Stark, you dissapoint me. When I saw you saying to me that it was pointless wasting my time playing Victoria, I did not know you would of fell for a Paradox game yourself. Why Stark...
But in all seriousness, I will say what Victoria was like for me as it pretty much fits all Paradox games save a couple:
For a start Victoria loaded up and there was no tutorial, none at all. I know this has changed since then but this just say's a lot about Paradox. In a game that requires you to do a lot of complex trade actions, diplomacy and other thing's; you have no introduction to what the game is like. Now you could say "But Bluewolf, there is a manual and online guides!". Frankly the manual is not helpful as it gives you an info dump. You are told all the concepts but it does not give you an easy way to put them into practise. On top of that the manual had to be
revised by the fans due to how (according to them) broken it was.
Even if we discard the fact that there is no tutorial, a simple quick guide manual would of been good. Iirc Galciv 2 has one and it is basically for the newbie player who just freshly installed it. It does not info dump a heap of infomation onto the player but gives them a good idea on where to start. Of course there is the full manual but the existence of that quick start quide makes thing's a lot eaiser.
Now the game itself. When Stark say's its a slider fest, well he is not kidding. There are a ton of options that are basically on some kind of bar, some kind of number and thats it. Now you may say that a lot of games are like this but I would disagree. Though not the best example, take a look at Rome Total War, Civ 4 or any other large scale game. The game is not just buttons and menu's. This brings me to my next problem. Sliders and that would not be so bad if the game was interesting to look at.
Graphically, besides the clunky UI (I will get onto that) and the map (which looks far better than HOI 3's one), there is little graphics. There is little to catch your eye or look at. In Civ 4, you had cities, the landscape and such to look at. In Rome Total War you could view your cities and the area around them. The games were good to look at. Even the little unit movement animations or map animations on both games was nice to look at and made the game more eye catching. In Victoria though, the most you see is a marching represenation of an army. Its boring to look at and does not work well at all. Even a game like DEFCON where there is little animation or colour still looks more interesting visually than Victoria.
Now onto the UI. It's awful. It takes a while to do even simple actions and it sucks up more time wih you fiddling around trying to get it to work. On top of that it even glitches on you at times. An example of the stupid UI is that EVERYTHING that is done by another nation pops up. UK has gone to war. POP UP. Spain has made a new colony. POP UP. US annxed Texas. POP UP. It's like I went back in time to the day's of Web 1.0 where "I was the 9999 customster". Its a horrid design choice and is just one of the many in the game. Yes it can be turned off but having it on like that is an awful idea to start off with.
I will stop ranting now but that is pretty much what Victoria was like and it feels that many other games done by them are like that. Messy and badly done. I don't know if anyone agrees with me though.
As Zod says, through digital download stuff it activates anyway (I can't even start Majesty 2 until my download is activated, then it asks again).
