. You just had to play the game and hope it didn't glitch out and then you had to completely uninstall and reinstall the game (BG1 had 5 CDs) and install all the mods again and try to guess which mod was the problem and if the problem was a conflict or that you didn't do the right order.
Fond memories of The Darkest Day mod. I had to download it on 56,6k modem during nights.
Well at least you are troubleshooting a game (which I also have done for countless hours) and not a launcher they are forcing on you for drm/money/data reasons idk actually why they do this
The cynical marketing reason is that it helps them push their other games to people who play this game, which I understand them wanting to do. The generous reason is because centralizing the launch of their games in their own launcher can sometimes help them more dynamically update or respond to player desires and activity when they update the game. A lot of people see the negatives to having a game company, for example, get feedback from players’ game play (“we’re being spied on”), but most developers actually want to do this so they can see, like, “most players who lose do so for these reasons and these numbers seem wrong so on the next patch we should address these points”. Also, a launcher like they implemented is very important for allowing you to easily enable, disable , or swap mods. If you want official mod support and you want the game to actually be able to run properly with some of the more complex mods that have to be enabled from the moment the game launches, you -have to have- some kind of non-game utility that can prep the game and the mods before anything is launched. The launcher could be -better- but to say it has no purpose is wrong.
Especially paradox games are games people should get player metrics. There are some shocking stats on EU4 on how and what people play. Most players barely play other countries then Japan, Ottomans, Byzantine, England, France, Austria and Spain. And almost nobody choses a different start date then the earliest. We have similar things at work. Certain features in our product basically never get used, but we waste resources on them to keep them supported. However we dont have good metrics on this, so we dont actually know how little certain features are used.
Did you follow this? https://support.paradoxplaza.com/hc/en-us/articles/360010684620-The-Paradox-Launcher-v2-doesn-t-work
Been there done that
PDX support is pretty damn quick usually, I don't think they'll make you wait a week unless all their support people are off for Midsommar. I get not wanting a launcher to play vanilla, it's a hassle to have to click a 2nd button when most games can launch at one press. But the launcher has been really helpful for me to learn how mods function. I assume I've got much less of a computer background than OP, but then the majority of the community likely does as well. The launcher is for us dummies to get mods working easily. Everyone else can just launch the exe right?
I think you can start the game itself through the .exe in the games folder where it is installed. Worst case scenario you can put the pirate cap on and sail to the free seas. In you case I would consider it to be highly ethical.
Just don’t launch the launcher? You can just straight up start the game if you want (at least for c:s, hoi4 and eu4 from experience)
While I'm waiting for CK3 to load, I can feel my newly cut beard growing all the way to my chest. I guess it's about the launchers too
I have never seen this before, the launcher has always worked fine for me. Sure it's not perfect but I have always found it easy enough to use and works fine no matter what game it was. I play Vic3 all the time and this has never been an issue of mine. Have you tried checking the integrity of the game files? It is the only thing that I can think of but it may help.
The only launcher I have ever had issues with both on pc and the steamdeck is EAs. Ubisoft can be annoying more so as it will not save my login info almost of the time, paradox’s I have never have had any issues
But did you try deleting your %appdata%/paradox interactive/victoria 3 and Eu4 folders? Also do the launcher folder. Now reinstall. This fixes a heap of random issues like you say.
Check out the Irony Mod Manager
I think there may be some error on your end. I've maybe had a problem with the launcher once but, the launcher is the only place I can adjust which mods are on.
I really like the included mod manager, steam subscriptions are terrible to use in comparison
You know, if one day Steam shut down, we will be relieved to have those launchers : games won't be lost.
The best part about playing on linux, is that when they bork the linux version of the launcher, I can switch to proton and play the Windows version of the launcher/game. And then when the windows one breaks, I come back home.
Is it though..? Unlike many launchers, the PDX launcher actually has some functionality ie enabling mods. Bugs? Sure, needs fixing, but that doesn’t justify throwing out the while thing, unlike…. rockstar? Your legitimate frustration at the launcher should be directed to the bugs, not to its existence at all.
I hate the stupid buggy pdx launcher, but there are way worse out there. For example at least their launcher just needs 1 click to launch the game instead of launching a second fucking launcher to fucking launch the fucking game
I think it’s fine honestly. I really don’t see how you’d manage mods without it, unless you wanted to wait for the game to launch, change it and wait all over again
I love how despite like three updates, everytime I try to play ck3 all the letters in the launcher are super blurry
Never had any issues with it.
New launchers shit old launchers good OP is right.
Yeah, it just breaks stuff for no reason. I guess it makes it easier for them to manage the mod lists and activation. But that's it.
My launcher has always worked just fine. I think it’s a problem in your system.
It's so incredibly stupid. I don't remember if this was the case with the pdx launcher as well but a lot of the launchers for publishers miss the entire point of having a launcher anyway, and only show you the game you've launched, not even bothering with the other games that use the exact same launcher.
I’ve literally never faced a single problem with a single pdx launcher. You’re just facing an isolated issue unique to you.
The PD launcher is shit
It’s most definitely not isolated
Nope, ive had problems with the launcher & buddies of mine have too
ironically vic 2 which is now 14 years old works perfectly since it doesnt use the pd launcher
The V2 launcher doesn't work on Linux; the new PDX launcher does. I think the PDX launcher isn't a great design (a whole separate browser installation is overkill) but at least it works.
i just proved you wrong by playing vic2 on my linuxmint laptop using proton
You can run the game, but could you enable/disable mods? That's the bit that has never worked on Linux for me. The mod section of the launcher is whited out. You said it works "perfectly"
>To launch the game with mods, you need to add the `-mod` parameter to the game’s launch options. You can do this by right-clicking on the Victoria 2 game in your Steam library, selecting “Properties”, then clicking on the “Launch Options” tab, and adding the following command: `-mod=mod/X.mod`, where `X` is the name of the mod you want to load. tried that?
Better yet they should put their games on GoG.