As if releasing two grand strategy games back to back wasn’t enough, Stellaris developers Paradox have claimed the next World War II game Hearts of Iron IV will be their ‘most moddable yet’.
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In the latest developer diary for HoI4, project lead Dan Lind spoke of the ease with which mods can be introduced to the base game after the adjustments the team has made.
Whereas previously mods required hard-coding to alter country names, dimensions, properties and so on, a new tool the team has been working on will let you do it all through a simple in-game interface.
“Another nice tool is the instant feedback system aka “Error Dawg” appearing in the lower right corner that will give you instant feedback about scripting errors and oddities during gameplay,” Lind wrote in the forum post. “Clicking on it will of course open the error log for you, painfully reminding you about things you have forgotten or otherwise faulty scripted.”
Other improvements have been made to the entire language the game has been built on to make it more mod-friendly and prevent obfuscation. In some cases, such as the language AI was written in, that also included obfuscation from the development team themselves.
“The AI in HOI3 was run though Lua scripts, but we decided to abandon these for several reasons in HOI4 (lack of lua knowledge at the company and low performance was the big ones),” Lind said. “The AI is still however very moddable and has a lot of scripts to modify.”
HoI4 will arrive shortly after Stellaris on June 9, at which point you’ll be able to completely recreate the plot of Game of Thrones over the mission structure of Operation Overlord, or Asterix and Obelisk, or whatever you’re into.