“A life sim made sense, and perhaps still make sense,” says chief creative officer
Image credit:Paradox Interactive
Image credit:Paradox Interactive
Next time, however, Paradox need to make smaller investments at the outset and be prepared for a longer spell in prototyping, Lilja went on. “We need to do it a different way. We need to start with a smaller team. We need to do pre-production longer. We need to prototype a lot, before we go into big production, because when you have a full game team, quite honestly, it costs a lot, so any pivot is going to cost all of that.”
The game’s relative expense meant it had to show significant progress faster than the developers could manage, Lilja said. “We were not getting the game we wanted, and the burn rate and cost was really high at that point, which is on us as a publisher. The devs did everything they could, but there were lots of them, so any major change would just put us more into [debt]. We were digging a hole that was just getting deeper. That’s why we had to stop it, and we didn’t really see any other option. It’s not like you can change dev team - we have to stop now.”
The game’s problems were too fundamental to iron out in early access, Lilja added. “If we thought people would be happy, we would have released it, but we were certain that they wouldn’t. So we had to stop.”
“What is the player experience going to be like, is it going to be better than Sims 4 in some way, at least?” he said. “And the unfortunate answer to that is that I didn’t feel it would be, and the other people who tested it were of sort of the same opinion.
“So, it’s not about single points of failure, if you will, it’s more the big picture experience of playing the game, and even in early access, you need to have a really solid experience that is fun and bug-free. It can be a little thin on content, sure, that’s not the big problem. It’s having that really fun experience playing. The game needs to be there.”
According to Delventhal, the developers “spent a month in purgatory” after release was postponed indefinitely, during which “we did everything we could to prove to them we were worth launching, including things like finding potential buyers or suggesting cutting ties and going indie. We heard virtually nothing back.”
“But I can tell you that the game was not what we needed it to be. The promise that they talked about, that people got excited about, was not the game that we were looking at. And there were many different reasons, and I’m going to own up that we did not control or help them steer that in a good way - that’s on us.”
Look out for more stories on Prison Architect 2, The Lamplighter’s League, Bloodlines 2 and Paradox’s grand strategy operations at large in the days to come.
