​Dev Diary | HOI IV-X Anniversary Update     ​

Generals! The DecadeA decade. It still feels strange to write. Hearts of Iron IV turns Ten this month, and somehow the most unbelievable number in our telemetry isn’t the millions of techs researched or wars declared, it’s this one: 39% of the people who started playing HoI4 back in 2016 are still playing today. Ten years on. Another is that HoI IV has been going on longer than WW2 actually took: 2194 days for WW2, 3652 (and counting) for HOI IV.The game has changed enormously since launch: most mechanics have deeper experiences, focus trees are very different and much more exhaustive, the AI plays the game better, and we are able to keep closer to the historical timeline than ever before. But the core vision, as described 12 years ago, still holds true. One thing we did not necessarily foresee, even if it was a core part of the vision at the start, was the adaptation of mods to the degree we see today. We’ve also seen two Game Directors transition to new internal projects, and we will talk about who will take over on June 18th!“Our hope for this game is that you as a player will feel in control of a real global conflict and want to learn the tools of warfare in an open sandbox environment during this intense period of history. Our goal with Hearts of Iron IV is to create a WWII game completely focused on Global Strategic Warfare.” – Dan Lind, 2014The PatchThis anniversary’s War Effort patch leans heavily into Naval AI, picking up the threads 1.17.4 left hanging. We extended the open beta longer than usual, specifically so you could help us. This anniversary patch also brings a wealth of late game performance improvements, fixing some of the worst offenders, and a rebalancing of the naval gameplay we trialed earlier in the year. With the release of Thunder at Our Gates next week, another large free update will be released as well!We have some cool stuff planned: 11th of June – Thunder at Our Gates release 🥳 18th of June – Anniversary “behind the scenes” video + teaser of what is coming up next.I also wanted to give a shout out to both our multiplayer and youtube community. Our youtube channel has grown over the years, and is one of the biggest ones we have compared to our other Paradox titles! It’s a, perhaps unusual, source of additional insight into our players minds. Then not to speak about all the great content creators making great videos about HoI IV.HoI 4 multiplayer is really fun to play, we play it every week at the office, but it’s also really fun to watch crazy 60+ people multiplayer games. And I just wanted to mention that we are aware of some of the problems we have with lobbies/hacking, and we are working on this at the moment. We’ll keep the post-release support going up until our Swedish-mandated Summer holiday, and pick straight back up as needed once we’re back.To every player who has shaped this game over the last ten years, and to every developer past and present who has poured themselves into it: Thank you. Her