When we release (not announce) [redacted], we will be removing Man the Guns from sale and rolling all content contained therein into the base game, as part of the free patch. Features such as the Ship Designer, Governments in Exile, Amtracs, Naval Access controls and Admiral Traits will now be part of the core HoI4 experience. The British and US focus trees will now contain their alt-history branches by default. If you want to see more, you can check out the Man the Guns store page while it is still accessible.
We have but a few days until our formal announcement (yes, I’m announcing the announcement), but our developer corners have been running now for a few months. After the releases of Götterdämmerung and Graveyard of Empires we committed to doing these in future - they are a great way to get early feedback in, and to help people understand what’s coming without going too far into detail. What we lose in impact, I believe, is more than made up for in quality - we’ve already made quite a few changes based on the feedback of the community this time around, some of which you may be able to spot in the following, carefully cropped images.
There could be several things going on here…
Many Content Designers died to bring us this information.
This one isn’t very subtle, but we felt it was important to make it clear - Korea will no longer be a playable starting tag. It didn’t have any planned content in this release, and historically made more sense as a governed territory. You will of course still be able to release and play as Korea if you like.
Horse
And a highly sought-after portrait update… which country leader could this be?
Of course this is not even close to all in terms of fan feedback we’ve acted on or implemented, but you’ll have to wait a bit longer to see things in greater depth.
And now I’ll hand over to our Tech Lead to talk a bit about the internal development impact of rolling an expansion like Man the Guns into the base game.
/Arheo
Hello,
As Arheo wrote above, we’ll be integrating Man the Guns into the base game as part of the free patch accompanying [redacted]. Meaning, it will be impossible to disable the DLC and to buy it as it will be a part of the base game.
The first time I heard about integrating a DLC in the base game about a year ago (Together for Victory, Death or Dishonor and Waking the Tiger) my first thoughts were “why?”. Quickly followed by “how do I make that work?” and then “this is wonderful”. This time around I jumped straight ahead to the “this is wonderful” part. In this post, I hope to be able to share some insight on why it’s appreciated by us in the development team when we integrate a DLC in the base game.
Every new DLC we release provides new content, mechanics, units or art to the game. This is of course what we want, more mechanics to use, more countries to play and have awesome looking units. But every new mechanic or piece of content that we add to the game will interact with the other parts of the game, creating additional overhead when adding the next thing. For example, a country that was developed before Arms Against Tyranny didn’t need to set up MIOs but since then, we now add and test MIOs for new countries as well. We also have to consider that not everyone has Arms Against Tyranny, so the content that interacts with the MIOs also needs to consider what to do if you don’t own Arms Against Tyranny. Quite often it means that we have to write two different versions of, for example, a focus.
Integrating a DLC doesn’t remove the features and content from it but it allows us to assume that everyone has the features and content from that DLC. That allows for fewer implementations of ownership checking, but perhaps more importantly lets us develop features even further without seeing diminishing returns on the number of players who have access to them. Ultimately this both saves us development time, and opens up new avenues to create better and updated content.
/pdxen