I like that a lot because it’s a reason I myself play it sometimes. Why? Because they go to HOI4 for relaxation. About 43% of players play on easier difficulties, and many of them also pick custom game options to boost themselves. “More generally, I like looking at difficulty settings. Shortly after releases, I enjoy trying to guess which branches of focus trees people pick (you guys pick monarchies.

“I have a couple so I am gonna list all of them. We asked Lind to share some final metrics with us as he departs: Favourite metric or player pattern While collecting data and player metrics to inform design decisions isn’t new, Dan Lind and the Hearts of Iron crew are one of the few development teams I know of that like to talk openly about the information they collect.

“I always wanted to make a research-themed, slightly crazy Wunderwaffen DLC,” he muses, “but it never felt prioritised enough compared to the rest of the ideas we wanted.” Lind still hopes that it will get improvements eventually, although that will be down to Hearts of Iron IV’s new game director, Peter Nicholson, who used to be in charge of Imperator: Rome before development was paused.Īs much as Lind had a plan for Hearts of Iron IV during his tenure, not everything went according to it, and there were many ideas he’s had over the years that never made the list.

The peace conference system is still my biggest disappointment “I always enjoyed playing HOI3 with a fair amount of front automation, but wanted some more control, plus being able to inject overrides.” Lind tells us that one of the first concrete thoughts he had during the early days of the game’s development was that of executable battle plans. The other day I heard Hearts of Iron referred to as the Garry's Mod of strategy games!” “It's very easy to craft different experiences with mods, it gives people a lot of cool stuff to play with between expansions, and stops you from becoming bored or burned out. “ reason HOI4 has such a strong community and consistently high number of players is likely due to the modding scene,” outgoing director Dan Lind reflects. On the other, it’s losing the game director that took it from its nascence through half a decade of being one of the most consistently popular of Paradox’s releases to date. On the one hand, it’s working towards one of the most significant expansions in its history, one that will finally give the Soviet Union the overhaul it needs. WWII grand strategy game Hearts of Iron IV’s fifth year is proving an eventful one so far.

Modding hearts of iron 4