19
Aug
2009
Hearts of Iron III Fallout
I’ve always been a huge fan of strategy games and actually prefer them to action games and shooters. So when my old buddy Plexis from my modding days got me playing Hearts of Iron the better part of a decade ago, I fell in love. When Paradox Interactive says that HoI is a grand strategy title, they do mean grand. In all three iterations of the games (not including expansions) you can play as virtually any country that existed between 1936 and 1948 and either follow the annals of history or rewrite it. Research technologies, manage your industries and production, ensure your population has what they need to survive, and wage war or, if you’d rather, stay completely neutral and watch the world destroy itself. Sounds fun, huh? Well, that’s because it is.
When Hearts of Iron III was announced and more and more media came flowing on to the Internet, I was tickled pink and I simply couldn’t wait to get my greedy little paws on it. Hell, I even pre-ordered it so I could get the bonus Sprite Packs (German and American specific unit icons). But when it was released, as with virtually all Paradox Interactive titles, it was riddled with bugs. Every game upon launch essentially since 1998 will have bugs due to the complex nature of modern games (especially so with Hearts of Iron), but in this case it was a little extreme.
I’m not one to call out developers on releasing bugs with their games as a huge majority of release day bugs are either hardware specific or wouldn’t have been immediately noticable during the beta testing phase. In the case of HoI3 though, there were performance issues beyond belief, numerous and common crashes, glitches, memory leaks, poorly programmed A.I., and other issues. I’m always the first to defend developers and bugs as it comes with the territory when you work in the gaming industry, but I find it hard to defend these bugs and the release of this game. Paradox Interactive has a very bad reputation for releasing games far too early, so this is very much their fault and it’s very clear why there are so many people who are very upset with the company and the game.
But there’s another side to this. Paradox isn’t a money hungry company that ignores their community and conducts business as they see fit, it’s actually quite the opposite in their case. The company head is very active on the community forums and interacts almost daily, and he and the company itself are known for giving support where support is needed. Even before the game was in the hands of the mass public there was a patch released followed by a hot fix followed by a slightly larger patch. Even as we speak (and for the next two weeks) Paradox is programming a comprehensive patch based on the feedback from their community. There’s nothing bad you can say about that, this is really a company that cares about the people that keep them in business.
This brings me to the community. I was looking to start posting regularly in the Hearts of Iron community forums and starting my own HoI fan site with news, information, guides, and most importantly mod downloads as from my experience with the Hearts of Iron 2 board, the community was very respectful and a refreshing change from the Half-Life community from where I hail. It turns out a lot of them are the exact same. The moderators at the Paradox forums, specifically the HoI3 boards, are working overtime from all of the people registering simply to bash the company and the game, and of course each other too. Older more mature people who have the patience to play grand strategy games are being banned for immature flaming and name calling simply because they expect gold on release day.
It’s painfully apparent that only the extreme minority understand what goes into game development, especially into games that have just so much to them as the HoI series does. All I’ve seen are “this game sucks, this, that, and the other thing should have been different, I’m not buying any more of their crap” posts. It’s endless and unrelenting, and it’s just sad to see. Yes, Paradox really dropped the ball with releasing a game that barely runs on multi-core CPUs where it should be utilizing them and having a game based on history (it’s supposed to be more of a simulation than anything) strays so far from it. But they’re fixing it, and people need to understand the amount of work it takes just to program one little bug fix in.
I’ve been a gamer since the early to mid 90s and here I am today still trying to find people like me to enjoy these games with. There’s no such thing as a good community anymore, and what few level-headed gamers there are stays away from them all too. Hearts of Iron III will be an awesome game once the kinks are ironed out, and when they are I’ll post a fair review of it here, but I’ve lost all hope in entering the community and giving them a central location to do their business. I’d only end up hating the community that way.
