@hosedandhappy: I really wasn't trying to compare tennis balls to the gaming industry. My point is that things shouldn't be expensive just because you can enjoy them for a long time.
@dragonsama: They'll have lower tier models soon, they always announce the flagships first. Or pick up a second hand last gen card, prices will be dropping.
@hosedandhappy: You can get hundreds of hours of entertainment from a simple tennis ball. That doesn't mean it's worth $100. Rubber & green fuzz is cheap. Paying for actual expansions is one thing, but paying for some low-detail unit models doesn't feel like great value to me. Sometimes the only way to truly communicate with the devs is buy & not buy individual pieces of content based on how much you personally value it, rather than just giving them unfettered support for everything.
A lot of the support came more from modders, rather than the devs too. There were plenty of UI improvements that the developers never made & a few that they only made after years of requests. Some expansions added fun new gameplay features, but others seemed like the devs were just intent on making the game harder, whether that was historically accurate or not (I had an achievement run completely ruined by Defensive Pacts before they could be toggled off - playing as the Byzantine Empire, trying to reclaim the old borders of Rome, the entire Catholic world & the entire Muslim world literally halted a crusade so that they could band together to stop me taking even a single province in Italy).
Like I said, I have mixed feelings, so I don't want to focus on the negatives too much. I just hope they make their content feel like better value for this game.
@mogan: The IGN review states 100 hours. Other reviewers have posted reviews in progress. Deadlines suck, but grand strategy games are notoriously tough to discover the depth of. You need to play a range of different campaigns to get a real idea of what the game is like. Rockpapershotgun has probably the best review I've read, but that's coming from someone who's experienced with the previous game, perhaps it's not so geared towards new players.
Maybe the fact that they felt qualified to write a review after only 50 hours is telling that the UI is easier to understand than last time round. I'm not saying this review is completely irrelevant, just that it lacks detail.
Having played over 500 hours of CK2 over the years, I don't think 50 hours with this game is enough for a review. It took me 100 hours to even figure out what I was doing in CK2, but I was still having a blast all the way.
I haven't been following the development of CK3 closely, but I've seen a couple of dev videos. It looks like they've incorporated a lot of the improvements from expansions & even mods from the years of support given to the previous game. Even so, I'm sure there's still plenty of room for expansions down the line.
I have mixed feelings about Paradox monetises their expansions, however. CK2 had a number of great expansions (like The Old Gods, which added not only Vikings & other Pagan cultures, but over 200 years to every single country on the map), and also some others which didn't look like so much fun to me. There was always a free patch with each expansion which usually brought some decent updates to gameplay, even if you weren't buying. What I didn't like is the separate art packs alongside each expansion. You would buy the expansion & then they'd still expect you to pay extra for some 2D portraits or tiny unit models.
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