Paradox slows down Stellaris updates to deliver more impactful changes

Paradox is changing its approach to Stellaris updates as it continues to tidy things up following the launch of the 4X game's recent major overhaul. Stellaris 4.0 and the accompanying Biogenesis DLC delivered dramatic, transformative changes to core systems such as population, but also resulted in a wave of crashes, bugs, and other issues that the developer has been working to fix. In a new Stellaris dev diary, game director Stephen 'Eladrin' Muray says the team is "committed to continuing to fix things until the 4.0 release is in the state it needs to be in," but that it's changing its approach.

I spoke with Muray in the wake of the Stellaris 4.0 launch, which was plagued by problems that led to widespread negative Steam reviews for Biogenesis, despite the expansion itself being largely beloved. He told me he was happy with the decision to release the update, admitting that it needed work but explaining that there would always have been issues to solve once such a widespread rework got out to the public. Paradox was quick to roll out patches, daily at first, and it's continued at pace to try and recover from a notable dip in performance for such a long-time fixture among our best 4X games.

"Our patch cadence has become problematic (and even counterproductive) in some ways," Muray explains in the new post. "Too often in game development, fixing one bug introduces another, and I haven't been giving our internal QA testers enough time to fully vet and test the changes we've been making." He points to a recent fix for a pop issue that caused the unexpected implosion of some Wilderness empires (a new Biogenesis faction that has become a beacon for Paradox's more experimental plans).

Muray says the plan is to allow more time for future updates to be tested internally. "This means that the patching frequency is going to slow down, but with more impactful releases." He also intends to make more use of open betas to allow players to offer feedback, pointing to the current Wilderness beta, which is testing experimental changes that Muray says "may or may not ever go live based on your feedback."

As for what the team is currently working on, Muray is "personally currently looking at ways to improve the AI's behavior." Other systems in active development include OOS investigations, along with several strata issues that affect slavery, purging, and other oddities among pop employment. Performance improvements are in the works too; Muray flags an issue where all empires were spending too much time calculating their biomass total, eating up valuable system resources in the process.

Finally, Muray highlights a design change the team is looking to implement based on player feedback. "We're looking at having newly grown pops go straight into the Civilian stratum or its appropriate equivalent instead of being unemployed members of thor parent pop group. While we liked the verisimilitude of top-heavy planets having more stability issues than ones that are more evenly developed, we acknowledge that having a persistent trickle of unemployed pops feels wrong."

In closing, Muray notes that traditional Stellaris dev diaries will be on hiatus until August, but that we can expect open beta updates as they roll out. "We'll remain in constant communication with you as we continue to update and improve the game."

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