Europa Universalis 4 director apologises for "long trail of low quality releases"

The recent Leviathan expansion for Europa Universalis 4 has managed to earn itself an unflattering spot amongst the lowest-ranked products on Steam, with a positive review rating of only seven percent from 3955 reviews. Players said the DLC was seriously buggy and suffered from a host of problems, and sure enough, the game's bug report megathreads quickly filled up with complaints. Paradox Tinto studio manager and game director Johan Andersson has now issued an apology for the state of the expansion and several previous releases for EU4.

Over on the Paradox Forums, Andersson admitted "Leviathan was one of the worst releases we have had," and that the expansion "follows a long trail of low quality releases starting back with Golden Century for EU4.

"As the studio manager and game director, at the end of the day, this is my responsibility, so I have to apologise for this," Andersson added. "This is entirely my fault."

Andersson explained he should have delayed the release of Leviathan until the team had the resources that were needed, along with giving them "time to properly onboard on the project". He felt that there should have been a break in the development of EU4 after the release of the Emperor expansion, "until we had a team ready to start designing and working early in 2021".

As a result of the negative feedback from the release, Paradox Tinto is now accelerating its plans to fix all legacy bugs for EU4, and wants to ensure these fixes are rolled out frequently. One patch is planned to release this week, with another due by the end of May or early June. Hotfix 1.31.1 was also rolled out at the end of April to tackle some of the issues introduced with Leviathan.

Eurogamer contacted Paradox last month for comment on the release, and was told the following:

"We know that Leviathan and 1.31 Majapahit did not live up to the expectations you and we had set for this release. We've been hard at work getting the 1.31.1 hotfix out to you as soon as possible, and we feel confident that it will solve many of the most glaring issues that we have collected and identified. We have identified and corrected some issues in our production process based on learnings from this release and are taking concrete action - both to fix the existing issues and to ensure future releases meet the quality you expect.

"1.31.1 is now available through Steam; it should be compatible with 1.30.0 saves (but we cannot guarantee this), and we have already begun work on 1.31.2 which will provide more updates in the near future.

"We apologise if you haven't been able to enjoy 1.31 and Leviathan the way we had hoped for, but we hope you'll give it another look with these fixes in place. Our goal is for you to be able to enjoy it now, and for the foreseeable future."

It's just as well Paradox has committed to focusing on getting these bug fixes out, as Leviathan sure did have a lot of them at launch. Players reported that games crashed after 100 in-game years, settled provinces reverted back to being unsettled, and Horde Government-Religious policy would set missionary strength to 100 percent instead of one percent. If you're wondering what all that looked like, well, here's a demonstration.

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