Stellaris patches promise "major gameplay improvements"
Making space great again.
Paradox always has big plans for its grand strategy games in the months and years following their release. Take the excellent Crusader Kings 2, for example, which received its latest major expansion in February, almost two years after launch.
"As long as enough players keep buying paid content for the game," said game director, Henrik Fåhraeus, "we promise to keep improving the game for everyone, almost like an MMO."
In a forum post yesterday, Fåhraeus laid out the studio's update plans for Stellaris, its latest strategy game about spaceships and alien racists.
By the end of this month, we can expect the "Clarke" patch, which aims to tidy up a few bugs, including a few remaining performance issues (some players encountered issues in the late-game, whilst playing in the larger galaxy type).
It also promises to rework aspects of the game's user interface and there's a rather vague line about AI improvements, with Fåhraeus noting that "this kind of work is never finished".
Later on, comes the really exciting stuff. Following "Clarke", the next two major patches will focus on major changes to the mid-game of a Stellaris campaign, with a bunch of new scripted events planned.
"We simply took too long getting all the early and late game stuff in," said Fåhraeus, "and neglected a whole category of events called 'colony events', which were supposed to be the bread and butter of the mid-game for the Science Ships."
It will also be more difficult to form and maintain alliances with neighbouring empires, although you will be able to give them actual directions and access a range of new diplomatic options on both an alliance and federation level.
In last week's review I referred to the version of Stellaris that I'd been playing as a starting point for continued support from both the development team and the modding community. This is exactly what I was talking about. Exciting!
These bigger changes will start to arrive with the "Asimov" patch, which is currently scheduled for the end of June.
