Good morning afternoon, or evening fellow Hoi4 Enjoyers and/or Nationstates fans. Today, I have the honour to discuss the unparalleled success that is Hearts of Iron 4 and why I believed it succeeded where other strategy games failed. This game is the epitome and most popular World War 2 based grand strategy game and even in the general grand strategy genre has only a few competitors and a majority of those games are owned by the same studio: Paradox Interactive such as Crusader Kings 3, and Europa Universalis 4.
The first and most important thing I noticed as to why it had an early success is that Paradox was considered a fairly trustworthy company. Hearts of Iron 3, its predecessor was considered fairly popular amongst the fandom, and its most recent release Europa Universalis 4 was considered very good at the time. I can not emphasize this trustworthiness of the community. This was Paradox Interactive, one of the heavyweight giants in the grand strategy genre, even now it is impossible to meet an online grand strategist who hasn’t heard of Crusader Kings, Hearts of Iron or Europa Universalis.
I think the first reason why Hearts of Iron succeeded so well is its complexity. As a Hearts of Iron mouth breather, I have played the game for hundred’s of hours and even then, I would still learn new things about mechanics or new strategies in the game. (The naval visibility strategy anyone?) It’s a solid reason as to why there are practically only two camps one which dedicates a few hours and the other camp that dedicates hundreds of hours into the game. This helps establish a very solid fandom, that if future additions to the game are positive will no doubt be repaid twice over in time and money spent on the game.
The second reason and one which I firmly believe to be the main reason is its adaptability and its replayability. If it wasn’t already enough that in the base game, you start off being able to play any nation as you see fit. You also have either generic or unique (depending on the nation) focus trees, which further increase the diversity of the nation. You could restore the kaiser in Germany, or make funny moustache man win WW2 and this is just the basic paths given to Germany way back in 2017, nowadays Paradox has created far more diversity in one focus tree that it further expanded the complexity and depth of the game. Of course that feeds into the replayability but what about its adaptability? Well let me introduce you to the storm that is the Hearts of Iron 4 Modding Community. Unlike to a lesser extent, Europa Universalis 4 and Crusader Kings 3. Hearts of Iron 4 has a near incomprehensible depth and breadth for its modding community with focus tree reworks, alternate history scenarios, increases in difficulty, (cough BlackIce cough) fantasy scenarios and so much more. This isn’t like your one person made mod of haha funny bring Trump into the game, this is dedicated teams with full on translators, coders and lore masters. Search up on Youtube, Kaiser Cat Cinema and you know exactly what I mean. The amount of depth that goes into this lore based videos is but a fraction to the depth of the actual mod itself. I think a comparison is in order, I would like to direct your attention to Total War Troy, which was a game I used to play fairly often back in COVID. This is a game which has neither the replayability nor does it have the adaptability of Hearts of Iron 4 even though they both fall under the broad genre of Grand Strategy Games. Total War Troy has very few mods and none which have reached the depth of Hearts of Iron and it doesn’t have the replayability due to a creative decision of limiting the amount of playable factions from the start.
The final point I would like to share is more so praise towards the company: Paradox Interactive, while my poor wallet would complain about how expensive a lot of the content packs or DLCs are I can not stress the amount of quality that they added in recent DLCs that vastly improved the game. La Resistance and No Step Back are my examples as they brought a complete rework of intelligence and logistics respectively on top of adding new focus trees for France and the Soviet Union. I think it is these consistent and innovative updates that allow this game to increase in popularity and never quite die down as these changes certainly improved both single player and multiplayer which is a whole other can of worms. Which I may or may not write more of in the future.
In conclusion, Hearts of Iron 4 is one of the most successful games because the initial bar was so high to begin with. When you compare Hearts of Iron 4 to Hearts of Iron 3, it was a complete makeover and expansion. As always some people would argue that Hearts of Iron 4 was not complete without DLCs at the base game or base launch which I can sympathize with but I think that even if we were to claim the bar was low for the base game it still was pretty high after all, I think it is that reason in which the HOI4 Modding Community sprouted and possibly eclipsed HOI4’s base. It is this high initial bar that allowed Hearts of Iron to have that impressive amount of replayability and adaptability which has furthered its success as more DLCs granted more content to both the players and modders who took on these new aspects of the game and ran with it.
Thanks to Alvantis for suggesting this essay topic, and hopefully I will return to write another UTEP piece soon. Cheers, Arleat 