[2022] Europa Universalis IV: Dev Diary - A 1.33 Retrospective

A lil somethin somethin: You can find the details for this event on the announcement page here.

Hello everyone, and welcome back to EUIV Dev Diaries! It’s been a while since the last one, but now we think it is due time to address a 1.33 Update Retrospective, and talk a bit with you about what we’ve been doing, and the topics concerning the community.

In the past month, since the 1.33 Update full release, the Team has been working mostly on the Post Release Support (PRS) of it. You may have noticed that our process in the Bug Reports subforum has changed a bit, and that the QLOC Team that gives us external QA support is directly addressing tickets, although the person in charge of it is AldathPDX, our QA Project Coordinator. Devs aren’t going to disappear from the subforum, though; we will still be going to interact directly with the reports when needed, but this way we’re becoming more efficient in what we really want to focus on - improving the state of the game. Speaking of QA, we have opened a position for an Internal QA Tester, as you may know. If you want to join us at Paradox Tinto, and you think you have the requirements for it, you can apply to it here[career.paradoxplaza.com]!

Regarding 1.33 PRS, we decided to prioritize the usually tricky and hard-to-catch issues of OOS and CTD for the 1.33.3 patch released last week. We really wanted to focus on these issues, as we shared the concerns about MP games becoming more unstable. And, precisely because of this, we also decided not to introduce gameplay changes in this patch, as we preferred to release the most stable version possible, and fixing and testing other issues may have delayed this patch even further. We know this may be controversial, but we think it’s the most beneficial course of action for the game at this moment.

This doesn’t mean that changes are set in stone, as we want to continue gathering feedback from the community. We have to say that we are pretty happy with the results of the 1.33 Open Beta that was handled in the month prior to the release. We fixed a lot of issues thanks to the direct feedback gathered from you, the players, and we were able to make some further tweaks and changes quickly thanks to this. We think this has been a useful tool, and we’re open to using Open Betas again for future updates.

Going back to the gameplay changes topics, there are a couple that we know have been concerning the community in the past weeks: Combat changes, and allied AI behavior. The last one is more related to the kind of situation that may appear after improving it: now the AI acts on its own interests, which may not be the player’s, and that are different from how it behaved previously. This is something that happened in a few fields when improving AI for 1.33 Update, and that we rollback while developing it; but sometimes, this kind of behavior appears. We will be targeting AI again in the following months, so your game experience is quite valuable about this point. About the former, well, we already said that we wanted to “shake” a bit how Combat works, and our position is that we want extra feedback before committing to new changes. So, please, we want some constructive feedback in this thread regarding both topics, with your opinion on what works/what doesn’t, to further improve the gameplay experience (note: posts of the type “these changes are bad, just revert to previous version” are much less useful for us than those tackling the current situation and suggesting further changes for improvement).

The other big gameplay topic we addressed in 1.33 was rebalancing and adding a some extra content for the Eastern Asian regions, specifically on the Empire of China and Mandate of Heaven mechanics. We’re quite content with the outcome, as we were able to improve those in the Open Beta, and the issues we’ve been fixing regarding it in the PRS are not very concerning. Anyway, again, further suggestions are welcome, although more on the topic of polishing balance changes, than in adding more content, as we have started to move on to new things.

So yes, we’re already working on new content to be added to another new update! We’ve been spending some development time in the last weeks planning that, so because of it we’ve been a bit more ‘shy’ here. And now we have good and bad news. Good news is that we’re also recruiting another Content Designer for the studio! So, if you’re interested, you can apply here[career.paradoxplaza.com]. The bad news is that you will have to wait a bit longer to take a look at the new content, as we’re in a very early development phase. In two weeks, after Easter vacation is over, we’ll present you the Roadmap for the new content, and we’ll start communicating again on a weekly basis.

That’s all for now! We hope to receive detailed feedback from you from 1.33, to keep working on it, as we’ll be reading your comments. See you!