Well, I was expecting much more from HOI2 than what was actually delivered, IMO the improvements on HOI are not worth buying a new game so I did not go for it. They did not spend a lot of time on it which was suspect considering all the issues left over . The EU games took several years to develop and they had the board game to stard with which had already taken many years to develop.
I get the feeling that markenting and financial considerations take the upper hand with the result that the products sold are not fully developped and the developpers have to cut short on many things to keep up with the deadlines. The end result is a game that could have been interesting but not worth buying in its current state, that still needs a lot of redesign and development time which means a lot of money to be invested while most of the profits have already been skimmed.
The risk is that the base of customers they acquired with the success of EU will fade away and the game engine will be left to die which means that all the resources of development already been spent into it will have been wasted in vain.
I couldn't agree with you more. They made a huge mistake in wasteing their resources on trying to make the game different rather than better. I think that the biggest problem at Paradox is that for some reason they don't seem to think that the AI is really all that important. Those guys are all up in Stockholm, at work, getting paid, playing on a LAN so that all of the major players are represented by humans. Every time I saw someone on the forum complain loudly, they were always told by someone that "you know you really should be playing online, that's where the game really shines."
Now, I don't have the box in front of me, but I believe I was promised an AI to play against. It was not sold as a multiplayer only game. I spent hundreds of hours lurking in their forums, and I believe that 90% of the gripes would have been solved if the computer could at least make a decent showing of moving it's units around the map. It just seems to me that if they spent x amount of money to get Y amount of income with HOI I, then if they spent even X*0.5 and only burned hours on programming they could make the game sufficiently better that everyone would be happy.
But instead they changed the UI [&:], changed the way combat works (movement is combat) [>:], made the tech tree simpler (where the hell did that come from?)[:o], took away the sprites (WTF? as far as I can tell most people wanted more sprites)[X(], oh yeah and we get some guy who calls himself Lothos who's gonna get right on that AI thing right after we collect everybodies money [8|].
That game's been out what, like a year now? And the magical 1.3 patch is just coming out now? OK, I'm not a cow, but I think I got milked a time or two here. I mean, I liked their attitude about staying in touch and listening to the players and so on, but I'm not gonna buy the same crap forever.
But in the end I don't think it really matters to me because after playing Witp I don't think I'll ever be happy playing a game as abstracted as HOI I or II. This game is so much better. All the time I was playing HOI I would literally be saying to my self "Man, I wish this game was more like WIR". In other words, I wanted to be able to build units at my discretion but I wanted them to be as detailed as those in WIR and Witp. Infantry divisions "with brigades" are generic and boring.
