HoI3 Released: Broken on Launch (Surprise!)

[Psychic_Sandwich]

As with every Paradox game in history, HoI3 is bugged and nigh unplayable for lots of people, it seems. The high (low?) points:

People who bought it off Steam don't have a CD key, so they can't play multiplayer or get access to tech support at all. It also, I think, means no manual, forcing a Steam buyer to try and figure everything out on their own. Ouch.

Consumer goods production is bugged, with the result that some major nations (notably France and the USSR) need to devote all their IC to CG production, to the exclusion of pretty much everything else, including supplies. Building anything is pretty much impossible for these nations. That's one way to make sure Germany wins the Battle of France I suppose.

The game runs abysmally slowly for some people. Not lagging, just slow, as if it were being played on the lowest speed setting all the time. Although, it lags as well. Clearly, Paradox are using our computers to run a giant distributed AI disguised as a strategy game, and will shortly assume command of the world's nuclear arsenal.

Plus the usual slew of crashes and instabilities you'd expect.

[MKSheppard]

The game runs abysmally slowly for some people. Not lagging, just slow, as if it were being played on the lowest speed setting all the time.

I tried the demo, and not only did it take forever to install/load, it ran horribly slow

[Stark]

I don't mean to +1 Shep, but really, this is terrible. I know it's Paradox, but this is less ambitious and worse than usual.

Clearly, terrible performance is the cost of their totally useless and ugly 3d map?

[MKSheppard]

Hey STRAK, you'll love this:

[Stark]

Whoa. That's pretty awful. How can they explain stuff like that? Their market is simulationists - details are critical!

[Duckie]

I don't mean to +1 Shep, but really, this is terrible. I know it's Paradox, but this is less ambitious and worse than usual.

Clearly, terrible performance is the cost of their totally useless and ugly 3d map?

Theoretically the 3d map is to shift processing of the map to the graphics card so that the CPU can have more space for AI calculations. In practise the AI seems pretty wonky too, with stuff like Australian invasions of Finland.

As usual I expect the game will become worthwhile to people interested in that sort of thing after 5 patches and 1 paid expansion then when the community gets its modding in gear to fix things like the map and AI and balance. [You'd think Paradox would learn just to keep their games in development for a year longer or something.]

Oh, and even more hillarious apparantly: everything on the map is incorrect. Everything. There's some minor stuff like every city is on the opposite side of the river it's supposed to be on, province named after city that didn't exist in WWII, spelling errors, etc. but some of the errors are hillarious.

Buffalo is a province in Canada. New York and Philadelphia are cities in New Jersey. Stalingrad is somewhere in the Caucasus.

Developer Response: "Map is finished. We aren't going for a google map exact projection of the world." Apparantly they even deleted a thread by the beta testers offering to redraw pieces of the map to fix it, so 2 days before the game came out some of the beta testers started making a map mod for the game. That's pretty sad.

I wish I could find some pictures of random places, it sounds like nerd rage but when you see things like "Rostov-on-Don" nowhere near the Don River, Stalingrad 400 miles south of where it should be, Philadelphia and fucking New York in New Jersey, et cetera in a World War II game it's hillarious when they simultaneously want the most micromanagey detailed simulation of WWII ever. AI bugs like 'Australia invades Finland' can be fixed, but the Map is just bizarre.

Edit- Ha, preempted! Oh man, Philadelphia has a coast line.

Edit 2- How hard is it to take a satellite map of the earth and draw squiggly lines on it and then name each squiggle after the biggest city underneath it, checking on wikipedia to make sure that place existed in 1940ish? Apparantly not too hard, if within a few months fans can make a better map. I could probably do a better research job than the 1 person (seriously, 1 person) they had assigned.

[RedImperator]

Those maps are embarrassing. I could draw better ones freehand.

[MKSheppard]

Reading HOI3 forums:

Apparently the 3d models are in a proprietary 3d format licensed by Paradox.

Which means.........NO FREE ADDONS for sprites -- if you want say, a B-29 on the map, you'll have to pay Paradox for it!

And Johan, the lead developer was quite critical of Empire Total War......which actually allows free 3d mods.

LOL: If you want to read the "HOI3 Mod" forum on Paradox Plaza, you have to have a registered copy of HOI3 attached to your screen name.

[Duckie]

Although if you're playing a paradox game, aren't you grognard war simulationist enough to use NATO symbols? I have only a passing interest in the World War II era and I understand how the little psuedo-cardboard chits work save maybe some obscure ones I don't know about. I don't understand how a super-realistic wargame made for WWII nerds would tout its use of pretty 3d models rather than what most of those people probably use anyhow. Seems like a waste of development time to me.

[Psychic_Sandwich]

LOL: If you want to read the "HOI3 Mod" forum on Paradox Plaza, you have to have a registered copy of HOI3 attached to your screen name.

That's not the best bit. That applies to the tech support forum as well.

People who bought it over Steam, and thus have no CD key, can't register their game. They thus have no tech support. With a Paradox game on release day.

[Duckie]

Well, it's as expected for a Paradox game. It's not like nobody saw it coming considering their track record. I know their company would go out of business if everyone did this, but personally even if I'm interested in one of their games I wait until about a year after launch or more before investigating whether the game is fixed and has a good mod made that further fixes it.

So, basically treating them as if they were Creative Assembly, if Creative Assembly actually fixed their games post-launch instead of just leaving all of it to modders.

[The Yosemite Bear]

god is there any company left that doesn't release shit on launch these days?

[Stark]

Console developers.

[Duckie]

Console developers.

Although it wouldn't surprise me if that's been changing due to the ability to rebalance and patch games using online distribution to xboxes and the like. I wonder if in the future all games will release like this until there's another video game crash of 1984.

[Stark]

Well, only a tiny proportion of console owners ever go online (something like 20% of Xboxes, if I recall) so they still can't afford to fuck up. It's easier, due to hardware, toolkits etc, but you can't release a console game that's fucked with the expectation you can patch it later.

[The Yosemite Bear]

Console developers.

I OWN copies of Fallout3

so not all console developers release working games.

[Stark]

Thanks for that, retard; you asked 'is there any company left that doesn't release shit on launch these days' and console developers in general do this routinely, because there is no expectation of universal patch access. Because a game (a port even, jesus fuck) had a problem once doesn't change that.

This problem is very much a PC gaming problem in general.

[MKSheppard]

god is there any company left that doesn't release shit on launch these days?

Small independent wargame companies like Matrix.

[CaptHawkeye]

Yeah, I got HoI 3 today and have been annoyed with its performance. I'd heard the was having slow down issues just week before release. So it sounded like Paradox was low on money and needed to rush it out the door. Unsurprising.

Holy christ those map pics are unbelieveable. Stalingrad is like 400 km south of where it's supposed to be. What the fuck? "Jawa Sea".

EDIT: According to the general forums, with picture evidence, it's possible to invade and conquer the United States... in 1939. After all that bragging Johan did about how hard world domination was going to be too. It looks like their is no penalty for length of supply lines. As a result the Germans can sustain a massive invasion force from more than 2000miles away and under constant harrasement from the RN and USN. Details are important in sims people.

[MKSheppard]

Behold how hard world domination is Hawkeye!



Yes, that's MEXICO invading Germany via amphibious landing.

[Duckie]

AI Controlled Mexico. Notice the top right and the events thing seem to indicate the player is Italy.

Well, it looks like the "AI Can Never Pull Off Operation Overlord" problem was solved.

[RogueIce]

So I read that they took off auto-sliders, and eventually they'll have a poll to see if it gets put back in, because "the beta testers didn't think it was needed" or something.

First of all, who the fuck were the beta testers and when can I punch them out?

Secondly, fuck that. I've played vanilla HoI2 and managing those damnable sliders was a pain in the ass. I loved Doomsday where I could just click "auto manage" and not even worry about it. Aside from wonky shit like when I get 1% dissent and everything (and I mean everything) went into CG.

Apparently there's some AI control of production thing now. How's that work?

[CaptHawkeye]

That's so fucking hilarious I started audibly laughing. The game doesn't even take into account supply line distance. And where the fuck did Mexico get all those divisions from?

Johan bragged about the "30 day supply limit" on invasions every day in the forums. That's pretty much the only penalty on long distance invasions and *gasp* it's completely worthless!

[Enigma]

This is completely retarded. I've got EU 1,2&3, HoI, HoI2 (with Doomsday and Armageddon) plus Victoria. The EU series worked fine with no lag. The same went with HoI. Victoria lagged a bit but I could tolerate it. HoI2 on the other hand would crawl to a stop and practically freeze the computer within 2 months game time. Paradox was completely useless in helping solving the issue. You'd think that with multi-core processors they could let the CPUs handle the load. HoI 3 looks to be much of the same so I'll be dropping it from my "must buy" list once I get a decent cashflow going. In fact, I'll be dropping any chance of buying anymore of the HoI series until they fix the lagging issues. Until then it is EU3 and Victoria for me.

[Duckie]

Oddly, the lag appears unrelated to how sophisticated your computer is, beyond a certain point (people below the minimum requirements get more jerkiness and lag, but people above them seem to get random levels). In fact, quad-core systems seem to be the number-one people experiencing heavy lag. Perhaps they fucked up their multithreading, or just didn't multithread at all.

On the plus side, a person has rapidly [completed all of europe so far except russia and ukraine] assembled a far superior map called Clio that isn't completely retarded and is actually geographically and province-wise correct, including taking suggestions from posters of X nationality on what province X should be named so that it actually resembles the proper country, and also making it compatable (unlike paradox's) with border changes with stuff like the First Vienna Award. Hopefully he'll complete it quickly so that mods for the game will universally adopt it, because I'll be damned if I could ever play HoI3, fixed or not, with stuff like philadelphia on the new jersey coast or stalingrad over by the caspian. It'd just feel silly. It's hillarious that a single guy can do a better job in a week completing 1/3rd the map, especially because this same guy was a beta tester who probably was shouted down or ignored by the company when he wanted to do the same thing.

It's a good thing they touted "highly moddable" for this version or else Paradox fans couldn't clean up Paradox's mistakes for them

Honestly given their track record it's expected that Paradox would fuck this up so badly, but given their track record I bet by mid or late 2010 the game will be tolerably fixed and modders will have improved the game sufficiently enough to warrant a purchase, at least for me, since I'm in to the whole 'obsessive compulsive historical gaming with bad interface' thing they do for some reason.