EU5 represents a substantial shift away from EU4’s highly gamified mechanics and abstracted concepts into an attempt at real granular simulation of the early modern world. Complex systems are designed to interact with each other in order to produce convincing emergent alt-history, and the level of detail visible to the player is incredibly exciting to any autistic historian. Instead of EU4’s big provinces with coarse values representing their base tax and productivity, we instead have tiny locations with individually modelled pops; culture, religion, class, wealth, and their jobs are all simulated in remarkable detail. The same shift is replicated across most of the game’s systems – goods, pops, urbanisation, trade, and disease all interact with each other to model some of the fundamental shifts that happened in the European Early Modern period.

       The result of this change is that the game’s entire perspective on what success looks like is different to its predecessor. In EU4, the game is about states, and its systems demonstrate this in a zero-sum, realist way. A state must expand and the blob on the map must grow, or you have failed as a player. EU5’s modelling of internal prosperity makes it fundamentally a game about people, and improving the quality of life of your pops is a viable win condition. This is a contrast between history from above and history from below: instead of seeing people as resources to be utilised by the state, pops in EU5 are conceptualised as historical actors in their own right. I consider this change to be unambiguously positive, but the rest of the game’s design leaves much to be desired.

       In EU4, the core gameplay loop is that a player generates magical mana points, and then uses these to press buttons that have immediate and obvious effects. The game presents concrete problems, and there is a concrete solution to those problems. This is gamey and players often criticised the mana system as a pointless imposition, but it also makes the game feel responsive. In EU5, these magical points and magical buttons no longer exist. Both problems and their solutions become diffuse and difficult to evaluate. Any action a player can take is ephemeral and you often need to wait hours to see if it had any effect at all. This approach is simultaneously far more interesting and far less fun. By obscuring the link between player action and in-game outcome, Paradox has removed the sense of player agency and made EU5 into a game in which things and numbers and events simply happen to you, and you have little choice but to watch them flow past.

       It is also true that EU5 simply does not work as designed in its current state. The complexity that Paradox reached for might not be possible to achieve, and the simulation often breaks instead of simulating history in the emergent way it was intended to. Recent Paradox releases have been criticised for treating their players as unpaid beta testers, and nowhere is this more apparent than in EU5. Many features were non-functional at launch, and instead of working to fix them and make the game work as intended, the developers instead release patch after patch adding yet more non-functional systems and breaking many of the ones that had been working up to that point. The enormous weekly shifts in values – a x10 here, a 0.2x there – make me suspicious that the developers do not understand their own systems or what it is that they want out of them.

       This vagueness of balancing hurts the game. The developers appear to institute changes for three reasons: because of the meta that arises in in-house multiplayer sessions, because some value or mechanic is perceived as too strong, and because the player base demands specific changes. None of these are a solid foundation for balancing a game that is at once this unfinished and this intricate. The lack of direction actively harms the historical model at the core of the game – instead of accepting that certain values should be superior to others in a game that simulates the progression from late Medieval feudalism to the Early Modern nation state, the developers insist on flattening the game so that every playstyle is viable and non-exploitable. Strong strategies are nerfed, and weak strategies are left as they are. If the game is to be a simulation that produces historical verisimilitude – or even just fun – they should accept that it comes at the cost of strict balancing.

       The game in its current state is not just flat, but empty. Part of this is a product of its unfinished release. The game is barren outside of Europe, with entire regions being non-functional because of their lack of specific trade goods with which to build infrastructure, or mechanics that were advertised as being in the game being either missing or broken. This will likely be fixed by a decade of patching and DLC, but a more troubling issue is the conceptual emptiness that arises from the design decisions themselves. EU4’s gamified style and use of mission trees to drive countries in specific directions resulted in nations that felt meaningfully different to play, and an AI that produced plausible historical outcomes. EU5 was supposed to achieve the same result emergently, but it fails to do so. Every nation plays in fundamentally the same way, and historical flavour is delivered through drab events that have little gameplay impact. No matter who the player chooses, they take the same actions and see the same outcomes play out, whilst the AI sits still. History does not happen at all.

       All of these issues combine to make a game that just isn’t functioning right now. Worse, the unfinished release and approach Paradox has taken to post-launch support have left me concerned that the game will never deliver on its promise. To be clear, I still enjoy the game! I’m an autistic historian creature with over 10,000 hours in EU4, so if they didn’t get me they really were fucked. Beneath all the problems is a genuinely incredible foundation, but it feels trapped under design and execution issues that make the promised game feel further away with each update. Currently, the game is fascinating to observe but miserable to play, and it fails to produce the convincing alt-historical outcomes that are the core of Paradox’s appeal.