The process of game development can get tedious. Sometimes, the smartest move workers can make is to shake things up and have a little fun at the job’s expense. That is exactly what the Paradox Interactive employees working on Stellaris did this morning.
A tweet appeared at 8:46 AM PST (4:46 PM GMT), featuring one of the game’s developers laid out on the floor with a long line of printer paper to his right. Beside that was a banana for scale. Assuming the developer is around six feet tall, the seven pages of patch notes are likely at least 5'6" long.
Assuming the font is set to 11pt Arial with 1.25x line spacing, which is the default for Google Docs, the patch notes list is likely to be around 280 lines long. For comparison, the 2.7.1 ‘Wells’ patch was 273 lines long. However, the devs are still working hard on bug fixes for both Stellaris and Stellaris: Console Edition, so clearly they expect the patch notes for this upcoming release to grow longer still.
The driving force behind these patch notes is likely the MegaCorp Expansion and the Lithoids Species Pack, both slated to release to consoles in 2021. The coding road from PC to console is often filled with bugs, as every feature added to Stellaris: Console Edition is likely to have its share of unanticipated glitches.
There is the possibility the eventual Stellaris update’s notes have been written to be amusing to read, like the impressive patch notes for Crusader Kings 3, which would add a little bit to its length, but not much.
Comments from the peanut gallery made references to ‘Outside,’ the concept that reality itself is a video game, saying that the developers must have a ’laziness’ bug that needs to be patched. Obviously, that is for Paradox Interactive to decide.
Stellaris is out now for PC, Mac, and Linux. Stellaris: Console Edition is available for PS4 and Xbox One.
