The Elephant in the Room
It would be hard to talk about Trial of Allegiance without first mentioning that we’re acutely aware of its critical reception from fans. I see no reason not to be transparent about this, and I’m going to use today as an opportunity to talk about what it means to us and how we analyze reactions, so let’s dive into some of the facts:Everything’s on Fire!
Well, actually no. Trial of Allegiance has thus far been one of our most stable releases in terms of bugs and player-encountered issues. This doesn’t mean there aren’t bugs: stuff always creeps through, but as you may have noticed by now, we’ve had an Open Beta running with a patch scheduled sometime today. The patch notes will be attached to the end of this document. Furthermore, we have another patch scheduled in next week to give us a chance to tackle more complex problems. Due to the low incidence of bugs in the ToA content, we’re spending a bit more time on general improvements and things folks thought were lacking. Developer’s Perspective: bugs are defects in the game - errors or unforeseen complexities that render part of the experience to not work as intended. We don’t usually consider design choices or outdated content as bugs unless they cause the first statement to apply, since that evaluation is often subjective.Circles Within Circles
Our steam review score has taken a fairly heavy beating on Trial of Allegiance. Reviews on DLCs are notoriously hard to draw accurate conclusions from, as very few people tend to leave reviews compared to the overall number of people who bought a DLC. Trial of Allegiance is particularly notable in that regard, as there are fewer reviews overall than we would normally expect. It’s absolutely possible to theorize behind why that is, but that’s all those are: theories. That said, we read every review. Aaand it’s quite hard, tbh. Being a venerable ancient of the internet, I could wax lyrical on toxicity, vocabulary, and dissociation, but at the end of the day folks leave reviews for a reason. The language they use isn’t as important as the sentiment they’re trying to convey, even if they don’t always know the right way to do it. What we try and do, therefore, is to try and don our armor of not-taking-things-too-personally, and group negative reviews by common themes or sentiments. For Trial of Allegiance, we assessed clear ‘meta’ groupings in order of weight*: - Unhappiness about recent regional currency price adjustments - Unhappiness about the price of the country pack > Compared to other HOI4 expansions > Other - Bought it but wanted something different > New mechanics, or > A european expansion - Unhappy with the quality of the release > In relation to specific issues; > In relation to mods > Unclear/Unintelligible > Unclear/Horrendously offensive *This requires looking at global reviews, not english-language only: something we take quite seriously. The exact weighting here changes a lot over time, but suffice it to say that the top grouping is significantly larger than any of the others, and the last grouping vice-versa. But hang on, does this just mean we’re being review bombed by angry interest groups? Well, that would be a nice easy assumption that allows us to feel good about ourselves and go home for supper, but there doesn’t seem to be any coordinated effort here as far as we can tell. What we can tell here is that folks commonly leave reviews for reasons unrelated to the content we made. So, these are the findings. So far these have been presented as factual; now we take a more subjective view when it comes to reacting to the findings.Regional Pricing
This one was a little unexpected, though in hindsight it shouldn’t have been. Looking back over recent reviews on our other expansions, we see the same trend. In January, Paradox made efforts to normalize pricing across various currency regions according to (as I understand it) a standard used by Valve. On HoI, we saw this as a mostly administrative change, and did not, I think, ask enough questions about the effect it might have on our game-specific player base. I am not promising any sweeping changes here for decisions that have already been made. What I can say however, is that we will not be treating any such changes as administrative in the future. We will be doing our due diligence.General Pricing
A little more expected, perhaps, but with some important notes. The vast majority of complaints about the pricing of this release came with comparisons or in relation to other content we’ve released in the past. While it overlaps a little with the next topic, I feel like we could have been clearer with setting expectations about what a country pack is. Another observation here is that our fanbase seems to attach more importance to the consistency of expansion prices than we tend to. A lot of the comparisons we’re seeing are equating content made many years ago or at a completely different scale to Trial of Allegiance.Wanted Something Different
This one is a real games-industry conundrum. Traditionally, if you bring something to market that doesn’t interest everyone, the uninterested ones avoid it. Not so here. We knew that South America would be a divisive topic amongst the fanbase: some regard it as important, some do not. We calculated that this would make these nations perfect for a country-pack release instead of a full expansion - including mechanics in something that may not interest everyone would put fans in the situation of having to purchase something they did not want. And, uh, that backfired a bit. Overwhelmingly, reviews in this category are asking where the mechanics are, or why we’re spending time on X instead of Y. Importantly though, we aren’t gonna change that. We will sometimes have country pack releases, and they will not contain mechanics, though perhaps there’s some middle ground for tech/unit/other additions. This all comes with a big but: the Juno team who created Trial of Allegiance are not the only ones working on HOI4. Creating content packs is not being done at the expense of other things. We aren’t ready to talk about exactly what’s coming yet, but simply put: we have mechanical expansions in the pipeline that are being built at this very moment. Outside of expansions, we have even more big stuff happening for HoI in the very near future. Watch this space. Developer’s Perspective: Even if we wanted to, making two mechanical expansions in parallel would be a significant technical challenge. Some games are built to make that easy! HOI is not one of them.Quality of Release
This is predominantly the stuff that reviews traditionally focus on. Was the delivered content good/bad/neutral? The nature of this is subjective, and these reviews are really where we can act by making changes and fixes. Below you’ll find the patch notes for our first iteration on ToA’s content, with more to come soon. Overall what we’re seeing from players that stated an active interest in South America is a trending positive reaction. There are some key problems raised to us from highly invested players, which we’ll do our best to address. There are learnings we want to take into future country packs or war effort patches, including but not limited to:- Shared branches were one of those things that made sense at the time, but in hindsight we should have avoided.
- People love map changes more than I thought humanly possible.
- Power creep is real, and we should have a balance reckoning sooner rather than later
- We can do more with units, tech, and non-focus content without being explicitly ‘mechanical’ in nature. This was sort of on our radar already, but player feedback confirms that.
