Tag: Paradox Interactive

There’s so much cool stuff coming to Crusader Kings 3 this year that I’m not sure what to be most excited for

About 10 years ago, I sat down in a San Francisco coffee shop across from Henrik “Doomdark” Fåhraeus, then game director for Crusader Kings 2, and asked him about the possibility of playing landless characters in Paradox’s rich medieval sandbox. Normally, you take the role of a count, duke, king, or emperor permanently tied to […]

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Extended Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 reveal is illuminating but disorientating

After last year’s brief snippets of vampiric shenanigans, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 developer The Chinese Room is giving us a longer peek at Seattle’s nightlife in a dev walkthrough with creative director Alex Skidmore and community manager Joshua Matthews.  It’s significantly more illuminating than the faction reveals, showing off a mission where Phyre, […]

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Paradox Interactive refreshes Prison Architect in new sequel

Do you want to get the latest gaming industry news straight to your inbox? Sign up for our daily and weekly newsletters here. Paradox Interactive announced that it’s bringing fresh life to the Prison Architect IP in 2024, with a 3D sequel titled, natch, Prison Architect 2. Along with developer Double Eleven, the publisher says […]

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Cities: Skylines 2 studio boss warns that growing toxicity could force developers to ‘pull back our engagement’ with the community

Cities: Skylines 2 was not in great shape when it launched in 2023. The underlying game was quite good but it was plagued with performance problems and missing a number of features, most notably an editor. That sparked a quick backlash on Steam, visible in the “mixed” user rating, but it also kicked off what […]

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Age of Wonders 4 reignited my love of 4Xs by letting me become Frankenstein

After nearly three decades and a genuinely unhealthy number of hours spent raising armies and devouring maps, I confess that my passion for 4X games has started to dwindle. As grand strategy games like Crusader Kings have grown ever more complex and flavourful, Civilization and its children just don’t pack the punch that they once […]

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Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2’s final clan reveal dashes the hopes of anyone wanting to play a Malkavian at launch

Vampire: The Masquerade’s blueblood vamps, the Ventrue, are the fourth and final clan being unveiled for Bloodlines 2. Unlike the unexpected addition of the Banu Haqim, shown off during the PC Gaming Show, the Ventrue reveal has been easier to predict: these vamps are VTM’s aristocracy, heavy hitters that often have important positions in the […]

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Strike from the shadows as Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2’s third clan, the Banu Haqim

As part of the PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted, we saw a brief reveal of the third playable clan coming to Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2. While the first two reveals were clans that appeared in the original Bloodlines, the rebellious Brujah and the sorcerous Tremere, this is the first clan we didn’t have […]

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Cities: Skylines 2 DLC has been delayed and weekly patches have come to an end

Since Cities: Skylines 2’s shaky launch, Colossal Order has been releasing regular patches to improve performance and squash bugs, but the studio’s attention is now turning to the issues that “require a bit more work”. This means an end to the weekly patches, as well as postponed DLC. The changes have been detailed today in […]

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It looks like modding tools for Cities: Skylines 2 are still several months away

Like cutting the red tape on a six-lane gravel highway, the launch of Cities: Skylines 2 has been both huge and rough. While undoubtedly offering an improved core experience over the original, the game’s performance issues were so severe that Colossal Order started warning about them before the game came out. Moreover, certain core features […]

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9 bizarre things I learned about Cities: Skylines 2 by following this one citizen around for his entire life

It’s easy when playing a city builder to focus on the grander scale: electrical grids, traffic patterns, resource management, the economy. Even the happiness level of your citizens can be summarized with a simple, aggregate smiley face that prevents you from having to zoom in to see their actual faces. But the best city builders […]

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One of 2023’s best strategy games, Age of Wonders 4, just received a massive free update full of overhauls and new features

Age of Wonders 4, easily Triumph’s best 4X, received a meaty free update alongside its premium expansion this week. The expansion itself is pretty tantalising, introducing a new form with the Avians, the Reaver culture, new tomes and a whole lot more, but the free update feels almost as significant.  The Golem update, which is […]

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Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 reveals its first clan, the Brujah, four years after it revealed its first clan, the Brujah

Now that Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 has a new developer, The Chinese Room, we’re going through the whole rigamarole of teasers and reveals all over again, starting now and carrying on into 2024, and possibly beyond. I hope you’re prepared.  This is why, more than four years after I wrote “Vampire: The Masquerade […]

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Cities: Skylines 2’s editor tools look better than the original’s, but they still don’t have a release date

I’ve taken a break from Cities: Skylines 2 to give Colossal Order time to address its many issues, from performance problems to bugs to critical systems not working as intended. There’s a lot of work still to do. I’ve also been waiting for editor tools, which is essential in a series that places such significance […]

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Cities: Skylines 2 has 8 packs of regional buildings on the way, for free

Cities: Skylines 2 has announced that eight new regional building themes will come to the city builder via the Paradox Mods distribution platform. Created by a variety of well-known modders from the Cities Skylines modeling scene, the new packs will be Japan, UK, East-coast USA, West-coast USA, China, France, East Europe, and Germany Spread across […]

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Victoria 3 conjures up yet another DLC type as it braces for its ‘grandest update to military, economy, and diplomacy’ yet

Like the industrial revolution itself, Victoria 3 forges ahead with patches and expansions, tearing asunder the idiocy of rural life, melting all that was once solid into the air, and faring relatively poorly in the Steam reviews for its DLC (the Steam reviews for capitalism would have been terrible in 1848, which is probably why […]

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Cities: Skylines 2 studio promises performance issues can and will be fixed: ‘We want to assure you that the issues are not deeply rooted in the game’s foundation’

A few days before the launch of Cities: Skylines 2, Paradox Interactive issued a warning about the game’s performance—specifically, that it might be a little less than ideal, especially on lower-end hardware. Sure enough, this was our experience: “random fps dips, slowdowns and hitches, and sometimes complete freezes that lasted a few seconds,” along with […]

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Cities: Skylines 2’s weird terrain quirks mean you’ll need to start landscaping immediately

I am a fickle mayor, it turns out. My first Cities: Skylines 2 town ended up in the bin after only a couple of hours—but I think for completely understandable reasons. It looked lumpier than my middle-aged arse. The way Colossal Order’s city-building sequel deals with terrain, and the way buildings interact with it, is […]

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Cities: Skylines 2: Immediately change these 5 graphics options for a big performance boost

Last week the developer of Cities: Skylines 2 warned players that the game doesn’t reach the performance benchmarks it was aiming for. I feel comfortable repeating this warning—while reviewing the game I had issues with frame rates, freezes and hiccups, occasional graphical glitches, and even a few crashes to desktop. Many other reviews cited performance […]

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The official Bloodlines 2 theme song is giving me a minor existential crisis over how old the first game is, and how much older I am now

Paradox Interactive has revealed the official theme song for Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2, a dark, moody piece called Midnight that’s really quite good. Also, I don’t think I like it. Let me explain. Written by Michel Zitron, Paulina Palmgren, and Jarly, Midnight is an interesting tune: Slow, electronic, forcibly gloomy. In many ways, […]

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Watching an actual civil engineer nerd out over Cities: Skylines 2 is some of the most wholesome city building content out there

You may remember Real Civil Engineer as the twisted mind behind the poop-powered city made in the original Cities: Skylines game. Well, he’s back again and turning his hand to Cities: Skylines 2. Aside from pulling a few vaguely sewage-related antics this time around, he’s been heartily nerding out over the road tools, assessing their […]

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Cities: Skylines 2 leaves out goofy stuff like pink vans with giant donuts on them, and I miss it

Cities: Skylines 2 could be headed for a rocky launch. As I said in my review, there are a lot of performance issues in the city builder sequel, and other reviews I’ve read mention a similar experience. That’s disappointing, and the fact that Colossal Order is actually warning players of performance issues ahead of launch […]

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Stellaris’ next DLC is gonna take you to another dimension

Galactic tyranny sim Stellaris is officially getting weird. Paradox has announced the game’s next DLC—named Astral Planes—and it’s promising to let you venture into whole new dimensions, where everything is topsy-turvy and the laws of physics go out the window. Announced yesterday and releasing alongside Stellaris’ upcoming 3.10 update, Astral Planes is a “narrative-focused expansion” […]

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