The changes to Stellaris have taken the game further away from its premise as a grand, highly interactive, geopolitical 4X game and more towards an inwardly focused, optimization-based, low-interactive empire management game. Let me try to spell it out it as concisely as I can. Lordy, take a look at the new, low-micro planetary management model. Whole gameplay systems were replaced with re-designed systems that took the game away from its initial vision (and what compelled me to hold out hope for so long) and turned it into something else entirely. But we also got a lot of things that undercut, trivialized, or simply did away with them entirely. We got a few of these improvements over the past few years. Maybe even adding a cool ethics based goal or victory system. In those early days, we could opine about all the things that needed improvement: rebalancing combat mechanics, improving the sector AI so it wasn’t a dunce, adding even more diplomacy options, making leaders more interesting, reworking the internal faction system, adding quality of life features, refining the end-game threats. The sector system frees you up to focus on the grand geopolitical game. The game also tackled one of the big questions that has dogged the genre for years: how do you scale up the size of your empire to dozens or hundreds of systems across an entire galaxy without drowning the player in tedious micromanagement? The answer of course is the sector system, which lets you scale up the level of your management to match, so that you don’t have to deal with the individual planets anymore. accounting for varied types of FTL movement or how federations operated).
The warfare system offered up something unique at the strategic level (e.g.
It had an exceptionally refreshing exploration and discovery phase. Here was a game where you could have a 1,000 stars and dozens of races in all sorts of geopolitical entanglements (Vassals! Subjects! Alliances!). When Stellaris launched (again ignoring the bugs and glitches and quality of life lapses in the UI), I felt that I could see the light at the end of the tunnel. That it would take geopolitical strategy and bolt on the initial empire expansion and exploration hallmarks of 4X gameplay. I thought, that this is what Stellaris would be. By geopolitics, I’m talking about diplomacy, foreign trade, military deployments, competing ethics and national personalities - you know the stuff that Europa Universalis IV is praised for. My idealized vision of a 4X game is one of empire growth and expansion that feeds into a titillating geopolitical strategic experience. Stellaris was billed as 4X meets Grand Strategy, and is developed by the company that is the undisputed master of grand strategy games (Paradox). Galaxy spanning empires and beautiful geopolitical messes… in theory. And not just for me, but for a vast swath of the game's early adopters. Rather, when I say that Stellaris is dead, it is because - “FOR ME” - the game’s underlying design has gone in a direction that runs counter to both my preferences, but more importantly, against what I felt the initial vision and dream of Stellaris was in the first place. But by version 1.9 the game was stable and working well. After all, version 1.6 was an utter mess. When I say that Stellaris is dead, it is not because of bugs and glitches that will - in all likelihood - eventually be fixed. I want to pretend the game is working properly because I want to focus the conversation instead on the changes to the game’s underlying design. I want us to pretend that these major updates were released and working as intended without the technical issues that have been levied on the fan base and patient customers. But for this conversation, I want to set all of that aside.
Many of Stellaris’s major patches - version 1.6, 2.0, 2.2 - have been riddled with bugs, glitches, and game-breaking jankiness or oversights that have certainly hurt the reception of the game.
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