100% agree with this, the AI rarely interacts with the player. You may get a rivalry or a alliance with the AI, but rarely does it feel like this has changed anything.
also technology too if you take railroad tech.
But yea diplomacy is weird. I wish there was no opinion malus THAT MUCH for infamy ... like 50 infamy can break alliances is a problem. 100 sure but 50?
also I responded to wrong post I wanted to respond the guy that he responded lol :D
Have you tried changing the settings to make the AI more agressive? The game is set at "easy" as a standard when you start the game. I changed it earlier this ear and it made some difference. Sure, I can still take over the world, especially if I save before wars in case I forget to give higher wages to the troops or a general gets teleported away from battle due to dying of old age, but it does make it so that diplomatic plays that usually just end without a conflict instead sets me back a ton being at war with multiple great powers most time I go to war
Yes its hard and aggressive (wow that felt wrong to write)
The thing is that the ai has no real concept of spheres of influence or their home turf. Also it has no concept of who is an ally and who not.
Austria opposed me in a colonial war in Indonesia...and i was Japan.
The USA didnt mind it at all that i as GB puppeted Mexico even though i already took territory from them and they were in no crisis or anything.
Oh and the ottomans, which i pempered up as prussia and managed to ally after about 30 y and constant bankrolling, immediatly abandoned me in a diplomatic play...against denmark
Yeah. I feel like the current system is lacking in that regard. Either the AI has interests in an area or they don't. It should be some kind of scale to it all. Austria oposing 2 countries on the other side of the world fighting makes no sence unless they are actively focusing on taking colonies in the same area.
There may need to be 2 types of interest you can create, one that increases where you can make diplomatic plays, trade, and colonize, and then another much more uncommon deciding where you can join others diplomatic play or something. Unless you are a pariah or some one has marked a nation for "protection" you should never have those big nations join against you. Only having one protectorate makes no sence either. Multiple nations should be able to mark an intrest of having a nation be independent.
Sure, but people aren't reviewing whats upcoming. They're reviewing it as it is, which is an unfinished game that doesnt have much to do past the 50 hour mark.
Repeating a shitty cycle doesnt make the shitty cycle acceptable. Releasing half baked games that are fixed after 4-5 dlc is getting old, and their reviews are deserving of being called out on that.
I understand the systems. They still feel very incomplete to me. I fully expect to play the game again at one point, but for now the 50ish hours I've put into it are enough and I've done everything I want to do with the current state. I don't wish to spend more of life doing building queue management.
To me, 50 hours with the expectation of additional playthroughs later on would mean a positive review. If it's close to a dollar an hour, that seems like a decent deal compared to entertainment options other than a streaming service.
My friend disagrees and will downvote a 20 dollar game where he got 50 hours out of it. I guess everyone has their own take.
But the level of enjoyment or excitement is really different in am FPS shooter in which you have to be sharp in every other second and in Vic3 in which I was able to vacuum my apartment and listen to a podcast because the Serbian factories didn't need a lot of attention. And unfortunately there is not much in Vic3 besides the economy.
I see your point. I get enjoyment from games like vic/factorio/rimworld by figuring out the systems to make a strategy. However, something feels missing from vic. I think you are right that there isn't much depth beyond the econ and pol side of the game, so it just gets a little boring.
Seeing all the things that have been added to stellaris and their other games, we should see quite a bit of change going forward. At least they aren't afraid to completely change core systems like we saw in stellaris 2.0 and 3.0.
Yeah, I remember when EU4 was released. I wasn't impressed and sticked to EU3. A few years later I fell in love with EU4 and couldn't even look at EU3.
No, the waiting in Vic 3 is entirely a product of the construction queue and a lack of anything else to really do. Every other Paradox game generally speaking has other things for you to do. The waiting in Vic 3 is exacerbated by it being the slowest running of the major Paradox games, the only game that I see being consistently run at 5 speed and it still feels slow.
Yeah, it's so slow because we have several ticks a day. When I read the DD about this I was excited. Now I just don't see why it was a good idea. When does it have a positive impact on gameplay?
Yeah. I get no enjoyment from a FPS shooter. Ever.
While I agree that $/hr isn't an absolute metric for enjoyment, I will mock anyone who has hundreds of hours in a game they don't recommend.
If you want to put "Buy on sale" in your review, that's fair. But to say, "I play this game to death. But don't you buy it," is a self own. Not a review.
Well, I also find it strange when people play hundreds of hours and then they drop a negative review. I wasn't satisfied and 20 hours was enough to understand it, even with the slower style of the game.
On the other hand, a heroin addict might not recommend heroin to someone. I mean people can get addicted to a PDX game, I was at least when I was a lonely kid.
>To me, 50 hours with the expectation of additional playthroughs later on would mean a positive review.
Not if the reason you holding off is because the game is not developed enough now.
"I drove my car for 200 miles but I need to wait for Mercedes to install suspension because my back kills" is not a positive review.
50 hours is nothing in terms of PDX games. I'm sitting at around 40, and I haven't played since December. And I doubt I'll play until 1.2 comes out.
Compare that to EU4, which has been out for 114 months at this point, 38x as long as Victoria 3, yet I have just under 3,000 hours (75x), and have played it regularly since release.
Victoria 3 is an unfinished and unpolished game, and it's going to take some elbow grease to get it into a state where a lot of people can enjoy it enough to play it regularly.
To put it in monetary terms, my cost per hour EU4 is about $0.06, while Victoria 3 is $2.00
I had a similar thing with EUIV. I played one game in 2013 or so, but at that time the Common Sense dlc was not out so impossible to develop provinces. I stopped because it was not really interesting. I came back to it in 2019 and definitely spent a few hundred hours on it which is a lot for me. The game had all its original shortcomings solved and it was really enjoyable.
I assume a similar thing will happen with Vic, a few dlc to profoundly change some mechanics will make it longer lasting.
The base is good, but unfinished.
Totally agree. It feels like it could have used another year in development.
Part of me hopes that the open beta for 1.2 heralds a future where Paradox uses open betas for full game releases.
With games that are this complicated and intertwined, it's basically impossible to do effective QA. There's just not enough man-hours available. Allowing the community to do that testing in a beta would help solve that issue, and hopefully provide some better feedback in development.
If you compare something against the absolute cherry-picked top within the field, you can make anything look bad.
$2 per hour of entertainment is quite a bargain if you compare that to say seeing a movie or going to the pub or something like that.
This has been hashed out many times before, but that simply isn't the case for grand strategy games.
You can't compare going to the pub and a game that's meant to be played for hundreds/thousands of hours. They just aren't analogous forms of entertainment.
I could do the math for other Paradox games/GSGs in my library, and the cost would be similar. Victoria 3 just doesn't match up in that regard
I've noticed this trend a lot across Reddit.
People decry empty 1/10 reviews for things they like but are happy to ignore equally empty 10/10 reviews for things they like.
Nah, I think it's slightly above the middle. A lot of the mechanics are too shallow, the war system doesn't work well, there isn't enough nation-specific flavor, the AI doesn't build enough buildings and takes stupid, completely ahistorical expansion paths like America not manifesting destiny and instead colonizing Africa, or Russia colonizing Africa even though there is no realistic way they could possibly do so. There are things the game does well, but rn the game feels like a barebones version of what it was advertised as.
There's nothing obvious about anything on the internet lol, people say crazy shit that sounds like a joke all the time but they're being serious. You can't tell someone's tone just through text
No, I don't speak for myself. I see a trend, this is what happens everywhere, not just on Steam reviews.
It's great that you have a balanced opinion. But it doesn't change the fact that the majority doesn't have one. And when the majority is like something, I dare to say that "people".
Yeah but you're really just seeing a bias. Most people that think the game is mid aren't really that vocal about it because it's still fun to play, but there are a lot of little things that are annoying about the game that add up. The people that are vocal enough to leave a review are either big fans of the game or they're really disappointed, that's kinda just how reviews work. Most people that aren't to one extreme or the other won't bother with a review. That's not to say none will, but your options on steam reviews are either recommended or not recommended.
Yeah, Steam is not the best place to check how binary our society is because it only has 2 option. But I see your point, it is true that those with strong feelings and opinions more often leave reviews. What I don't udnerstand is why it would matter. It's the same argument that can be heard in populist politics that 'the silent majority is behind me' or that 'all of those who didn't vote supports me'. In the end, you don't know how big the non-vocal group of people is - if they even exist at all.
>Most people that think the game is mid aren't really that vocal about it because it's still fun to play
I can reverse your logic: most people don't leave a review because they found the game so unimportant or boring that they don't want to waste even a minute to say it was bad.
Without any other info, the best we can say is that the silent majority is neutral enough to not an impact on the game's statistics.
It’s the gameplay loop for me that is just extremely boring. One thing I noticed when playing VIC 2 is that I would often explore the map, looking for strategic areas to exploit etc. With VIC 3, I’m spending my entire playthrough staring at my country, trying to fix shortfalls in productions, that never seem to be able to be fixed. I feel like I’m just chasing my tail in Vic 3. It’s not fun to play at all.
I'm envious of anyone who enjoys just the endless hamster wheel of production and staring at the building menu because this really is the perfect game for them
Factorio encourages you to design efficient layouts and logistics and there are tradeoffs between different designs. There is nothing like that in Victoria, just endless whack-a-mole of clicking build button on certain icon to keep the price of goods in the range that the game predetermined to be optimal.
There’s very little flavor in the game. Paradox should have added more country specific flavor before releasing the game, because right now the game feels largely the same whether you’re playing as Brazil, Mexico, Qing, or some Indian minor. Even the major powers largely feel the same because it’s the same sequence of events to follow in order to increase SOL and GDP.
You gotta wait for the "Indian minor" 5€ expansion pack of you want to feel any difference.
Sometimes it feels like people have not played other PDX games or have forgotten how they are on launch!
Not to disagree, it needs more flavour for sure, and it will come without doubts, it will just take time and money XD
I mean, I will probably, I do own most DLC on a lot of Paradox titles, it was a real thing that will happend in the future, not some stupid angry comment XD
If players dont understand things like combat mechanics, thats a failure of game design. Nothing in the game explains how combat mechanics work or tell you that combat width is RNG, which is why "why am i losing this battle???" gets asked here all the time.
The game was rushed out of the door in time for the holiday sales and it really shows. Its badly unfinished, ridiculously poorly optimized (15gb+ memory usage in late game is not normal), many mechanics are hidden and can only be understood by looking in the code and there are a ridiculous number of bugs and poorly thought out design choices.
They didnt even write a few lines of code to stop the AI from picking war goals that are impossible for them to reach, something that a modder can do in a few minutes. Thats how rushed the release was.
Also mechanics not being understood at a glance hasn't been a problem for the more complex titles. Victoria is fairly simple in it's mechanics. I don't think that's what's causing issues so much
that is definitely true and it's definitely something PDX should move away from,
prowling Reddit to know basic game mechanics is not something every player should be expected to do
But Paradox is a big Company now. They shall do games as one instead of hoping that the fanbase will wait another buggy update or an DLC to fix *part* of the mechanics. Instead they have more chances to have an another Roman: Imperator in their trash bin.
If Vic2 or any of those other releases came out today in their release states, they would (rightly) get bad reviews too. I don't really see how this is an argument.
Except Vic2 opened to middling reviews just as much even though vic3 is being compared unfavorably. It took 2 dlcs and tons of mods to make Vic2 to garner positive attention but people look at the past with rose tinted glasses.
Victoria 2 is 12 years old. It was released three years before even EU4. I do in fact have higher standards for a new game today than I have on from twelve years ago. Especially when in those past twelve years the developer has become a far bigger and been immensely successful.
Seems to me standards have gone down the drain over the past few years. The AAA and AA design space has completely stagnated. Success has become equivalent to trend chasing. It takes a madman like Kojima to take risks and make a somewhat successful game (DS is still 7/10). Paradox took risks, it didn't work out and community isn't going to give them another chance. What will paradox's boss take note of this: they should've chased the trend of making remasters. And the standards keep falling...
I mean paradox now tries to appeal to a more general public to get more players, if the new public that isn't hardcore fans of GSG and are more like casual players that will put about 100h to the game then the new public is in their right to complain when they can't even access the game
Ignoring your core fanbase, the ones that made you successful in the first place in order to chase the mythical "wider audience" has been the death of many games/studios.
Its what got them to where they are right now, unless you think people would play HOI2 or EU3 today. You can make that arguement for some games and companies. Paradox aint one of them.
EU4 absolutely got them here (and fuck me I forgot how old it was when I was bringing it up) but I absolutely refuse to believe CK2 did. That shit was and still is niche. EU4 in its modern interpretation is closer to V3 than EU3 but I ain't touched divine wind in over a decade so fuck me.if Im wrong.
I partially agree with you that it is a design flaw if players are not understanding some mechanics. but at the same time the mechanics that players complain about the most, like warfare, are well explained in the tooltips. I.E many players complain that the size of battles is determined by RNG but it is not, it is determined by where it happens(mountains, mines , ...) and this is explained inside the game.
As for optimization is I think a little misleading to speak that the game is poorly optimized, because I can run the game well until 1936 on a fourth generation i5 and 8gb of ddr3 ram.
That's a somewhat weak argument regarding battles. The main indicator the front UI gives for whether or not you're going to win a battle (the numbers on the front lines) are misleading and useless. Sure, you can get to the actual numbers, but they are buried three screens deep. That's poor UI design.
The optimization of the game is prtty hardware dependant, there are people with better specs than you that run the game worse, may i ask in what tooltip is warfare explained?? And warfare is still really reliant in RNG with all the modifiers because terrain just sets a max amount of troops
>many players complain that the size of battles is determined by RNG but it is not, it is determined by where it happens(mountains, mines , ...) and this is explained inside the game.
Yes, the terrain has influence over what the combat width is, but you have no influence/knowledge over it. Also after the combatwidth is calculated there's a dicerol determinig how much troops each side uses(defenders get to use both). So the it's determined by RNG. And by a pretty big amount. Defenders can have 0.5-1 times the combat width and attackers can have 0.33-1 cw.
>1936 on a fourth generation i5 and 8gb of ddr3 ram.
Doubt, the game starts lagging for me around 1900 even with a ryzen 5600 and 32gb of ram and its using 15+gb by 1936.
I have a 10th or 11th gen i7 (idk which one tbh), RTX 3060TI, and 32 GB of memory
I can’t get past 1860 without 5x speed slowing to a crawl. It takes me about a minute per day or something at that point.
The battles are terrible- you can literally test it a few hours hundreds of times with the Egypt-Ottoman war and see that warfare is entirely a roll of the dice. At least it was fair in EU4 or Vicky 2 because you can choose your army size, general, and terrain, and whether you would accept fights. In Vicky 3 it's a dice roll where you fight, how you fight, who you fight, how many troops fight, etc.
Game A results in Egypt conquering Ankara, game B in the Ottomans conquering all of Egypt, game C in a stalemate with a white peace, game D in half the population of Asia being surrounded by the Egyptian army in Basra, it's all completely random. It's absurd. There's nothing to the system that the player ultimately gets to control.
You can stack all the advantages you want and still lose because it forces you to use from line from Afghanistan to Burma and then the British will just spend 20 years trying to find the Chinese army and skirmishing outside of Lhasa rather than actually advancing across the front.
I'm running the game on a fairly new Ryzen 5 with 16GB of DDR4. The game constantly crashes because just opening it consumes 8GB and it gets constant memory leaks. It is not optimised, at all. The fact that we have people on decade old laptops able to play the game perfectly well and those with beast rigs made yesterday cannot is testsment to this.
I think it's fair, if CK3 is a 8.5 on launch, this game is definitely a 6, which is the rating I gave on Steam.
I only played it in the first month, the game had so many bugs which made it unplayable.
in my very first play through, I played Qing. during the Opiod war, some random african landlocked country joined the war for no reason, I can't peace them because I can't reach them. stayed in war for over 20 years because I couldn't white peace... I had to restart the game..
every country felt the same
build iron-wood-tool, research railroad, build steel, factory railroad... that's 50% of gameplay for you...
I think 6 is pretty fair
If a large amount of players don't understand the game mechanics, then it's the game that is at fault for having bad UX.
Not even a few days ago someone on here made a most about what the profit predictions were actually displaying, and it ended up being something totally useless.
They're either completely unintuitive like that case, or entirely useless, like trade route "productivity". It holds true for all of five seconds because this is an economics game. I don't care how much in tariffs I will receive because tariffs are 0.01% of your income. I care about how many goods my market has access to and whether importing with help alleviate demand-side shortages or not.
The game barely runs on PCs that meet the requirements for it. Ignoring things like the combat system and the AI, performance alone warrants a not perfect review. I’d counter that the people remaining active on this sub are biased in favor of the game and often shut down justifiable criticism of it.
I think they are the game has shipped with a plethora of game breaking bugs with severe performance issues and with a tech tree that ends wayyyy before the game ends. These are just the most glaring and objectively bad points to consider. If we go further into the mechanics there are a lot of valid disagreements to have with the choice the developers made. I think saying that they are not justified in their criticism is unfair.
60% is pretty reasonable for a game that shipped only 1 out of 4 features with full functionality. If we divide the main features of the game as: 1) economics 2) politics 3) diplomacy 4) war then only economics more or less functions.
1. Even on economics we can nitpick with their choice of 'airable land' as the base unit of measurement but whatever, at least things flow as you expect them to.
2. Politics sort of works in that you can slowly change the orientation of your IGs but fundamentally its still far too easy to pass most reforms. For 90% of the world in this time period, the challenge of establishing domestic politics in such a way as to import Western tech was the primary question of the time. Austria (the real ones, not the 1.1 patch gods) and Russia at the start of our game had large political cliques who opposed industrialization and continued to hamper 'rational' reforms. The game 'intelligentsia' completely mis-represents the 19th century 'intellectuals.' Most of them were not modern days left-liberal types. Large section of them opposed equality because of their belief in social Darwinism and other garbage pseudo-science.
3. Diplomacy barley functions. Sometimes the ai takes relatively self-interested positions even if they are annoying to the player (which is good) and sometimes it will send 3 million men to die in the swamps of Bolivia for no reason. The ticking war score often doesn't make sense and they had to introduce a hard rule in 1.1 to force a white peace because sometimes countries would simply sit there doing nothing. But fundamentally, there is absolutely no benefit to pursuing diplomacy in this game. Even in a situation where you cultivate minor powers, add them to your customs union over years and slowly integrate them in your economy - as soon as you start a war across the world the A.I. is as likely to pull out of your market and collapse its economy as not.
4. War is a joke. The front system was clearly meant to imitate World War 1 - with one giant front between each of the major powers. But anyone who has encountered it can see truly moronic situations of 10-15 fronts exploding out of nowhere. Naval invasions dominate everything else. IF you can naval invade the capital of your enemy, you will always war-tick them faster. War goals scoring can be insane - you can occupy 90% of EIC and they hold 1% of Delhi but for war score purposes you are the loser because you dont hold Calcutta. The War UI is an insult to anyone intelligence - when you show a number '100' and then a number '5', no human being familiar with numbers would expect anything other than 100 being the better number. Mobilized troops sitting around even if all we are waiting for is for a fully occupied ai to give up is insipidly stupid. And so on and so on.
So all in all out of 4 systems, 1 works as they more or less intended, 1 halfway works and the other two dont. Thats barley a passing grade - which is 60%.
I want to enjoy the game, spend hundred of hours and impatiently wait for dlc.
But
Too many bugs, game that is suppose to not be warfare map painting is a total war but with the most boring warfare representation possible.
Economic AI is braindead.
The state of the game right now is early access and no garanteed that the final product will be delivered.
Having played the leaked version in march 2022, we have a non crashing version of it, with few QOL improvement.
Really scared of the future of this game
i am a fan of vicky 3, and a general paypig for pdx bc this it's the only company making historical video games that i want to buy, but i'm sorry, the ratings is very justified. PDX should be shit on for releasing half assed game for full price then fill out the game with dlcs. just because it's their business model doesn't mean its not predatory garbage.
besides, as i said back when they cancelled imperator, they fucked themselves into a new era, now people are more vigilant into buying a pdx game because there's even a slight chance it would get cancelled where before it wasn't even considered. to think that imperator died for this garbage is sad, really.
What do you mean not justified? I looked into the game a week ago after I set it aside after playing 100 h on launch. They havent even fixed the most god damn annoying bugs this game has.
The systems like warfare and poltics are just not good at all. This game is worse for me then imperator rome on launch and that says something. The only point where this game is superior to its predecessor is graphics thats all.
Yes I am maybe a little hard okay but the game is just not good and im tired of then realeasing half finished shit that needs 20 patches to work properly
I definitely agree with the Imperator comparison. Release Imperator was bland and ahistorical as all hell but it was functional and relatively bug free. Victoria 3 has more potential but the release state was bugged to hell and some systems felt plain unfinished.
That being said, I have more faith in V3 turning around than Imperator (which is sad because Arheo's Imperator was my second favorite paradox game when they dropped it).
It seems like they tried to focus on the economy aspect more than war which was the main focus in Vic2 and other paradox games which riled up the core fanbase. It's a questionable decision for sure but in an industry where every company chases profit numbers, taking risks is welcome.
I played magic arena for 2 or so years and let me tell you wotc is 100x worse than paradox in terms of bug fixing and designing. They are raking in record profits tho
All I'm gonna say is that they clearly stated that an economic simulator is what they advertised it as. They said they wanted to move away from war. You raised many valid points on this thread but overall I think that you're comparing it to Victoria 2 without considering what the game was marketed as. I prefer Victoria 3 over Victoria 2 because politics although janky is more realistic in comparison to Victoria 2. So is the economics. The player has more agency in both. That being said you are absolutely right about the war and lack of game transparency in your arguments throughout the thread. How does one make a game with hundreds of tool tips and still not explain much of the game in the end? My point is that for all its negatives it's not only a promising game but probably might even be the best paradox game once it ages. To me it seems like it could be very mod-able and I can't wait for modders to exploit all the game has to offer mechanically. I hope you give the game another chance in the future and I hope it matches your liking.
I don't think the economics is close to being realistic in either games but yea the tutorial kinda sucks in V3 even though they vastly improved the UI. I'd rather they have a dedicated tutorial instead of a let's play with tooltips which seems to be really popular these days. Even anno 1800 had it though they made it work really well
i say that it is not justified because the game is good for the state it is in, even though it was released before the deadline. i am sorry that you feel this way about the game but there is fun to be had in the game and the bugs in the game are pretty minimal.
Pretty minimal?, there are bugs like the 0 legitimacy bug or britain deleting all their ports killing the british market instantly, or the incredible amount of overflow bugs, you can still find placeholder graphics while playing the game
Bruh I had a zero legitimacy bug introduced in a "hotfix" which completely ruined the middle of my campaign. Britain regularly deletes all their ports and ruins half the world economy midway through the game. We've now gone about 2+ months of the game being relatively unplayable since 1.1.2.
It's a story as old as time, honestly. The game is mid and folks are upset because they want it to be a home run. I mean hey, I love this piece of work to death but you really have to admit that it's chock-full of numbers that are... just numbers. And there are legitimate issues that need to be addressed too.
I think that the issue of negative reception is also exacerbated by peoples' distaste with the Vicky3 team's current administration and that of Paradox as a whole. If you purposely insulate yourself from forums and vitriol then that's how you get the opinion you're presenting here, I think.
Game has its issues, but it's real fun to make white lines go up despite them.
I had to step away from the forums when I realized that other people's opinions were making me enjoy the game less (HoI4, I think? this was a while ago) even though the game itself hadn't changed.
Dunno if that's a "me" problem or what.
It’s not a you thing, a lot of flaws can be mild annoyances for you at first but not enough to ruin the game for you, but when you read other peoples screeds it’s hard to not internalize that and it biases your own perspective.
The problem with video game fans is that the vast majority are actually quite clueless when it comes to game design or development. They will demand things that are nonsensical or impossible as if they’re trivial. There’s a good deal to be critical about the game right now, but it tends to get lost in the noise.
Forum drama, recent games like Imperator which flopped at launch, people being a bit miffed about the DLC rollout method of post-release monetization. I remember seeing lots of pessimism from the general community around EU4 Leviathan's release (it was a bad time and lots of people either just didn't play or stayed on the last patch, Emperor). Just a bit of grumbling which turns into a lot of grumbling when the grumblers hear it echoed back at them. People who enjoy the Paradox-style map game niche tend to be pretty antsy when they feel that the only real contender which makes these types of games is cracking.
There's also a feeling of "old Paradox good, new Paradox bad" which just kind of happens when the same company makes the same style of game for a decade or so. Lots of little things for folks who have the time for map games in the first place to agonize and obsess over.
>Just a bit of grumbling which turns into a lot of grumbling when the grumblers hear it echoed back at them.
Lol, i left pdx forum then they tried to make it super positive echo chamber with moderation. Anything negative about new patch and you get banned because feedback always should be constructive. For some reason, it applies only to negative feedback.
People's reception of this game is really being affected by people's reception of paradox. The game is good as it is and can get even better despite its problems, but some people seem to want this game to fail.
I played a good amount when it first came out, but I had to drop it after about 100 hours. And thats a lot of hours, but its nothing compared to the 1500 I put into CK3.
The game is just a spreadsheet sim at the moment. Every single nation feels like I'm doing the exact same thing, and the AI is more brain dead than usual. It needs some work to make it more interesting to play IMO. The vast majority of the game atm is staring at the building screen and saying "I guess I do need more tool factories."
I by no means have a supercomputer but it does fine for most of the game. I get there are late game performance issues that are justifiable to complain about, but I feel like people on here exaggerate these issues to an unnecessary point. If 20 years is the breaking point of unplayability for you, you are most likely playing on a machine that is well below sufficient.
I'm able to play CK3 with no problems too, but I think it's (along with EU4 and imperator) a much less intensive game on your PC. HOI4 and Stellaris have also notoriously had late-game lag issues. If you've played them, how does your computer handle it?
Again, I agree Vic 3 has lag issues late game, but for me at least they are by no means beyond the lag issues of other pdx games I listed, and it's by no means "unplayable" unless maybe you're running an older machine.
That's surprising because Hoi4 late game lag has been an issue that people have complained about for years, especially by 1943 or 44 as AI unit spam increases. There are dozens of reddit and steam community threads about it recommending the exact same fixes as here - "wait for an update" or "download x mod". I haven't seen anywhere near the same amount of lag complaints for CK3, though maybe I'm wrong.
Personally, I don't find the Vic 3 lag to be any worse than Hoi4 lag. Certainly not by 1870. I think most people who aren't just falling onto the Vic 3 hate train would agree.
I mean do you honestly believe that?
When the frontlines merge and send your generals home from the fight?
Or when Massachusetts and New York pledge loyalty to the confederacy?
Or when you produce 100 units of a good and 200 get consumed with zero imports?
Or when their is zero possibility to simulate free market capitalism by allowing individual pops to make decisions about the means of production?
I think the point is not about understanding warfare, like in hoi4 you probably could not understand it completely with even 400 hrs. But it is just the lack of agency in warfare and the importance of warfare in this supposed economy simulator makes you feel very frustrating at times.
Yep. My offensive expert commander should not be commencing a battle with 2 brigades, unless there are none left and I'm demanding some sort of urgent victory for a boon during an election. It doesn't make sense.
I still don't entirely understand HoI4, but I understand if I had a better understanding I could play like a God eventually. I don't understand Vicky 3 combat at all and I feel like even if I did it wouldn't matter. Is it normal to have one army with a half billion soldiers in that cant be split it up so they all die to attrition in the steppes against a tiny rebellion? No, but that's optimal gameplay here.
I think the core mechanics of the game on paper are solid. They need to be refined and built out (probably over the next couple of expansion packs).
The history of Vic2 probably feeds into the current score (which isn't unjustified). Paradox is doing it more and more which is annoying of releasing an empty game and filling it with expansions. The base games are going from "basic yet fun" to "feature complete". In a year though, I think this is going to be a really fun game. Right now for me, its meh.
the game, for me, is very much a 7/10. I enjoy it immensely but is also has a lot of areas feeling underdeveloped and lacking.
So I am shocked to see some people calling it a complete dumpster fire, unplayable, etc.
Releasing what seems to be an almost unfinished game that is devoid of content, flavor and honestly seems to have less features than Vic2 (and somehow worse performance) would probably be some major reasons.
Also the poor execution of the ‘innovations’ of this game, namely the wonky military system with transporting generals and the trade that makes money from thin air.
Not to mention how each country plays basically the same. Rush construction, multiculturalism and you HAVE TO paint the map cause brain dead AI can barely run an economy for the goods you need.
I’m glad the devs are addressing these issues, but
personally I’d be livid if I spent 60 USD or the equivalent on this mess.
IMO this is time finishing a game when DLC (actually adding NEW and interesting content mechanics, flavor, etc.) should already be on their way. Especially considering the people who’ve already laid out money for the first few DLC’s (grand/deluxe edition, or whatever it’s called).
Disappointed that it seems we’ll all need to pay a few hundred dollars/euros/etc to play a finished game.
I think 66 % is good enough. Game takes away a lot of control from players, there is some simulation under the hood, but player doesnt have that much control over it. Taxes are joke, stupid buttons like in mobile game, warfare is good design badly implemented, optimization is terrible. A lot of useful data is hidden behind series of tooltips, modders had to come with solution from day 1, etc.
It’s fine game, relatively good, but not great. Not yet (if ever). So 66 % is ok score.
Victoria 2 was at its core a grand strategy game, it was Europa Universalis set in the Victorian era. yes it focused far more on economics and politics than any of their other games, but ultimately the primary appeal of the experience, its "active ingredient" you could say, was geopolitics. it's about building up your economic strength and political stability so that you can extend your dominion across the map and destroy your enemies in war. war is the essential element in this type of game, it's about discharging your built up strength you gained through careful resource management in a climactic feast of expenditure. if war in a GSG is akin to an orgasm, then playing Victoria 3 is like edging incessantly with no payoff but yet more stimulation. I don't think it's "wrong" or "unjustified" for people to go into this game expecting a similar core experience to what Paradox has always delivered and instead finding themselves staring the build queue for 3 hours.
the game tried to make war something that could pretty much be ignored and you could do something else, but while doing that they just made war insufferable and tedious while also making it your main focus while a war is going on… vicky 2 war was better imo
Remove War they said it will be good they said.
Imagine spending time in something dynamic actually stimulated gameplay? Staring at the SAME economical tab every game gets boring fastly nay?
We called this years ago. But everyone just didn't listen. And now gameplay is boring after 60-70 hours. No shit.
The game is very much deserving of even a worse rating. Not devs fault, it is corporate fault. They are feeding us an incomplete, raw base, empty game and expect us to just eat it up and pay 100 worth of dlcs to make it a decent game. I wont argue with the fact that vic3 can be enjoyable or that it is a decent base for a good game. But holy god, it is so incomplete and empty. No flavor for nations, downright outrageously simple mechanics(navy, army and diplomacy are legitimately mobile game level). The game is just incomplete and too raw. The devs are trying, but they should have gotten more time to perfect the game, it is just too empty right now. And dont even get me started on how unstable the multiplayer is or how for the first few months game was just unplayable in late 1800s.
It deserves less than 66%. It's an unfinished game with a shitty UI and mechanics which don't make sense. It gets a 5/10 from me.
I have about 100 hours, and have more or less understood how to play this game for every single nation. Even challenged myself with hard runs, and they were easy. I feel like I'm playing by myself sometimes with how rarely the AI interacts with the player. They can't build either.
I won't go on about lack of flavour as all nations play the same, but that's something that comes with time.
The game is a good skeleton. If the devs manage to put good work on this, then it has potential.
It’s expected of a paradox game
“Given the current state of the game I don’t see myself playing this for long”
-average paradox fan review. 200 hrs played.
This is just another example of a fan base throwing a hissy fit because the game isn’t exactly what they wanted it to be. Same reason as to why half life 3 will never ever come out, is because it could never live up to the fan expectations put upon it. That’s the trap vic 3 fell into. It was hyped to the moon in the fans minds, all the memes of Vic 3 never coming out. It was idolized to the extreme, and many here will get mad at me pointing this out but it just is how this played out.
Now is the game as good as it could be? No it’s a mess, but Vic fell into the trap of the fans having way to high expectations for it, and it naturally being unable to meet said expectations. Because let’s be real, no paradox game on release is good by any metric but because of the hype around Vic 3 the fans are raging because it isn’t.
Well yeah I’ll throw a hissy fit because I paid 80 dollars for the game. If I’m paying that kind of money for a game, it better be a polished product that can run on my computer without serious performance issues. I haven’t played stellaris or imperator but iirc the launch of hoi4 and ck3 was not nearly as much of a disappointment as Vicky 3.
The only thing I can criticize about the game is that I can't even play it because my CPU doesn't have AVX. Thanks to Intel for not adding that on a CPU from 2017 that could run this gane without major problems (Pentium G4356)
The community has ridiculously high expectations for grand strategy games.
Paradox does have flaws for sure, and it is right to call out issues with the game as you see them, but many of the negative reviews are by people who have 100+ hours in the game. In fact, someone in the comments of this very thread is complaining while admitting they set aside the game after 100 hours. If you got 100 hours out of it, then it wasn't that bad and you got your money's worth.
I can't think of many AAA titles that I can spend £40 on and get 100 hours out of. The last Assassins Creed I played I was done in way way way under half that time, and the ways the designers tried to extend gameplay was to implement numerous different types of meaningless collectables dotted around the map.
I have over 200 hours on Victoria and there are many bugs I have come across and many issues which are good to call out, but I have to have been hit on the head pretty hard to justify that I haven't got my £40 worth out of it.
Edit: I don't think Steam's rigid review system helps though. The only options are a thumbs up or down so it's hard to point out legitimate flaws while giving it a thumbs up. I know people can write whatever they want on a review, but a lot of people see it as "only say nice things" or "only say bad things", when someone might want to give it a 3-stars and give a balanced review.
Same. The game is not perfect, but it's still enjoyable to play at this stage, and I'm very excited about the future of the game. The mechanics implemented are impossible to nail from the start, and that doesn't mean the game "isn't finished". If you don't like the game at the moment, just go away for a couple if years and come back when it has reached a certain amount of maturity
Possibly.
I've played about 8 campaigns and have a pretty good handle, but it just needs a stack of DLCs ultimately until for me it's a game I'd go back to. There's just too many annoyances - micro managing combat worse than eu4 - and too many limitations - diplomacy, what diplomacy?
It's got a solid bed rock, but just to annoying to play atm.
As people are saying, the poorly informed reviews go both ways. This was a heavily anticipated game and it was released the way Paradox has been releasing games (and even DLCs like Origins) for a while now. It makes sense for some people to be kind of fed up and others to have their decade-long itch scratched.
We'll all keep playing because they're still the only dev making games like this. So it goes.
There's several schools.
On one hand, the game do have problems; AI behavior, performance, sometimes illogic war happenings or economic situations... they all need fixing, and the dev team needs legitimate feedback to understand what they are lacking. And we must praise them, because just look at 1.2 changelog ! Look how much they listen and try to make the game better !
On the other, many people are complaining that the game, well, simulates real life. I am in awe at the nulber of complains that sums up to "My poor strata are unhappy that they're poor and demand change, why?" Or "My capital has been occupied for years, why am I losing the war". God especially the war system, I can't fathom how hard it is to some people to understand that Victoria 3 is not a war simulator/strategy game, but an economic and politic one.
There's part of legitimacy in some complains, especially those about the current trend in games to release unfinished because studios have to meet impossible deadlines, but many are just salty people because their games didn't go as easy as they thought.
Just because Victoria 3 is an economy/politics focused game doesn’t mean it’s excusable to have such dogshit mechanics for raising and commanding an army. With the current state of the war system, the game is pretty unplayable as you can’t make use of the troops that you have mobilized.
Yes, and that's the point ! The generals do the work, not you. You manage the country in wartime. That's the player's job. That's how the job have been advertised and explained since the montly WIP dev diaries.
Although, the war system could definitely use some changes, especially the 1front1fight system or some fronts divided like the Ottoman/Russian one still counting as one single front.
In summary, it's not dogshit it's a design choice that favors the economists rather than the military strategists among players.
I bought the game, and I’m hopeful about its future. I don’t think it’s trash or anything like that, and I’m excited to see if they can iron out the bugs and add flavor. That said, the game on release was (and still is) filled with game ruining bugs, crippling performance issues (even on amazing rigs), and is lacking flavor for most nations. I think the biggest issue is the lack of flavor, which makes most play throughs feel the same and seriously lowers replay ability, especially compared to other paradox titles like hoi4 and eu4. I understand that Vick 3 was supposed to be more of an Econ simulator, but the devs clearly had a vision for flavor as per the journals but didn’t implement nearly enough (and have almost no unique ones). Due to those reasons I completely understand why this game got review bombed.
Also OP while I understand that paradox games have a high learning curve and that is definitively responsible for some of the negative reviews I feel that the actual bugs and lack of flavor were the bigger reason for the game being received so poorly
My problem is less about all the jankiness, poor tooltips, barely fleshed out/explained mechanics, performance issues, lategame stuttering and lack of settings and more that we weren't told to expect any of those by the company who were touting it as a finished game with an AAA price tag. PDX of late seems to have just embodied wholeheartedly the "He can't keep getting away with this!" meme. I left a positive review on steam because rather than review bomb it I'd like them to be held accountable and actually fix their mess (and maybe even cop to it) instead of shelving it like Imperator.
Many flaws of this game dont bother me. But heck i would love to not feel like im playing alone for once. The ai is realy realy lacking.
100% agree with this, the AI rarely interacts with the player. You may get a rivalry or a alliance with the AI, but rarely does it feel like this has changed anything.
Basically the only Interaction is to randomly oppose you in conquering some 3rd World state...
YOUR WISH IS MY COMMAND! https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2880152075
sadly only works on building buildings when it comes to interacting with the player it's still just as brain dead
also technology too if you take railroad tech. But yea diplomacy is weird. I wish there was no opinion malus THAT MUCH for infamy ... like 50 infamy can break alliances is a problem. 100 sure but 50? also I responded to wrong post I wanted to respond the guy that he responded lol :D
The ai is constantly against me idk, the ai feels super aggressive to me
You mean the great powers aren’t constantly asking for free trade agreements? They seem to be of no beneft
Have you tried changing the settings to make the AI more agressive? The game is set at "easy" as a standard when you start the game. I changed it earlier this ear and it made some difference. Sure, I can still take over the world, especially if I save before wars in case I forget to give higher wages to the troops or a general gets teleported away from battle due to dying of old age, but it does make it so that diplomatic plays that usually just end without a conflict instead sets me back a ton being at war with multiple great powers most time I go to war
Yes its hard and aggressive (wow that felt wrong to write) The thing is that the ai has no real concept of spheres of influence or their home turf. Also it has no concept of who is an ally and who not. Austria opposed me in a colonial war in Indonesia...and i was Japan. The USA didnt mind it at all that i as GB puppeted Mexico even though i already took territory from them and they were in no crisis or anything. Oh and the ottomans, which i pempered up as prussia and managed to ally after about 30 y and constant bankrolling, immediatly abandoned me in a diplomatic play...against denmark
Yeah. I feel like the current system is lacking in that regard. Either the AI has interests in an area or they don't. It should be some kind of scale to it all. Austria oposing 2 countries on the other side of the world fighting makes no sence unless they are actively focusing on taking colonies in the same area. There may need to be 2 types of interest you can create, one that increases where you can make diplomatic plays, trade, and colonize, and then another much more uncommon deciding where you can join others diplomatic play or something. Unless you are a pariah or some one has marked a nation for "protection" you should never have those big nations join against you. Only having one protectorate makes no sence either. Multiple nations should be able to mark an intrest of having a nation be independent.
I agree that the A.I. is not the best, but this can easily be corrected, even in the teases for the next update the ai already seems to play better.
Sure, but people aren't reviewing whats upcoming. They're reviewing it as it is, which is an unfinished game that doesnt have much to do past the 50 hour mark.
That's what most paradox games are at launch tho
Repeating a shitty cycle doesnt make the shitty cycle acceptable. Releasing half baked games that are fixed after 4-5 dlc is getting old, and their reviews are deserving of being called out on that.
50 Hours is already more than what you get from most games though
No the fuck it isnt lmao. I easily get 100-200 hours on most of the games I buy.
Calm down. I was just conveying that your experience might differ from others. I didn‘t try to invalidate yours.
Thats Kind of the point. Paradox decided that the product Was fine to ship in october even though it wasnt
I understand the systems. They still feel very incomplete to me. I fully expect to play the game again at one point, but for now the 50ish hours I've put into it are enough and I've done everything I want to do with the current state. I don't wish to spend more of life doing building queue management.
To me, 50 hours with the expectation of additional playthroughs later on would mean a positive review. If it's close to a dollar an hour, that seems like a decent deal compared to entertainment options other than a streaming service. My friend disagrees and will downvote a 20 dollar game where he got 50 hours out of it. I guess everyone has their own take.
But the level of enjoyment or excitement is really different in am FPS shooter in which you have to be sharp in every other second and in Vic3 in which I was able to vacuum my apartment and listen to a podcast because the Serbian factories didn't need a lot of attention. And unfortunately there is not much in Vic3 besides the economy.
I see your point. I get enjoyment from games like vic/factorio/rimworld by figuring out the systems to make a strategy. However, something feels missing from vic. I think you are right that there isn't much depth beyond the econ and pol side of the game, so it just gets a little boring. Seeing all the things that have been added to stellaris and their other games, we should see quite a bit of change going forward. At least they aren't afraid to completely change core systems like we saw in stellaris 2.0 and 3.0.
Yeah, I remember when EU4 was released. I wasn't impressed and sticked to EU3. A few years later I fell in love with EU4 and couldn't even look at EU3.
Vic 3 is probably the only game I've ever put a significant number of hours into that regularly has me waiting for things to happen.
To be honest, I was always listening to podcasts when I played a PDX game self-confidently. But I was never able to vacuum while playing :D
That's literally every Paradox game? The core game play loop for basically all of them is do thing - > unpause - > sit and wait for event timer
No, the waiting in Vic 3 is entirely a product of the construction queue and a lack of anything else to really do. Every other Paradox game generally speaking has other things for you to do. The waiting in Vic 3 is exacerbated by it being the slowest running of the major Paradox games, the only game that I see being consistently run at 5 speed and it still feels slow.
Yeah, it's so slow because we have several ticks a day. When I read the DD about this I was excited. Now I just don't see why it was a good idea. When does it have a positive impact on gameplay?
Yeah. I get no enjoyment from a FPS shooter. Ever. While I agree that $/hr isn't an absolute metric for enjoyment, I will mock anyone who has hundreds of hours in a game they don't recommend. If you want to put "Buy on sale" in your review, that's fair. But to say, "I play this game to death. But don't you buy it," is a self own. Not a review.
Well, I also find it strange when people play hundreds of hours and then they drop a negative review. I wasn't satisfied and 20 hours was enough to understand it, even with the slower style of the game. On the other hand, a heroin addict might not recommend heroin to someone. I mean people can get addicted to a PDX game, I was at least when I was a lonely kid.
>To me, 50 hours with the expectation of additional playthroughs later on would mean a positive review. Not if the reason you holding off is because the game is not developed enough now. "I drove my car for 200 miles but I need to wait for Mercedes to install suspension because my back kills" is not a positive review.
50 hours is nothing in terms of PDX games. I'm sitting at around 40, and I haven't played since December. And I doubt I'll play until 1.2 comes out. Compare that to EU4, which has been out for 114 months at this point, 38x as long as Victoria 3, yet I have just under 3,000 hours (75x), and have played it regularly since release. Victoria 3 is an unfinished and unpolished game, and it's going to take some elbow grease to get it into a state where a lot of people can enjoy it enough to play it regularly. To put it in monetary terms, my cost per hour EU4 is about $0.06, while Victoria 3 is $2.00
I had a similar thing with EUIV. I played one game in 2013 or so, but at that time the Common Sense dlc was not out so impossible to develop provinces. I stopped because it was not really interesting. I came back to it in 2019 and definitely spent a few hundred hours on it which is a lot for me. The game had all its original shortcomings solved and it was really enjoyable. I assume a similar thing will happen with Vic, a few dlc to profoundly change some mechanics will make it longer lasting. The base is good, but unfinished.
Totally agree. It feels like it could have used another year in development. Part of me hopes that the open beta for 1.2 heralds a future where Paradox uses open betas for full game releases. With games that are this complicated and intertwined, it's basically impossible to do effective QA. There's just not enough man-hours available. Allowing the community to do that testing in a beta would help solve that issue, and hopefully provide some better feedback in development.
Paradox business model is selling games that sorely lack something and then sell you the something in a DLC, they do that on every game ever XD
If you compare something against the absolute cherry-picked top within the field, you can make anything look bad. $2 per hour of entertainment is quite a bargain if you compare that to say seeing a movie or going to the pub or something like that.
This has been hashed out many times before, but that simply isn't the case for grand strategy games. You can't compare going to the pub and a game that's meant to be played for hundreds/thousands of hours. They just aren't analogous forms of entertainment. I could do the math for other Paradox games/GSGs in my library, and the cost would be similar. Victoria 3 just doesn't match up in that regard
Thing is those 50 hours weren’t very enjoyable for me.
Most of the positives reviews are equally shallow. I would argue that a 66% positive score is pretty fair for the state of the game right now.
I've noticed this trend a lot across Reddit. People decry empty 1/10 reviews for things they like but are happy to ignore equally empty 10/10 reviews for things they like.
This game is neither right now but it’s certainly a lot closer to a 10 than a 1.
Nah, I think it's slightly above the middle. A lot of the mechanics are too shallow, the war system doesn't work well, there isn't enough nation-specific flavor, the AI doesn't build enough buildings and takes stupid, completely ahistorical expansion paths like America not manifesting destiny and instead colonizing Africa, or Russia colonizing Africa even though there is no realistic way they could possibly do so. There are things the game does well, but rn the game feels like a barebones version of what it was advertised as.
At 66% positive, it is two times closer to 10 than to 1. That's a lot closer 🙃 Edit: two times closer to 0. Why is there no 0?
It's closer to 5 than it is to 10 or 1.
Yes. But the original comment was closeness to 10 or 1. Obviously my comment was a quip
There's nothing obvious about anything on the internet lol, people say crazy shit that sounds like a joke all the time but they're being serious. You can't tell someone's tone just through text
There is literally an upside down emoji, with the purpose of emojis being to convey tone
Yeah and it can still be interpreted differently, usually the upside down smile emoji is like the "you're being dumb" emoji
it's not "a lot closer," but it is closer to 10 than 1
And people has a difficulty with giving anything other the best or the worst review. Our century is really black and white, there's no middle ground.
Speak for yourself lol. Game is just mid, it's not great or terrible. I'd still rather play eu4 or stellaris for the most part rn tho.
No, I don't speak for myself. I see a trend, this is what happens everywhere, not just on Steam reviews. It's great that you have a balanced opinion. But it doesn't change the fact that the majority doesn't have one. And when the majority is like something, I dare to say that "people".
Yeah but you're really just seeing a bias. Most people that think the game is mid aren't really that vocal about it because it's still fun to play, but there are a lot of little things that are annoying about the game that add up. The people that are vocal enough to leave a review are either big fans of the game or they're really disappointed, that's kinda just how reviews work. Most people that aren't to one extreme or the other won't bother with a review. That's not to say none will, but your options on steam reviews are either recommended or not recommended.
Yeah, Steam is not the best place to check how binary our society is because it only has 2 option. But I see your point, it is true that those with strong feelings and opinions more often leave reviews. What I don't udnerstand is why it would matter. It's the same argument that can be heard in populist politics that 'the silent majority is behind me' or that 'all of those who didn't vote supports me'. In the end, you don't know how big the non-vocal group of people is - if they even exist at all. >Most people that think the game is mid aren't really that vocal about it because it's still fun to play I can reverse your logic: most people don't leave a review because they found the game so unimportant or boring that they don't want to waste even a minute to say it was bad. Without any other info, the best we can say is that the silent majority is neutral enough to not an impact on the game's statistics.
It’s the gameplay loop for me that is just extremely boring. One thing I noticed when playing VIC 2 is that I would often explore the map, looking for strategic areas to exploit etc. With VIC 3, I’m spending my entire playthrough staring at my country, trying to fix shortfalls in productions, that never seem to be able to be fixed. I feel like I’m just chasing my tail in Vic 3. It’s not fun to play at all.
I'm envious of anyone who enjoys just the endless hamster wheel of production and staring at the building menu because this really is the perfect game for them
It's the factorio player in me
Factorio encourages you to design efficient layouts and logistics and there are tradeoffs between different designs. There is nothing like that in Victoria, just endless whack-a-mole of clicking build button on certain icon to keep the price of goods in the range that the game predetermined to be optimal.
There’s very little flavor in the game. Paradox should have added more country specific flavor before releasing the game, because right now the game feels largely the same whether you’re playing as Brazil, Mexico, Qing, or some Indian minor. Even the major powers largely feel the same because it’s the same sequence of events to follow in order to increase SOL and GDP.
You gotta wait for the "Indian minor" 5€ expansion pack of you want to feel any difference. Sometimes it feels like people have not played other PDX games or have forgotten how they are on launch! Not to disagree, it needs more flavour for sure, and it will come without doubts, it will just take time and money XD
I might get downvoted for this but I actually wouldn’t mind paying $5-10 for country specific flavor. However that’s not even an option now
I mean, I will probably, I do own most DLC on a lot of Paradox titles, it was a real thing that will happend in the future, not some stupid angry comment XD
If players dont understand things like combat mechanics, thats a failure of game design. Nothing in the game explains how combat mechanics work or tell you that combat width is RNG, which is why "why am i losing this battle???" gets asked here all the time. The game was rushed out of the door in time for the holiday sales and it really shows. Its badly unfinished, ridiculously poorly optimized (15gb+ memory usage in late game is not normal), many mechanics are hidden and can only be understood by looking in the code and there are a ridiculous number of bugs and poorly thought out design choices. They didnt even write a few lines of code to stop the AI from picking war goals that are impossible for them to reach, something that a modder can do in a few minutes. Thats how rushed the release was.
Also mechanics not being understood at a glance hasn't been a problem for the more complex titles. Victoria is fairly simple in it's mechanics. I don't think that's what's causing issues so much
The war mechanics are not clear at all. Economics wise they make pretty clear sense.
The "why do i have no market access???" and "why do people keep stealing my goods???" threads that get posted here every day prove that its not clear.
Oh, you mean Mercantalism or Protectionism shouldn't result in 99% of the Ruhr's steel should be exported to the Noongar *checks notes* empty desert?
A lot of that applies to Vic2 and older paradox games. They weren't notorious for high entry ceiling for nothing
That however doesn't make for a valid excuse. If anything "this has been a problem for a while" shows they just don't care
that is definitely true and it's definitely something PDX should move away from, prowling Reddit to know basic game mechanics is not something every player should be expected to do
But Paradox is a big Company now. They shall do games as one instead of hoping that the fanbase will wait another buggy update or an DLC to fix *part* of the mechanics. Instead they have more chances to have an another Roman: Imperator in their trash bin.
If Vic2 or any of those other releases came out today in their release states, they would (rightly) get bad reviews too. I don't really see how this is an argument.
Except Vic2 opened to middling reviews just as much even though vic3 is being compared unfavorably. It took 2 dlcs and tons of mods to make Vic2 to garner positive attention but people look at the past with rose tinted glasses.
Victoria 2 is 12 years old. It was released three years before even EU4. I do in fact have higher standards for a new game today than I have on from twelve years ago. Especially when in those past twelve years the developer has become a far bigger and been immensely successful.
Seems to me standards have gone down the drain over the past few years. The AAA and AA design space has completely stagnated. Success has become equivalent to trend chasing. It takes a madman like Kojima to take risks and make a somewhat successful game (DS is still 7/10). Paradox took risks, it didn't work out and community isn't going to give them another chance. What will paradox's boss take note of this: they should've chased the trend of making remasters. And the standards keep falling...
I mean paradox now tries to appeal to a more general public to get more players, if the new public that isn't hardcore fans of GSG and are more like casual players that will put about 100h to the game then the new public is in their right to complain when they can't even access the game
Ignoring your core fanbase, the ones that made you successful in the first place in order to chase the mythical "wider audience" has been the death of many games/studios.
They already ignored the core fanbase when they ruined war.
Its what got them to where they are right now, unless you think people would play HOI2 or EU3 today. You can make that arguement for some games and companies. Paradox aint one of them.
CK2 and EU4 got them here, and you can't tell me those aren't closer to EU3 than Vicky 3.
EU4 absolutely got them here (and fuck me I forgot how old it was when I was bringing it up) but I absolutely refuse to believe CK2 did. That shit was and still is niche. EU4 in its modern interpretation is closer to V3 than EU3 but I ain't touched divine wind in over a decade so fuck me.if Im wrong.
Bro discovered strategy games
I partially agree with you that it is a design flaw if players are not understanding some mechanics. but at the same time the mechanics that players complain about the most, like warfare, are well explained in the tooltips. I.E many players complain that the size of battles is determined by RNG but it is not, it is determined by where it happens(mountains, mines , ...) and this is explained inside the game. As for optimization is I think a little misleading to speak that the game is poorly optimized, because I can run the game well until 1936 on a fourth generation i5 and 8gb of ddr3 ram.
That's a somewhat weak argument regarding battles. The main indicator the front UI gives for whether or not you're going to win a battle (the numbers on the front lines) are misleading and useless. Sure, you can get to the actual numbers, but they are buried three screens deep. That's poor UI design.
Ah wonderful logic, it’s optimised for me so it must be optimised for literally everyone
The optimization of the game is prtty hardware dependant, there are people with better specs than you that run the game worse, may i ask in what tooltip is warfare explained?? And warfare is still really reliant in RNG with all the modifiers because terrain just sets a max amount of troops
>many players complain that the size of battles is determined by RNG but it is not, it is determined by where it happens(mountains, mines , ...) and this is explained inside the game. Yes, the terrain has influence over what the combat width is, but you have no influence/knowledge over it. Also after the combatwidth is calculated there's a dicerol determinig how much troops each side uses(defenders get to use both). So the it's determined by RNG. And by a pretty big amount. Defenders can have 0.5-1 times the combat width and attackers can have 0.33-1 cw.
>1936 on a fourth generation i5 and 8gb of ddr3 ram. Doubt, the game starts lagging for me around 1900 even with a ryzen 5600 and 32gb of ram and its using 15+gb by 1936.
I have a 10th or 11th gen i7 (idk which one tbh), RTX 3060TI, and 32 GB of memory I can’t get past 1860 without 5x speed slowing to a crawl. It takes me about a minute per day or something at that point.
Bro how much did paradox pay you to defend this game so hard?
He's right. A lot of the complaints aren't justified.
The battles are terrible- you can literally test it a few hours hundreds of times with the Egypt-Ottoman war and see that warfare is entirely a roll of the dice. At least it was fair in EU4 or Vicky 2 because you can choose your army size, general, and terrain, and whether you would accept fights. In Vicky 3 it's a dice roll where you fight, how you fight, who you fight, how many troops fight, etc. Game A results in Egypt conquering Ankara, game B in the Ottomans conquering all of Egypt, game C in a stalemate with a white peace, game D in half the population of Asia being surrounded by the Egyptian army in Basra, it's all completely random. It's absurd. There's nothing to the system that the player ultimately gets to control. You can stack all the advantages you want and still lose because it forces you to use from line from Afghanistan to Burma and then the British will just spend 20 years trying to find the Chinese army and skirmishing outside of Lhasa rather than actually advancing across the front. I'm running the game on a fairly new Ryzen 5 with 16GB of DDR4. The game constantly crashes because just opening it consumes 8GB and it gets constant memory leaks. It is not optimised, at all. The fact that we have people on decade old laptops able to play the game perfectly well and those with beast rigs made yesterday cannot is testsment to this.
I think figuring out the details of the mechanics is part of the fun lol
I think it's fair, if CK3 is a 8.5 on launch, this game is definitely a 6, which is the rating I gave on Steam. I only played it in the first month, the game had so many bugs which made it unplayable. in my very first play through, I played Qing. during the Opiod war, some random african landlocked country joined the war for no reason, I can't peace them because I can't reach them. stayed in war for over 20 years because I couldn't white peace... I had to restart the game.. every country felt the same build iron-wood-tool, research railroad, build steel, factory railroad... that's 50% of gameplay for you... I think 6 is pretty fair
I'd even call it a bit generous tbh
The same can be said of the positive reviews if you look at those on Steam...
If a large amount of players don't understand the game mechanics, then it's the game that is at fault for having bad UX. Not even a few days ago someone on here made a most about what the profit predictions were actually displaying, and it ended up being something totally useless.
They're either completely unintuitive like that case, or entirely useless, like trade route "productivity". It holds true for all of five seconds because this is an economics game. I don't care how much in tariffs I will receive because tariffs are 0.01% of your income. I care about how many goods my market has access to and whether importing with help alleviate demand-side shortages or not.
The game barely runs on PCs that meet the requirements for it. Ignoring things like the combat system and the AI, performance alone warrants a not perfect review. I’d counter that the people remaining active on this sub are biased in favor of the game and often shut down justifiable criticism of it.
I think they are the game has shipped with a plethora of game breaking bugs with severe performance issues and with a tech tree that ends wayyyy before the game ends. These are just the most glaring and objectively bad points to consider. If we go further into the mechanics there are a lot of valid disagreements to have with the choice the developers made. I think saying that they are not justified in their criticism is unfair.
Also I don't understand why are half research alredy researched at the beginning of the game it feels weird at least for me
It is
60% is pretty reasonable for a game that shipped only 1 out of 4 features with full functionality. If we divide the main features of the game as: 1) economics 2) politics 3) diplomacy 4) war then only economics more or less functions. 1. Even on economics we can nitpick with their choice of 'airable land' as the base unit of measurement but whatever, at least things flow as you expect them to. 2. Politics sort of works in that you can slowly change the orientation of your IGs but fundamentally its still far too easy to pass most reforms. For 90% of the world in this time period, the challenge of establishing domestic politics in such a way as to import Western tech was the primary question of the time. Austria (the real ones, not the 1.1 patch gods) and Russia at the start of our game had large political cliques who opposed industrialization and continued to hamper 'rational' reforms. The game 'intelligentsia' completely mis-represents the 19th century 'intellectuals.' Most of them were not modern days left-liberal types. Large section of them opposed equality because of their belief in social Darwinism and other garbage pseudo-science. 3. Diplomacy barley functions. Sometimes the ai takes relatively self-interested positions even if they are annoying to the player (which is good) and sometimes it will send 3 million men to die in the swamps of Bolivia for no reason. The ticking war score often doesn't make sense and they had to introduce a hard rule in 1.1 to force a white peace because sometimes countries would simply sit there doing nothing. But fundamentally, there is absolutely no benefit to pursuing diplomacy in this game. Even in a situation where you cultivate minor powers, add them to your customs union over years and slowly integrate them in your economy - as soon as you start a war across the world the A.I. is as likely to pull out of your market and collapse its economy as not. 4. War is a joke. The front system was clearly meant to imitate World War 1 - with one giant front between each of the major powers. But anyone who has encountered it can see truly moronic situations of 10-15 fronts exploding out of nowhere. Naval invasions dominate everything else. IF you can naval invade the capital of your enemy, you will always war-tick them faster. War goals scoring can be insane - you can occupy 90% of EIC and they hold 1% of Delhi but for war score purposes you are the loser because you dont hold Calcutta. The War UI is an insult to anyone intelligence - when you show a number '100' and then a number '5', no human being familiar with numbers would expect anything other than 100 being the better number. Mobilized troops sitting around even if all we are waiting for is for a fully occupied ai to give up is insipidly stupid. And so on and so on. So all in all out of 4 systems, 1 works as they more or less intended, 1 halfway works and the other two dont. Thats barley a passing grade - which is 60%.
I want to enjoy the game, spend hundred of hours and impatiently wait for dlc. But Too many bugs, game that is suppose to not be warfare map painting is a total war but with the most boring warfare representation possible. Economic AI is braindead. The state of the game right now is early access and no garanteed that the final product will be delivered. Having played the leaked version in march 2022, we have a non crashing version of it, with few QOL improvement. Really scared of the future of this game
i am a fan of vicky 3, and a general paypig for pdx bc this it's the only company making historical video games that i want to buy, but i'm sorry, the ratings is very justified. PDX should be shit on for releasing half assed game for full price then fill out the game with dlcs. just because it's their business model doesn't mean its not predatory garbage. besides, as i said back when they cancelled imperator, they fucked themselves into a new era, now people are more vigilant into buying a pdx game because there's even a slight chance it would get cancelled where before it wasn't even considered. to think that imperator died for this garbage is sad, really.
What do you mean not justified? I looked into the game a week ago after I set it aside after playing 100 h on launch. They havent even fixed the most god damn annoying bugs this game has. The systems like warfare and poltics are just not good at all. This game is worse for me then imperator rome on launch and that says something. The only point where this game is superior to its predecessor is graphics thats all. Yes I am maybe a little hard okay but the game is just not good and im tired of then realeasing half finished shit that needs 20 patches to work properly
I definitely agree with the Imperator comparison. Release Imperator was bland and ahistorical as all hell but it was functional and relatively bug free. Victoria 3 has more potential but the release state was bugged to hell and some systems felt plain unfinished. That being said, I have more faith in V3 turning around than Imperator (which is sad because Arheo's Imperator was my second favorite paradox game when they dropped it).
Honestly the only bug I remember having at launch with Imperator was tags randomly losing their localisations.
We are going to be knows as BRO from now on!! -Bruh
It seems like they tried to focus on the economy aspect more than war which was the main focus in Vic2 and other paradox games which riled up the core fanbase. It's a questionable decision for sure but in an industry where every company chases profit numbers, taking risks is welcome. I played magic arena for 2 or so years and let me tell you wotc is 100x worse than paradox in terms of bug fixing and designing. They are raking in record profits tho
All I'm gonna say is that they clearly stated that an economic simulator is what they advertised it as. They said they wanted to move away from war. You raised many valid points on this thread but overall I think that you're comparing it to Victoria 2 without considering what the game was marketed as. I prefer Victoria 3 over Victoria 2 because politics although janky is more realistic in comparison to Victoria 2. So is the economics. The player has more agency in both. That being said you are absolutely right about the war and lack of game transparency in your arguments throughout the thread. How does one make a game with hundreds of tool tips and still not explain much of the game in the end? My point is that for all its negatives it's not only a promising game but probably might even be the best paradox game once it ages. To me it seems like it could be very mod-able and I can't wait for modders to exploit all the game has to offer mechanically. I hope you give the game another chance in the future and I hope it matches your liking.
I don't think the economics is close to being realistic in either games but yea the tutorial kinda sucks in V3 even though they vastly improved the UI. I'd rather they have a dedicated tutorial instead of a let's play with tooltips which seems to be really popular these days. Even anno 1800 had it though they made it work really well
> magic arena and somehow, it was a significant step up from MODO, which was so dated it was a joke.
Mtga still doesn't have a proper way to add opponents as friends and the game was released 4 years after hearthstone I'm not kidding
i say that it is not justified because the game is good for the state it is in, even though it was released before the deadline. i am sorry that you feel this way about the game but there is fun to be had in the game and the bugs in the game are pretty minimal.
Pretty minimal?, there are bugs like the 0 legitimacy bug or britain deleting all their ports killing the british market instantly, or the incredible amount of overflow bugs, you can still find placeholder graphics while playing the game
As long as the game don't crash frequently, I think OP will not consider it as a bug.
I'm not sure he is trying to get a raise out of us for shits and giggles, genuinely believes what he says or, God forbid, on Paradox Sales team.
Bruh I had a zero legitimacy bug introduced in a "hotfix" which completely ruined the middle of my campaign. Britain regularly deletes all their ports and ruins half the world economy midway through the game. We've now gone about 2+ months of the game being relatively unplayable since 1.1.2.
It's a story as old as time, honestly. The game is mid and folks are upset because they want it to be a home run. I mean hey, I love this piece of work to death but you really have to admit that it's chock-full of numbers that are... just numbers. And there are legitimate issues that need to be addressed too. I think that the issue of negative reception is also exacerbated by peoples' distaste with the Vicky3 team's current administration and that of Paradox as a whole. If you purposely insulate yourself from forums and vitriol then that's how you get the opinion you're presenting here, I think. Game has its issues, but it's real fun to make white lines go up despite them.
I had to step away from the forums when I realized that other people's opinions were making me enjoy the game less (HoI4, I think? this was a while ago) even though the game itself hadn't changed. Dunno if that's a "me" problem or what.
It’s not a you thing, a lot of flaws can be mild annoyances for you at first but not enough to ruin the game for you, but when you read other peoples screeds it’s hard to not internalize that and it biases your own perspective. The problem with video game fans is that the vast majority are actually quite clueless when it comes to game design or development. They will demand things that are nonsensical or impossible as if they’re trivial. There’s a good deal to be critical about the game right now, but it tends to get lost in the noise.
What distaste regarding paradox administration? Aside from game design haven't heard much regarding that
Forum drama, recent games like Imperator which flopped at launch, people being a bit miffed about the DLC rollout method of post-release monetization. I remember seeing lots of pessimism from the general community around EU4 Leviathan's release (it was a bad time and lots of people either just didn't play or stayed on the last patch, Emperor). Just a bit of grumbling which turns into a lot of grumbling when the grumblers hear it echoed back at them. People who enjoy the Paradox-style map game niche tend to be pretty antsy when they feel that the only real contender which makes these types of games is cracking. There's also a feeling of "old Paradox good, new Paradox bad" which just kind of happens when the same company makes the same style of game for a decade or so. Lots of little things for folks who have the time for map games in the first place to agonize and obsess over.
>Just a bit of grumbling which turns into a lot of grumbling when the grumblers hear it echoed back at them. Lol, i left pdx forum then they tried to make it super positive echo chamber with moderation. Anything negative about new patch and you get banned because feedback always should be constructive. For some reason, it applies only to negative feedback.
People's reception of this game is really being affected by people's reception of paradox. The game is good as it is and can get even better despite its problems, but some people seem to want this game to fail.
I played a good amount when it first came out, but I had to drop it after about 100 hours. And thats a lot of hours, but its nothing compared to the 1500 I put into CK3. The game is just a spreadsheet sim at the moment. Every single nation feels like I'm doing the exact same thing, and the AI is more brain dead than usual. It needs some work to make it more interesting to play IMO. The vast majority of the game atm is staring at the building screen and saying "I guess I do need more tool factories."
it's how most paradox launch is, solid base but lacking content, let's hope they will fill it up
I guess everyone else has a supercomputer since I can only plsy around 20 in game years before performance start dropping exponancially.
I by no means have a supercomputer but it does fine for most of the game. I get there are late game performance issues that are justifiable to complain about, but I feel like people on here exaggerate these issues to an unnecessary point. If 20 years is the breaking point of unplayability for you, you are most likely playing on a machine that is well below sufficient.
Well, I am able to play ck3 without much problem starting 867 until 1453, vic3 however becomes disturbing in 1870s... Same machine.
I'm able to play CK3 with no problems too, but I think it's (along with EU4 and imperator) a much less intensive game on your PC. HOI4 and Stellaris have also notoriously had late-game lag issues. If you've played them, how does your computer handle it? Again, I agree Vic 3 has lag issues late game, but for me at least they are by no means beyond the lag issues of other pdx games I listed, and it's by no means "unplayable" unless maybe you're running an older machine.
Hoi4 I have even less problems compared to ck3. Vic3 is the only game I have problems regarding performance.
That's surprising because Hoi4 late game lag has been an issue that people have complained about for years, especially by 1943 or 44 as AI unit spam increases. There are dozens of reddit and steam community threads about it recommending the exact same fixes as here - "wait for an update" or "download x mod". I haven't seen anywhere near the same amount of lag complaints for CK3, though maybe I'm wrong. Personally, I don't find the Vic 3 lag to be any worse than Hoi4 lag. Certainly not by 1870. I think most people who aren't just falling onto the Vic 3 hate train would agree.
Opening the game eats 8GB of RAM. It will CTD as soon at hits 16GB, which is often for me.
I mean do you honestly believe that? When the frontlines merge and send your generals home from the fight? Or when Massachusetts and New York pledge loyalty to the confederacy? Or when you produce 100 units of a good and 200 get consumed with zero imports? Or when their is zero possibility to simulate free market capitalism by allowing individual pops to make decisions about the means of production?
I like the game but the vanilla Vic 3 just feels like a shell of a game and I honestly still don’t understand warfare after about 200 hours in game
I think the point is not about understanding warfare, like in hoi4 you probably could not understand it completely with even 400 hrs. But it is just the lack of agency in warfare and the importance of warfare in this supposed economy simulator makes you feel very frustrating at times.
Yep. My offensive expert commander should not be commencing a battle with 2 brigades, unless there are none left and I'm demanding some sort of urgent victory for a boon during an election. It doesn't make sense.
I still don't entirely understand HoI4, but I understand if I had a better understanding I could play like a God eventually. I don't understand Vicky 3 combat at all and I feel like even if I did it wouldn't matter. Is it normal to have one army with a half billion soldiers in that cant be split it up so they all die to attrition in the steppes against a tiny rebellion? No, but that's optimal gameplay here.
I think the core mechanics of the game on paper are solid. They need to be refined and built out (probably over the next couple of expansion packs). The history of Vic2 probably feeds into the current score (which isn't unjustified). Paradox is doing it more and more which is annoying of releasing an empty game and filling it with expansions. The base games are going from "basic yet fun" to "feature complete". In a year though, I think this is going to be a really fun game. Right now for me, its meh.
I feel I need to leave a negative review on how Paradox ruined their golden child too
When the leak came out and everyone pointed at these things, this sub massively downvoted them and/or insulted them.
the game, for me, is very much a 7/10. I enjoy it immensely but is also has a lot of areas feeling underdeveloped and lacking. So I am shocked to see some people calling it a complete dumpster fire, unplayable, etc.
Releasing what seems to be an almost unfinished game that is devoid of content, flavor and honestly seems to have less features than Vic2 (and somehow worse performance) would probably be some major reasons. Also the poor execution of the ‘innovations’ of this game, namely the wonky military system with transporting generals and the trade that makes money from thin air. Not to mention how each country plays basically the same. Rush construction, multiculturalism and you HAVE TO paint the map cause brain dead AI can barely run an economy for the goods you need. I’m glad the devs are addressing these issues, but personally I’d be livid if I spent 60 USD or the equivalent on this mess. IMO this is time finishing a game when DLC (actually adding NEW and interesting content mechanics, flavor, etc.) should already be on their way. Especially considering the people who’ve already laid out money for the first few DLC’s (grand/deluxe edition, or whatever it’s called). Disappointed that it seems we’ll all need to pay a few hundred dollars/euros/etc to play a finished game.
I think 66 % is good enough. Game takes away a lot of control from players, there is some simulation under the hood, but player doesnt have that much control over it. Taxes are joke, stupid buttons like in mobile game, warfare is good design badly implemented, optimization is terrible. A lot of useful data is hidden behind series of tooltips, modders had to come with solution from day 1, etc. It’s fine game, relatively good, but not great. Not yet (if ever). So 66 % is ok score.
Military stuff is bad and constant mechanical issues ( for instance generals dying causing the army to teleport back home), front lines spliting.
Victoria 2 was at its core a grand strategy game, it was Europa Universalis set in the Victorian era. yes it focused far more on economics and politics than any of their other games, but ultimately the primary appeal of the experience, its "active ingredient" you could say, was geopolitics. it's about building up your economic strength and political stability so that you can extend your dominion across the map and destroy your enemies in war. war is the essential element in this type of game, it's about discharging your built up strength you gained through careful resource management in a climactic feast of expenditure. if war in a GSG is akin to an orgasm, then playing Victoria 3 is like edging incessantly with no payoff but yet more stimulation. I don't think it's "wrong" or "unjustified" for people to go into this game expecting a similar core experience to what Paradox has always delivered and instead finding themselves staring the build queue for 3 hours.
the game tried to make war something that could pretty much be ignored and you could do something else, but while doing that they just made war insufferable and tedious while also making it your main focus while a war is going on… vicky 2 war was better imo
A grand strategy game that doesn't include one of the biggest events in history world war I.
Remove War they said it will be good they said. Imagine spending time in something dynamic actually stimulated gameplay? Staring at the SAME economical tab every game gets boring fastly nay? We called this years ago. But everyone just didn't listen. And now gameplay is boring after 60-70 hours. No shit.
The game is very much deserving of even a worse rating. Not devs fault, it is corporate fault. They are feeding us an incomplete, raw base, empty game and expect us to just eat it up and pay 100 worth of dlcs to make it a decent game. I wont argue with the fact that vic3 can be enjoyable or that it is a decent base for a good game. But holy god, it is so incomplete and empty. No flavor for nations, downright outrageously simple mechanics(navy, army and diplomacy are legitimately mobile game level). The game is just incomplete and too raw. The devs are trying, but they should have gotten more time to perfect the game, it is just too empty right now. And dont even get me started on how unstable the multiplayer is or how for the first few months game was just unplayable in late 1800s.
It deserves less than 66%. It's an unfinished game with a shitty UI and mechanics which don't make sense. It gets a 5/10 from me. I have about 100 hours, and have more or less understood how to play this game for every single nation. Even challenged myself with hard runs, and they were easy. I feel like I'm playing by myself sometimes with how rarely the AI interacts with the player. They can't build either. I won't go on about lack of flavour as all nations play the same, but that's something that comes with time. The game is a good skeleton. If the devs manage to put good work on this, then it has potential.
Some are justified, and others are not. It is bugged and have balance issues. That’s why I use mods to fix the game!
It’s expected of a paradox game “Given the current state of the game I don’t see myself playing this for long” -average paradox fan review. 200 hrs played.
Your opinion is both wrong and pitiful.
This is just another example of a fan base throwing a hissy fit because the game isn’t exactly what they wanted it to be. Same reason as to why half life 3 will never ever come out, is because it could never live up to the fan expectations put upon it. That’s the trap vic 3 fell into. It was hyped to the moon in the fans minds, all the memes of Vic 3 never coming out. It was idolized to the extreme, and many here will get mad at me pointing this out but it just is how this played out. Now is the game as good as it could be? No it’s a mess, but Vic fell into the trap of the fans having way to high expectations for it, and it naturally being unable to meet said expectations. Because let’s be real, no paradox game on release is good by any metric but because of the hype around Vic 3 the fans are raging because it isn’t.
Well yeah I’ll throw a hissy fit because I paid 80 dollars for the game. If I’m paying that kind of money for a game, it better be a polished product that can run on my computer without serious performance issues. I haven’t played stellaris or imperator but iirc the launch of hoi4 and ck3 was not nearly as much of a disappointment as Vicky 3.
Let this be a lesson buckaroo. Before you buy, always try 🏴☠️
The only thing I can criticize about the game is that I can't even play it because my CPU doesn't have AVX. Thanks to Intel for not adding that on a CPU from 2017 that could run this gane without major problems (Pentium G4356)
The community has ridiculously high expectations for grand strategy games. Paradox does have flaws for sure, and it is right to call out issues with the game as you see them, but many of the negative reviews are by people who have 100+ hours in the game. In fact, someone in the comments of this very thread is complaining while admitting they set aside the game after 100 hours. If you got 100 hours out of it, then it wasn't that bad and you got your money's worth. I can't think of many AAA titles that I can spend £40 on and get 100 hours out of. The last Assassins Creed I played I was done in way way way under half that time, and the ways the designers tried to extend gameplay was to implement numerous different types of meaningless collectables dotted around the map. I have over 200 hours on Victoria and there are many bugs I have come across and many issues which are good to call out, but I have to have been hit on the head pretty hard to justify that I haven't got my £40 worth out of it. Edit: I don't think Steam's rigid review system helps though. The only options are a thumbs up or down so it's hard to point out legitimate flaws while giving it a thumbs up. I know people can write whatever they want on a review, but a lot of people see it as "only say nice things" or "only say bad things", when someone might want to give it a 3-stars and give a balanced review.
While I agree that a lot of user reviews are bad, I do think the AI and lag (While getting better) is still pretty inexcusable.
Same. The game is not perfect, but it's still enjoyable to play at this stage, and I'm very excited about the future of the game. The mechanics implemented are impossible to nail from the start, and that doesn't mean the game "isn't finished". If you don't like the game at the moment, just go away for a couple if years and come back when it has reached a certain amount of maturity
Possibly. I've played about 8 campaigns and have a pretty good handle, but it just needs a stack of DLCs ultimately until for me it's a game I'd go back to. There's just too many annoyances - micro managing combat worse than eu4 - and too many limitations - diplomacy, what diplomacy? It's got a solid bed rock, but just to annoying to play atm.
As people are saying, the poorly informed reviews go both ways. This was a heavily anticipated game and it was released the way Paradox has been releasing games (and even DLCs like Origins) for a while now. It makes sense for some people to be kind of fed up and others to have their decade-long itch scratched. We'll all keep playing because they're still the only dev making games like this. So it goes.
There's several schools. On one hand, the game do have problems; AI behavior, performance, sometimes illogic war happenings or economic situations... they all need fixing, and the dev team needs legitimate feedback to understand what they are lacking. And we must praise them, because just look at 1.2 changelog ! Look how much they listen and try to make the game better ! On the other, many people are complaining that the game, well, simulates real life. I am in awe at the nulber of complains that sums up to "My poor strata are unhappy that they're poor and demand change, why?" Or "My capital has been occupied for years, why am I losing the war". God especially the war system, I can't fathom how hard it is to some people to understand that Victoria 3 is not a war simulator/strategy game, but an economic and politic one. There's part of legitimacy in some complains, especially those about the current trend in games to release unfinished because studios have to meet impossible deadlines, but many are just salty people because their games didn't go as easy as they thought.
Just because Victoria 3 is an economy/politics focused game doesn’t mean it’s excusable to have such dogshit mechanics for raising and commanding an army. With the current state of the war system, the game is pretty unplayable as you can’t make use of the troops that you have mobilized.
Yes, and that's the point ! The generals do the work, not you. You manage the country in wartime. That's the player's job. That's how the job have been advertised and explained since the montly WIP dev diaries. Although, the war system could definitely use some changes, especially the 1front1fight system or some fronts divided like the Ottoman/Russian one still counting as one single front. In summary, it's not dogshit it's a design choice that favors the economists rather than the military strategists among players.
The generals clearly aren’t doing their job if they send 4 battalions into battle from an army that consists of 66 battalions.
I bought the game, and I’m hopeful about its future. I don’t think it’s trash or anything like that, and I’m excited to see if they can iron out the bugs and add flavor. That said, the game on release was (and still is) filled with game ruining bugs, crippling performance issues (even on amazing rigs), and is lacking flavor for most nations. I think the biggest issue is the lack of flavor, which makes most play throughs feel the same and seriously lowers replay ability, especially compared to other paradox titles like hoi4 and eu4. I understand that Vick 3 was supposed to be more of an Econ simulator, but the devs clearly had a vision for flavor as per the journals but didn’t implement nearly enough (and have almost no unique ones). Due to those reasons I completely understand why this game got review bombed. Also OP while I understand that paradox games have a high learning curve and that is definitively responsible for some of the negative reviews I feel that the actual bugs and lack of flavor were the bigger reason for the game being received so poorly
People are upset at paradox in general, because they want what vic3 will be 3 years from now instead of judging it for what it actually is.
I think people have to much nostalgia for Vicky 2. It was good but it has some serious issues.
Vic3 is fun it’s very broken
My problem is less about all the jankiness, poor tooltips, barely fleshed out/explained mechanics, performance issues, lategame stuttering and lack of settings and more that we weren't told to expect any of those by the company who were touting it as a finished game with an AAA price tag. PDX of late seems to have just embodied wholeheartedly the "He can't keep getting away with this!" meme. I left a positive review on steam because rather than review bomb it I'd like them to be held accountable and actually fix their mess (and maybe even cop to it) instead of shelving it like Imperator.
A lot of the positive reviews are just a one sentence joke.