Dev Diary: Greece

Way back in 2017, we released Death or Dishonor, something we called a Country Pack at the time. Back then, the community was mainly asking for big new flashy mechanics and revamps of game systems, so the initial reaction from the community was pretty mixed. In hindsight perhaps we shouldn't have been surprised :D. These days though we are bombarded with requests of more, better and bigger focus trees, and people are wondering if it's going to take 10 years to add trees to everyone? As a Content Designer, it has been very rewarding to see the community get more excited to see focus trees!

So we have decided to bring back the idea of a Country Pack, a smaller expansion that focuses on a specific part of the world and covering 3-4 minor nations. But at the same time, we didn’t want to put the entire team on it while there were still other parts of the game we wanted to work on such as adding an intelligence system. The idea is that this will let us increase how many focus trees and flavor we add while still being able to deliver big juicy features in larger expansions.

The approach we took was to recruit a freelancer to work on the focus trees while the rest of the team in Stockholm worked on the next big DLC, which would eventually become La Resistance. Today we are going to show you the first of the new focus trees coming in the next country pack, and in the coming weeks we will share more information on what other countries get focus trees in the pack, as well as what other content will accompany the release. As always, the country pack will be accompanied by a patch that will fix some bugs as well.

We think that this approach allows us to get more content to you faster, without taking resources away from the main team, which continues to work on the next big DLC. You will get more information on what that DLC contains after the country pack releases later this year (disclaimer: it is 2020 and fate can be fickle).

I’ll now hand you over to the man of the hour: Freelance CD Busby, working from Australia!

G’day, my name is Busby and I am the Freelance Content Designer who was responsible for putting together Greece and another soon-to-be-revealed mystery nation! ‘Freelance Content Designer’, I hear you ask, ‘how does that differ from your standard run-of-the-mill Content Designer’? Well, with COVID-19, those lines have certainly blurred; nominally, it means that I work remotely of the core team so I can focus on getting this pack out to you while they all collaborate on the next big expansion! Of course, I didn’t work alone, and you’ll be hearing from a familiar face who worked with me on this next week!

Before kicking things off, I just want to say as someone who used to read Hearts of Iron IV Dev Diaries on my lunch break in high school that it is an absolute privilege and an honour to be presenting you all with one of my very own! So, without further ado: Greece! Greece was a very interesting challenge to tackle, they are well known for repulsing