Plagued /r/TNOmod and the Reddit HOI4 modding community - When a subreddit for a video game mod turns to utter insanity

2WRW is dead, devs have moved to tfr, in a supposed “pro Putin” coup. Whatever that means
 
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Gone Ham said:
2WRW is dead, devs have moved to tfr, in a supposed “pro Putin” coup. Whatever that means
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Development is still going on the Asian server apperantly so fear not. It “died” because the main dev left and handed it over to some Serbian faggot who decided to end the mod and shill his own shitty mod that’ll never come out. And deleted the server.

NATO truly did not bomb that shithole enough
 
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Which is another issue. The TNOification of HOI4 has become a big problem.
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The New Order and its consequences have been a disaster for the HoI4 modding scene.

And I'm not talking just about the general left wing bias in modding, I'm talking about gameplay. Vanilla HoI4 is, in general, not railroaded, while there are certain paths the game pushes you towards, there is nothing stopping you from stepping off of them. Mods like TNO and to a lesser extent even Kaiserreich have popularized the concept of railroading the player's experience by limiting the ways he can interact with the ingame world. Good example from TNO is the fact that you can't justify wargoals or declare war unless the story is generous enough to allow it. The popularity of railroaded mods like these proves one point only: people don't want freedom in their gameplay, they want a curated experience, instead of using their own brains to create a narrative they yield to a ready-made narrative. Luckily not all of the community is like this, but a large part.

Another consequence of TNO is the popularity of "realistic" art styles, specifically when it comes to portraits. Vanilla HoI4 has this charming painting-style going for it, not quite comic-like, but not realistic either. Of course, TNO wasn't the first to use realistic portraits, but it certainly cemented the popularity of this soulless style. The simplest reason mods started using it in the first place is that there aren't many artists in the community with a sufficient level of talent to replicate vanilla-style portraits. Don't get me wrong though, sometimes making those realistic portraits takes some real effort, especially when the source material is shit, and even TNO artists have pulled off some laudable achievements in creating some of the portraits. It's just a pity the majority of the community went with this realistic style over more interesting styles, like the vanilla one.

I'm not sure who to blame this on, but I reckon it was again TNO that popularized the text- and narrative-heavy style of mod. Again, the longest vanilla event pales in comparison to your average TNO event, since a vanilla event is focusing on delivering information, while a TNO event is focusing on delivering a narrative. This style really does slow the pacing of the game down, but then again, TNO isn't exactly a high APM mod to begin with. The problem is that mods that are supposed to be more gameplay-oriented are also trying to do this whole narrative thing, which really just slow the game down, when they should be focusing on a more vanilla-style event concept.

tl;dr: Not only did TNO turn a wargame into a worse game, they also managed to spread their cancer to other mods.

EDIT. Oh and about the 2WRW thing, I have no idea how they managed it but apparently they lost all graphical assets made since last year when the Discord server was deleted. Were those numbnuts really using their server as a fucking repository, even though they had a github? For that alone they deserved to be burned like that.
 
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NotJohan said:
Another consequence of TNO is the popularity of "realistic" art styles, specifically when it comes to portraits. Vanilla HoI4 has this charming painting-style going for it, not quite comic-like, but not realistic either. Of course, TNO wasn't the first to use realistic portraits, but it certainly cemented the popularity of this soulless style. The simplest reason mods started using it in the first place is that there aren't many artists in the community with a sufficient level of talent to replicate vanilla-style portraits. Don't get me wrong though, sometimes making those realistic portraits takes some real effort, especially when the source material is shit, and even TNO artists have pulled off some laudable achievements in creating some of the portraits. It's just a pity the majority of the community went with this realistic style over more interesting styles, like the vanilla one.
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I have to disagree on the art style part for TNO. For one, I would hardly call the TNO "style" realistic, given the very poor quality of the colourisation on most pictures and reliance on reds and greys. Like these pictures are hardly coloured like real humans. The images either have too much or too little contrast and they rely on a ton of background blur.

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I think these are far worse compared to the portraits in the style that has been semi-recently done by Kaiserreich, which looks decently nice when done right in my opinion. These aren't always fully realistic either but they look a lot better than whatever shit TNO usually has.

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However, I do think I agree with most of what you've said on the other points, especially with regards to narrative and gameplay, and the fucking overreliance on scripted GUIs for everything.
 
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NotJohan said:
and to a lesser extent even Kaiserreich
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I've been replaying Kaiserreich a lot lately as various nations and while there is railroading because you do inevitably end up fighting certain nations but I see it more like playing a Hoi4 game with historical AI on than the bullshit railroading that gets done with TNO, you're encouraged to follow the narrative but you can absolutely go do what you want playing the actual game and not waiting 10 IRL minutes for the next focus to unlock to progress the story.
 
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That's fair, and to be honest I haven't touched Kaiserreich since it first released, so I'm just going by random Youtube videos I've seen about it. I seemed to recall that while going off the path is allowed, it could screw up the other narratives, for instance I imagine if you declare was on France as Spain as soon as possible or something it would throw everything off balance, but maybe they've addressed that since.

the shoebill said:
I have to disagree on the art style part for TNO. For one, I would hardly call the TNO "style" realistic, given the very poor quality of the colourisation on most pictures and reliance on reds and greys.
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I couldn't think of a better word for it other than "realistic", since that's obviously at least what they're aiming for. If you disagreed with the fact that TNO portrait artists have worked on impressive magic on certain portraits, I'll have to hunt down some examples of it, I'm mostly referring to how they original source images have been of extremely poor quality, yet somehow they managed to salvage them and make decent portraits out of them.
 
NotJohan said:
The New Order and its consequences have been a disaster for the HoI4 modding scene.

And I'm not talking just about the general left wing bias in modding, I'm talking about gameplay. Vanilla HoI4 is, in general, not railroaded, while there are certain paths the game pushes you towards, there is nothing stopping you from stepping off of them. Mods like TNO and to a lesser extent even Kaiserreich have popularized the concept of railroading the player's experience by limiting the ways he can interact with the ingame world. Good example from TNO is the fact that you can't justify wargoals or declare war unless the story is generous enough to allow it. The popularity of railroaded mods like these proves one point only: people don't want freedom in their gameplay, they want a curated experience, instead of using their own brains to create a narrative they yield to a ready-made narrative. Luckily not all of the community is like this, but a large part.

Another consequence of TNO is the popularity of "realistic" art styles, specifically when it comes to portraits. Vanilla HoI4 has this charming painting-style going for it, not quite comic-like, but not realistic either. Of course, TNO wasn't the first to use realistic portraits, but it certainly cemented the popularity of this soulless style. The simplest reason mods started using it in the first place is that there aren't many artists in the community with a sufficient level of talent to replicate vanilla-style portraits. Don't get me wrong though, sometimes making those realistic portraits takes some real effort, especially when the source material is shit, and even TNO artists have pulled off some laudable achievements in creating some of the portraits. It's just a pity the majority of the community went with this realistic style over more interesting styles, like the vanilla one.

I'm not sure who to blame this on, but I reckon it was again TNO that popularized the text- and narrative-heavy style of mod. Again, the longest vanilla event pales in comparison to your average TNO event, since a vanilla event is focusing on delivering information, while a TNO event is focusing on delivering a narrative. This style really does slow the pacing of the game down, but then again, TNO isn't exactly a high APM mod to begin with. The problem is that mods that are supposed to be more gameplay-oriented are also trying to do this whole narrative thing, which really just slow the game down, when they should be focusing on a more vanilla-style event concept.

tl;dr: Not only did TNO turn a wargame into a worse game, they also managed to spread their cancer to other mods.

EDIT. Oh and about the 2WRW thing, I have no idea how they managed it but apparently they lost all graphical assets made since last year when the Discord server was deleted. Were those numbnuts really using their server as a fucking repository, even though they had a github? For that alone they deserved to be burned like that.
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I would add that TNO and KR had an impact on the way modders build the world and what happens to the countries of their mod. You can't escape the TNO Russia syndrome, which is breaking up or having an event that breaks up a country into a million uninteresting rump states for little to no reason and gameplay value.

There's also the problem of having civil wars with a gazillion different sides. The problem is the implementation of it. I haven't played the game in a while, but I remember that the Spanish civil war can see one of the sides have a faction break up, creating a multi-sided war. But in those mods, it's always the same events, you'll have 6 sides in your civil war, it will always be the same script over and over again.
 
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Valentinian II said:
I would add that TNO and KR had an impact on the way modders build the world and what happens to the countries of their mod. You can't escape the TNO Russia syndrome, which is breaking up or having an event that breaks up a country into a million uninteresting rump states for little to no reason and gameplay value.

There's also the problem of having civil wars with a gazillion different sides. The problem is the implementation of it. I haven't played the game in a while, but I remember that the Spanish civil war can see one of the sides have a faction break up, creating a multi-sided war. But in those mods, it's always the same events, you'll have 6 sides in your civil war, it will always be the same script over and over again.
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Terrible as Paradox usually is, the vanilla (or maybe it requires DLC, I don't know) Spanish Civil war works quite perfectly. If you are able to do well pre-war, you can have your side completely overpower the other, and if you play it right you can delay or simply prevent the uprising of allied factions. Most of the time in non-historical plays you get Nationalist/Falangist/Carlist uprisings against Republican or Soviet and Anarchist uprisings.
 
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Adolphin said:
So they are going to remove Atlantropa. Finally, some "sanity". However, that will force them to rewrite the lore for Italy and Spain into a more sensible one...
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Also fuck the devs for not committing to the dystopian, metal, sightly Warhammer-esque and even a bit fantastical and insane aesthetic that the mod was originally going for (which totally wasn't my personal interpretation [even if it was it still was better than what they're doing now]) and instead of cucking themselves by trying to make it more "realistic" and "sane" = boring.
 
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Eoc said:
Oh well,not a lot stuff changed until now since i can confirm that Atlantica is still active and activly striking down the re-uploads of the Old Slackjawed videos that he made about He/she/it/them/they/etc.
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And he still striking them,oh well.
 
TNO reminds me of an alternate history I came across where there is an American Civil War in 2024 called "And Our Flag Was Not There: A History of the Second American Civil War." I found it by looking around for info on the obscure Qanon offshoot "Sabmyk" that briefly existed IRL but plays a major part in the alt history.

The only positive is that the formatting, especially in the prelude section, is kinda cool, the writer did a decent job (like TNO) of at times capturing the tone of certain sides, news sites, etc.

The real similarities to TNO are the cringey, blatant left-wing bias (like having AOC lead a socialist US that is very obviously poised to be the winner in the civil war, while half the world suffers communist coups or revolutions and the other half are taken over by incompetent moronic right wing radicals) and the very sad, autistic praise from other weirdo internet leftists. The story is amazing comedy honestly, Unicorn Ranch is featured as a heroic and successful fighting force that defends itself against multiple coordinated right wing raids while a nonbinary/tranny becomes the lover of a successful Catholic Chapo type militia leader.

Like TNO, the obsession with inserting internet leftist politics and bias into alt history ruins the believability. I'm the kind of nerd who loves a decent alt history, as a kid I read some Turtledove, but like many hobbies, it is ruined by transgenders attempting to place themselves and their meme views into it as the stars and heros.
 
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