Stellaris updates are going to start coming more slowly, because new patches are causing new problems and QA testers can't keep up

Two days after releasing another update for Stellaris, Paradox says the pace of patches is going to slow down—not because Stellaris 4.0 is in tip-top shape (it's not), but because firing out updates so quickly is causing more headaches than its worth.

Released in early May alongside the not-very-popular BioGenesis expansion, the 4.0 update was not in a great state when it went live. "During the lead-up to the release, I was confident that we would be able to finish the revamp and clean up the most critical bugs," game director Eladrin wrote shortly after the update rolled out. "We fell short of that goal, and we’re committed to continuing to fix things until the 4.0 release is in the state it needs to be in."

Hotfixes and patches have flowed regularly since then, up to the most recent 4.0.21 update that arrived earlier this week. In a message posted today, however, Eladrin said that cadence of updates "has become problematic (and even counterproductive) in some ways."

"Too often in game development, fixing one bug introduces another—and I haven’t been giving our internal QA testers enough time to fully vet and test the changes we’ve been making," Eladrin wrote. "Examples from recent patches include a few weeks ago when an unrelated fix to a pop issue caused Wilderness empires to seemingly randomly destroy themselves by killing all of their biomass, or when another fix just after that caused save games to corrupt and become unloadable."

Because of that, Paradox is going to ease up a bit and adopt a "more measured and deliberate approach" to releasing updates. Future patches will roll out more slowly, but will be more "impactful," and the studio also plans to make more use of open beta testing to ensure things are ready to go before they actually go.

"My intent is for us to update the Open Beta on a weekly to fortnightly basis depending on internal progress throughout the summer," Eladrin wrote. "While the Stellaris team will be continuing development during this time, it will soon become difficult for us to arrange for live patches—barring a critical hotfix or a 'eureka moment,' I expect the next 4.0.x live release will be sometime in August."

Developers are currently working on a number of issues including AI and performance improvements, and very Stellaris-sounding gameplay stuff like "having newly grown pops go straight into the Civilian stratum or its appropriate equivalent instead of being unemployed members of their parent pop group," which I assume makes sense if you play and understand the game. Developer diaries are going to be put on hiatus until August, however: Communications will instead be shared via open beta updates as they occur.

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