Victoria 2 : dev diary part 3

Paradox a publié la troisième partie du carnet de développement de cette suite de Victoria an empire under the sun. Au menu, le design du jeu, c’est à dire un résumé des choix de l’équipe de développement consistant bien sûr garder le meilleur de Victoria tout en améliorant ce qui ne fonctionnait pas. Vous trouverez les précédents chapitres sur le forum officiel de Paradox, le second traitant de la carte et le premier expliquant pourquoi il a été décidé de reprendre ce jeu malgré le peu de succès commercial de la première version.

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Developer Diary 3 – Design Philosophy

Well we’ve done a couple of introductory Developer Dairies but let’s do something with a bit more meat in it. Today let’s talk about the overall goal of the Victoria design. Plus, to please the crowd, we’ll also mention a little bit about events, or perhaps not, but we’ll mention them anyway.

At its core we are seeking to set up a sandbox game. Victoria 2 is all about changing history as well as making it. So from that point of view you are not going to see the following happen: It is 1914 and you are Germany. You and your French and Russian allies have together all but destroyed Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. However, that matters not because you are now allied with Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire in a life or death struggle with Russia and France. Basically, we are looking to remove the hard coded steering out of the game and allow the player more freedom.

At the same time this is a historical game, so instead of adding in hard coded scripts to steer a country, we add game mechanics that place historical constraints on your freedom of action. Let’s take Russia here as a very good example of a country that was considered by many to be overpowered in Victoria and I’ll talk a little bit about what we mean here. First off is POP promotion; it is going to be automatic. Now there are various things you as a player can do to influence it and I will return to this subject in future developer diaries, but for now just take my word for it. The population of Russia has lower literacy than Western European powers; because of this they are less aware of opportunities than Western European POPs. This in turn makes them less likely to promote. We are trying to model Russia’s relative backwardness in the period, and at the same time giving means for the player to overcome them.

We’ve also mentioned somewhere that we have bureaucrat POPs who represent the administration. However, absolute monarchies have aristocrats who will serve in the administration (and unlike bureaucrats do it free of charge), so the classic Victoria no brainer tactic of immediate reform is no longer so obvious. If you are a more backward state where the aristocracy forms a pillar of the state, you can’t simply just ditch them immediately; you need to encourage a bureaucracy first. But wait, you are too busy encouraging a working class because you are afraid of economic backwardness… Well, you are going to need to balance these things. There are of course more things than this but if we revealed everything now there wouldn’t be anything left for future developer diaries.

Well, that’s the grand scope covered but there is another key element that shaped our design choices. Victoria is a very different animal than Hearts of Iron 3. It is more than simply just painting the map your colour. It is about politics and economics. You can have a lot of fun with Victoria without ever starting a war, and we wanted to keep this element as well as the depth (even expand on it where we could). Victoria 2 is a sequel to Victoria so we want those of you who enjoyed Victoria to enjoy this. However, we also have two other goals: Those who did not enjoy Victoria should enjoy Victoria 2, and those who never played Victoria should also have fun with Victoria 2. So, those of you who did play and enjoy Victoria should feel a certain element of familiarity with the game, while for those of you who didn’t enjoy Victoria we hope that we have removed the things that stopped you playing.

The final part of our design philosophy is the interface. To be kind to Victoria, we could say that the interface did not win many awards. So, with the Victoria 2 we are putting a lot of thought into how information is displayed. Now, I know some our recent interface efforts have lead to accusations of “dumbing down” by the fan base, but, trust me on this one, with a good interface you can actually add complexity into a game without turning it into a struggle to just get on with playing the damn game.

I suppose I should finish with events. On the one hand we have promised thousands of events and on the other hand we are kind of hinting that events do not feature heavily in our plans. Well, rigid historical events forcing the game down a certain path are not on the agenda; we don’t want people to have to read through the event files and learn to decode them just to be able to play the game. On the other hand, events in themselves do add something to a game. If you get events for Brazil then you get the feeling you are playing Brazil and not generic South American Country A. What Victoria had was two classes of event; major and flavour. We are looking to shunt the major events in decisions and make them more generic, thus if things are right in Japan you will get the Meji Restoration, but you can play another uncivilised country and get the same effect. The flavour events remain. Now, overall a point of prestige here or a small increase in CON there is not going to make or break your game, but this is your country that made a huge scientific breakthrough and won a noble prize this year and a not generic country. Thus, we are trying to balance the goal of a sand box game while trying to provide the immersion of playing a particular country.

Well, that ends this weeks developer diary, next week I’ll start talking about how we are going to make this a reality.