Space 4X game Stellaris has its ninth birthday this week, and to celebrate developer Paradox has launched one of its most transformative updates in a long time alongside a fresh expansion, Biogenesis. It hasn’t all been smooth sailing, however; while the strategy game’s new DLC is being widely praised, the Stellaris 4.0 update brought a tidal wave of issues including lag, crashes, and other bugs into play. Speaking exclusively to PCGamesN, game director Stephen ‘Eladrin’ Muray says the team bit off more than it could chew and apologizes for disappointing players, but maintains that it was the right move for the patch to launch when it did.
“We did release this in a rough state,” Muray admits of Stellaris 4.0. “I felt that we were showing that a little bit by having a big known issues list in the patch notes, [but] I should have been more explicit about the state we had it in. [Players] need to know what’s happening, and the path to getting better.” Despite the rocky start at the update’s launch on Monday, by the end of the week Paradox had already deployed multiple patches for its 4X game targeting most of the serious issues that had been reported by players.
Echoing a statement made in the wake of 4.0, Muray says he’s “sorry for disappointing the fans,” but explains that he’s still content with the decision to not delay the update because the much larger player base will always uncover problems that don’t appear in testing. “If we had pushed it two weeks, I don’t think that we would have caught as many of the issues – it would have been in a better state, but we still would have had a week of hardcore patching, [if] not as intense as it is right now. It’s difficult because there are so many moving parts.”
The situation has created a rather unusual phenomenon; the new Stellaris Biogenesis DLC currently sits with a ‘mostly negative’ average Steam rating, yet read through those reviews and you’ll mostly see praise for the expansion, which includes some of the most inventive and mechanically flavorful ideas brought to the space game in years. The swarm of thumbs-down responses is almost entirely a result of 4.0-related issues. Has that caused Muray and the team to reconsider its standard policy of launching DLC and free updates simultaneously?
“That’s something that we’re discussing a little bit internally for the future, if we make changes of this magnitude again,” Muray responds. He says the way that expansions are tied into the base game makes this “very difficult” and would cause more development overhead, “but I feel that it might be worth it in the future. That would let us get more information about the base game without the DLC.”
Despite the blowback, it’s clear players are willing to stick with Stellaris. Part of that trust is earned by how communicative the development team at Paradox is. Muray and his coworkers deliver extensive weekly dev diaries talking about current issues and future plans. “We’re making the game for our fans, so I need to talk to them a lot,” he says. “I’m proud of the team, they did the impossible for me on unreasonable timeframes. I’ve been in the game industry for 20 years and I’ve never had a better team.”
As for what lies ahead, Muray lists optimization, usability, and improvements to tooltips and the overall user experience as the current priorities. While the pop rework has improved performance in the late-game, it’s creating more slowdown in the early game on lower-spec machines. That, combined with a troublesome memory leak that the team is currently attempting to pin down, “hurts a lot” for users on older machines, he notes. “We’re at the very beginning of 4.0 optimization, and we need to get better.”
“[Patch] 3.14 was at its limits of optimization, 4.0 is just getting started. We have a lot of ideas on how to make things better,” he continues. One change that was considered “too risky” to include in the current update is set to reduce the number of very small pop groups that can be created as a result of systems such as ethics shifting. “That one alone should help significantly, but I need more internal testing on that before we put it public.”
With the rework in place, however, there’s a lot of potential that Muray is excited for. Along with the simultaneous pop growth and improved automigration, he highlights the future of the new district specializations. Along with the initial four, a fifth has been introduced since launch adding hydroponics for habitats in the generator district to enable solar farming, and more are planned.
“We have some pretty big plans for some other things,” Muray teases. “I have a design for resort worlds that has been given to me that is freaking amazing, and I’m really looking forward to getting to do that one. I think that generally the systems are more robust – initially confusing, especially if you’re used to the 3.14 systems, but I think that by 4.6 we’ll be like, ‘Oh, how did we ever use the old system?'”
We’ll have more thoughts from Muray on the popularity of Biogenesis and what it means for the future of Stellaris in the coming days. For now, take a glance through the best grand strategy games on PC right now, or perhaps the best games like Civilization.
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