The latest Europa Universalis IV DLC is here, and the situation isn't looking good for Paradox. Leviathan seems to have launched in a completely broken state, and it's being savaged on Steam and elsewhere by players incensed that they paid $20 for a product they feel is unfit for release.
What's going on with the Europa Universalis IV Leviathan DLC?
The Leviathan DLC is a piece of premium content that adds a number of features to the base Europa Universalis IV game. These include asking nations for favors, new colony specializations, and new regency options, among other things. However, if player reports are to be believed, the DLC is riddled with bugs and frequent crashes. Steam user crusher234 describes Leviathan as "an unbalanced, buggy mess" in which the only redeeming quality is the fact that "you don't have to suffer through it because it crashes so often". At present, the DLC is sitting on an Overwhelmingly Negative Steam rating, with only 11% of 958 reviews (at time of writing) offering positive ratings. Some of those are joke reviews, too, so it's likely that the approval rating is even lower than that.
Specific issues players are pointing to include broken systems (with particular reference to Monuments), buggy icons and text, and regular crashes causing the game to simply hang on certain dates. Some players are also pointing out that some art assets appear to be placeholder or work-in-progress pieces rather than finished items. One user, in particular, said that the character models for indigenous Australians were replaced by "vanilla European unit models" (which a developer says a fix is coming for in the next version, but it boggles the mind that it released with such a problem). While the minutiae of many of the issues won't be familiar to non-Europa Universalis players, it's clear the consensus here is that the Leviathan DLC simply isn't up to scratch, with users even going so far as to collect entire comprehensive lists of bugs and other issues in Leviathan.
How is Paradox responding to the Europa Universalis IV Leviathan situation?
Earlier today, Paradox issued a statement via its forum explaining that it's working on patches for Leviathan. However, that post and the accompanying thread now appear to have been deleted (the above link being a web cached version of the statement). It's possible Paradox is working on a full response to the problem, so we may hear something from the studio in the next couple of hours. It's worth noting that the previous Europa Universalis IV DLC, Emperor, also launched in a buggy and broken state. Paradox did fix many of the issues with Emperor, but it's still sitting on a Mixed Steam rating, so the animosity hasn't completely dissipated, and it is a problem that the same issue is happening a year later of unready software being released.
Paradox did issue a patch that was intended to address some of the myriad issues in Leviathan. Fans on the forums responded broadly positively to the patch, but many were saying that it didn't go far enough, with more changes needed to bring the new Europa Universalis IV DLC up to an acceptable state. We don't know what Paradox has in store for the game, but we'll likely hear more soon. In the meantime, we've reached out to Paradox for comment on this situation.
Have you experienced issues with the Europa Universalis IV Leviathan DLC? Let us know in the comments below!
