What’s more exciting than learning the Hearts of Iron IV: No Step Back release date? Seeing the expansion in action, that’s what! As part of Paradox Interactive’s regular grand strategy game streaming schedule, viewers were treated to their first look at content from the upcoming Hearts of Iron 4 DLC.
Regular hosts Benjamin Magnus and Alex Dunk from the community team were joined by content designers Manuel Molina and Thomas Arnfeldt. The stream featured around an hour’s worth of gameplay as the Soviet Union with their new focus tree, which we’ve reported before needed a dedicated design team just to create. During the stream, the developers mentioned that there could be at least 300 different options in total, making it the biggest tree to date.
Other fascinating nuggets from the stream include the fact that players can trigger around three different civil wars themselves when playing as Russia, although that doesn’t take into account various AI actions and possibilities outside of player actions. With all that purging, we wonder if you’ll have time to fight the real war against Germany.
You can watch the stream below and through this link. The Hearts of Iron IV segment is nestled between a CK3 and an EU4 stream, so if you need timestamps the relevant section starts around the 1:48:00 mark and finishes around 2:40:00.
There was a dev diary this week as well. It didn’t tell us anything new about the expansion in terms of content, but it did go into detail on how the key art was made, which is pretty cool if you like that kind of stuff.
Related: The best Hearts of Iron 4 mods
There will be more feature streams with the new expansion in the run up to release, which is scheduled for November 23.