Paradox apologise for releasing the worst reviewed game on Steam
Europa Universalis IV’'s Leviathan DLC was released broken, but they promise to fix it
Paradox Tinto’s studio manager and game director Johan Andersson has apologised for the state of Europa Universalis IV’s Leviathan DLC. The buggy release was so bad that it swiftly became Steam’s worst reviewed game, and remains 'Overwhelmingly Negative' on the store. Andersson posted on the game’s forums taking full responsibility. "This is entirely my fault," he said.
The game was released in a terrible state, generating a megathread on Reddit to catalogue an extraordinary pile of issues. This wasn’t just a number of crashes, but the release was clearly unfinished. For example: "The religion interface is straight out of the dev diary, half of the modifiers don't even have names, and even the convert provinces prompt is improperly cropped."
Johan Andersson posted on the official forums, apologising for Leviathan and the general quality of other releases leading up to it. He said:
"Leviathan was one of the worst releases we have had, and follows a long trail of low quality releases starting back with Golden Century for EU4.
"As the Studio Manager and Game Director, at the end of the day, this is my responsibility, so I have to apologize for this. This is entirely my fault.
"I should have delayed the start of the development of Leviathan until we had all the resources that were needed, and they had time to properly onboard on the project. We should have announced a break in the development of EU4 after the Emperor release, until we had a team ready to start designing and working early in 2021.
"We are partially changing our plans for the rest of the year. We had originally planned to fix all legacy bugs before we stop developing further expansions for EU4. Now we are accelerating these plans, and also making sure that the community will be getting them frequently.
"The 1.31.3 patch is planned to be out this week, and the next patch after that we aim to release either at the end of may or early june, and then we aim to release several more patches for the rest of the year.
"This is of course a rough first expansion for the team and the studio, but it’s far from the end. We have recruited a set of great individuals, with a huge passion for the game, to form Paradox Tinto, giving us a bright future for Europa Universalis."
Though the quality of the release won't ever be forgotten, apologising and promising resources to both fix the bugs and changing future developments is a decent enough opening salvo. The good thing about games is they can always be patched. They'd better get to work.