Ah, word limits. The bane of every enthusiastic writer!
I do find CK2 to be a little different from the other Paradox games, and I have to say that Stellaris is my favorite.
Of course, some of this may be down to the fact that I've actually finished a game of Stellaris without winding up in a burned out husk of an empire.
I find it kind of amusing that my editor is pretty aggressive about my column inches limit on a digital publication. I get it, but it's funny.
I finish Stellaris games a lot more frequently than I do any of the other Paradox library, which is also more than a little amusing. In part I think it's because the system is designed such that you are intended to win. Or at least go down fighting. CK2 and EU4 are really geared more toward some kind of elegant failure along the way.
Really, it's just a matter of a game design focusing on a different set of stories to tell.
(Also, man, I'm looking forward to the new MegaCorp expansion ...)
Back when I used to do some freelance writing, it was always funny to see when people would say "Okay, do your thing!" or have highly specific demands about what you should do.
Yeah, part of the thing with Stellaris is that it's fantasy and exploring the unknown. CK and EU are about struggling against reality.
I do want to try out MegaCorp when it arrives. I'm so eager to get a spin with it, even though I'm sure I'll get horribly wrecked by even the easiest AI.
I've honestly been really impressed working with Joe at Strategy Gamer. I made it fairly clear when I signed on to freelance for them that I was perfectly happy to write anything they wanted to see done, I'd make sure he got turned around in hours or days rather than weeks, I'm pretty casual about when I get paid, and I enjoy the material. In return he's been good enough to pitch me things that are pretty interesting, is more than happy to take my input and run with it, fairly forgiving of my personal quirks (though not to the point where he's taking my articles in Markdown yet, but I have hope), and generally just pleasant to work with.
My usual freelancing has been with less tight, self-contained content. I much prefer to write longer pieces with more detail, but this games journalist gig is pretty sweet. And it's nice working with someone who acts as professionally as they're supposed to, which is a surprisingly rare state of affairs, especially in anything associated with gaming.
The longform gameplay videos that the Stellaris guys have been putting out on YouTube are amazing. Honestly, there is no better advertising for a game than seeing the developers playing it, in front of you, talking about what the design decisions are and showing you the whole thing even if there are rough edges and stuff that they know they're going to be refining, and trusting that you as a consumer are as excited as they are about the product. It just about removes any need for the punditry to make comments. The likely audience can see and judge for themselves without any intermediary.
Also, I'm absolutely going to run a criminal syndicate mega-church with a focus on infecting other cultures with my spirituality. It ought to be a lot of fun.
Keep working on getting articles submitted in Markdown. It's so convenient!
Yeah, generally freelancing has been somewhat limited for me. I spend so much time on my own stuff and have dirtied myself with enough conflicts of interest that I don't d o a whole lot, and it 's been a while since I've done any. Plus, I've found that just as I have problems finding decent freelancers, there are a lot of people out there who don't follow through on their end of the bargain when you're a freelancer for them.
I don't really watch the preview videos because I like jumping in and being surprised, but I will say that when I know that companies do community outreach like Paradox and Digital Extremes pride themselves on doing really frequently it's a good sign that they're going to be making games that actually have what gamers want to see. Long, closed development processes are scary.
I'm just excited about having a different way to take to the stars and approach things from a new perspective. I modded Stellaris pretty heavily to get novel experiences with each playthrough, and I look forward to having even more interesting experiences.
You're telling me! Unfortunately, some people will forever be wedded to the old cut-and-paste routine from DOCX files. This pains me at levels it is impossible to truly understand, but luckily the Markdown editor I use (Typora) is able to export through Pandoc to a very clean DOCX, so all is not lost.
I edit in my accustomed tools and just export to whatever the client wants. Same as always.
I've been on the other end of trying to manage freelancers enough times that I don't want to be one of "those guys." Though it's always been a lot easier to deal with writers than graphic artists. Writers will be late but they generally deliver what they promise. Artists? They'll be late, deliver something other than what you asked for, and then expect to be patted on the head and praised for it. "Herding cats" would give such management too much credit.
I don't regret not doing that much anymore.
Unless new management blows the whole line altogether, Stellaris looks like it will be one of those games that Paradox selling for many years to come. Both EU and CK say that they are really devoted to keeping things going and providing new content on a regular basis for thing you already own.
Now, making it easier to get in from the ground floor for new users? They could work on that a bit. But if that's the worst thing about their management at this point, they are doing a damn fine job.
Gah, artists. I love artists, but many of them don't freelance well. I've had a ton of artists whose work I love, but who I absolutely can't afford to hire because they don't give me stuff I can use, so I'm just throwing away money to get them to make stuff that doesn't come through in useful resolutions or formats.
I think the whole thing going for Paradox is that they embrace the complexity, and cater to players who don't care about the fact that it's a learning process. I can tell you that I feel like their grand strategy is perhaps even easier than many "simpler" games that are enigmatic because they try to abstract things out. They give you very simple tools, and let you make what you can with them.
When I got stuck doing layout and artist wrangling for the book for guardians of the order I cowrote, Hearts Swords and Flowers, I learned that dealing with artists was the last thing the world I really wanted to do because that was my first professional book management experience in the RPG industry – and it was a real trial by fire.
Artists are just a pain in the ass to work with for the most part. There are a few who go out of their way to be extremely professional and businesslike and love to hit deadlines and deliver what you talked about in your art requests, but they are almost impossible to find in every single one of them has some absurd, extreme quirk.
I've done more of it since, but it will never be my favorite thing in the world to do. Given the choice, I prefer just being a writer.Paradox knows the kind of game that they have a reputation for, they've embraced that, and they know their audience is there. They have spent many years building that audience, interacting with that audience, and liking that audience, which is all too rare.
In a weird way, EU4 is very much like Minecraft. They both give you a delimited set of verb-like interactions with the setting, albeit extremely large sets of them, then turn you loose and what's effectively a sandbox with goals which are largely the creation of the user. Some people completely freeze up and don't know how to deal with that has a game and some people flourish in it.
Being able to recognize that both of those groups exist and catering to the one while not demonizing the other is a finely balanced activity.