I first downloaded Stellaris in 2016. I was looking for a space exploration and empire building strategy game, and nothing else came even close to hitting the spot for me. Since its launch, I’ve put in well over 1,000 hours, making it the most played game in my Steam Library. But Stellaris has received constant updates and DLCs since its release, and is no longer that original game I got. Though many of them introduce fantastic story content and mechanics, the sheer quantity has left the game a mess. This has been especially true following the release of 4.0 and Biogenesis.  

The 4.0 update promised an overhaul of the game’s economy, user interfaces, new player tutorials and features, and performance improvements. All these changes were released alongside the Biogenesis update, which offered several new ascension paths, empire origins, player-crisis, and a complete new space combat playstyle with fleshy biological shipsets. Unfortunately, this was simply too much for one update. 4.0 had a broken release, with players finding bugs in nearly every facet of the game, especially the ones developers focused on improving in the update. Performance, the centerpiece of the update according to developer diaries, was significantly worse. Multiplayer desyncs became common. And some bugs with the new Wilderness empire caused immediate game losses. Paradox released as many patches and hotfixes in June & July as they did in the ten months preceding. 

Some of this can be blamed on the scope of an update. Had the developers been given more time or had fewer goals with the 4.0 update, the release might have been more stable. But bringing 20+ DLCs and free updates’ worth of features up to speed was also likely a contributing factor. That is a vast amount of content that needs to be designed around and modified when game systems get redesigned. Even so, Stellaris makes sweeping and far-reaching changes to core gameplay systems frequently. At launch, traversing the galaxy involved picking one of three FTL engines. The warp drive allowed slow navigation to any star within a certain radius, the hyperdrive required ships to traverse specific routes between systems, and wormhole stations allowed quick traversal within a radius of said stations. Now, empires start with the hyperdrive (with a few exceptions) but can develop many other methods of travel including gateways, hyper relays, quantum catapults, and jump drives. Empire borders expanded out in a radius from a limited number of Starbases, which slowly enveloped systems with their influence. 

At launch, planetary management involved a tile system where players would manually move populations along tiles jobs that produced single digit quantities of resources: food, minerals, energy credits, and research. This tile system was replaced in the 2.2 Update with the much better district system, which reduced the amount of micromanagement required. The economy was revamped again in Stellaris 3.0 with the introduction of industrial districts, and of course in Stellaris 4.0. New resources, such as unity, consumer goods, alloys soon joined these basic ones. In recent years, many more niche resources have been added, including Exotic Gases, Volatile Motes, Rare Crystals, Dark Matter, Nanites, Living Metal, Minor Artifacts, and Astral Threads. The economy and exploration aspects of the game are just two of the many ways Stellaris has reinvented itself over the years. Comparing a screenshot from the game’s launch to the present shows just how much the game has changed. 

Were these changes worth it? It’s a mixed bag. The continuous stream of updates has kept the game fresh for years longer than it otherwise would have. Despite objections to the performance issues caused by each update, players largely appreciate and endorse the new iterations of game systems. Few would dispute that the district economy system outclasses the original tile system, or that the vast variety of playstyles now possible is bad for the game. But the 4.0 update has started showing weaknesses in the model of constant expansion and reinvention. 

As previously mentioned, the baggage of earlier DLCs and updates is piling up. With so many unique combinations of origins, civics, ethics, traits, events, and situations, the amount of bugs developers have to address is higher than ever. Patch notes in early versions of the game tend to be rather straightforward, looking like “Frontier Hospital technology now properly requires Frontier Health” or “Now possible to revoke independence support.” Recent patches, sometimes coming out multiple times per week, have to address dozens of niche situations with notes like: “The Awakened Control Fragment will no longer denounce itself in the Galcom when it comes to picking a side in the War in Heaven” or “Fixed a case in which virtual ascended empires could get unworkable fallen empire jobs on habitats.” 

Furthermore, the new player experience has also steadily worsened over time. While established players can learn a new or changed mechanic every few months, new players are faced with a massive, complex game that requires dozens of hours to grasp even the basics of. Paradox has attempted to address this in 4.0 with an in-game wiki as well as the Empire focus system, which provides short term exploration, military, and economy goals for players in exchange for technology unlocks. Despite the introduction of these systems, the game’s tutorial has remained mostly unchanged since the original launch in 2016, and was largely inadequate even back then. If Stellaris continues this path of constant rebirth, these systems will likely fall further out of date. With all of these updates, perhaps it is time for Stellaris 2. While I’ve sunk many hours and an irresponsible amount of money into the current version of the game, perhaps it’s time for a sequel title, unburdened by a decade’s worth of design baggage. Doubtless, there are many cool features that developers ruled out due to limitations of the engine or existing content.

However one quantifies Stellaris’s reinventions, whether it be 4 four major versions, 17 expansions, or 130-odd different patches, it seems that Stellaris is approaching the limit. Perhaps Paradox can continue altering the game at this rate, but it risks further damaging the player experience. It’s time to build a new Stellaris; not constantly replace beams and panels in the current one.

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Featured Image: Paradox Interactive

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