Given how much cost Paradox have sunk into that game, they are just trying to break even here, I think. I’m not saying that means anyone should be okay with this, I’m just offering an explanation. But makes me wonder if that’ll actually work out, or if they end up losing more through that bad PR.
Now justify gutting all the work that was already done to turn an RPG into Dishonored: Vampire Edition
DLC Clans? Seriously? So are some clans just straight up not present unless you have the DLC?
Or does a fucking box come up if you talk to a Malkavian asking you to buy that dlc?
Ya know I played the Godfather game for Xbox 360 and in it. In order to upgrade your weapons you need to find higher level gun runners.
Except I never found them they’re too well hidden, except for the four star level gun runners that straight up run up to you out of the crowds… and then they force you into a menu where you have to BUY THEIR GUNS WITH REAL MONEY because the four star guns are on disc dlc.
Never in my life have I seen a dlc practice so scummy
DLC playable clans. Toreador and Lasombra NPCs will work fine with or without the DLC. If you want to play as one of those then you need to shell out another $20.
Ngl putting Toreador of all clans behind a paywall is like a Mario Kart game where Luigi is behind a paywall
I’ve never really been a Nintendo guy. Is Luigi very noticeably the post popular (or maybe at worst a very close top 2) racer in Mario Kart? I admit, I’d have guessed it was Mario.
It’s alright, I have a confession too, I never meant to buy anything but the complete version patched for two years and 75% off
It looks… okay. Not worth what they’re asking, doubly so as an Unreal5 game. FUCK that engine and its horseshit performance gimmicks.
Fuck unity. Unfortunately Unreal is a solid engine and Godot ain’t quite there for all purposes.
At some point CCP Games held the IP and didnt do absolutely anything with it for years and then sold it to paradox. Thank you CCP Hilmar for not fucking something up for once and just doing what you do best, twiddling your thumbs while doing nothing.
I think the real answer was “we wanted to charge $90 for the game, but knew we’d get our shit pushed in over that. So, we released a stripped down version at $60 and then did a $30 up-charge for the Premium edition, which is the full game”.
On the upshot, the game and it’s “DLC” will probably hit the usual Steam sales in a year or three. I can snag it then.
The Sims business model.
Except it was “we know you wouldn’t spend $400 on a game so here’s a $50 game and we’ll release the rest in pieces over the next year.”
That was also like 25 years ago.
Patient Gamers ftw
Even more so; they sold the game as pre-order, then announced they’re rebooting the development (twice), offered refunds to anyone, but as far as I understood nobody refunded. So right now they need to sell something else to cover the costs.
Yeah, sorry, I don’t care, still not buying the game or the DLC. Maybe I’m harsh, but I don’t give a crap if the game originally had only half a clan planned and now it expanded to six - locking a significant portion of the game behind launch day DLC is a scummy, greedy and user-hostile practice that I will not support, no matter the reason.
I’ve never had a problem with it since I read an article showing that if you don’t have dlc then basically you just get less game. And for this game it doesn’t matter, unless you’re doing multiple playthrough or you only want malkavian then it won’t even affect your gameplay experience.
And for this game it doesn’t matter, unless you’re doing multiple playthrough
But that’s the thing, they’ve put the most popular option behind the DLC paywall. And popular because it’s a good standard option. It’s not like the Nosferatu or Malkavians, which are popular as secondary options for a weirder later playthrough. That would be bad enough, as a day-one DLC, but doing it with the Toreador is so much worse.
Bloodlines is one of my all time favourite games. It’s not perfect gameplay wise, but it has probably the best world, characters and atmosphere I’ve encountered. I just love it.
Whenever Bloodlines 2 was announced I got excited. Then it went through developer hell and my expectations dropped to zero. Nowadays after I’ve seen and read couple previews and hands-ons, my hopes went up a notch and I started to get excited again.
Then release date and price got announced and I was like WTF? Cold shower. I know, it’s Paradox and the have billions of DLCs for everything, but still… Day one DLC should be a crime! If you feel the game is worth more or you have so much content you need a DLC (lol), either pack all in and rise a price bit or release that DLC later, not day one.
I’m a patient gamer with huge back log, so I probably wouldn’t buy at release anyway and wait for sale, but it still sucks to hear such a bullshit. I hope it’s going to be good game, or at least okish game with good story, characters and atmosphere, but it feels like they’re already tripping their legs with such moves.
One of your all-time favourites, fails to spell the name correctly.
Bloolimes 2 acidic Bloogaloo.
Thanks for pointing out at my sausage fingers typing error. Corrected.
Its Paradox.
Paradox is notorious for extremely ridiculously priced regular DLC releases that just add bits of new content and features to a barebones base game, in lieu of allowing devs to actually take the time needed to craft a comprehensive product.
The article mentions this, go look at all the available DLC for HOI4 or Stellaris or Cities Skylines.
Yeah, if you wanna actually buy a full Paradox game, with all DLC, $300 USD bucks please.
Its been like this with them for basically a decade.
If ya’ll Bloodlines fans don’t know, yeah, Paradox’s bread and butter is actually ‘grand strategy’ games, basically everything they publish is some kind of ‘top down perspective simulator game’, or at the very least, has ‘sim’ or ‘simulator’ somewhere in its tag cloud… their idea of ‘narrative’ is literally: text blurbs pop up on screen that describe some psuedo historical event.
I am fairly sure Paradox has never published nor developed… an actual first person game with narrative before, they have no idea how developing that kind of game works.
… Yeah, looks like the closest thing to that was them publishing
the originalMount and Blade: Fire and Sword, and then that dev team noped the fuck out of that and came up with a different publisher for M&B 2, Bannerlord.Paradox is almost certainly speaking through Ian’s mouth like a sock puppet, if he doesn’t say what they want, well Paradox had no problem axxing the last dev team for this game!
OG Mount & Blade (box) and Warband also published by Paradox. And then we self published Bannerlord, with local agreements for box sets.
I miss Bannerlord When memes though.
I miss Humphrey too 🐪.
Ah!
I was trying to go by wiki pages, I may have misread something.
Also… ‘we published’?
Well then, I appreciate getting the record set straight by an actual dev!
Ugurcan is part of the studio. It’s not hard to be confused though because there was a very long time in development and they halfway transitioned to using ravencourt as a publisher for console stuff.
They are finally coming out with a sailing dlc this year and I’m hopeful they will eventually make a new brytenwalda Viking dlc.
Personally im very excited for this game. It will probably be a skyrimish light RPG, mostly an open world action game, but hopefully the storytelling and gameplay is fun. I dont particularly care about the DLC. Inflation has been crazy the past few years. It cost a ton of money to create a modern AAA game. I really dont think they do it out of greed, so much as a need to profit off a single player game where they cant sell skins and stuff. Hopefully its good.
The first game was a cult classic full of bugs because of how early it was created in the source engine’s life. It exists only because a small passionate fan base push past the bugs created patches. This is not an IP where you can say fuck you pay me to the audience, especially in the current gaming climate. Additionally these aren’t new clans they chose the most popular clan that most people chose for their first play through, We have Vampyr, we have v-rising, we have Blood Of The Dawn walker coming. We’ll all wait for the inevitable GOTY version in a year or two.
Additionally these aren’t new clans they chose the most popular clan that most people chose for their first play through
That’s what gets me. Just looking at the original game and projecting it forward, if the Nosferatu or Malkavians were the ones locked behind a DLC, it would still be shitty, but it would at least make sense. They might be fan favourites, but even then they’re still clans that people usually recommend for a second playthrough, not a first. But the Toreador? Come on! That’s just extortion. Why not lock the Ventrue as well, while you’re at it?
Didn’t even need to mention which clan and you got it.
I mean, because I already knew which two clans it was. If I had had to guess, it’d have been a tossup between Toreador and Ventrue for me.
Nosferatu would make sense because it’s one of the most drastically different ones that requires a lot of work to implement.
Now justify gutting all the work that was already done to turn an RPG into Dishonored: Vampire Edition
I’ll probably still buy it… in a year or two, heavily discounted with all dlc included. But at these prices and conditions at launch? Lol.
Yeah that’s my feeling precisely. I have high hopes, but rock-bottom expectations, and with those expectations, the cost of the game and the shitty business practices with this day-one DLC are just not going to sell me on the game. I’m going to be waiting for reviews from dedicated fans who have had months to digest the game at the bare minimum, and for any inevitably-necessary patches (whether they come from the devs or from fans). This game and this developer and this price just have not earnt the trust necessary to buy the game at full price shortly after release, let alone pre-order it.
This is exactly why I stopped playing CK3. It was fine at release, a bit wonky coming from 2 but with DLCs releasing and me not buying them, it just started to become a hot mess
Go look at other Paradox games and their DLC prices.
… Paradox games are why sites like G2A exist, they are notorious for requiring you to buy $200 of DLC to actually play the modern version of the game, they just develop the core game assuming you will also have all the other DLC, and then wow big surprise, the core game on its own is basically an unbalanced, lackluster mess, 3 years on.
