im extra mad about this. its just so inept. no excuses for this level of mismanagement of a project, esp when its workers, and not the execs responsible, who are once again paying the price
small source of the mad is that i love this company's bread and butter. and now hold grave fears for the future of pretty much everything outside of CK3. EUV, HoI3, i should be excited for them! but im mostly just frowning. esp after whats happened to vic 3.
Not a surprise. Anything short of revamping the military system from scratch (among other necessary improvements) doesn’t seem like it would help much. What a shame.
You can map Paradox's troubles almost exactly to them going public. Prior: an ambitious developer and publisher who sometimes misstepped. After: a keystone cops shit show with just enough residual pride to cancel things but no inkling of the dire effects of that.
I've seen this happen to way too many companies (including those I worked for). Vision invariably goes from making good products to making as much money as possible once a company floats.
I know you touched on it in the other article but the layoffs at HBS were actually months before Lamplighter's actually came out, we never really had a chance. Tectonic news dredging up a lot of feelings.
The reviews of Lamplighters League on Rock Paper Shotgun are so sad. Across three articles, the same reviewer goes from hyped to disappointed, and that’s the end of it.
I started out really digging Lamplighters, and then the mechanics just wore me down, and when I couldn’t really succeed, all I could do was start over. And that’s not a great feeling after like 20 hours of tactical gameplay
I got all three Shadowrun games and the MW game from Harebrained schemes, and they all tend to be very mechanics lite. Really was looking forward to Lamplighters, but honestly not surprised it failed. Something about Harebarined not being able to make systems gel very well.
yyyyyyyyyep.
also the TTRPG rights too, if I recall. for the entire world of darkness line. (and chronicles but theyre doing their damndest to let that one die quietly)
Yup and they contracted Chinese Room to make Bloodlines 2 into *checks notes* what appears to be an action adventure game with minimal RPG mechanics after their own inhouse studios devved it in such a way they apparently needed a full restart
I wrote off VTMB2 after they brought in Chinese Room. Not that I have anything against TCR, I’m not familiar with them at all, but it’s such an extreme move that I can’t imagine the end product will work at all
It's a wild situation handled abysmally by Paradox. One of the now-former employees was venting on LinkedIn that they were far exceeding all internal metrics and were given thumbs up from leadership to launch not long ago, then heard about the closure from the public statement.
Paradox have just been getting worse and worse over the last couple of years. Hooded Horse are going to eat their lunch in every genre they care about.
Because it's their flagship title, I don't see them killing it off like this - it would just be such a fatal blow to the company. It might end up being a clusterfuck in all the other ways though.
Yeah I'm thinking it's going the Vic 3 route of being a messy release, especially with everything from the Tinto Talks making it look like Vic 3 and CK3 had a baby
I think at that point they'd have lost so much money between failed dev cycles and launches that go really mediocre (Cities 2) they might be economically forced to look inward
Afaik the leadership team responsible for deciding to publish these games were forced out. Current leadership doesn't seem to want to follow through and/or are not interested in the projects they are publishing
