Today, August 13th of 2023, Marks the 10th Anniversary day of
Europa Universalis IV. To look back on how we got here, we invite you to join long time GSG Developer and Studio Manager of Paradox Tinto Johan Andersson as he reflects on the last 10 years.
[h3]Please enjoy this retrospective from him below:[/h3]
Today it is 10 years ago since we released EU4, back on August 13th of 2023. I guess it's a sign that you are getting old that you can write posts like this.
Back in the early autumn of 2011, PDS was much smaller, I was still the studio manager, and we had 1 full team led by Henrik ‘Doomdark’ Fåhraeus working on CK2, while a smaller team with Dan ‘podcat’ Lind and 2 other people was doing expansions for HoI3 and V2. Paradox France, which was a small subsidiary with 2 employees, was working on “March of the Eagles” with support from Olof ‘Birken’ Björk.
I remember this as a time when we had lots of experience, with some of us doing these games for a decade or more, and the studio was growing every year.
We had just wrapped up Sengoku with another small (4-5 people) team, and we needed to decide what to do now. Thomas ‘Besuchov’ Johansson, by then a ten year veteran, who had been away on parental leave was coming back, and the two together with Chris ‘King’ King started to define what project we want to do.
It was quickly obvious that it should be a sequel to Europa Universalis III, but how we should go ahead was a bit harder. After a few days of talks, we settled on a simple vision of
- 25% on better UI
- 25% on multiplayer
- 25% on better graphics
- 25% on new features
We started building the game in late 2011, with Thomas taking the new engine version of CK2, with better map graphics, multiplayer code and support for the new DLC model, and ported in so that EU3 was running on it. After that we could start with the true development of the project.
When it came to the better UI, this was the first time we had a dedicated UI designer. Daniel Moregård who later worked on Stellaris, and is now a Game Director at PDS did a great job, making sense of the mechanics. While the macro builder he designed was a great boon we all appreciate since then, one thing he made that is not as obvious was the naming consistency on all modifiers and values in the game.
The creation of EU4 was not just about making a good UI, we also had to make new features. Some of the EU3 features were reworked, like how we went from the policy sliders to the new Ideas system, which included unique National Ideas for quite a few countries. We also reworked the trade system from the Centre of Trade system of previous iterations to the new system where you had a flow of trade and had to control ports and manage light fleets.
There were countless other features added to the game, but the biggest and most noticeable one was the introduction of the monarch power system. During all the previous iterations of EU we had had problems with balancing the game between various size of countries, and this was an attempt both to stop the snowballing that is so common in strategy games, while also creating ebbs and flows in a countries progress, tying it heavily to the monarchs themselves.
The map, graphical looks and the core features were all in and working by the summer of 2012, and we could announce the game on Gamescom in august that year.
this is one of the first screnshots we had in an early development diary for EU4.As we had a playable game early on, we could constantly playtest the game. By the autumn of 2012 we had grown the studio to include 4 internal QA. We divided the EU4 team into two, where Thomas Johansson led people developing additional features, fixing bugs and improving UI, while I led the other half that just focused on playtesting, balancing and feature changes.
Several days each week for quite a while we started the new nightly version in multiplayer, with about 6 players playing one of France, Castille, Portugal, England, Burgundy or Austria. After about 100-150 years, or about 5-6 hours into the session we gathered for feedback, fixed what we could fix, or made jira’s for the other team on what did not work.
All in all, we spent about 18 months on the project before release, and by the time we reached the release, it was the biggest project PDS had ever done.
I guess you could describe the release as a roaring success. By then it was our best selling GSG, while also having a 87 score on Metacritic.
We had experience of how good the new DLC model was for our studio with Crusader Kings 2, so we planned for up to 3 years of regular DLC. The key thing was to do realistic things that could be released on a regular basis, which would be good for the player. Most of the time this succeeded. So let's now see how this decade panned out, and if I have any anecdotes.
The first dlc was the minor American Dream, which was basically an event pack that was released not too long after the release. I really don’t have any memories from it, and suspect it is not on anyone’s list of our top 5 dlc’s.
The first big expansion for EU4 came about half a year after release, with Conquest of Paradise. Back during the original design talks for EU3, I had envisioned a random new world. This was beyond our skill back then, and it was beyond what we could add to Eu4 at release, so we thought it would be a good idea to add to the first expansion. In hindsight it was not. Besides the fact that it was insanely expensive to do, it also did not work properly in multiplayer nor did it create good maps.
The next two expansions, Wealth of Nations and Res Publica, that we released during the first half of 2014 were smaller in scope, and mostly focused around trade and politics. During this time period we played lots of both single player games and dev clashes, so a lot of feature design came from, let's make this better.
Speaking of the dev clashes. Most of the features we made for Art of War, which came out in late autumn of 2014, were designed and created directly based on our experience there. First of all, we added in the Zone of Control system that has been used ever since, removing the tedious need to siege every single province. Most importantly, we spent a lot of time revising the map outside of Europe to make density more evenly distributed, so warfare outside of Europe was as fun as inside it. Moving armies on a detailed map is about half the fun of a PDS game, and especially in a multiplayer game. I really must give a huge shout out to Henrik ‘Trin Tragula’ Lohmander, who was doing a lot of that map overhaul!
We had some map upgrades to India for Art of War. During the summer of 2014 we did some severe reorganizations at Paradox and I got cursed with the position being an executive in charge of all of our studios, so after Art of War I basically had to leave the EU4 development, which I handed over to Martin ‘Wiz’ Anward, who had been working with AI and design on EU4 for a while. Of course, I could not keep my hands away and did design and code systems like the Nahuatl religion and the development system.
During Martin’s reign, we first released El Dorado, which included fun mechanics for the new world, while also adding the custom nation feature, which is among the most popular starts. The accompanying patch had the big reworking of the random new world feature, making it actually fun to use.
The next expansion was Common Sense, which made the political and diplomatic game deeper, and after that, in December of 2015 it was time for The Cossacks, which added so much to the center of the eurasia. This was also when estates were first introduced into EU4.
Now,in the beginning of 2016, PDS had grown a fair bit, and we had two games about to be released in HoI4 and Stellaris, and other games in the early phases, like CK3 and V3, so the team got reduced in size, and Martin left for the V3 team. I came back to be a dedicated Game Director for EU4 for a while. Being an executive is not fun, and it's far more fun to be a game developer.
As we started on Mare Nostrum we had a dilemma, as we would be releasing in the middle of Stellaris and HoI4 which was not something Paradox could handle then. So we scoped down and reduced the price of it to reflect what it contained, and released it earlier than originally planned. It was not a great expansion, but it was not bad either..
Now Jake Leiper-Ritchie joined the team as a designer, and we designed Rights of Man together. This is one of the expansions I am most proud of. We added the great powers system, personalities and traits to rulers & leaders, consorts for rulers and ways to give military objectives to your subjects. In the accompanying patch we reworked technology groups to the new Institutions system. During this development, we also added in ideas for what we then viewed as the final four expansions, which we had already named, and set the theme for. Mandate of Heaven, Cradle of Civilization, Dharma and Emperor.
Mandate of Heaven, this was the April 2017 expansion, where the focus was on East Asia with mechanics for China, Japan and Manchu. Together with a patch that added the Age System this was greatly appreciated by the players.
During the spring, I had the idea that we should make smaller immersion packs, focused on a single country, or a smaller region. I wrote the design and coded Third Rome, basically myself, with Art and QA support, for a release in June 2017. Ironically, the timing was pretty shit, as at the same time we released it, a dlc with focus on Russia, our sales team did a huge regional price adjustment which was a bit less than popular to say the least.
Now I felt that Jake was experienced enough to handle EU4, and he took over as Game Director.
The second of the “final” expansions was Cradle of Civilization which was released in late 2017, with a focus on the Middle East. In retrospective it's interesting how much we released during the first four years of EU4.
Spring of 2018 saw the release of the immersion pack Rule Britannia, which was a pretty release, but it's overshadowed by the patch which introduced the new mission system. This new mission system has managed to prolong the life cycle of the game several years beyond what we had deemed possible.
At the end of the Summer of 2018 we saw the release of what we had envisioned as the “penultimate” expansion of Eu4, named Dharma. It was not all that positively received, and the most popular feature, the government reforms were baked into the base game soon after.
A third immersion pack ‘Golden Century’ was released at the end of the 2018, also to extremely bad reviews. A decision was made to make a big free patch fixing bugs and improving the game, but the patch got severely delayed, and was also tied together with the new launcher which was not popular either. At this point, we had to bake in features like transfer occupation, government reforms and improve development to the base game, to improve the community perception.
Meanwhile, work was ongoing on what we had we originally thought of as the final expansion, in Emperor. It was getting delayed, and then Jake resigned during the autumn of 2019, to focus more on his career as an influencer. At this point “Emperor” was in a mess, and we had no idea if it could be finished. PDS had other projects with major needs, so we decided to move most people to projects like CK3 and Stellaris, and focus with a small old-school team Daniel ‘Starnan’ Olsson as producer/qa-coordinator, Henrik ‘Groogy’ Hansson as designer/programmer, Daniel ‘neondt’ Tolman as content designer and me as game director/programmer. We had some UX, Art and QA support as well, but the team was really small. A lot of features was revamped, redesigned, and made more streamlined, and I must say that those 3 people did a marvelous job, an absolutely stunning performance there. What made it even more challenging was the little thing called “Covid” which happened half-way through “Emperor”'s development. We eventually launched at huge success, being the best selling eu4 expansion ever. It was definitely a good way and a good end to what we originally had planned for EU4.
It was during Emperor, and reflecting over the impact of the pandemic, that we started the decision to create a studio, Paradox Tinto, in Barcelona. Some of us had houses there, so it felt like a good place for somewhere new. Of course, the studio needed to do something, so starting with making content for EU4 sounded like a good idea.
Yeah.. We released leviathan. Good ideas, and pretty fun now, but the launch was an unmitigated disaster. Too buggy, and missing art etc.
Anyway, we moved forward, recruited more people, and continued on. What does not kill you etc,..
One of the fun things with recruiting to Tinto has been recruiting people with more hours than me actually playing the game. I’m a noob outside of work, with only about 1400 hours in my spare time playing the game. Being able to hire modders with more experience making mission trees for eu4 than any internal staff, or QA with 5,000+ hours is such a boon. I can’t name drop everyone at Tinto, but they are all awesome to work with!
While we had focused a fair bit on fixing old bugs before the release of Leviathan, now it was our goal with all releases. We should be the team with the least amount of open and known bugs at Paradox, which we have successfully been able to uphold ever since then, averaging between a third or a half of the 2nd best teams bug count. We also made the decision to not add new major systems, nor do major map overhauls to keep risks down, and make sure that the player experience was the main focus of our job.
The first release we did as a full team on our own here at Tinto was Origins, which was the African focus Immersion pack. It was a good learning experience for the team, and we like to think it was well received. We tried out new ways with missions, which so far has been a success for us.
The year after Origins, we released Lions of the North, an immersion pack focused on the Baltics. Here the team went absolutely ballistic with content, and diverging mission trees, new government reforms, and most importantly overpowering Sweden.
I guess this was a bit more popular.After this, the team went even more ambitious with Domination, creating enormous mission trees, unique units and much more for the major powers, those that are the most played ones.
It's been a fun ride for over a dozen years, actually, let's face it, it's been 25 and half years since we started with the first EU1. Most of the time I’ve been involved on a daily basis, and sometimes I’ve merely been a supervisor, but EU has always been the franchise closest to my heart
What does the future hold from here? Well, we have promised some more releases….
The World of Anbennar
Magic UI
Necromancy is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural
Racial advisor portraits
The God Fragment by Biegeltoren
