A Final Goodbye To A User Unfriendly War of the Vikings

I’m pissed. – That really could be the interlude to all these blog posts, so on with the point:

I’m sure everyone is still raving about Oculus Rift getting bought out by Facebook for an amount of money that doesn’t seem justified for me, but I’m going to totally sidestep that issue. Today, I’ve learned about some issues with Steam Early Access that I should’ve anticipated but ultimately didn’t. Some games are hastily shoved on there. No, I knew that; what I didn’t know is that it means their development pipeline isn’t even structured, before the bare wireframe is released, so to speak. I’m talking about War of the Vikings from Paradox Interactive.

Paradox Interactive is a company I highly respect and I believe their games have done pretty well on NoobFeed. I personally love games like Warlock: Master of the Arcane, King Arthur, Magicka and Mount and Blade. Have you played the awesome Mount and Blade? Anyway, I’m going on too many tangents. What I’m saying is that I’d like to give them the benefit of the doubt on most things, but I don’t believe they’ve taken to Early Access like one should. Instead, they’ve seen it for a way to get money down before their game is properly lined out, which is a tactic a lot more projects have used. That’s not what I’m mad about. I’m mad that they didn’t even have the courtesy to organize the barebones release before putting it on, which affects its current state far into the process. I wasn’t fully on board with War of the Vikings when we previewed it, but at least I signed off with the optimism it would turn itself around.

War of the Vikings is now at the brink of release. I will never play another second of War of the Vikings in my life.

Allow me to explain:

A few months ago, the game did something I really hadn’t seen before. It prompted me to download an update on Steam of several Gigabytes (GB). That’s a tough pill to swallow. This was a patch that required half the size of the game itself, coming in at 8672MB. Then it pulled another one like that, then it wanted over 10GB. That’s when my jaw dropped. It wanted to download more than what the game takes, for “big” updates. This would, however, be the final time, the developer vowed. Nope.

It then had another 10GB update that would really be the final one, then it needed a 5GB update and my mind just snapped. I don’t have time or the envy to redownload the full game several times over in a few months’ time. I vowed that I would never update the game again in such magnitude, as my patience had long worn out. Today, it came back to say it needed another 5GB. It’s now wiped.

Fun fact: War of the Vikings also doesn’t have any other option to uninstall than Steam’s underperforming standard option that leaves a ton of mess. War of the Vikings is possibly one of the most poorly optimized games I’ve had to endure in years and it shouldn’t be. There’s quite the team behind the game. It should be better. It shouldn’t be this crippling.

Oh yeah, it also doesn't care for users with custom controls.

It boils down that War of the Vikings is an insult to consumers. It’s sort of that mentality Adam Orth pleaded to users when the Xbox One “deal with it” controversy came to pass. It assumes you’ll put up the effort of getting the resources required and just download around 30GB on their behalf, just because. Screw you. That’s a gross mentality I can’t follow. Technically I could do that, but I’m not exactly one to comply, because a game’s attitude is so poorly geared towards its audience it didn’t foresee sensible patches in its development. It’s an Early Access game. We could’ve expected a patch or two.

My home computer now is more facilitating than it was before, but I still clearly remember needing to make sure everything was lined up perfectly to play on my AGP slots PC a year or so ago. I had to do so for War of the Roses. It’s in that same line that, even though I have the resources to download 30GB at whim, I can empathize perfectly with people who can’t. As a company serving a niche audience, Paradox Interactive really dropped the ball on that. Since War of the Vikings itself even recently added an element to vastly reduce graphics for a better performance, I do believe they’re still targeting the smaller gamer, at least partially. What they didn’t do is wait for a decent system to service them. Money talks. Money slurs, more like it. I don’t like money’s sizzling in my ear. It doesn’t want me for my personality; it’s just looking for a quick fling and I’m not down with that.

Now, I can’t pretend I have the technological insight to know why these updates have all come in at such gross sizes. I’m sure the developers have a fine justification about adding content and so on, some semantics about models and performance and so forth. My point is that this should have been foreseen, not that it has a reason for occurring. One 10GB patch on a game that’s smaller than what it’s updating is already demanding. Several of those are just poor form and a slap in the face of the people buying into this game. If there was no other way to release the game than with that system, then it should’ve been put back on the drawing board, not chucked out. That’s an opposite logic I can’t stand for.

Since this was also a decision vouched for by Paradox Interactive, I’ll now also need to reassess what I’m expecting from their other titles. One of my most anticipated games this year is the impending release of Warlock 2: The Exiled. I’m not exactly sure what’s going to happen there, but since 4X games tend to linger on my install list, I sure as hell don’t want to be suckered into this same situation twice. Fortunately for me, Paradox is already swaying me decision there by making the sequel a lot more expensive than the first game. I’m sure that has its justifications as well.

Anyway, here’s a video with eighties aerobics that’s about a band fully modeled after the 1985 representation of Michael J. Fox in Teen Wolf. It’s a day for tangents.