Magna Mundi - Better grab your popcorn folks, this one will go into the DRAMA history books

[Kane]

Hi all,

I wanted to give you an update on the current state of project Magna Mundi. Unfortunately its fate is looking grim. The latest Release Candidate was not at all where it needs to be, far from it.

We failed the latest Release Candidate due to numerous crashes, and will deliver a more extensive list of bugs to the dev team this week.

This latest submission follows a string of Release Candidates who were also failed, and the sad fact is we see just as many crashes, bugs and imbalances as we did 6 months ago, some of them brand new and some of them old and well known. This is not a good sign and a terrible sad one as well as it indicates that the development of the game is not happening in a controlled manner. The game was announced in Jan 2010 and the target was a 2011 release. We have reached a point where we no longer can see an end to this, at least not honestly.

We will see what power the developers can muster to remedy the many holes in the game, but given the recent history of development hopes are not high. It cannot go on like this, and we are at a point where time, money and patience is long gone. Only hard and sad choices remain. Choices we will not make lightly but need to make. We will keep you posted.

Mattias Lilja
Executive Producer of Magna Mundi

http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?611749-The-sad-state-of-affairs

Where is the decline tag if you need it?

 

[Gord]

As a complete newfag to these games, how is MM supposed to be different from e.g. EU3 or V2?

 

[Malakal]

I am not at all surprised its a horrible mess since the mod also wasnt good in this aspect. What is surprising however is the fact they arent going to release it anyway. After so many games released in early beta or even alpha that wouldnt be new, especially since Paradox did this a few times too. And Stardock. And many other developers.

At least they are being honest. They too too much on their plate.

 

[Malakal]

As a complete newfag to these games, how is MM supposed to be different from e.g. EU3 or V2?

It was supposed to be a greatly expanded EU3 with lots of new concepts based on the mod that was considered the best and hardest of all EU3 mods.

 

[Morkar Left]

This sucks on so many levels...

 

[Berekän]

Looks like most of the problems are on multiplayer, but Paradox won't let it release with disabled multiplayer:

Most of the issues are with multiplayer, which wasn't tested so much simply because of our limited resources (namely: time) and has some nasty bugs indeed. Single player is in far better shape than several Paradox titles were at their release time and with the Day 1 patch it will be even better.
We still have several options for the game, including the beta release and shutting the whole project down, so it's up to Paradox which path to chose. As I see they have the following choices:
- Postpone release (they obviously don't want to do that)
- Release it as a Beta (it seems that the community supports this idea)
- Take over the project from here and release later (not the best idea because they would spend a lot of time learning how the mechanics and the modified engine work and only then can they start the bug hunt)
- Shut down the project (this option in itself has several scenarios which we will talk about only if this option comes true)

All I can say is that we will work in every minute of our spare time till the decision is made.

Why wont you release only a single player first?
Do really that many people play multiplayer of EU-like games?

For me multiplayer and 'any start date possible' are HUGE waste of developing time.

That was discussed within the team, but Paradox insisted on having the multiplayer in the first release. I don't know statistics, but according to them, many people play EU3 in multi. Or I don't know why, but they think it's imperative to have.

 

[hoverdog]

Wasn't MM in gold already? And now they're saying they might not release the game at all due to bugs?

weird

though it definitely would be a shame

 

[catfood]

 

[Cassidy]

Wouldn't be the first unfinished game Paradox released if it were to be released at its current state.

 

[MasterSmithFandango]

What the fuck... god dammit... fuck...

 

[Topher]

I don't even care about this game, never thought the mod sounded interesting, but it seems silly to stop the release because MP is buggered while SP works.

 

[Malakal]

I read their tread, the team seems optimistic enough and confident in bug fixing, that Paradox gal not so much OTOH. They are currently playing the "push back the release date" game it seems. Not sure for how long more Paradox will be willing to finance them.

 

[CrimsonAngel]

Well her is hoping for the best.

 

[Renegen]

Multiplayer is always imbalanced in Paradox games. I need Magna Mundi.

 

[oscar]

95% of Paradox players probably don't even touch the multiplayer.

 

[Cassidy]

95% of Paradox players probably don't even touch the multiplayer.

Even if that is exaggerated, the explanation really sounds weak. I wonder if there could be an internal conflict behind this they are trying to keep quiet about.

 

[DakaSha]

Magna Mundi always seemed to just enhance the aspects about the EU games that I hated so on that note: Dont give a shit.

Having said that, i understand people have different tastes and although I had no interest in the mod-turned-game it is pretty fucking weak of paradox (and/or the dev team) to do this. If i were one of the bros waiting for this id be pretty butthurt lol

 

[Destroid]

EU without magma mundi is a trivial map painter. I mean you can still map paint in MMU, but at least it's difficult, and rapid expansion has severe consequences.

 

[Spectacle]

Wouldn't be the first unfinished game Paradox released if it were to be released at its current state.

One thing is to release a game before it's ready and then fix it in patches, it's another thing to release a game when the devs are struggling so hard they have no idea if they can ever fix it.

The multiplayer excuse sounds pretty silly. Even if having multiplayer would mean significantly more sales (and I'm far from convinced of that) releasing MM as a singleplayer only game would recover at least some of the development budget, axe the game completely and it's all lost.

Though personally I've never been particularly interested in Magna Mundi. The original mod seemed like it was just piling tons of random bullshit on top of EU3.

 

[Kane]

random shit?

 

[Raghar]

Multiplayer is always imbalanced in Paradox games. I need Magna Mundi.

There are crashes in MP. And from that tread, I seen they didn't bothered to test it more than about 50 turns, which means they completely missed some game crashing bugs, and from my experience these are hardest to find.


Which basically only validates my proclamations: it's idiocy to fund some moders and release mods as pay ware.

0-70-100 years tests. But it is not even necessary to make longer runs because as all the features are in already (we're mostly hunting bugs and setting up features to WAD). And lately, we did not experience game crashing issues only in about 30-50 years periods. And these issues can mean only a missing } or " in the code and nothing more serious.

Only?

This reminds me about my prolonged unemployed period. Why are these people being paid?

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

I read their tread, the team seems optimistic enough and confident in bug fixing, that Paradox gal not so much OTOH. They are currently playing the "push back the release date" game it seems. Not sure for how long more Paradox will be willing to finance them.

To me it just reeks of "fucking lazy" on part of the dev team. They've had a massive dev cycle, while having ready engine and assets to build on. I wouldn't put tag for Paradox, I'd put it on the dev team for sitting with their thumbs up their asses. I mean, haven't they had more time to develop this than CK2?

Not to mention of course that MM was a fucking mess when it came to organization and presentation of the game mechanics, and had a lot of stupid arbitrary bullshit that detracted from the whole in a big way (to such an extent I'd rather play vanilla and mod myself when necessary rather than ever install MM again), so I still hold some minor skepticism about the final outcome after ubik's good pitch of their ideas.

The multiplayer excuse sounds pretty silly. Even if having multiplayer would mean significantly more sales (and I'm far from convinced of that) releasing MM as a singleplayer only game would recover at least some of the development budget, axe the game completely and it's all lost.

Hence why I've got big suspicions that it's exactly just that: An excuse. I hold it very possible that the bugs and issues go far beyond multiplayer if total axing is being considered. And again, this is Paradox we're talking about, so these must be massive bugs.

 

[Spectacle]

It's possible that the game is simply banal shit boring, beyond any fix short of scrapping everything and starting from scratch. Cancelling the game with some made up excuse could be better than releasing a guaranteed critical failure.

 

[Malakal]

You know what REALLY pisses me off? Apparently Ubik, and perhaps other devs too, is working on ANOTHER new game. Shit man, deliver one game before you think about expanding your "studio". K_merse tries to defend it on their forums but really, its not defensible. I can already see them being a shit studio.

They should learn from Paradox. Starting humble but finishing games (even when it wasnt profitable ie CK) then expanding their power base on good customer support and long time patching for old games.

 

[MasterSmithFandango]

Eh, I don't feel that Pdox is putting a lot on the line reputation-wise with this... it's pretty widely known that this is from a bunch of modders.

Look, if the bugs are in MP, then release SP. Some of you (faggots) don't like MM, and that's fine (for a bunch of faggots). I do agree that it seems unlikely that the problems are just MP though. Whatever, just fix the damn thing and release it. I need this shit, man.