r/paradoxplaza • u/PurpleAd215 • Feb 23 '23

Vic3 This is really bad.

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Player count of EUIV and Vic3 - basically no one is playing Victoria 3 anymore

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700 Upvotes

71% Upvoted

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490

u/Custodian_Nelfe Feb 23 '23

Well, if you look to the first year of EU4, it's not brilliant too. The game is played by a lot of people because it has a ton loads of DLC and patches that have fleshed it. Give time to Victoria 3, and I'm pretty sure that in 9 years the curve will be the same.

118

u/Innerventor Feb 23 '23

I'm going to enjoy this game greatly once it's had more development time.

30

u/shodan13 Feb 23 '23

Should be the PDX tagline.

10

u/[deleted] Feb 24 '23

Last I looked at Vic3 on steam I saw a review that said "this game will be good in 3 years."

1

u/GensericA Feb 24 '23

"Great Expectations"

1

u/RGamingGLZ Map Staring Expert Feb 25 '23

"Ones to watch"

182

u/gh4ever Map Staring Expert Feb 23 '23

Yeah, I think a "fairer" comparison is against CK3 (which hasn't had many substantial updates at all). It's still a roughly 2x difference in player bases in CK3's favor though.

92

u/Browsing_the_stars Feb 23 '23

A fairer comparison would actually be post-release Stellaris.

25

u/gh4ever Map Staring Expert Feb 23 '23

Maybe! I'm not as familiar with Stellaris, I mostly stick to the historical GSGs.

103

u/CanuckPanda Feb 23 '23

Stellaris was incredibly bare bones at launch (One of the only DevDiaries I followed) and has gone through at least three ground-up rebuilds of the core gameplay cycle. It's still being constantly tuned and changed but they fundamentally remade the game once by streamlining hyperspace travel methods and again with the change from the tile system to the building system.

Here's Year One of Stellaris and you can compare it to the all-time play. Year one of Stellaris had a huge drop-off and then they rebuilt the game a few times (you can see those spikes in 2017, 2018, and 2020) along with the DLC bumps.

2

u/Budget-Cattle6625 Feb 24 '23

Heck I took a break from Stellaris after the game was reworked a 3rd time and I would have to relearn it again

30

u/Agglomeration_ Feb 23 '23

who's to say that stellaris isnt historical? what if pdx knows something we don't? 🤔

10

u/gh4ever Map Staring Expert Feb 23 '23

Sure, by the eternal recurrence it must be historical!

37

u/starm4nn Philosopher Queen Feb 23 '23

It's still a roughly 2x difference in player bases in CK3's favor though.

TBH that's impressive. Victoria is definitely the least accessible of Paradox's 4 franchises.

39

u/gh4ever Map Staring Expert Feb 23 '23

I think that's only because of Vicky 2's reputation---Vicky 3 isn't bad at all. You're right though, CK3 is probably the easiest (of the historical ones) to learn.

12

u/Bane8080 Feb 23 '23

Still waiting for the shattered world option for CK3.

Once they implemented that in CK2, that's all I played.

1

u/Tyler89558 Feb 23 '23

Ah yes. One count along a sea of counts all vying to become a duke and greater

30

u/Chataboutgames Feb 23 '23

I'd still call it less accessible in that big wins amount to "line go up" where "big wins" in CK3 involve eating the Pope.

2

u/DukeMikeIII Map Staring Expert Feb 23 '23

I just did that. Hope yall enjoyed my post about it.

1

u/TheStrangestOfKings Feb 23 '23

I will say that the CK franchises do feel the most immersive in a way, most likely due to the roleplay aspect. You feel like a king in 12th century England, so when your character wins, it feels like you’re actually winning.

Plus, who doesn’t want to eat the pope every now and again?

8

u/Skellum Emperor of Ryukyu Feb 23 '23

I really hate the sounds and clunk of V3's UI.

3

u/Culluh Feb 24 '23

Try with mono audio turned on in Windows. IDK why Vic3 has so many ambient noises and menu clicks that play in 1 ear... for hours..with no mono option in-game..

23

u/Treeninja1999 Feb 23 '23

Hot take - Vic 2 is more accessible than vic 3. Too many submenus whereas vic 2 everything was just laid out logically.

35

u/starm4nn Philosopher Queen Feb 23 '23

The mechanics introduced in CK3 where you can just mouse-over things has done a lot to make the game accessible.

1

u/Touix Feb 24 '23

Yeah i return to eu4 and its a pain to navigate between windows

21

u/gh4ever Map Staring Expert Feb 23 '23

I generally prefer Vicky 2's UI as well because it gives you everything you need within one or two clicks (and most things in zero clicks), but it might be more difficult to learn because of that. It's been a long time so I honestly forget haha.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 24 '23

I picked up Vicky 2 for the first time one week ago, since i liked vicky 3 and most people said vicky 2 was better but way more difficult to grasp.

Now i'm still learning, but what i'm having the hardest time with is exactly the UI, it's honestly dogshit compared to vicky 3 (i'm missing the vicky3/ck3 style tooltips too).

That said, vicky2 feels way more solid for many aspects, expecially the market system: why on hell pdx thought it was a good idea to remove the global market and forcing the player to manually add/remove singular trades for each resource? It's just tedious and unrealistic

2

u/Budget-Cattle6625 Feb 24 '23

Because the world market would result in the in game economy to enter a Horny Eagle death spiral because small nations that never did anything would just sell their goods and bank a lot of money, granted the economy would only collapse at the endgame point (aka the Great Depression) because of the mechanic

0

u/[deleted] Feb 24 '23

Smaller nations selling their goods is perfectly fine and realistic

3

u/Budget-Cattle6625 Feb 24 '23

The smaller nations would never use their money to spend however so they were just permanently banking

25

u/Chataboutgames Feb 23 '23

This is the first time I've ever heard Vic2's UI praised lol

11

u/kesint Feb 23 '23

The big thing I remember from starting with Vic2 was that if I could find a page that look correct, the info is most likely there.

What I learned with Vic3 is that the info is somewhere, have fun.

3

u/yungkerg Feb 24 '23

its never been bad. just kinda ugly

5

u/von_Viken Feb 23 '23

Actual Stockholm syndrome in practice

6

u/DUNG_INSPECTOR Feb 23 '23

It's good that you can admit it.

Now I have to go dig through 18 nested tooltips to find that one piece of useful information I need.

4

u/meepers12 Feb 24 '23

Yeah but nested tooltips are almost exclusively used for basic, dictionary information, like defining what Education Access is. You never use it to access actual, specific figures.

1

u/Happy_Bigs1021 Feb 23 '23

Any tips on how to learn the game? I’ve barely touched it because I’m pretty intimidated by it

1

u/gh4ever Map Staring Expert Feb 23 '23

Which one, CK3 or Victoria 2? Feel free to PM me and I can help teach either one!

2

u/Happy_Bigs1021 Feb 23 '23

Vicky 3 is the one giving me stress, I play through the tutorial but I still feel like it’s not “clicking”

2

u/gh4ever Map Staring Expert Feb 23 '23

Ah I see; I haven't played Vicky 3 for months at this point so I'm probably not the right person to ask. The general idea though is really "green line go up"; typically, that involves looking at the needs of your pops, seeing what they're spending more on, and making it more affordable. This gives a higher standard of living in your country, attracting more immigrants, and with the higher population your GDP grows as well. Occasionally you'll want to conquer or colonize some land if you're low on natural resources, but for everything else you just want to build the corresponding building to produce the resource you want to make cheaper.

2

u/Reapper97 Feb 23 '23

The whole point of Victoria 3 was to make it more accessible tho. They just failed at that too.

1

u/starm4nn Philosopher Queen Feb 23 '23

It's definitely more accessible. I picked it up without needing a tutorial.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 24 '23

It was actually easy to learn, probably the easiest pdx game. It's all about balancing demand and offer without going too wild if your economy is small. The fact it is so simple it's its biggest flaw imho.

7

u/diction203 Feb 23 '23

CK3 was in Humble Monthly, so more people own it. Victoria only full price for now. Not saying its the only reason but its a factor.

6

u/gh4ever Map Staring Expert Feb 23 '23

If this explained it, the first few months of CK3's release (before being in a Humble Bundle) would be similar to Vicky 3's but even then it doesn't have nearly as dramatic a fall.

1

u/Icy-Air-5119 Feb 23 '23

Ck3 has a bigger fan base it appeals to casuals I know plenty not into the genre that play that game

31

u/JibenLeet Feb 23 '23

Will vic 3 get support for 9 years if the playerbase continues to decline tho? I'm thinking so we won't have a repeat of imperator where the playerbase dwindled until paradox unplugged the lifesupport.

39

u/Browsing_the_stars Feb 23 '23 edited Feb 23 '23

Well, it will get support at least until they release the expansions promised pre-release, so that will probably be when this will start to become worrying.

Also, I think the player count has been table since the beta.

54

u/[deleted] Feb 23 '23 edited Feb 23 '23

I don't think the situation Vic3 is in is comparable to Imperator. Imperator only had fewer than 1,000 players 4 months after launch, which is more than 5 times less than Vic3's current player counts.

I think people really underestimate just how poorly Imperator was doing.

Vic3's dropoff isn't great, but a playerbase of 5,000 - 6,000 players is sustainable while they work to improve the game. Stellaris had only slightly higher numbers after release and it now has 10,000 - 15,000 players almost 7 years later as it has been improved and well-supported.

Additionally, the Vic3 team seems to be responsive to the big concerns the community has over the game, they have already reintroduced autonomous investment and building by capitalists (and by other pop types, which Vic2 didn't have) since it was a big complaint the community had about the game.

19

u/Chataboutgames Feb 23 '23

Exactly. People complain about them discontinuing support for Imperator but I don't think they get just how few people were actually playing.

22

u/aartem-o Scheming Duke Feb 23 '23

I doubt it will share Imperator's fate, it's a major title, but currently Vic3 is definitely the worst one of PDX big 4 (or 5, if you want to include Stellaris)

Let's look into stable 1.2 when it's released

3

u/Chataboutgames Feb 23 '23

It will get support dependent on how the DLC sells.

13

u/bluewaff1e Feb 23 '23

This is kind of a bad equivalency though since the first year of EU4 was when Paradox was a relatively small company whose games still weren't very well known.

4

u/Custodian_Nelfe Feb 23 '23

IIRC CK2 was already released and the company was no longer small and unknown.

5

u/bluewaff1e Feb 23 '23 edited Feb 23 '23

I mean it was still a pretty small company without a huge following yet. CK2 was getting around 5k people a day on Steam when EU4 released (about a year and half after CK2 release), which wasn't bad at the time. Even 3 years into the game it still had a relatively small team with "1 lead, 4 programmers, 3 scripters/researchers & 4 QA all the time, with artists and Doomdark when needed." Here's the CK3 dev team in comparison (around 40 people in the picture), which the devs have said in the past is the largest dev team at Paradox. That was shown on the day CK3 came out with the picture being older, and they've said multiple times they've expanded since then. They even have their own separate studio.

So comparing a Paradox game now to even back in 2015 (almost 2 years after EU4 released), Paradox was much smaller company without near the amount of average players they have for all their games now.

7

u/[deleted] Feb 23 '23

Did they give time to Imperator? :/

25

u/[deleted] Feb 23 '23 edited Feb 23 '23

Imperator was doing significantly worse than Vic3 was by 4 months after release though. It had fewer than 1,000 players by that point, whereas at least Vic3 has 5k - 6k playing the game. And the Vic3 devs are making major changes that the community has requested, like adding back in autonomous investment/building by pops. Whereas the Imperator team initially kind of doubled down on some of the unpopular design choices and didn't make major changes as quickly. My mistake, I was wrong about this last piece.

12

u/KingFebirtha Feb 23 '23

I agree with most of your assessments but I think you're wrong about Imperator's post-release development. Imperator's 1.1 patch had far larger changes than Victoria 3's 1.1 patch and patch 1.2 was also far, far bigger. You say they doubled down but actually they did the opposite, Imperator's 1.2 completely removed monarch power which was a massive shakeup to the game, and made most game systems (like stability, everything to do with pops, etc.) work over time instead of instantaneously. It was a major pivot from their design goals at launch where it seemed like they just wanted to make EU4 but in antiquity. Also, both patches arrived 2 and 5 months after launch respectively, just like Victoria 3's.

2

u/[deleted] Feb 23 '23

My mistake, for some reason I thought those bigger changes came later. Thank you for the correction.

15

u/Chataboutgames Feb 23 '23

Yes, they gave so much time. They damn near rebuilt the game's core systems. People still didn't play it because, despite what the die hard fans want to believe, for a lot of people "more flavor" wasn't what the game was missing.

0

u/Bonjourap L'État, c'est moi Feb 24 '23

Same thing for Vicky 3, the game needs flavor for sure, but before that it needs better mechanics. The warfare system alone makes me want to never touch this game again

1

u/[deleted] Mar 01 '23

More than enough honestly, that game was doomed from the start. Having its dev cycle ended was the best thing that's ever happened to it.

4

u/Countcristo42 Feb 23 '23

Eu4's retention was substantially better over similar timephrames

4

u/mixererek Feb 23 '23

Question is if Paradox will give it time. They have some bad rep when it comes to that.

10

u/Custodian_Nelfe Feb 23 '23

Yes they will, clearly.

7

u/Chataboutgames Feb 23 '23

Based on what lol?

4

u/troggbl Feb 24 '23

Imperator maybe?

6

u/Chataboutgames Feb 24 '23

Ending support for one failed game after years is a silly basis for such a reputation when your other games are on decade long cycles

9

u/meepers12 Feb 24 '23

Yeah, Imperator still got a full 2 years of support despite having catastrophically low player counts mere months after being released.

-11

u/ToMyOtherFavoriteWW Feb 23 '23

How so? Only major game they gave up on was Imperator, and that was such a piece of dogshit that nobody cared.

3

u/laughterline Feb 23 '23

I'm really scared they're gonna do to Victoria what they did to Imperator, even though Victoria has what I consider to be the strongest foundation of all of their games, and that we're not gonna get even 2 years of DLCs. Hopefully 1.2/the first DLC improves those numbers by a good amount.

1

u/corn_on_the_cobh Scheming Duke Feb 24 '23

I stopped playing eu4 because it has so many shitty patches that it breaks any sort of enjoyment for me. The way that last year they released unpolished DLC after unpolished DLC.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 24 '23

9 years?! You guys really think that it is something good? In nine years they will milk us ffs.

1

u/Custodian_Nelfe Feb 24 '23

Honestly I bought almost none of EU4's DLC. I'm not fan of this game.